Some Quotes 'de sang Celte'
'For my own part, though Welsh by blood, I am English by upbringing... But I know that Vaughan's conception of the whole universe being indissolubly interconnected and of the perpetual 'commerce' between earth and heaven is familiar to the Welsh mind.'
'Henry Vaughan: A Life and Interpretation' by F. E. Hutchinson, a notice by Charles Morgan.
Some related topics:
'.....there are both gains and losses involved in becoming literate. The advantages are so clear to us.........' the increased availability and durability of knowledge, allowing complex and geographically widespread social and knowlege stuctures to develop. The disadvantages sometimes escape us and need more emphasis. In a completely oral society, gaining knowledge cannot be divorced from the fundamental human interactions of that society. Knowledge is preserved in the very customs and rituals which bind the society together. In so far as the social group is stable, the knowledge it transmits tends to be stabilizering, dependable, and sufficient for life........
Literacy, in contrast, involves the possibility that knowledge becomes esoteric and unmanageable................
Written notation also encourages us to distance ourselves from our words and those of others. When they are captured in permanent form on paper it is easier to analyze, dissect, and treat them as lifeless objects, distinct from us and thoughts. In this way, they lose some of thier power and immediacy. This has some good consequences. It allows us,....to resist the power of words used for persuasion, seduction or demagoguery... But it also encourages the formation of an image of ourselves as seperate from our words and actions. We see ourselves as observing and acting on the world rather than being part of it.
Finally, by selecting the aspects of an utterance which are preserved, notation can lead to improvished communication.
J. A. Sloboda (1985) 'The Musical Mind: The Cognitive Psychology of Music,' Clarendon, Oxford. (Extracts taken by Gary Bagnall (1996) 'Law as Art' Dartmouth Publishing Company
'......how can I co-exist with the other and leave his otherness intact? His answer is that only a concept of infinity and not totality can allow for this kind of relationship.' Modern Literary Theory by Philip Rice & Patricia Waugh Pub: Arnold 2001
'The inquiry is both empirical, and practical: empirical, in that it is concerned with, takes its 'evidence' from, the experience of life; practical, in that its aim is to find a conception by which humans beings can live, and live together. Martha Nussbaum, 'Love's Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature'. 1990
I do not struggle with a faceless god, but I respond to his expressionn, to his revelation. Emmanuel Levinas 'Totality and Infinity.' 1969
'I believe that mankind's great spiritual evolutions basically affect physical life on earth, and that if the demoralisation of its inhabitants continues, the planet will be destroyed by its own nonviability, and crack into pieces in some kind of cosmic catastrophe. But what I see coming is not basically a cosmic, but a historical phenomenon: the inevitable catastrophic finale to mass-thought, and thus to mass-man, which is in the making here and which now I see on the horizon in all its frightfulness and all its promise.'
Diary of a Man in Dispair' by Friedrich Reck-Malleczewen (1884-1944) translated by Paul Rubens. Pub: Duckworth 2000 (A non-fiction masterpiece about the comprehension of evil)
'....living in Bavaria, his encounters are with Catholicism - not formally so, of course, but these diaries are an interesting literary testimony to something, that in Germany today, matters. For, in the Federal Republic, the wreckage of one Germany, largely Protestant and Prussian, was subsumed in another, dominated by Catholics from the south and west.'
Norman Stone, Introduction to 'Diary of a Man in Dispair'
Friedrich Reck-Malleczewen was murdered at Dachau on 16th February 1945 by Genickkschuss - a shot in the neck.
'A great deal of Charles Morgan's fear of mass thought and the assault on the individual mind lies in this book.' (The Judge's Story)
'I feel of you, as a woman, that only in our love for each other and our gentleness and our infinitely patient vision have we any weapons against evil' (Letter to Hilda Vaughan 1922, his future wife)
Selected Letters of Charles Morgan by Eiluned Lewis. Pub: Macmillan 1967
