‘The sole raison d’etre of a novel is to discover what only the novel can discover.’
Milan Kundera, The Art of the Novel
What a length Rubens has the three men dying together in. Close to each other, too, in a strange, intimate triangle.
‘Oh the crap that lies lurking in the English soul. Somewhere it, the English soul, received an injection of romanticism which nearly killed it. That’s what killed my father, English romanticism, that and 1930 science. A line for my notebook:
Explore connection between romanticism and scientific objectivity. Does a scientifically minded person become a romantic because he is a left-over from his own science?’
From Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer.
‘The Bible is very easy to understand. But we Christians are a bunch of scheming swindlers. We pretend to be unable to understand it because we know very well that the minute we understand we are obliged to act accordingly. Take any words in the New Testament and forget everything except pledging yourself to act accordingly. My God, you will say, if I do that my whole life will be ruined. How would I ever get on in the world?’
-Kierkegaard
A new Uni set up by Dawkins, A.C. Grayling, Niall Ferguson and others is promising to give a top class education in the arts and humanities for a huge price. This despite the fact that almost all of the profs involved have tin ears for anything really alive in the arts. Students are more likely to gain a series of simplistic prejudices that they can learn, just as easily, by absorbing the popular philosophy of the day. Although they will probably have elevated their crude philosophies to the level of actual reality by the end of their three years.
Only a bunch of stunted intellects would come up with that crap name, too.
(Expect Ian McEwan to join team Enlightenment. Encouraging the students to embrace his dull entertainment-prose as if it is an antidote to the pop nihilism he is raging against.)
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