ashes

Thursday, April 10, 2008
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RISING FROM THE ASHES
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Just when our philistines begin to rejoice in the knowledge that they have been successful in burying our literature, some damn fool comes along and tells them, “Not so fast, friends!”
When in the midst of a catastrophic defeat, John Paul Jones said “I have not yet begun to fight,” an unnamed Marine is quoted as having remarked: “There is always one son of a bitch who never gets the word.” I may well be that s.o.b.
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If time is on your side, you can afford to be patient.
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Neither Socrates nor Jesus wrote a single line. Why? My guess is, they knew that politicians and lawyers could misinterpret the written word to mean the exact opposite of what they say.
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If some day we rise from the ashes of degradation, it will be by means of reason and objectivity. To equate objectivity with self-loathing is therefore the same as equating reason with insanity. Reason is a gift and a blessing. It is not a curse. Objectivity is an asset, not a liability.
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The secret of life is not coming to terms with the inevitable but using it as a springboard. Not easy, you say. Who said life in a rotten world was going to be easy?
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Friday, April 11, 2008
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FOOD FOR THOUGHT
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In his latest collection of essays, HOLD EVERYTHING DEAR: DISPATCHES ON SURVIVAL AND RESISTANCE (New York, 2007) John Berger writes that Nazim Hikmet was so tall that he was nicknamed “the Tree with blue eyes.” We are further informed that he wrote half of his life’s work in prison.
They imprisoned their best in the name of Ataturk; we killed ours in the name of Stalin.
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It is not always easy to separate what we think from what we were told to think.
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Perhaps what I have been doing is writing fragments of our story or that of a nation that has been committing slow-motion suicide – a story whose aim is to convince our denialists who refuse to see the obvious by reason of our Oedipus complex (when reality is against you, blind yourself) and Ottomanization.
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Saturday, April 12, 2008
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A WONDERFUL BOOK
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Paul Johnson’s HEROES (New York, 2007, 299 pages) is an eminently readable collection of profiles in courage from Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar to Churchill and De Gaulle. The reader will find here many insightful observations and entertaining anecdotes. Here is a typical paragraph: “The last celebrity executed in public at the Tower of London was Lord Lovat, hanged for his part in the 1745 rebellion of Bonnie Prince Charlie. Lovat, aged eighty-two, kept alive the tradition that a great man died with spirit. On his way to the scaffold, a hag screamed out: ‘They’re going to hang ye, ye old Scotch do,’ to which he replied: ‘I believe they will, ye old English bitch.’"
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Once in a while gentle readers take it upon themselves to remind me that I am going about it the wrong way, I am a failure, and I will never amount to anything. They may be right. I suppose our options are limited: we either fail like a dog or succeed like a bitch.
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