Wordsworth, in the early 19th century, quoted by Will Durant in the late 20th century, and still timely in the early 21st century:
“The world is running mad with its notion that its evils are to be relieved by political changes, political remedies, political nostrums, whereas the great evils – civilization, bondage, misery – lie deep in the heart, and nothing but virtue and religion can remove them.”
The Age of Napoleon, p. 452.
I keep thinking about all the certainties I read about; all the people who know
I lose patience. My thoughts go roughly like this.
Empires are not created — and do not decline — in a day or two. Neither are free republics lost so quickly. It takes time. Years ago, in going through old journals, I found this poem copied out, by Archibald MacLeish, titled “Conversation in a Belfry,” from Ten Conversations, written post-Watergate. Each passing year only goes to show how truly he saw.
Conversation in a Belfry
Centennial bell that will not ring,
Tell me why your iron tongue
Rusts in the rain, your mouth is dumb.
Why are you silent, bell?
For shame.
You are not shamed.
Not I but you.
We? With all we’ve done and do?
We’ve ruled ourselves two hundred years.
No name on earth is proud as ours.
It was your fathers’ pride that ruled:
Their sons are tricked and lied to, fooled
As Lincoln said no people could be –
All of them – always – for their good!
But still we’re free. Ring out, O ring!
What man is free when fraud is king?
Our souls are ours: our minds our own.
While someone listens on the telephone?
This is John Adams’ holy land…
John Adams would have seen you damned!
When Jefferson’s immortal word…
Jefferson’s immortal word
Is yet to hear. It will be heard
But not by those who sell his soul.
You ring now, bell.
I toll, I toll.
Monday, June 28, 2010
5:40 AM. Indexed the last ten days of May last night, working backwards, having already done all of June. The question of how the information is to be put together was the subject of a dream, I think, but I don’t remember it. One thing that’s clear is that I do need to go along collecting unfollowed thoughts and threads — or maybe just rely on them to do it, given time.
So here we are again. I noticed, transcribing, that yesterday started off to be a discussion of the connection between politics and psychic exploration. We got diverted.
Or maybe not diverted. Maybe what followed was necessary groundwork.
So You Think Your Life Was Wasted – Part Three (10)
Monday March 13, 2006
(10:30 a.m.) I’m open to suggestion, if anybody is queued up to talk.
When you don’t ask for anyone in particular, your default guidance kicks in. your guardian angel, your conscience, your guidance system. Even when you don’t ask for anyone you occasionally get one identifiable personage, just because that one time and occasion are lined up, but that doesn’t mean you should expect it to happen. So, your friend Henry shows up because it was the time and the occasion – that is, you were mentally in the right “place” – even though you hadn’t thought to ask. Lincoln showed up after you concluded that Joseph had been talking to him after Lincoln’s death, and suddenly it was clear that you could do so as well. Bowers, more or less by request, and Wilson distinctly by request. So you may look upon your connections – anyone’s – as a vast interconnecting library of people. Perhaps a simpler analogy now, that would have been incommunicable in earlier eras, would be to compare us to the internet. It is as if you were hooked into the individual internet, with the difference that here everyone is linked up. You may find someone on line or you may not – but they are linked.
I think that this was written in the depths of the Great Depression, though I am not sure. (In my earlier days of journalizing I wasn’t particularly careful about my citations.) In any case, it seems appropriate for these times.
“I predict that both of the two opposed errors of pessimism which now make so much noise in the world will be proved wrong in our own time — the pessimism of the revolutionaries who think that things are so bad that nothing can save us but violent change, and the pessimism of the reactionaries who consider the balance of our economic and social life so precarious that we must risk no experiments.”
John Maynard Keynes