Like lead in the keel of a sailing vessel, which keeps it from capsizing, sloth is what has given our island its stability, its longevity, and its virtue. I never tire of pointing out to incredulous visitors that Sicily has more extant Greek antiquities than Greece because the people here were too lazy to break apart temples to make door jambs and pave patios.
These poems of Henry Timrod, the finest poet of the War Between the States, are posted courtesy of Vince Cornell:
I genuinely pity most of the rich and/or famous people I have known. It is as if the savages were right to fear the black box that would take their soul. People who spend their lives on screen seem to end up drained of all reality, hollow shells.
Solzhenitsyn endorses the agrarian, patriarchal, and authoritarian institutions of Russia’s past as good examples. These institutions, he says, “preserved moral health […] incomparably higher than that expressed today in simian radio music, pop songs and insulting advertisements: could a listener from outer space imagine that our planet had already known and left behind it Bach, Rembrandt and Dante?”
At first glance there are simply too many exceptions to prove the rule. Take Emily Dickinson, a woman of transcendent genius who dreamed up a whole new language of English poetry, too advanced for our age to find any proper understanding or creative use. If anybody knows anything at all about Dickinson, it’s that she was a hermit, living at a remove from urban civilization and the cultural milieu it nourished.
I never liked Robert de Niro as an actor–it’s all just mugging for the camera. I’d rather watch Jerry Lewis. But you gotta admit he’s right on Trump. I mean there is nothing too low for this charlatan, including sucking up to the world’s meanest dictator. And for what? Getting a declaration that the funny little fat guy is going to denuclearize Korea. Who cares. Bring it on. Now, Obama, there was a real negotiator. He knew how to give billions of dollars of paybacks and benefits to Iran and Korea, and so far we haven’t had a war. If...
I don’t think Trump, as the Europeans fear, is gearing for a trade war. This is just his typical negotiating style. The Europeans really are freeloaders and trade cheaters who long took advantage of American negotiators. Now they’re feeling like Hillary did on Nov. 9, 2016.
If one were to cut open, the way one saws through a tree trunk, the literary career of Tom Wolfe, in the circles revealed therein one could read the entire history – or, more to the point, the whole tragedy – of what happened to the press in America in the twentieth century. As the writer passed away last month, I want to say a couple of things about him which the gentle reader is unlikely to find in the numerous obituaries. In 1966, after a lengthy struggle, New York’s Herald Tribune – by then the only remaining highbrow competitor...
How blithe each morn was I tae see
My lass come o’er the hill.
She tripped the burn and ran tae me.
I met her wi good will.
The year 1978 was five years after the Roe vs. Wade abortion-on-demand edict of the Supreme Court, a legal and moral outrage still not revoked. And today even children can access the worst pornography on a cell phone. The American birthrate keeps dropping well below the replacement level. Europe is even worse.
