Christianity is always out of fashion because it is always sane; and all fashions are mild insanities.
—G.K. Chesterton in The Ball and the Cross (via gkchestertonquote)
(via michaelfunderburk)
(Source: brain-food, via michaelfunderburk)
What kind of impoverishment can be attributed to the denizens of Western technological societies in view of the obvious wealth of such societies in such categories as food, shelter, goods and services, education, technology, and cultural institutions?
(g) None of the above. All arguments between the traditional scientific view of man as organism, a locus of needs and drives, and a Christian view of man as a spiritual being not only are unresolvable at the present level of discourse but are also profoundly boring—no small contributor indeed to the dreariness of Western society in general.
—Walker Percy, Lost in the Cosmos
Henri Cartier-Bresson
Serbia. Bass player on the road Belgrade-Kraljevo, to play at a village festival near Rudnick. Yugoslavia 1965
(via talaazar)
The word ‘boredom’ did not enter the language until the eighteenth century.
Boredom is the self being stuffed with itself.
Why is it no other species but man gets bored?
—Walker Percy, Lost in the Cosmos
Boldness formerly was not the character of atheists as such. They were even of a character nearly the reverse; they were formerly like the old Epicureans, rather an unenterprising race. But of late they are grown active, designing, turbulent, and seditious.
—Edmund Burke
(Source: twofishareinatank)
(g) The lost self. With the passing of the cosmological myths and the fading of Christianity as the guarantor of the identity of the self, the self becomes dislocated, Jefferson or no Jefferson, is both cut loose and imprisoned by its own freedom, yet imprisoned by a curious and paradoxical bondage like a Chinese handcuff, so that the very attempts to free itself, e.g. by ever more refined techniques for the pursuit of happiness, only tighten the bondage and distance the self ever farther from the very world it wishes to inhabit as its homeland.
—Lost in the Cosmos
If the sexual drive is but one of several biological needs, why are we living in the most eroticized society in history? Why don’t TV, films, billboards, magazines feature culinary delights, e.g., huge chocolate cakes, hams, roasts, strawberries, instead of women’s bodies?
—Lost in the Cosmos
And why is it that one can look at a lion or a planet or at someone’s finger as long as one pleases, but looking into the eyes of another person is, if prolonged past a second, a perilous affair?
—Lost in the Cosmos
