The head of the secret police in CS Lewis's That Hideous Strength tells one
of her students:
Ah, you fool, it's the educated reader who can be gulled.All of our difficulty comes with the others. When did you read a workman
who believes the papers?...But the educated public, who read the highbrow weeklies, don't need reconditioning. They're alright already. They'll believe anything.
And, Gandalf tells the assembled Captains of the West, as they prepare to
go into near-hopeless battle
Yet it is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till. What weather they shall have is not ours to rule.
(Lord of the Rings, Book V)
Yes.
ReplyDeleteSomewhat related. Apparently it's the most popular video on Youtube right now.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TG4fe9GlWS8
Don't forget Walt Whitman's "Election Day, November, 1884," reproduced in your almost-home-town paper.
ReplyDeleteCS Lewis's is the best quotation ever. It got me to thinking about the Founding Fathers' vision and that famous John Adams quotation:
ReplyDelete"I must study Politicks and War that my sons may have liberty to study Mathematicks and Philosophy. My sons ought to study Mathematicks and Philosophy, Geography, natural History, Naval Architecture, navigation, Commerce and Agriculture, in order to give their Children a right to study Painting, Poetry, Musick, Architecture, Statuary, Tapestry and Porcelaine."
He missed the final step, when forgetfulness sets in:
". . . in order to give their Children a right to study Political Correctness, Moral Relativism and Navel Gazing."
Related thoughts from my tsunami blogpost of four years back, "Then a gradual return to forgetfulness":
"It's only human to forget -- repress? -- horrific experiences, to move on. Those who were there and lived to tell the tale are scarred for life and will never forget. They know it in their bones and will try to warn the world -- of what? Pay attention to your surroundings? Don't take anything for granted? Repent before it's too late? -- with their stories. Locally it will enter the communal lore. But beyond the region, it won't stick. The rest of us out here in the larger world -- who only hear of it, see media images and try in our mind's eye to imagine the horror but then can turn away to the comfort of our everyday lives -- we are the ones in danger of forgetting."
Adams quotation link:
http://www.masshist.org/adams/quotes.cfm
Blogpost link:
http://sisu.typepad.com/sisu/2004/12/then_a_gradual_.html