David Foster over at Chicago Boyz included this quote in an article about state intrusion into parenting.
“To minimize suffering and to maximize security were natural and proper ends of society and Caesar. But then they became the only ends, somehow, and the only basis of law—a perversion. Inevitably, then, in seeking only them, we found only their opposites: maximum suffering and minimum security.” Walter M. Miller, Jr. A Canticle For Liebowitz.
"children of Merlin, chasing a gleam. Children, too, of Eve, forever building Edens – and kicking them apart in berserk fury because somehow it isn’t the same."
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"The closer men came to perfecting themselves a paradise, the more impatient they seemed to become with it, and with themselves as well. They made a garden of pleasure, and became progressively more miserable with it as it grew in richness and power and beauty; for then, perhaps, it was easier for them to see that something was missing in the garden, some tree or shrub that would not grow. When the world was in darkness and wretchedness, it could believe in perfection and yearn for it. But when the world became bright with reason and riches, it began to sense the narrowness of the needle's eye, and that rankled for a world no longer willing to believe or yearn. "
Same book? It's been awhile.
ReplyDeleteYes. You recognize the style, don't you?
ReplyDeleteLove that book. I've read it many times. When I first read it as a kid, I was completely unfamiliar with Catholic thought and indeed with religious thought of any kind; the priest's struggles with euthanasia at the end affected me strongly. That part is set in the renewed atomic era that follows the first section (about the isolated monk who finds Emma Liebowitz's bunker) and the second section (about New Rome's scientific renaissance at the end of a dark era). James's excerpt is the sad rumination of the priest.
ReplyDeleteUntil I looked it up, I hadn't realised it was originally 3 novelettes. Miller had the inspiration that it was really a 3-part novel and reworked and renamed the material only as he was writing the third part.
ReplyDeleteTex99...same with me, reading it when I was about 12, being raised in a quite secular family and in a town where there weren't that many Catholics anyhow
ReplyDeleteThe only copy I read was missing the first some pages. The only impression I have now is at the end, the current people were denigrating those from the past for not knowing as much as they did now (and much was wrong, for they did not understand what the past people did know).
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