ARCHIVED ENTRIES FOR
JULY 2013 |
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Patrick: Lagniappe
The most strident criticism came in the form of
a dense, multipage epistle from
Ambler,
a tiny Inupiat
village on the
Kobuk River north of the Arctic Circle. The author was a
white writer and schoolteacher, formerly from Washington, D.C.,
named Nick Jans. Warning that it was 1:00 A.M. and he was well
into a bottle of Seagram's, Jan let fly:
Over the past 15 years,
I've run into several McCandless Types out in the country.
Same story: idealistic, energetic young guys who overestimated
themselves, underestimated the country, and ended up in trouble.
McCandless was hardly unique; there's quite a few of these guys
hanging around the state, so much alike that they're almost a
collective cliché. The only difference is that McCandless
ended up dead, with the story of his dumbassedness splashed across
the media. . . . . (Jack London got it right in "To Build a Fire."
McCandless is, finally, just a pale 20th-century burlesque of
London's protagonist, who freezes because he ignores advice and
commits big-time hubris). . . .
His ignorance, which
could have been cured by a USGS quadrant and a Boy Scout manual, is
what killed him. And while I feel for his parents, I have no
sympathy for him. Such willful ignorance . . . amounts to
disrespect for the land, and paradoxically demonstrates the same
sort of arrogance that resulted in the Exxon Valdez spill--just
another case of underprepared, overconfident men bumbling around out
there and screwing up because they lacked the requisite humility.
It's all a matter of degree.
McCandless's contrived
asceticism and a pseudoliterary stance compound rather than reduce
the fault. . . . McCandless's postcards, notes, and journals . . .
read like the work of an above average, somewhat histrionic high
school kid--or am I missing something?
--Into the Wild by John Krakauer
[N.B.: Krakauer rightly insinuates that
this criticism can't be right--else how is Krakauer going to make
money off of this book and sell the movie rights? If
McCandless is actually a callous, bumbling, quarter-educated
miscreant, who's going to want to read about that? Better to
point out that the correspondent is a "strident" white guy
suspiciously hanging out in Indian country (no doubt exploiting
these Native Americans who truly understand the land and the value
of a seeker such as McCandless).]
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Patrick: Lagniappe
McCandless's apparent sexual innocence,
however, is a corollary of a personality type that our culture
purports to admire, at least in the case of its more famous
adherents. His ambivalence toward sex echoes that of
celebrated others who embraced wilderness with single-minded
passion--Thoreau (who was a lifelong virgin) and the naturalist John
Muir, most prominently--to say nothing of countless lesser-known
pilgrims, seekers, misfits, and adventurers. Like not a few of
those seduced by the wild, McCandless seems to have been driven by a
variety of lust that supplanted sexual desire. His yearning,
in a sense, was too powerful to be quenched by human contact.
McCandless may have been tempted by the succor offered by women, but
it paled beside the prospect of rough congress with nature, with the
cosmos itself. And thus was he drawn north, to Alaska.
--Into the Wild by John Krakauer
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Patrick: Lagniappe
It felt comfortable to be in a country where it
is so simple to make people happy. You can never tell whether
a Spanish waiter will thank you. Everything is on such a clear
financial basis in France. It is the simplest country to live
in. No one makes things complicated by becoming your friend
for any obscure reason. If you want people to like you you
have only to spend a little money. I spent a little money and
the waiter liked me. He appreciated my valuable qualities.
He would be glad to see me back. I would dine there again some
time and he would be glad to see me, and would want me at his table.
It would be a sincere liking because it would have a sound basis.
I was back in France.
--The Sun Also Rises by Ernest
Hemingway
[N.B.: Why this antipathy between the
citizens of the United States and those of France? We have
much more in common than we know.]
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Patrick: Lagniappe
He had flashes of the old greatness with his
bulls, but they were not of value because he had discounted them in
advance when he had picked the bulls out for their safety, getting
out of a motor and leaning on a fence, looking over at the herd on
the ranch of his friend and bull-breeder. So he had two small,
manageable bulls without much horns, and when he felt the greatness
again coming, just a little of it through the pain that was always
with him, it had been discounted and sold in advance, and it did not
give him a good feeling. It was the greatness, but it did not
make bull-fighting wonderful to him any more.
--The Sun Also Rises by Ernest
Hemingway
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Patrick: Lagniappe
There was no answer. I tried the knob and
it opened. Inside the room was in great disorder. All
the bags were opened and clothing was strewn around. There
were empty bottles beside the bed. Mike lay on the bed looking
like a death mask of himself. He opened his eyes and looked at
me.
"Hello, Jake," he said very slowly. "I'm
getting a lit tle sleep. I've want ed a lit tle sleep for a
long time."
"Let me cover you over."
"No. I'm quite warm."
"don't go. I have n't got ten to sleep
yet."
"You'll sleep, Mike. Don't worry, boy."
--The Sun Also Rises by Ernest
Hemingway
[N.B.: Neat trick--the gap between
syllables of a word.]
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Patrick: Lagniappe
Romero never made any contortions, always it
was straight and pure and natural in line. The others twisted
themselves like corkscrews, their elbows raised, and leaned against
the flanks of the bull after his horns had passed, to give a faked
look of danger. Afterward, all that was faked turned bad and
gave an unpleasant feeling. Romero's bull-fighting gave real
emotion, because he kept the absolute purity of line in his
movements and always quietly and calmly let the horns pass him close
each time. He did not have to emphasize their closeness.
Brett saw how something that was beautiful done close to the bull
was ridiculous if it were done a little way off. I told her
how since the death of Joselito all the bull-fighters had been
developing a technic that simulated this appearance of danger in
order to give a fake emotional feeling, while the bull-fighter was
really safe. Romero had the old thing, the holding of
his purity of line through the maximum of exposure, while he
dominated the bull by making him realize he was unattainable, while
he prepared him for the killing.
--The Sun Also Rises by Ernest
Hemingway
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Patrick: Lagniappe
"How did you go bankrupt?" Bill asked.
"Two ways," Mike said. "Gradually and
then suddenly."
--The Sun Also Rises by Ernest
Hemingway
[N.B.: Hmmm, this explanation reminds me
of
something.]
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Patrick: Lagniappe
"Here's a taxidermist's," Bill said.
"Want to buy anything? Nice stuffed dog?"
"Come on," I said. "You're pie-eyed."
"Just one stuffed dog. I can take 'em or
leave 'em alone. But listen, Jake. Just one stuffed
dog."
"Come on."
"Mean everything in the world to you after you
bought it. Simple exchange of values. You give them
money. They give you a stuffed dog."
"We'll get one on the way back."
"All right. Have it your own way.
Road to hell paved with unbought stuffed dogs. Not my fault."
We went on.
--The Sun Also Rises by Ernest
Hemingway
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Patrick: Lagniappe
At five o'clock I was in the
Hotel Crillon waiting for
Brett. She was not there, so I sat down and wrote some
letters. They were not very good letters but I hoped their
being on
Crillon Stationery would help them. Brett did not turn up,
so about quarter to six I went down to the bar and had a
Jack Rose with George the barman. Brett had not been in
the bar either, and so I looked for her up-stairs on my way out, and
took a taxi to the
Café
Select. Crossing the Seine I saw a string of barges being
towed empty down the current, riding high, the bargemen at the
sweeps as they came toward the bridge. The river looked nice.
It was always pleasant crossing bridges in Paris.
--The Sun Also Rises by Ernest
Hemingway
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Patrick: Lagniappe
"I didn't ask you to insult her."
"Oh, go to hell."
He stood up from the table his face white, and
stood there white and angry behind the little plates of hors
d'oeuvres.
"Sit down," I said. "Don't be a fool."
"You've got to take that back."
"Oh, cut out the prep-school stuff."
"Take it back."
"Sure. Anything. I never heard of
Brett Ashley. How's that?"
"No. Not that. About me going to
hell."
"Oh, don't go to hell," I said. "Stick
around. We're just starting lunch."
--The Sun Also Rises by Ernest
Hemingway
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Patrick: Lagniappe
THOMAS THE CYNIC
Nothing is more natural than that an unemployed
fireman should turn to arson.
--The School for Dictators by Ignazio
Silone (tr. William Weaver)
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Patrick: Lagniappe
THOMAS THE CYNIC
In the Goebbels diary of the Berlin transport
strike of November 1932, where Nazis and communists fought amicably
together to make the strike succeed, there are some very revealing
pages on this subject. Goebbels records with irony the shocked
comments of the democratic press at that apparently unnatural
alliance, and he notes in lyrical terms the acts of violence that
the strikers committed against the Social-Democrat scabs. "Our
party apparatus," he writes proudly, "works splendidly. In
every clash our men are leading the violence. There are
already four dead and countless wounded, both workers and police.
the authorities say that the financial conditions of the transport
company make it impossible to grant the workers' requests.
These consideration," Goebbels remarks, "are no concern of ours.
An opposition has a right to ask even what the government cannot
give."
--The School for Dictators by Ignazio
Silone (tr. William Weaver)
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Patrick: Lagniappe
THOMAS THE CYNIC
A single principle seems to have guided
Mussolini and Hitler every time thy had the choice of taking part,
by whatever means, in the struggle of workers against entrepreneurs:
incite to disorder, aggravate disorder, maintain disorder as an
endemic condition. For only prolonged disorder can justify the
installation of a dictatorship. Systematic disorder paralyzes
social and economic life, makes foreign relations difficult,
increases poverty, throws irremediable discredit on established
institutions, renders all plans uncertain, and finally makes
dictatorship seem the only hope of salvation. Permanent
disorder creates the spiritual conditions in which the man in the
street loses his patience, abandons all self-control, and keeps
repeating to everyone he meets, even strangers: "I don't care who
comes next, even if it's the devil himself, just so long as he
governs the country properly and puts an end to this chaos once and
for all."
--The School for Dictators by Ignazio
Silone (tr. William Weaver)
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Patrick: Lagniappe
THOMAS THE CYNIC
In modern times the death of a democracy is,
more often than not, camouflaged suicide. A regime of freedom
should receive its lifeblood from the self-government of local
institutions. When democracy, driven by some of its baser
tendencies, suppresses such autonomies, it is only devouring itself.
If in the factory the master's word is law, if bureaucracy takes
over the trade union, if the central government's representative
runs the city and the province, and the leader's henchman controls
the local branches of political parties, then you can no longer
speak of democracy. Unfortunately, the democratic and
socialist parties have always been, at least in Europe, the most
active in promoting centralization to the detriment of local and
regional autonomy, following the tradition of the Jacobins, who felt
that the hegemony of the capital over the rest of the country
provided them with a weapon in the struggle against the priests and
the nobles. Another cause of centralization of democratic and
socialist parties can be found in the fact that their adherents,
peasants, workers and lower middle class, are among the poorest of
the population, and it seems necessary for the national government
to assist them. In this way the All-Providing State is born.
While the constant subsidies and protective laws of the state
increase the supporters of the socialist and democratic parties, at
the same time they stifle local autonomy. So in the history of
some countries you can observe this apparent contradiction: the
maximum material and numerical strength of the democratic and
socialist parties immediately precedes the collapse of democracy.
--The School for Dictators by Ignazio
Silone (tr. William Weaver)
[N.B.: Oh, and the stifling of local
autonomy also stifles job creation as well--which accelerates unrest
and collapse. And what follows? Hmmm, I do believe there
is a title to this book.]
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Patrick: Lagniappe
MR. DOUBLE YOU
Have you ever heard of Van Buren? In 1828
he helped Jackson to the presidency with an over-whelming election
campaign whose slogan was the defense of the "people's sacred
rights." Nobody was threatening those rights, least of all
John Quincy Adams, the outgoing President, but Van Buren's slogan
had a wild success. Van Buren himself succeeded Jackson as
president, and he was forced to witness the efficacy of his
miraculous recipe when, standing for re-election, he found himself
opposed by Harrison, presented as "the man of the people," and the
"log-cabin man," the simple, modest, sober family man as opposed to
Van Buren who, being President, lived in a palace with a whole lot
of servants and ate with gold knives and forks.
THOMAS THE CYNIC
Forgive me, I am truly mortified. You
Americans have nothing to learn from a European.
--The School for Dictators by Ignazio
Silone (tr. William Weaver)
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Patrick: Lagniappe
THOMAS THE CYNIC
But Mussolini didn't lack the talent of piling
emphasis on the most hackneyed formulas. "We are against
renunciations, we are for our rights," he used to say. "We are
against irresponsibility, we are for the respect of values," he
often repeated. Mind that word "values." You can make
unlimited use of it; it sounds well, and it doesn't commit you to
anything.
--The School for Dictators by Ignazio
Silone (tr. William Weaver)
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Patrick: Lagniappe
I remember for a time feeling my heart unrulily
beating in my breast, and a tight constriction at the throat.
That was perhaps only excitement, or tense expectation of activity.
It was not the shuddering grovelling impulse, the sudden jet of pus
intot he thrilling blood stream, that would sometimes, on the sudden
near detonation of a shell, poison one's humanity. That, as I
have said, is the only real kind of fear--the purely physical
reaction. From that state a few men can recover because they
have minds that can surmount a physical state: an imaginative sense
of equilibrium. Imaginative--it was the men of
imagination that were, if any, the men of courage. The men of
mere brute strength, the footballers and school captains, found no
way out of the inevitable physical reaction. Their bodies
broke in fear because the wild energy of the instinct was impingeing
on a brittle red wall of physical being.
--The Raid collected in
The Contrary Experience by Herbert Read
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Patrick: Lagniappe
One week in the trenches was sufficient to
strip war of its lingering traces of romance: there was nothing, in
the Ypres Salient where I first went into the line, but primitive
filth, lice, boredom and death. Even the novelty of the
experience, in such circumstances, is no palliative. But after
weeks and then months, and finally years of such a life, with no
moral sanction to support the spirit, no fervour or enthusiasm, no
hatred of the enemy, the whole business became fantastically unreal,
a monstrous nightmare from which one could not awake. It
should be remembered that a modern army is largely made up of young
civilians without political experience, and the propaganda which is
designed to inspire them (and perhaps does inspire them for a time)
soon wears thin against the crude realities of war. If only, I
used to think, we poor bloody soldiers could walk out, walk home,
and leave the politicians to make the best of a quarrel which we did
not understand and which had no interest for us! But though
these were the sentiments of nine men out of ten, there was no
possibility of proceeding to action. a soldier is part of a machine:
once the machine is in movement, he functions as part of that
machine, or simply gets killed.
--The Impact of War collected in
The Contrary Experience by Herbert Read
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Patrick: Lagniappe
The human race is the trunk and branches of
this tree, and individual men are the leaves which appear one
season, flourish for a summer, and then die. I am like a leaf
of this tree, and one day I shall be torn off by a storm or simply
decay and fall, and become a pinch of compost about its roots.
But meanwhile I am conscious of the tree's flowing sap and steadfast
strength. Deep down in my consciousness is the consciousness
of a collective life, a life of which I am a part and to which I
contribute a minute but unique extension. When I die and fall,
the tree remains, nourished to some small degree by my brief
manifestation of life. Millions of leaves have preceded me and
millions will follow me; the tree itself grows and endures.
--The Tree of Life collected in
The Contrary Experience by Herbert Read
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Patrick: Lagniappe
Meanwhile death was being forced more brutally
into my consciousness: men were being killed by my side, before my
eyes. The terrible fragility of life was made evident to me; I
saw that individuality and intelligence and all the unique make of a
man could seep into the ground with a trickle of warm blood.
But still I did not fear death, strongly as I wanted to live.
The philosophy which was force on me by this experience was simply
fatalistic--it was not resigned enough to be called stoical.
It had in it an element of bitterness or resentment which we fin in
'the tragic view of life,' and fatalism is perhaps the best word to
describe my permanent attitude to this problem. My favourite
symbol is the Tree of Life.
--The Tree of Life collected in
The Contrary Experience by Herbert Read
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Patrick: Lagniappe
This is not the place to enlarge on the
question, but as a general indication of what I mean, I would say
that it is necessary to make a clear separation of the historical
and the technical aspects of each art. The history of
literature or the history of painting (including, of course, the
history of their technical development) would be distinct subjects,
taught like the history of any other aspect of social evolution.
But the technique of literature, like the technique of painting,
would be encourage as a practical activity. Poetry and plays
would be written, recited or produced, and the creative artist would
be elevated above the academic scholar. It would, of course,
revolutionize educational standards if marks were to be awarded, or
even a degree granted, on the artistic merits of an original
composition; but that, I contend, is the only way in which the arts
can be brought into organic relation with a vital system of
education.
--The Falcon and the Dove collected in
The Contrary Experience by Herbert Read
[N.B.: I don't disagree with this
argument--but Read underestimates the power of co-option by
academics. Classes in creative writing were originally meant
to operate somewhat on the lines outlined above. But now they
are little more than refuges for mediocre creative-writing graduates
who in turn teach their charges how to excrete prose in a uniform
manner much along the lines that McDonald's excretes hamburgers.
Hence the reason that there is no group of American writers
comparable to the British literary generations starting with the
baby boomers of Amis, McEwan, Banville, Barnes, etc....]
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Patrick: Lagniappe
[T]he attempt to reconcile art and scholarship
is nearly always fatal: poetry cannot be dissected unless it is
first killed. I do not imply, however, that poetry--or art in
general--should be excluded from the curricula of our schools and
universities. On the contrary, I think that the arts should
play a greater part in education. But they should be treated
as arts and not as 'subjects,' still less as sciences.
--The Falcon and the Dove collected in
The Contrary Experience by Herbert Read
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Patrick: Lagniappe
It is possible to conceive of poetry as an
established form, and of the poet's duty as merely to add to the
general fund. That is the classical conception of the poet.
But my conception was, and still is, of poetry as a unique
experience: the individual, with his particular moods, emotions,
thoughts, trying to express himself integrally, in his own choice of
words. It is true that he has to use words which are common to
all his countrymen; but there is an infinite number of ways of
selecting and combining these words, and from these infinite
possibilities one exact, original correspondence of idea and
expression must emerge, or the poem will be an affectation and a
failure.
--The Falcon and the Dove collected in
The Contrary Experience by Herbert Read
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Patrick: Lagniappe
It is not easy for an adult to recollect the
quality of his pre-adolescent emotions. They have been
obliterated by thousands of other emotions, which while not
necessarily so acute, are more memorable. The emotions of a
boy or girl have a baffled intensity which is due to our inability,
at that age, to express ourselves. We have found words to
describe outward objects, and to express simple sensations, like
physical pain. But the vague emotions which are aroused by our
environment, by strange experiences, by the unknown--for these we
have no ready words. We cannot impart our moods, even to our
most intimate friends. Children of this intermediate age
suffer like animals, dumbly and vaguely; and the only release is
tears.
--The Falcon and the Dove collected in
The Contrary Experience by Herbert Read
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Patrick: Lagniappe
I suspect humanity has often entered periods
like ours, in which discipline of judgment and the pursuit of
intrinsic value have declined or disappeared. When this
happened in the past, however, no record was left of it, since a
society without culture loses its memory and loses also the desire
to immortalize itself in lasting monuments. Very soon
barbarism takes over, and the society is swept from the face of the
earth. What is interesting about our situation is that we have
the technological means to sustain our society in being beyond the
moment when it might lose all inner sense of its value, and
therefore lose the ability to sustain itself from its own inherent
reservoir of faith. This is a new situation, and we should ask
ourselves what we might do, in these circumstances, to ensure the
survival of culture.
--Culture Counts by Roger Scruton
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Patrick: Lagniappe
In almost every sphere we are now discouraged
from offering criticism; it suffices that a work of art has an
audience, that people want to look at it, to read it, to listen to
it, or at any rate to overhear it. . . . We have entered
a time when aesthetic judgments are routinely avoided. People
have tastes, certainly, but these tastes are no different from their
tastes in food--desires for gratification of the kind that we can
witness as easily in an animal as in a rational being. What
was distinctive of the aesthetic experience--namely, that it was
founded in the perception of value--has dropped from the picture,
and desire alone remains. If people study art at all it is
often merely to explore technique, or else to "go behind" the whole
tradition of artistic expression and to deconstruct its hidden
political assumptions. Judgment itself--whether the judgment
contained in art, or the judgment applied to it--is routinely
avoided.
--Culture Counts by Roger Scruton
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Patrick: Lagniappe
Aesthetic values are intrinsic values, which
cannot be measured by price; they also prompt us to find intrinsic
values in the world in which we live. At the time of the
industrial revolution, when the thought first entered people's heads
that our natural environment is vulnerable, that all on which we
depend could be squandered and polluted through our mad
mismanagement, there emerged an aesthetic movement which had natural
beauty as its ruling cause. Burke's Treatise on the
Sublime and Beautiful, Addison's essays on the "Pleasures of
the Imagination," Kant's Critique of Judgment, and the
works of such thinkers as Price, Alison, Home, Lessing, and
Rousseau, all served to place nature at the center of our aesthetic
interests, and to invoke a realm of intrinsic value that was
threatened by our footsteps. Now you could say that this
invocation of aesthetic value, which led to the great revolution in
artistic sensibility that we find in Novalis, Wordsworth, Beethoven,
Schubert, Friedrich, and Constable, had a function--which was to
protect the world form our predations. And that is true: the
aesthetic value of nature encouraged people to renounce the hubris
which says we have a right to every natural resource.
--Culture Counts by Roger Scruton
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Patrick: Lagniappe
Terry's buildings either go unmentioned in the
architectural press or are subjected to dismissive polemics,
focusing on their alleged nature as "pastiche." This
epithet--which, if taken seriously, would condemn all serious
architecture from the Parthenon down to the Houses of
Parliament--has been elevated into an all-purpose critical tool, by
people who are determined that no whisper from the past shall ever
again be heard in our cities.
--Culture Counts by Roger Scruton
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Patrick: Lagniappe
As
[Quinlan] Terry has frequently pointed out, modernist buildings
use materials that no one fully understands, which have a
coefficient of expansion so large that all joints loosen within a
few years, and which involve massive environmental damage in their
production and in their inevitable disposal within a few decades as
waste. Modernist buildings are ecological as well as aesthetic
catastrophes: sealed environments, dependent on a constraint input
of energy, and subject to the "sick-building syndrome" that arises
when nobody can open a window to let in a breath of fresh air.
--Culture Counts by Roger Scruton
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Patrick: Lagniappe
For three millennia Western builders looked
back to their predecessors, respecting the temple architecture of
the ancients, refining its language, and adapting it to the European
landscape in ways that are subtly varied, entirely memorable, and,
above all, human. Then Le Corbusier burst on the scene.
His plan was to demolish Paris north of the Seine and to put all the
people into glass boxes. Instead of dismissing this charlatan
as the dangerous madman that he clearly was, the world of
architecture hailed him as a visionary, enthusiastically adopted the
"new architecture" that he advocated--though it was not an
architecture at all, but a recipe for hanging sheets of glass onto
crates of steel--and set about to persuade the world that it was no
longer necessary to learn the things that architects once knew.
Thus was born the modern movement.
--Culture Counts by Roger Scruton
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