Enjoying the view from Limbo
The most important part of any conversation is the silence. For speaking is thought translated into verbal symbols, and thought is by definition a silent, private activity of the soul. Thus, a conversation consisting only, or even primarily, of words flying back and forth involves little speaking in the strict sense, but only talking, much as Wilde wrote that a woman who cannot...
If you found a woman’s private diary under a pillow at a drug rehabilitation facility, would you read it, publish it, use it to humiliate her family and potentially cause serious material harm to the woman herself? If you would, then you would fit right in among today’s American conservatives. Perhaps I come to this story very late, because I try to avoid...
Tyranny is a gossip whispering anxiously about his neighbors. Democracy is a crowd alternately screaming its envy and singing its lust. Freedom is a lively and unconstrained conversation among equals. The tyrant and the democrat are therefore united in their hatred of the free man — the former, because the free man appears impervious to gossip, and is therefore a threat to the...
Yesterday, I visited National Review, the preeminent source of “conservative” opinion — by which I merely mean the source least likely to be mistaken for a profiteering clown show — for my roughly tri-weekly scan of the homepage teasers. (I almost never read anything there, of course, apart from the occasional Armond White film review. I have a life.) This time, one teaser...
Government vs. God / Ideas and Reflections / What is Progressivism?
by Daren Jonescu · Published October 24, 2020
A broken clock is right twice a day, as they say. It is with this adage in mind that I note, so as not to be remiss, that Pope Francis (aka Francis the Talking Marxist) finally met God’s hour hand for a passing moment. Specifically, during his weekly address in St. Peter’s Square in early September, Francis strayed from his usual themes of...
Number One: They reveal the heart of our age, in accordance with the old adage, “Great men talk about ideas, ordinary men talk about events, small men talk about other people.” Ours is an age of small men. Number Two: They provide the most straightforward answer for everyone who has ever been inclined to wonder, “How in the hell could a man like...
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