Yeats on Modernity

The woods of Arcady are dead,
And over is their antique joy;
Of old the world on dreaming fed;
Grey truth is now her painted toy;


W. B. Yeats
"The Song of the Happy Shepherd"
Crossways

Yeats on Modernity

The woods of Arcady are dead,
And over is their antique joy;
Of old the world on dreaming fed;
Grey truth is now her painted toy;


W. B. Yeats
"The Song of the Happy Shepherd"
Crossways

A Storm Scene

Then, soaked like paper, the hills were a Chinese scroll

and she saw a subtlety where none was before.
Bamboo strokes.  Wet cloud.  Peasant with straw hat and pole.
Fern spray.  White mist. Heron crossing fresh waterfall.

Omeros

Havel - The Phenomenology of Responsibility

"Patocka used to say that the most interesting thing about responsibility is that we carry it with us everywhere.  That means that responsibility is ours, that we must accept it and grasp it here, now, in this place in time and space where the Lord has set us down, and that we cannot lie our way out of it by moving somewhere else..."

The Power of the Powerless

[Jan Patocka was a Czech Philosopher of Phenomenology, banned from teaching by the Communists, and a signer of Charter 77]

Havel - limitations of legislation

"The key to a humane, dignified, rich and happy life does not lie either in the constitution or in the criminal code.  These merely establish what may or may not be done and, thus, they can make life easier or more difficult.  They limit or permit, they punish, tolerate or defend, but they can never give life substance or meaning.  The struggle for what is called "legality" must constantly keep this legality in perspective against the background of life as it really is.  Without keeping one's eyes open to the real dimensions of life's beauty and misery, and without a moral relationship to life, this struggle will sooner or later come to grief on the rocks of some self-justifying system of scholastics."

The Power of the Powerless

The Ideological Fallacy - Havel

"Every Society, of course, requires some degree of organization.  Yet if that organization is to serve people and not the other way around, then people will have to be liberated and space created so that they may organize themselves in meaningful ways.  The depravity of the opposite approach, in which people are first organized in some way or another (by someone who always knows best "what people need") so they may then allegedly be liberated, is something we have known on our own skins only too well."

Power of the Powerless

The only proper starting point of politics

Havel speaks of returning politics to its "only proper starting point...if all the old mistakes are to be avoided: individual people."  He contrasts this with the politics of ideology, where the needs of people are subordinated to ideas.  An easy contrast to draw in a communist state, but he goes on to say-


"In democratic societies, where the violence done to human beings is not so obvious and cruel, this fundamental revolution in politics has yet to happen, and some things will probably have to get worse there before the urgent need for that revolution is reflected in politics."]


The Power of the Powerless