terribly

George Orwell: “When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer.”

 Quotes  Tagged with:
Nov 202010
 

The inflated style itself is a kind of euphemism. A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outline and covering up all the details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink. In our age there is no such thing as “keeping out of politics.” All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia. When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer.

Politics and the English Language

John Keats – When I Have Fears That I May Cease To Be

 Poems
Nov 202010
 

When I have fears that I may cease to be
Before my pen has glean’d my teeming brain,
Before high-piled books, in charactery,
Hold like rich garners the full ripen’d grain;
When I behold, upon the night’s starr’d face,
Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,
And think that I may never live to trace
Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance;
And when I feel, fair creature of an hour,
That I shall never look upon thee more,
Never have relish in the faery power
Of unreflecting love;–then on the shore
Of the wide world I stand alone, and think
Till love and fame to nothingness do sink.

Karl Marx: “So long as things go well…”

 Orts  Tagged with: ,
Nov 202010
 

So long as things go well, competition affects an operating fraternity of the capitalist class… But as soon as it is no longer a question of sharing profits, but of sharing losses, everyone tries to reduce his own share to a minimum and to shove it off upon another. The class, as such, must inevitably lose. How much the individual capitalist must bear of the loss, i.e., to what extent he must share it at all, is decided by strength and cunning, and competition then becomes a fight among hostile brothers. The antagonism between each individual capitalist’s interests and those of the capitalist class as a whole then comes to the surface…

Capital

Xenophanes – The Image of God

 Poems  Tagged with: ,
Nov 202010
 

1.
It was man who made god, who endowed god
with the body of a man, the voice of a man,
who dressed him in the earthly garments of a man.

2.
If a workhorse or lion or unyoked ox
had eyes to paint, had hands to sculpt,
had voice to sing its tribal song,

the horse would paint god as a horse,
the lion would sculpt a lion god,
the ox would sing a divinity of oxen.

3.
The Ethiopians say, “Our gods have flat noses
and black skins.” The Thracians say, “The hair
of our gods is red, their eyes the color of jade.”

translated by Sherod Santos from Greek Lyric Poetry

William Shakespeare – Sonnet 65

 Orts  Tagged with:
Nov 202010
 

Since brass, nor stone, nor earth, nor boundless sea,
But sad mortality o’er-sways their power,
How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea,
Whose action is no stronger than a flower?
O, how shall summer’s honey breath hold out
Against the wreckful siege of battering days,
When rocks impregnable are not so stout,
Nor gates of steel so strong, but Time decays?
O fearful meditation! where, alack,
Shall Time’s best jewel from Time’s chest lie hid?
Or what strong hand can hold his swift foot back?
Or who his spoil of beauty can forbid?
O, none, unless this miracle have might,
That in black ink my love may still shine bright.