The Quotes of Jamie Chadwickfrom various correspondence, 1977-1996(written to amuse and entertain)"A beginning is all we can ask for; a happy ending is not even a mythological beast - it is only a contradiction in terms." "I've been three days in the library... It appears the history of Western thought has been deeply influenced by a corporate entity called the James Gang. Jesse and Frank James were indubitably the more creative members, but Henry and William did some vulgar literary spadework also worthy of note. (Or did I turn over two pages at once?)" "I have a floppy disc (so called no doubt because it is rigid and square)..." "You know, Psychology is after all only a section of Natural Philosphy, as indeed are all the sciences. The business of Natural Philosophy is, I think, only to reconcile Man to his own products, his own mechanisms. Galileo didn't disrupt the universe giving the sun the fixed place and the earth the moving because it is inherently 'right' that way around, or anymore advantageous that way. NASA's space program could still have landed men on the moon launching them from a Ptolomaic earth into a Geocentric sky. He did it because some damned Dutchman had allowed a telescope to come into existence, and Man and the telescope were about to embrace in a death grapple. The machine was 'reasonable' and man was 'rational', and whereas the machine could never cease to be reasonable, Man could easily cease from being rational. It was man that adapted to the machine." "My speculation that Byron could both achieve and defy tragic status is an instrument of provocation. When he hears of it he will be furious." "I cannot stop myself from flinching from a value system that utilizes as coinage the cost of a week's bombing over Vietnam. It's not the first time I've seen or heard it done - one day it will become as universal as the gold standard. Businessmen will discuss market campaigns, costing them as decimal fractions of an holocaust." "I know why we have jugglers: to demonstrate that however many things one's two hands must handle, they can be handled with grace." "Some people hold that the taxonomic 'tree' also represents an evolutionary 'tree'. I am not among their number... At the same time though, I do not challenge the taxonomic tree. It would be as futile to tamper with the index as to change the accepted order of the alphabet. However, everybody does know that the order of the alphabet is arbitrary and a product of human history, not a divine revelation of nature." "I am delighted by the grace of the well-turned, but spurious apology, with which you introduce your letter; which letter incidently would be sufficient to engender an encyclopaedia of inspirations in response, had I but the ink or stamina." "No couple are as secure in their mutual bonds as those who are linked in mutual perversion." "Keep in touch, or at least don't stray more than three paces removed from possible contact - we all might need each other for something some day." "Properly speaking, the object of desire is the cessation of the desire. Hungry men do not desire food particularly; they desire not to be hungry." "Frazer in 'The Golden Bough' described the history of ideas as black and white, black being magic and white science; a rich tapestry of infinite gradation. According to him, where the fabric is at its greyest, the red thread of religion is brightest. He detested submission to the forces of the universe, and this submission to 'divine will' is religion in his book. The white-coated scientist and the black-coated magician both wrestle with nature and with themselves as nature incarnate. Both are worthy of respect. If he were to be right, then this history must have a terminus. The tapestry woven in perfect black when all minds were magical will finally be woven in undifferentiated white when all minds are illuminated by reason." "I sometimes think that everyone has grown-up or died. I have neither, but I prefer to feign death than feign adulthood." "My machine is no golem; the program is no tetragrammaton. As a baby recognises three spots as eyes and mouth and an infant imbues a doll with life because it's face is the semblance of a face, we childishly mistake the nature of our machines for the machinery of nature." "... I seem to remember a gilded hour spent in the embrace of a wine whose name, in the vintage of its renaissance had almost reclaimed the prefatory epithet "Imperial" ...a rich golden wine called Imperial Tokay which had the reputation of an aphrodisiac amongst the Almanach de Gotha... It is hardly to be expected that the state-owned collective farms would stoop to pick a grape of such ill-repute... I remember classifying it at the time as "the ideal aperatif to a line of coke"... it's evocation of incest at Marienbad was stimulating, but I should imagine that it would cloy in habitual use unless drunk as a fetish - But for Christ's sake, don't do anything on my say so... Do you like Retsina?" "You and I were marginal people before homelessness froze into social permafrost." "Chess Problem. The problem is I can't play chess... I think this paragraph is prone to syntactic palsy. I will therefore omit the well-phrased prologue and leap at once to the denoument. I shall include no chess move today, because I am waiting for a chess bible...I might at least make a fight of it. You must pardon me, if the tantalizing taste of my blood is already on your lips, that I mouselike, remain in my wainscot." "Utter a line, a pearl to prize - I'll tell you who you plagarize." "A sentence is a thing, a remarkable thing in which the subject undergoes a transformation, and the transformation is susceptible to infinite variation. A mathematical equation, a formal syllogism, all the other machines of conceptual transformation are crude by comparison; the process terms are very few: "is equal" or "is not equal" or "is equivalent" or "is not equivalent" etc. - their number is minute compared to the gigantic armoury of transitive verbs with which every human being may be equiped. This very knowledge is itself a weapon in the hands of the crusaders of light. The first effective opposition offered to Behaviourism came from scholars of linguistics. Men create from within themselves; they do not merely process stimulation. Because they can always create new sentences, man may be said to create, not merely to perform." "[..Chaos Theory.. ] Is mother nature dropping another veil in her endless dance?" "Political attitudes are generally strategies of power; power over hearts and minds, which is the mores of our conduct and the language of our communication." "Posthumously, [Byron] was the spirit that let the Liberals believe a freedom fighter could exist." "I profoundly mistrust pragmatism... I don't claim every psychologist is in direct linear descent from [William] James, but psychology does seem to work always in consciousness of a mythological pragmatic observer, an impatient father figure standing over the work jingling small change in his trouser pockets, as if the only end of all our labours was to achieve a perpetual smugness. Imagine a pragmatic physician; his medicine chest would contain only placebos and opiates." "Who would be the obvious choice to send as ambassador to alpha Centaurus?... There is a place for a singer in the stars." "Given three lines of a man's hand-writing, ...I or anyone can plait a rope to hang him with." "When I was at school... I would have preferred to have spent some time studying structural grammar at the level that one uses it in one's native tongue, rather than in one's primitive Latin." "...a superfluous word in a poem is as wicked a disfigurement as a superfluous leg on a man." "...in the early hours of last Christmas morning I tuned into the World Service of the BBC... I listened gobsmacked to the Reith Christmas lecture transmitted to the english speaking world. It was Neo-Darwinian orthodoxy translated from Biology to Cosmology and delivered with [what you would call] 'proud certainty', that I call arrogance. The children of the world were being treated to a catalogue of conclusions supported not by argument but by inaccurate historical anecdotes. The conclusions were, needless to say, rabidly negativist, materialist and final. Tablets of stone from an atheist Sinai." "It means a lot to me to have someone talk to me occasionally; probably more than it means to me to talk to someone." "As a matter of fact, I am not obsessed by punctuation, but if my apparent obsession stimulated your analysis of the nature of diacritical markings then I should be delighted to be thus afflicted." "...an Apologia was included in my last letter as a mere formal necessity. As for its content, I chose to apologise for my spelling and punctuation rather than my style and content because the former are unimportant and the latter important in the extreme. Today I shall apologise for excessive length and ugly script." "I was taught always to look farther Far Far Farther than... Textbooks of modern illusion, sursum corda lies Shibboleths of class and education The academic mill, the literary knocking shop Histories of political convenience, Churches of common assent The affections of consenting adults, the architecture of the totalitarian utopia The Hygiene of the unsanctified soul Autobahn freedom of Volkswagen movement Newsprint liberty of acceptable thought The momentary beauty of the well-photographed atrocity" "There is a maxim, that a gentleman never insults another unintentionally." "I was once a member of the Flat Earth Society by the way. The pleasure in publicly espousing a heterodoxy is the rabid reaction of the orthodox. I have seen ordinary undergraduates literally foam at the lips in trying to disabuse me of the heresy. They usually start with the empirical argument: "But everyone knows..." and end with coercion and abuse. Those who could martial cogent arguments in defense of the spheroid model are generally wise enough not to bother for fear of claiming 'a priori certainties' or 'leaps of faith'. The challenge is to remain calm and keep a straight face in the face of humourless bigotry." "No woman .... could .... should .... does .... love a man who doesn't .... couldn't ....may .... mightn't .... mustn't .... oughtn't .... daren't." "...Planck and the Quantum: Planck thought it unnecessary to detail the nature of the forces he was dealing with even if he thought it possible, so he quarried a piece of Latin to signify 'an amount', 'a lump of', 'a package'; a new word to avoid the contradictions and confusions of the old. To 'avoid' mark you, not to clarify." "The perfect product is 'Domestos'. The consumer buys it, takes it home and throws it away - then buys some more. He is encouraged to flush it into the sewer by the fact that it is too deadly a poison to leave around the house. He is encouraged to renew his supply by the idea that it is in some way health giving to bring it into the house." "I'm sick of the dominance of bio-chemists, They seem determined to disrupt the Babel of life science terminology into a plethora of metalanguages. Consider the word 'respiration'. The Biochemist insists that the word is properly applied only to the liberation of 'energy' (no definition supplied) from A.T.P. which is a compound, apparently chemical for which a formula is given. You try looking it up: T.P. gives us triphosphate and A. gives us 'adenosine' which is a generic adjective and not a chemical noun and is probably intended to refer to cellular nucleic material (no definition supplied) in direct denial of the other uses of 'Aden...' which is plain greek and means 'a gland'. (How are your Adenoids?) One might as well coin a phrase like: "Glandulescence Tri-Phosphate'; which makes all the sense of 'Woodiness Bi-Carbonate' or "Rockyness On-Toast'. I really don't much care about their words. They are by nature ephemeral and insubstantial, infinitely more so than the twitterings of a sparrow. But I do care very much that they annexe the word 'respiration', suggesting I should use the expression 'Gas Exchange' instead. (I can imagine far better 'definienda' for that phrase.) The word 'respiration' is a member word of a structure as 'real' as the periodic table... Dum Spiro Spero respire aspire inspire exspire transpire perspire conspire (prefix + 'spirare') ...and these latin derivatives are not only English but also obviously members of all Romance languages and most have been stable enough to be borrowed into Germanic and Slavonic. If the verb spirare (breathe) is mobile then at least the prefixes re-/ ad-/ in-/ ex-/ trans-/ and per-/ may be let to hold some continuous significance. The usurption of language is a witful wickedness." "...Charles [Darwin] reminds me that He did not dispute the possibility of heritable acquisitions, only he never found any. His orthodox followers found the notion heretical, not him... "You do realise Charles that modern opinion holds that many cell organelles in many species were originally diseases - Mitochondria for example". Poor Charles. It was not until I summoned his ghost did I realise how sadly he has been used. The orthodoxy must have known that Darwin was not Darwinian enough for them. Well, Marx isn't a Marxist, Christ isn't a Christian, and such is fame. Darwin's ghost was with me for four hours. He is no less ugly now than he was in life. The hideous ailments that raddled him are still to be seen between the fluffy white whiskers. Ghosts have no use for medicine, nor [for] pity either. I though, who am in the midst of life, am bound to compassion and the healer's wheel of diagnosis, prognosis, prescription and proscription. His skin was yellow and covered in suppurating pustules. His eyes were tiny and sore. I raised him as a Tiresias, but tended him from the pit of blood and meal until he spoke. He mistrusted all I told him, but would have surrended all post-mortem glory in exchange for a crumb of knowledge of life." "The divine Augustus reformed Latin phonetics by misspelling in his Youth through ignorance; errors which he did not correct in maturity through pride." "It is no coincidence that sober little linguists like Noam Chomsky started by developing a general theory of Language and then found themselves at war with the big corporations." "Robin Hood wears Lincoln Green because Red cloth was forbidden to men of his class. Lincoln Red was cheaper from the loom because Vermilion dye was cheaper than Green; but vermilion is grown from a parasite in the bark of oak trees. A black market in Vermilion was killing trees faster than ship-building. Dyers were buying it up at a cost in negligible financial terms but at huge environmental ones. Green dyes are cultivated (eg Madder); costly, but indirectly feeding the farmer. The green man of Mythology, and his avatar Robin Hood, may wear green for symbolic reasons, but the cloth trade south of the Humber was responsible for deforestation and social destabilization that the sheriffs of the shires felt bound to suppress. The forester (Robin Hood) as guardian of the oak weald would attack those who wore red because they were of the upper classes, but red was forbidden to the lower classes to protect the oaks themselves." "History of events and persons and ideas is written on the paper of the correct with the instruments of the correct in the ink of the incorrect." "Don't take your references from [Timothy] Boyer. It's like asking Ian Paisley to validate Roman Catholic Liberation Theology as practised in Brazil." "I don't like mentioning Einstein. Roland Barthes once described Einstein's brain as 'a mythical object'. Linguistic semiotics demands we should know the nature of myths but it makes us uneasy about perpetuating them." "Academics do make metalanguages. The terminology of grammar is one such, but 'Discourse' is not grammatical. It is unwise to give grammar precedence before discourse and unforgivable to then give the grammar all fucked up. Conscious or unconscious, this is obscurantism and we have no word in english dirty enough for those who appropriate the means of expression. Slavery and murder may be cognate terms because to enslave is to deprive the individual of his or her life (in some sense). To deprive an individual of the means of life is generally called theft, and sometimes property. There should be some equally perjorative term for those who dispossess others of the means of generating, receiving and communicating ideas." "The divine afflatus that inspires poets is always feminine. It is no coincidence that lovers find a sudden rush of words to the head. The 'muse' as you call her, is the goddess in her least compromising mood and she can laugh as she hangs gobbets of her servitors' flesh on the barbed wire between the worlds for the wind to winnow. Therefore beware!... Most of us meet the goddess once or twice; few of us can follow her for long." "History does not record how monstrously Beatrice suffered for Dante - or Laura for Petrarch." "I find this explanation [of the disappearance of the dinosaurs] at least as convincing as any other that I've heard and it provides a better accompaniment to Wagnerian music." "Poetry requires discipline, which is why it is the art by which we learn to bridle Pegasus and ride the beast we know first and last in the passion of love." "Sha Jehan bacame an architect and built a mausoleum. There is a story that when, at last, the Taj Mahal was [completed], he then cleansed it of its one imperfection by removing the body of his beloved wife that through love and death first drove him to the work." "Never apologize for a poem. Were I the least generous of men, I would praise each of yours far above your own praise, even by damning it out of hand. You invoke a higher judge - to whom you must listen." "Dash yourself on no rocks. Burn yourself on no altars. Throw yourself on no swords. If you can not resist these romantic temptations, you will not be fit to serve. Human Love is service." "Rhyme? Poetry (in Milton's telling phrase) is 'harmonious numbers' and not (as Marvell noted) 'jangling rhyme'." "I'll never get any better at chess because people unwisely assume that I understand it. In fact I lose focus very quickly. The romance of a doomed knight makes me dream of Parsifal or something instead of playing." "- you know I play the devil's advocate - it's my job... Some people are frightened or seduced by my client Lucifer." "Poetry demands a discipline which is so like the discipline we feel the lack of, in intense emotional states..." "I entrust you with a politically incorrect idea - My life is in your hands if the thought police catch you. Your blood is on my head if you do not betray me." "I write to you in the spirit of play, therefore - no I don't want my ball back - keep on playing." "The whole history of english speaking imperialism leaves one truth bobbing like a cork in the maelstrom. English is the language of free men and women. English speakers enslave others - yeah, sure, no argument, but english speaking communities are not enslaved anywhere on the planet." "I am praying for the hour that I can embark on one train of thought." "Perhaps our diffidence is a natural aspect of our outlawry One by one we are free people One by one we are outlaws Dozen by dozen we would be gangsters which is too dear a price to pay for the liberty we take." "Call the O.E.D. They are a surprisingly helpful bunch of people and always happy to compare notes, even if they don't give hospitality to a word within the pages of the dictionary. They do have an unpleasant habit of asking where in print did you first encounter the word. I can never remember." "Yes, one may talk of a 'nest' of social workers. One speaks of a nest of vipers. T S Eliot has just come back. 'I Tiresias fore suffered all.' I know his allusion. Tiresias witnessed the copulation of serpents and became both wise and blind. Me, I just feel awe when I see serpents, egg laying or live bearing viviparous beasts. Social workers I loathe and detest as a travesty of human kind.
"You have probably been rash, and made obvious declarations. This is not wise - indeed such premature ejaculations resemble the other sort as a kind of interpersonal clumsiness." "There are sweet apples in the wintry tree a vintage in the stark bare vine which do not yield to hungry shakings only to the warmth of time That was not intentional - I was not trying to write poetry." "Why did women love Byron while he lived; and loved Shelley when he was dead?" "Don't 'humbly' say it. The shits with their jargon are in every sense our enemies. Wandsworth council once tried to induct me as... Oh! God knows what. The brief was "to progress the aims of the council...". I stood 'like an ox in the furrow' arguing that to progress is an intransitive verb, and therefore unsuitable. The english transitive verb is:- 'advance'. 'Do you want me to advance the aims of the council?' quoth I. 'Well yes' quoth they. 'Surely [the] "aim" is not in question' quoth I. 'Surely target is the better word.' 'Oh yes - Oh yes' they simpered. Well I advanced the target beyond their reach. You'll never take me alive." "Remember too, that I wrote my text of human and inhuman language in the light of phosphorescent death and with the enforced company of 'primary healthy care workers' talking about 'enabling' still curdling my ears." "Which reminds me, the great seal of the USA. I can't help translate it. I don't know what a 'SECLUM' is, though the great seal promises a new order of them. Semiologically, these fragments of ancient tongues are instruments only of dominance. They have no meaning. If I said: 'A new order of ages' in english, or any other vulgar tongue, you would have the right to question my questionable meaning, but you can get away with the most abstruse barbarism in Latin. I do not know what is meant by 'A New Order of Periods' and I'm happy to tell you: 'The Emperor has no clothes.' Consider 'E PLURIBUS UNUM' (or is it 'Unam'?). They write it on dollar bills. Out of many - one. Now tell me what the fuck does that mean? You can't write a meaningful sentence without a verb. If you read:- 'Out of/from/by plurality one thing' you would say 'I don't understand this'." "'Levant' is a direction, a bearing, a vector; it's not a place. It is the name of a wind, as North or South are. The wind that comes from the direction of the rising sun is 'Levant' or 'easterly' as the declining west is 'ponente'. For your pleasure - a classical compass rose:
The origin must be Aeolus' Isle." "Is it nostalgia that draws me to the nearly recent times when science was virtually unhampered by technology? I should say - when the curious mind could understand how its instruments worked, and when 'black boxes' meant nothing other than coffins." "Sometimes when I'm having a bad day in the reference library, I divert myself by looking up some of my ancestors. I am particularly fond of a line of barons who, each in their generation, supported Queen Mathilda against King Stephen, The People against King John, De Montfort against the King, and so on. Never once between Hastings and Trafalgar was any one of them on the winning side, but I dare say that doesn't mean they were on the wrong side. We will feast together in Valhalla and laugh together like drains over the lovely brave folly of life." "I myself have a high opinion of my own quality. I think of myself as a mind of the fifth order in that I can freely communicate with those minds wiser than my own. They, in their turn, have the same relationship with minds of the third order, and these minds could freely communicate with minds like Maxwell. I call him a mind of the second order because a mind of the first would be an ideal thing (like Kelvins 0 degrees or Von Guericke's vacuum). It would be like the mind of God... You know why Newton never became a philosopher? Leibniz made a stab at it, and for all my low opinion of the 'Monadology' it is worth infinitly more than Newton's blatherings on the geography of Hell and the hidden meanings of the Book of Daniel... I make it axiomatic that the capacity for religion is as ineluctably human as the capacity for language - and naturally as diverse and fluid in its forms of expression. I don't know why Newton couldn't satisfy his soul's thirst for the divine through a reflecting telescope but he too is a mind of the second order and I must respect that he had his reasons even though I will never understand them." "Mind seems to differ from a computing machine not only in scale. Mind is distinct by quality, not only by quantity... Do you know the 4 colour problem?... The question is: how many pens does a mapmaker need to colour a map? Better to say if areas are differentiated without drawing lines between them, how many distinct qualities must be given to those areas... No pattern, however complex, requires more (in plane space) than 4 [colours]... No known rule or theorem tells us why this should be so. Well I'm not surprised by that. The colours are qualities, not quantities, and mathematics is not built to handle quality. A hyper-intelligent dog would see only in black and white - perhaps the dog would have a four-scent problem. Quality is experiential. Quantity alone is mathematical. In the '50s Heinrich Heesch suggested that we compile a list of all possible surfaces where the 4 quality solution might conceivably fail and test them all. If the 4Q conjecture does not fail in any conceivable set of circumstances then we have the right to accept it as an axiom of nature. Wolfgang Haken applied himself to this approach in 1970 but the fastest machine available then would have taken more than 100 years to test every possibility... Between '72 and '74, he and Kenneth Appel developed a better program, and hardware too improved. This is probably the rubicon of Information Technology. The machine itself by its nature contributed to its programme. Over 6 months in early '76 the machine tested every possibility and predictably did not find a single exception. Why is this result unsatisfying? The first universal theorem given by a machine. We are drawing lines here between opposing camps... The philosopher Stephen Tymoczko claimed: 'If we accept the 4 colour theorem as a theorem, then we are committed to changing the sense of "theorem", or more to the point, to changing the sense of the underlying concept of proof.' I for my own part claim the right to reject any proof that emanates only from a "black box", a self-enclosed system, with the same vigour that I reject a Jehova's Witness's "proofs" from biblical text by the established logical rejection of the false argument: 'Aristotle said x; Aristotle was wise and true (bollocks); x is wise and true.'" "[Chomsky] has been fighting a simple good fight for years. His honesty had, and yet has, implications that extend into many fields. He is accepted as a brilliant linguistic philosopher just so long as linguistic philosophy is only grammar. When it touches politics, reportage, psychology, or any area of vested interest, the drawbridge is raised, the portcullis dropped." "Telecommunications was the province of engineers - engineers don't tell lies - engines function, or do not. Machines function by the precepts of physics as moderated by mathematics. One cannot dispute with a functioning machine, but one can dispute with the mathematics." "I don't think that reason need be betrayed to enjoy magic." "I have conjectured for a long time that truth is a force of nature; real and subject to natural law. If I were to awake tomorrow and say 'Hail the Day!' this exclamation might well possess a charge (as it were), a quantum of truth. I know (by inductive method) that repetition does not equal reiteration and that the quantum will diminish rapidly and in direct inverse proportion to repitition... I feel, I intuit, perhaps even I observe that at a point the force of truth intersects the horizontal axis and becomes something else entirely (maybe a sociological or psychological quantity). I say sociological with reason. The cartesian model has a third axis: the number of simultaneous repetitions. 3 voices making the same declaration at the same time is analogous to 1 voice repeating thrice." "Perhaps it would be easier to speak of Angels and Devils. Demons are, after all, only used Angels." "If you make war on love itself you invite the fate of Carthage, a perpetual and utter destruction. Salt ploughed into the furrow and eternal fruitless bitterness." "A learned and detailed report has been published that states that there is no such thing as satanic child abuse in England... I await the day that someone defends his or her family against social workers by claiming to be Satanist and hence a member of the only community known never to abuse children." "I live in a country where censorship is already a more pernicious endemic evil than free men are accustomed to endure... Am I to believe that dour Swedes and sober Danes are monsters of sepravity without moral censors? Am I to accept that Germans and Japanese can't get up for work in the morning being glutted with obscenity?" "...out of curiosity, I applied for a post in the real world. I met a 'professional debt counsellor' who I swear had never known any of societies edges except in fantasy, or the selfish inflation of her own self pre-occupation to a mythic archetype. I am neither a good nor patient man. I could load tumbrils full of these people." "Chivalry is a very simple notion, namely that: the only proper application of strength is in the protection of the weak. In this context I have been truly awed by the strength in the seemingly frail: the strongest wine in the most delicate vessels. Courtesy is a linked but distinct idea. What I think of as courtesy exists amongst all social animals in some appropriate flowering. It is not anthropomorphic for me to claim that I have witnesses refined coutesy amongst a troop of baboons. On the contrary - I tend to 'simiamorphism' (if I can coin the word) when I observe human antics." "Punctiliousness is always more important when dealing with dangerous enemies than with trusted friends." "Has it occurred to you that your respect for, and tolerance of these people who view this vast dangerous and glorious universe through very different eyes is a product of your own breadth of experience? As I get older, I am at the same time more tolerant and angrier. 20+ years ago I knew too little to often judge. I accepted far too much as just the way of the world. I could have been angrier and resisted. I could have realised too that the strangers around me were more than two dimensional effigies of humanity. They were the real thing." "The lines are being drawn very plainly - it's an us and them division. I see my duty very plain - never to be counted amongst the 'us'." "War does make strange bedfellows and I dislike being driven into a camp which shelters bedfellows not of my choosing - this is the effect of criminalising sectors of the community." "The best parts of a man or woman are not those parts that they themselves treasure but the good things that others find in them." "To my mind the lowliest fiddle player on the last bench of the 2nd violins represents an investment of thousands of man-hours and hundreds of years. I can hear his mother's scrimping and saving in his bowing and scraping. I can hear every apprentice fiddle maker since Cremona was great glueing together violins, and I hear the noise of every axe that ever felled a tree to make them, and I can hear the trees scream as they fall. I hear the stuffy rooms echo to the complaints of old men trying to teach the unteachable and sometimes miraculously suceeding and then going away to die." "The allocation of resources is the prime function of government." "I argue that the free market economics of our recent regime is not balanced by a philosophy of freedoms." "On your travels, if you meet anyone who would accept my love, telegraphic and chaste as it must necessarily be, you have my proxy and power of attorney - distribute lavishly." - collated by Weed (1994-2001) |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||