Normality and the Crowd

"The Feminine in Fairy Tales" Marie-Louise Von Franz

"At the beginning of Nazism in Germany I was several times asked by Germans in what respect they were abnormal, for though they were unable to accept Nazism, not doing so made them doubt their own normality. Those who stuck to their instinctive reactions and in a higher sense, remained on the right path,

yet fell into misery and complete disaster. They were impressed by the collective impulse though they were right in not joining the collective movement. In that case misery fell upon people who had done the right thing."
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Copyright 1972
1993 Shamballa Press Edition
Page 36

The Generall Historie of Virginia, New-England, and the Summer Isles

"These temporizing proceedings (of ours) may to some seeme too charitable, to such a daily daring trecherous people: to others not pleasing,that we washed not the ground with their blouds, nor shewed such strange inventions in mangling murdering, ransacking,and destroying (as did the Spanyards) the simple bodies of such ignorant soules..."

The Generall Historie of Virginia, New-England, and the Summer Isles:
With the Names of the Adventurers, Planters, and Governours From Their First Beginning Ano: 1584. To This Present 1624. With the Procedings of Those Severall Colonies and the Accidents That Befell Them in All Their Journyes and Discoveries. Also the Maps and Descriptions of All Those Countryes, Their Commodities, People, Government, Customes, and Religion Yet Knowne. Divided Into Sixe Bookes. By Captaine Iohn Smith, Sometymes Governour in Those Countryes & Admirall of New England.
London: Printed by I.D. and I.H. for Michael Sparkes, 1624.

FULL TEXT LINK

Saul Bellow:"Herzog"

Saul Bellow

Herzog ruminations:

"Considering his entire life, he realized he had mismanaged everything - everything. His life was, as the phrase goes, ruined. But since it had not been much to begin with, there was not much to grieve about. Thinking, on the malodorous sofa, of the centuries, the ninteenth, the sixteenth, the eighteenth, he turned up, from the last, a saying that he liked:
Grief, Sir, is a species of idleness."

-"Herzog" Pgs 5,6

"Dear Dr. Shrodinger, in "What is Life" you say that in nature only man hesitates to cause pain. As destruction is the master- method by which evolution produces new types, the reluctance to cause pain may express a human will to obstruct natural law..... In your remarks on entropy... how the organism maintains itself against death- in your words, against thermodynamic equilibrium....Being an unstable organization of matter, the body threatens to rush away from us. It leaves. It is real. It! Not we! Not I! ....
To have a human life and also an inhuman life....To bite, to swallow and at the same time pity your food. To have sentiment. at the same time to behave brutally. It has been suggested ( and why not!) that the reluctance to cause pain is actually an extreme form, a delicious form of sensuality, and that we increase the luxuries of pain by the injection of a moral pathos. Thus working both sides of the street. "

From one of Moses E. Herzog's letters written in the head but never mailed in "Herzog"- pgs 194,195.

Empire

Exerpt from a review of "Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic"
by Chalmers Johnson. Review by Jonathan Freedland in the June 14, New York Review of Books

"Americans have never constructed colonies abroad.(?) Oh, but they have, he says; it's just that Americans are blind to them. America is an "empire of bases," he writes, with a network of vast, hardened military encampments across the earth, each one a match for any Roman or Raj outpost. Official figures speak of 737 US military bases in foreign countries, adding up to an armed American presence, whether large or small, in 132 of the 190 member states of the United Nations.
Johnson reckons the number is actually higher, if one includes those bases about which the Pentagon is coy. The 2005 Base Structure Report omits to mention, for example, garrisons in Kosovo, as well as bases in Afghanistan, Iraq, Israel, Kyrgyzstan, Qatar, and Uzbekistan, even though it is well known that the US established a vast presence in both the Persian Gulf and Central Asia after September 11. (Admittedly, the US was evicted from its base in Uzbekistan in 2005.) Nor does the Pentagon ledger include the extensive military and espionage installations it maintains in Britain, estimated to be worth some $5 billion, since these are nominally facilities of the Royal Air Force. "If there were an honest account, the actual size of our military empire would probably top 1,000 different bases overseas, but no-one—possibly not even the Pentagon —knows the exact number for sure," writes Johnson. Intriguingly, he notes that the thirty-eight large and medium-sized US facilities around the world, mostly air and naval bases, match almost exactly both the thirty-six naval bases and army garrisons Britain maintained at its imperial peak in 1898 and the thirty-seven major sites used by the Romans to police the empire from Britannia to Egypt, Hispania to Armenia in 117 AD. "Perhaps," muses Johnson, "the optimum number of major citadels and fortresses for an imperialist aspiring to dominate the world is somewhere between thirty-five and forty."

Par Lagerkvist: "The Sibyl"

"In a little house on the mountain slopes above Delphi lived an old women and her witless son. The house consisted of a single room; one wall was the mountainside itself, and always dripped with moisture. It was not really a house at all but a ramshackle hut which the herdsmen had built for themselves. It stood alone away up in the wild mountain, high above the the buildings of the city and the sacred precincts of the temple. The woman seldom left the house, her son never. He sat within, in the half light, smiling to himself as he had always done; he was now well into middle age and his lank hair had begun to turn gray. But his face was untouched; it was as it had always been, without any real features in its beardless, downy childishness, only that queer perpetual smile. The old women's face was furrowed and austere, and swarthy, as if it had been touched by fire, her eyes had the look of eyes that have seen god."

'The Sibyl' Par Lagerkvist 1956 trans. Naomi Walford

"Radical Hope: Ethics in a Time of Cultural Devestation": Jonathan Lear

"Plenty Coups refused to speak of his life after the passing of the buffalo, so that his story seems broken off, leaving many years unaccounted for. "I have not told you half of what happened while I was young" he said when urged to go on. "I can think back and tell you much more of war and horse stealing. But when the buffalo went away the hearts of my people fell to the ground and they could not lift them up again. After this nothing happened. There was little singing anywhere. Besides," he added sorrowfully, " you know that part of my life as well as I do. You saw what happened to us after the buffalo went away. "

- from 'Radical Hope.' here Lear quotes Plenty Coups as recounted in "Plenty Coups: Chief of the Crows" by Frank B. Linderman, University of Nebraska Press 1962

Process and Reality

" The wisdom of subjective aim prehends every actuality for what it can be in such a perfected system - its sufferings, its sorrows, its failures, its triumphs, its immediacies of joy - woven by rightness of feeling into the harmony of the universal feeling, which is always immediate, always many, always one, always with novel advance moving onward and never perishing. The revolts of destructive evil, purely self regarding, are dismissed into the triviality of merely individual facts; and yet the good they did achieve in individual joy, in individual sorrow,in the introduction of needed contrast, is yet saved by its relation to the completed whole. The image- and it is but an image- under which this operative growth of God's nature is best conceived is that of a tender care that nothing be lost.

The consequent nature of God is his judgment on the world. He saves the world as it passes into the immediacy of his own life. It is the judgement of tenderness which loses nothing which can be saved. It is the judgement of a wisdom which uses that what in the temporal world is mere wreckage"

From "Process and Reality" pg. 407-408

Published 1929