The sage who defines his Utopia as a society in which any man can say to any other, “Go to hell,” but no man wants to say it, and no man need go when it is said, may have been crude in expression, but he was sound in substance. Pride and fear are the attitudes least becoming human beings, and a people which is a people, not a mob, will be intolerant of both. It will respect all men and feel awe of none. It will give short shrift to all forms of authority, whether political or economic, which breed arrogance in this class and servility in that.

– R. H. Tawney

Tawney, R. H. Equality. London: Unwin, 1975.

2015-08-01

Ledgard, J. M. Submergence: A Novel. Minneapolis: Coffee House, 2013.

2015-08-01

We cannot talk with definition about our souls, but it is certain that we will decompose. Some dust of our bodies may end up in a horse, wasp, cockerel, frog, flower, or leaf, but for every one of these sensational assembles there are a quintillion microorganisms. It is far likelier that the greater part of us will become protists than a skyscraping dormouse. What is likely is that, sooner or later, carried in the wind and in rivers, or your graveyard engulfed in the sea, a portion of each of us will be given new life in the cracks, vents, or pools of molten sulphur on which the tonguefish skate.

You will be in Hades, the staying place of the spirits of the dead. You will be drowned in oblivion, the River Lethe, swallowing water to erase all memory. it will not be the nourishing womb you began your life in. It will be a submergence. You will take your place in the boiling-hot fissures, among the teeming hordes of nameless microorganisms that mimic no forms, because they are the foundation of all forms. In your reanimation you will be aware only that you are a fragment of what once was, and are no longer dead. Sometimes this will be an electric feeling, sometimes a sensation of the acid you eat, or the furnace under you. You will burgle and rape other cells in the dark for a seeming eternity, but nothing will come of it. Hades is evolved to the highest state of simplicity. It is stable. Whereas you are a tottering tower, so young in evolutionary terms, and addicted to consciousness.

– J. M. Ledgard

It is the nature of privilege and tyranny to be unconscious of themselves, and to protest, when challenged, that their horns and hooves are not dangerous, as in the past, but useful and handsome decorations, which no self-respecting society would dream of dispensing with. But they are the enemies, nevertheless, both of individual culture and of social amenity. They create a spirit of domination and servility, which produces callousness in those who profit by them, and resentment in those who do not, and suspicion and contention in both. A civilized community will endeavour to exorcise that spirit by removing its causes. It will insist that one condition, at least, of its deserving the name is that members shall treat each other, not as means, but as ends, and that institutions which stunt the faculties of some among them for the advantage of others shall be greatly recognized to be barbarous and odious. It will aim at making power, not arbitrary, but responsible, and, when it finds an element of privilege in social institutions, it will seek to purge it.

– R. H. Tawney

Miles, Barry. Call Me Burroughs: A Life. New York: Twelve, 2014. Print.

Finished 2015:06-25