Occasional Percy
On Carl Sagan, from
From 
Signposts in a Strange Land:
An essay on abortion,
with something to offend everybody.
"Legalized abortion... is yet another banal atrocity in a century where atrocities have become commonplace."Letter to the New York Times."There is a wonderful irony here. It is this: the onset of individual life is not a dogma of the Church but a fact of science. How
much more convenient if we lived in the thirteenth century, when no one knew anything about microbiology and arguments
about the onset of life were legitimate. Compared to a modern textbook of embryology, Thomas Aquinas sounds like an
American Civil Liberties Union member."
"...certain consequences, perhaps unforeseen, follow upon the acceptance of the principle of the destruction of human life for what may appear to be the most admirable social reasons."
From 
The Message in the Bottle:
"At the end of an age the theorists of the age will go to any length to
stretch their theory to fit the events of the age in the name of science,
even if it means that theory is stretched out of shape and is no longer
scientific.
What theorists of the old modern age had to confront were the altogether unexpected disasters of the twentieth century: that after three hundred years of the scientific revolution and in the emergence of rational ethics in European Christendom, Western man in the twentieth century elected instead of an era of peace and freedom an orgy of wars, tortures, genocide, suicide, murder, and rapine unparalleled in history.
The old modern age ended in 1914. In 1916 one million Frenchmen and Germans were killed in a single battle."
"The hero of the postmodern novel is a man who has forgotten his bad
memories and conquered his present ills and who finds himself in the victorious
secular city. His only problem now is to keep from blowing his brains out."
Rhetorical Questions:
Why does man feel so sad in the twentieth century?Why has man feel so bad in the very age when, more than in any other age, he has succeeded in satisfying his needs and making over the world for his own use?
Why has man entered on an orgy of war, murder, torture, and self-destruction unparalleled in history and in the very century when he had hoped to see the dawn of universal peace and brotherhood?
Why have more people been killed in the twentieth century than in all
other centuries put together?
Why is war man's greatest pleasure?
Why is man the only creature that wages war against its own species?
What would man do if war were outlawed?
Why is it that the only time I ever saw my uncle happy was the afternoon of December 7, 1941, when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor?
Why did he shortly thereafter become miserable when he learned that he was too old to go to Europe to shoot at Germans and stand a good chance of being shot by Germans?
Why is it that the only time he was happy before was in the Argonne Forest in 1918 when he was shooting at Germans and stood a good chance of being shot by Germans?
Why was he sad from 1918 to 1941 even though he lived in as good an
environment as man can devise, indeed had the best of all possible worlds
in literature, music, and art?
Where are the Hittites?
Why does no one find it remarkable that in most world cities today there
are Jews but not one single Hittite, even though the Hittites had a great
flourishing civilization while the Jews nearby were a weak and obscure
people?
When one meets a Jew in New York or New Orleans or Paris or Melbourne,
it is remarkable that no one considers the event remarkable. What are they
doing here? But it is even more remarkable to wonder, if there are Jews
here, why are there not Hittites here?
Where are the Hittites? Show me one Hittite in New York City.
What does a man do when he finds himself living after an age has ended and he can no longer understand himself because the theories of man of the former age no longer work and the theories of the new age are not yet known, for not even the name of the new age is known, and so everything is upside down, people feeling bad when they should feel good, good when they feel bad?
Why is there no such thing as a primitive language?
Why is it that scientists have a theory about everything under the sun but do not have a theory of man?
Is it possible that a theory of man is nothing more nor less than a
theory of the speaking creature?
From The Moviegoer
it is unaware of being despair."
-Soren Kierkegaard
I become absorbed and for a minute or so forget about the girl.
What is the nature of the search? you ask.
Really it is very simple, at least for a fellow like me; so simple that it is easily overlooked.
The search is what everyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life.
This morning, for example, I felt as if I had come to myself on a strange island.
And what does such a castaway do?
Why, he pokes around the neighborhood and he doesn't miss a trick.
To become aware of the possibility of the search is to be onto something.
Not to be onto something is to be in despair."
The search always ends in despair.
They like to show a fellow coming to himself in a strange place--but what does he do?
He takes up with the local librarian, sets about proving to the local children what a nice fellow he is, and settles down with a vengeance.
In two weeks' time he is so sunk in everydayness that he might just as well be dead."
Until recent years, I read only 'fundamental' books, that is, key books on key subjects, such as see p. 60
I have noticed, however, that the believers are far from unique themselves, are in fact alike as peas in a pod."
Now in the thirty-first year of my dark pilgrimage on this earth and knowing less than I ever knew before, having learned only to recognize merde when I see it, having inherited no more from my father than a good nose for merde, for every species of shit that flies--my only talent--smelling merde from every quarter, living in fact in the very century of merde, the great shithouse of scientific humanism where needs are satisfied, everyone becomes an anyone, a warm and creative person, and prospers like a dung beetle, and one hundred percent of people are humanists and ninety-eight percent believe in God, and men are dead, dead, dead;
and the malaise has settled like a fall-out and what people really fear is not that the bomb will fall but that the bomb will not fall--on my thirtieth birthday, I know nothing and there is nothing to do but fall prey to desire."
Lancelot
Why did I discover nothing at the very heart of evil? There was no "secret" after all, no discovery, no flickering of interest, nothing at all, not even any evil. There was no sense of coming close to the "answer" as there had been when I discovered the stolen money in my father's sock drawer. So I have nothing to ask you after all because there is no answer. There is no question. There is no unholy grail just as there was no holy grail.
Love in the Ruins
The old Republican Party has become the Knothead Party, so named during the last Republican convention in Montgomery when a change of name was proposed, the first suggestion being the Christian Conservative Constitutional Party, and campaign buttons were even printed with the letters CCCP before an Eastern-Liberal commentator noted the similarity to the initials printed on the backs of the Soviet cosmonauts and called it the most knotheaded political bungle of the century--which the conservatives, in the best tradition, turned to their own advantage, printing a million more buttons reading "Knotheads for America" and banners proclaiming "No Man Can Be Too Knotheaded in the Service of His Country."
The old Democrats gave way to the new Left Party. They too were stuck with a nickname not of their own devising and the nickname stuck: in this case a derisive acronym that the Right made up and the Left accepted, accepted in that same curious american tradition by which we allow our enemies to name us, give currency to their curses, perhaps from the need to concede the headstart they want and still beat them, perhaps also from the secret inkling that our enemies know the worst of us best and it's best for them to say it. LEFT usually it is, often LEFTPAPA, sometimes LEFTPAPASAN (with a little Jap bow), hardly ever the original LEFTPAPASANE, which stood for what, according to the Right, the Left believed in: Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, The Pill, Atheism, Pot, Anti-Pollution, Sex, Abortion Now, Euthanasia.Our Catholic church here split into three pieces: (1) the American Catholic Church whose new Rome is Cicero, Illinois; (2) the Dutch schismatics who believe in relevance but not God; (3) the Roman Catholic remnant, a tiny scattered flock with no place to go.
The American Catholic Church, which emphasizes property rights and the integrity of neighborhoods, retained the Latin mass and plays The Star-Spangled Banner at the elevation.
The Dutch schismatics in this area comprise several priests and nuns who left Rome to get married. They threw in with the Dutch schismatic Catholics. Now several divorced priests and nuns are importuning the Dutch cardinal to allow them to remarry.
Students are, if the truth be known, a bad lot. En masse they're as fickle as a mob, manipulable by any professor who'll stoop to it. They have, moreover, an infinite capacity for repeating dull truths and old lies with all the insistence of self-discovery. Nothing is drearier than the ideology of students, left or right. Half the students here revere Dr. Spiro T. Agnew, elder statesman and honorary president of the American Christian Proctological Society; the other half admire Hermann Hesse, Dr. B. F. Skinner, inventor of the Skinner conditioning box, and the late Justice William O. Justice, a famous qualitarian who improved the quality of life in India by serving as adviser in a successful program of 100,000,000 abortions and an equal number of painless "terminations" of miserable and unproductive old folk.People talk a lot about how great "the kids" are, compared to kids in the past. The only difference in my opinion is that kids now don't have sense enough to know what they don't know.
On the other hand, my generation is an even bigger pain.