"it is not possible to get the blessing without the madness"

"It is fifteen years since H. G. Wells said Mind was at the End of its Tether—with a frightful queerness come into life:  there is no way out or around or through, he said; it is the end.  It is because I think mind is at the end of its tether that I would be silent.  It is because I think there is a way out—a way down and out— . . . —that I will speak.
     ". . . The alternative to mind is certainly madness.  Our greatest blessings, says Socrates in the Phaedrus, come to us by way of madness—provided, he adds, that the madness comes from the god.  Our real choice is between holy and unholy madness. . . .
     "And there is a way out—the blessed madness of the maenad and the baccant. . . .  It is possible to be mad and to be unblest; but it is not possible to get the blessing without the madness; it is not possible to get the illuminations without the derangement."

     Norman Oliver Brown, "Apocalypse:  the place of mystery in the life of the mind" (Columbia University, May 31, 1960), in Apocalypse and/or metamorphosis (Berkeley:  The University of California Press, 1991), 2 (1-7).    The reference is to John Senior, The way down and out: the occult in symbolist literature (Cornell University Press, [1959]).  "Sometimes—most times—I think that the way down and out leads out of the university, out of the academy.  But perhaps it is rather that we should recover the academy of earlier days—the Academy of Plato in Athens, the Academy of Ficino in Florence. . . ."
     My thanks to Dana R. Wright, who put me onto this passage by asking for help in tracking a James E. Loder, Jr. quotation of it to source.

"fools with tools are still fools"

"second, mysteries are unpublishable because only some can see them, not all.  Mysteries are intrinsically esoteric, and as such are an offense to democracy:  is not publicity a democratic principle?  Publication makes it republican—a thing of the people.  The pristine academies [of Plato and Ficino] were esoteric and aristocratic, self-consciously separate from the profanely vulgar.  Democratic resentment denies that there can be anything that can't be seen by everybody; in the democratic academy truth is subject to public verification; truth is what any fool can see.  This is what is meant by the so-called scientific method:  so-called science is the attempt to democratize knowledge—the attempt to substitute method for insight, mediocrity for genius, by getting a standard operating procedure.  The great equalizers dispensed by the scientific method are the tools, those analytical tools.  The miracle of genius is replaced by the standard mechanism.  But fools with tools are still fools. . . ."

     Norman Oliver Brown, "Apocalypse:  the place of mystery in the life of the mind" (Columbia University, May 31, 1960), in Apocalypse and/or metamorphosis (Berkeley:  The University of California Press, 1991), 3-4 (1-7).  Needless to say, I have my reservations about this wonderful essay.  There have been real geniuses in modern science, too (and in Brown's sense); nor is it "Either miracle or scripture" (6; indeed, "only the fool will take these [too] as mutually exclusive"); etc.  Still, I'm one of those "fools with tools" who needs to be taken down a notch or two from time to time.

"If everybody always lies to you"

"The moment we no longer have a free press, anything can happen. What makes it possible for a totalitarian or any other dictatorship to rule is that people are not informed; how can you have an opinion if you are not informed? If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer. This is because lies, by their very nature, have to be changed, and a lying government has constantly to rewrite its own history. On the receiving end you get not only one lie—a lie which you could go on for the rest of your days—but you get a great number of lies, depending on how the political wind blows. And a people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and to judge. And with such a people you can then do what you please."

     Hannah Arendt, "Hannah Arendt:  from an interview," The New York review of books 25, no. 16 (October 26, 1978):  18.  "Hannah Arendt made the comments that follow in 1974 during an interview with the French writer Roger Errera."  Could that actually be 1973?  (I haven't watched that yet.)

Gallows humor

      "When the attackers approached the house they were not sure whether Gunnar was at home, and wanted someone to go right up to the house to find out.  They sat down on the ground, while Thorgrim the Easterner climbed on to the roof.  Gunnar caught sight of a red tunic at the window.  He lunged out with his halberd and struck Thorgrim in the belly.  Thorgrim dropped his shield, lost his footing, and toppled down from the roof.  He strode over to where Gizur and the others were sitting.
     "Gizur looked up at him and asked, 'Is Gunnar at home [(Hvárt er Gunnar heima)]?'
     "'That's for you to find out,' replied Thorgrim.  'But I know that his halberd certainly is [(Vitið þér þat, en hitt vissa ek at atgeirr hans var heima)].'
     "And with that he fell dead."

     Njal's saga 77 (trans. Magnus Magnusson & Hermann Pálsson (London:  Penguin Books, 1960), 169).  Original (which I know nothing about) from the critical edition upon which the above translation is based:  Brennu-Njáls saga, ed. Einar Ól. Sveinsson (Reykjavík : Hið íslenzka fornritafélag, 1954), 187.

"the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being." But it can be crossed once and for all.

     "If only it were so simple!  If only there were evil people somewhere insiduously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them.  But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being."

     Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, The gulag archipelago [(Архипелаг ГУЛАГ)] 1918-1956:  an experiment in literary investigation I-II, pt. 1, chap. 4, "The bluecaps," trans. Thomas P. Whitney (New York:  Harper & Row, 1973), 168.  On the other hand (174-175),

     There was a rumor going the rounds between 1918 and 1920 that the Petrograd Cheka, headed by Uritsky, and the Odessa Cheka, heading by Deich, did not shoot all those condemned to death but fed some of them alive to animals in the city zoos.  I do not know whether this is truth or calumny, or, if there were any such cases, how many there were.  But I wouldn't set out to look for proof, either.  Following the practice of the bluecaps, I would propose that they prove to us that this was impossible.  How else could they get food for the zoos in those famine years?...  Those enemies were going to die anyway, so why couldn't their deaths support the zoo economy?...  Wasn't it expedient?
     That is the precise line the Shakespearean evildoer could not cross.  But the evildoer with ideology does cross it, and his eyes remain dry and clear.
     Physics is aware of phenomena which occur only at threshold magnitudes, which do not exist at all until a certain threshold encoded by and known to nature has been crossed....
     Evidently evildoing also has a threshold magnitude.  Yes, a human being hesitates and bobs back and forth between good and evil all his life.  He slips, falls back, clambers up, repents, things begin to darken again.  But just so long as the threshold of evildoing is not crossed, the possibility of returning remains, and he himself is still within reach of our hope.  But when, through the density of evil actions, the result either of their own extreme degree or of the absoluteness of his power, he suddenly crosses that threshold, he has left humanity behind, and without, perhaps, the possibility of return.