What happens when thoughts left by those already dead, rise up to speak truth to those still living, as their written words are read and passed on from one blog to another, only to circle back in the form of a comment left by a blog child on the birthing blog and land here at Lem's Levity, with thanks and appreciation:
Excerpt taken from a C.S. Lewis essay, written three years after the bombing on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, “On Living In An Atomic Age”:
"In one way we think a great deal too much of the atomic bomb. “How are we to live in an atomic age?” I am tempted to reply: “Why, as you would have lived in the sixteenth century when the plague visited London almost every year, or as you would have lived in a Viking age when raiders from Scandinavia might land and cut your throat any night; or indeed, as you are already living in an age of cancer, an age of syphilis, an age of paralysis, an age of air raids, an age of railway accidents, an age of motor accidents.”
In other words, do not let us begin by exaggerating the novelty of our situation. Believe me, dear sir or madam, you and all whom you love were already sentenced to death before the atomic bomb was invented: and quite a high percentage of us were going to die in unpleasant ways. We had, indeed, one very great advantage over our ancestors – an aesthetics; but we have that still. It is perfectly ridiculous to go about whimpering and drawing long faces because the scientists have added one more chance of painful and premature death to a world which already bristled with such chances and in which death itself was not a chance at all, but a certainty.
This is the first point to be made: and the first action to be taken is to pull ourselves together. If we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things – praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts – not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs. They may break our bodies (a microbe can do that) but they need not dominate our minds."
Via a comment left at Althouse, with a link to this Darkhorse Podcast.
4 comments:
You always bring us men up short with your reasoned and incisive posts, Mama.
I note, however, that TOP is drifting well to the Left these days.
I was reading a blog and there was a comment about Althouse focusing on the alleged "Let's go Brandon" statement made by a Southwest pilot. Of course, idiot Annie went off on some weird commie tangent about metal tubes and stuff, but she completely elided over the point that her innate fear of flying renders the whole discussion moot. She would no more get on an airplane than she would speak ill of her beloved mental equal, Joe Biden, who, word has it, just shit on the Pope. Birds of a feather, as they say.
It's drifting somewhere. This was a comment left on her blog by the one who started this blog, which has its own focus and bent.
As long as I'm quoting, here's one that came in yesterday from Michael Yon, referencing Hero With a Thousand Faces by Joeseph Campbell, which links to another "blog synchronicity" as a recently mentioned book and author on the motherblog. Yes, indeedy, nothing happens in a vacuum, here, there, everywhere.
Nobody ever recommended to me that I read HERO WITH A THOUSAND FACES for sake of studying information campaigns. It occured to me only long post-facto that this book is great broth and basis. If you already are knowledgeable about information campains and warfare, you will understand before you finish the book.
I devour books that permit me to see more. Such as a book I read many years ago on fractals and chaos.
Everything is related to everything. Everything. Nothing is isolated.
Everything effects everything.
Everything you touch touches you.
There is no truth without context.
Nothing is isolated.
The vast majority of my work revolves around discovering context and conditions.
For instance, attacking Mexico and Panama for the migration crisis with never stop it. This invasion is product of massive information warefare campaigns in a bid for a hostile takeover of United States, and then the rest will easily be taken bit by bit. Australia, as example, is taking itself and making itself weaker.
Who would want all that potential farmland in Australia? Just get rid of those pesky Australians and it’s all yours. Better yet, hijack their minds and they will off themselves.
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