“[Virginia Woolf] protests and complains as a woman and as a writer, but above all as a human being, who has discovered with bitterness that being born privileged does not alter the conditions and limitations of human existence” (Theodore Dalrymple, Our Culture, What’s Left of It, p. 75).
A Medieval Puritan
“I am not arguing that [Edmund] Spenser was not a Calvinist. A priori it is very likely that he was. But his poetry is not so written as to enable us to pick out his own beliefs in distinct separation from kindred beliefs. When a modern writer is didactic he endeavours, like Shaw or M. …
The Dull Pornographer
“Yet literal-mindedness is not honesty or fidelity to truth—far from it. For it is the whole experience of mankind that sexual life is always, and must always be, hidden by veils of varying degrees of opacity, if it is to be humanized into something beyond a mere animal function. What is inherently secretive, that is …
Living Out the Will of God
“But if a man stops to get the will of God in tying in shoe, or on making a lane change, he will soon be experiencing what might be called piety paralysis. God governs the world; we are not competent. Our lives are a mist. This does not mean we are to throw up our …
The Puritan and Nature
“The Romantic poet wishes to be absorbed into Nature, the Elizabethan, to absorb her” (C.S. Lewis, English Literature in the 16th Century, p. 341).
When Vice Gets Good Press
“When did we no longer appreciate that to dignify certain modes of behavior, manners, and ways of being with artistic representation was implicitly to glorify and promote them?” (Theodore Dalrymple, Our Culture, What’s Left of It, p. 55).
No Little Decisions
“Every son of Adam was at one point a fertilized egg. The moment before millions of sperm were vying to be the one. During the course of that day, how many actions affected the outcome of this most fascinating race? This sperm results in this individual (along with the many thousands of this individual’s descendants), …
Medieval and Protestant
“In that way the Arcadia is a kind of touchstone. What a man thinks of it, far more than what he thinks of Shakespeare or Spenser or Donne, tests the depth of his sympathy with the sixteenth century . . . It gathers up what a whole generation wanted to say. The very gallimaufry that …
Can’t Have It Both Ways
“A crude culture makes a coarse people, and private refinement cannot long survive public excess. There is a Gresham’s law of culture as well as of money: the bad drives out the good, unless the good is defended.” (Theodore Dalrymple, Our Culture, What’s Left of It, p. 52).
A Bragging Fog
“I am married now, but have no idea whether or not it is God’s will for me to be married tomorrow. How would a mist know something like that? This is why James tells people not to boast, saying that they will go here and there, making big bucks as they go. he says that …