Characters More Or Less Present Themselves To

The Accessibility And Effective Immortality Of Actual Information Is A Magnificent Phenomenon, A Beautiful Extension Of Human Consciousness. It Is Too Bad People Find So Many Ways To Abuse The Internet, But That's Just How Things Are.

Every Spirit Passing Through The World Fingers The Tangible And Mars The Mutable And Finally Has Come To Look And Not To Buy. So Shoes Are Worn And Hassocks Are Sat Upon And Finally Everything Is Left Where It Was And The Spirit Passes On, Just As The Wind In The Orchard Picks Up The Leaves From The Ground As If There Were No Other Pleasure In The World But Brown Leaves, As If It Would Deck, Clothe, Flesh Itself In Flourishes Of Dusty Brown Apple Leaves And Then Drops Them All In A Heap At The Side Of The House And Goes On.

What An Embarrassment That Was, Being Somewhere Because There Was Nowhere Else For You To Be.

Theologians Talk About A Prevenient Grace That Precedes Grace Itself And Allows Us To Accept It. I Think There Must Also Be A Prevenient Courage That Allows Us To Be Brave - That Is, To Acknowledge That There Is More Beauty Than Our Eyes Can Bear, That Precious Things Have Been Put Into Our Hands And To Do Nothing To Honor Them Is To Do Great Harm. And Therefore, This Courage Allows Us, As The Old Men Said, To Make Ourselves Useful. It Allows Us To Be Generous, Which Is Another Way Of Saying Exactly The Same Thing.

The Loss Of Seriousness Seems To Me To Be, In Effect, A Loss Of Hope. I Think That The Thing That Made People Rise To Real Ambition, Real Gravity Was The Sense Of Posterity, For Example - A Word That I Can Remember Hearing Quite Often When I Was A Child And I Never Hear Anymore. People Actually Wanted To Make The World Good For People In Generations That They Would Never See. It Makes People Think In Very Large Terms To Try To Liberate Women, For Example, Or To Try To Eliminate Slavery.