Leo Wong

30140621 Pin your hopes on the next life. There’ll be plenty of time for self-improvement after you die.

30140619 Americans are the Chosen People, like the Jews.

30140617 Little children aren’t saints.

20140616 No need to prove you are a sinner.

20140615 To myself: The biggest liar: you. The biggest lie: you.

The reason for sex is babies.

Selfish and sentimental.

20140612 The importance of the vocative.

20140424 I prefer good news to bad news, comedy to tragedy.

20140418 Anne’s 10th birthday. Last night the new bishop met Anne and said, “She reminds us of the dogginess of God.” Anne woke us up at 5:30 this morning. “Here I am, Dog.”

20140412 In heaven Beethoven again hears. And Milton sees.

20140410 Observe the commas.

20140409 The dead are not behind us, but ahead of us.

20140323 The Mass is greater than the Gospels.

20140301

… neither do the spirits damn’d lose all their virtue;

Paradise Lost, II. 482–483

20140228 Prayers not pronouncements.

Art is a good deed done. Music is a good deed being done.

20140221 One of the greatest advantages of religion over science is that stupid people can understand religion as well as and often better than smart people.

20140214 “Two immigrants from Germany [meet] for the first time after many years in New York. One asks the other: ‘Are you happy here?’' Reply: ‘I am happy, aber glücklich bin ich nicht.'” Albert O. Hirschman, Exit, Voice, and Liberty, 1970, 113.

“Great movements in the arts, like revolutions, don’t last more than about fifteen years. After that the flame dies down and people prefer a cozy glow.” Ibid., 120.

“The convention by which the great events in biblical or secular history could be enacted only by magnificent physical specimens, handsome and well-groomed, went on for a long time — till the middle of the nineteenth century. Only a very few artists — perhaps only Rembrandt and Caravaggio in the first rank — were independent enough to stand against it. And I think that this convention, which as an element in the so-called grand manner, became a deadening influence on the European mind. It deadened our sense of truth, even our sense of moral responsibility ; and led, as we now see, to a hideous reaction.” Ibid., 133.

“Sit we upon the highest throne in the world, yet sit we upon our own tail.” Montaigne, quoted ibid., 163

“The stabilising, comprehensive religions of the world, the religions which penetrate to every part of a man’s being — in Egypt, India or China — gave the female principle of creation at least as much importance as the male, and wouldn’t have taken seriously a philosophy that failed to include them both. These were all what H. G. Wells called communities of obedience. The aggressive, nomadic societies — what he called communities of will — Israel, Islam, the Protestant North, conceived their gods as male. It’s a curious fact that the all-male religions have produced no religious imagery — in most cases have positively forbidden it. The great religious art of the world is deeply ‘involved with the female principle. Of course, the ordinary Catholic who prayed to the Virgin was not conscious of any of this; nor was he or she interested in the really baffling theological problems presented by the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception. He simply knew that the heretics wanted to deprive him of that sweet, compassionate, approachable being who would intercede for him, as his mother might have interceded with a hard master.” Ibid., 177.

“As a rule it is the act of confession that matters, not the attempted cure.” Ibid., 177.

“The sense of grandeur is no doubt a human instinct, but, carried too far, it becomes inhuman. I wonder if a single thought that has helped forward the human spirit has ever been conceived or written down in an enormous room: except, perhaps, in the reading room of the British Museum.” Ibid., 192

20140211 “Great works of art can be produced by barbarous societies.” Kenneth Clark, Civilization, 1.

“Where some way of thought or human activity is really vital to us, internationalism is accepted unhesitatingly.” Ibid., 35.

“How much we have lost by turning churches into museums.” Ibid., 40.

20140210 Not: history is; but: histories are.

So much telling, so little showing.

It is true that we have a guardian angel. But a photo of us with our guardian angel would be odd.

20140209 The “next life” is already “this life” for those who have died.