flood

We mourn wasted potential, but this is usually a proxy for something more deserving of our mourning, such as useless inequity. 

Wasted potential, in itself, is no more to be mourned than the universal fact of mortality. Imagine a world in which potential was not wasted. Impossible!  Or if possible, stupefying in its badness.  From this we may rightly pray for relief, as from too much rain. 

dub thee

A college or university of great name shifts where a young person is from.  And this - an timely second chance and translation - well, who can blame students and parents for leaping crazily at that.

Screwtape

There's no doubt the road to hell is wide, with sections variously paved and unimproved, to suit all tastes.  And still many hack through the bramble and brush to get there.  The work that people put into their degradation!  The look on the face of the self-ruined is sometimes a look of Falstaffian, florid ecstasy.  But it is more often the look of the haggard, the exhausted, the laborer.

yer

Language and politeness overlap.  Some languages are so formally open that they reveal their specific  nature only in the effort to be a good conversational guest.  And most languages are comprehensible even if spoken brutally, or brokenly, which are the same except in intent.  And by politely I do not mean formally, as the starchy tone of many of the worst internet comments make clear.

Speakers who turn quickly to profanity, or offense, wire themselves into toggle switches when they'd do better on a rheostat.  (Of course it is no good to mistake politeness for being permanently set to slight, or dim, or barely.)

cravat

Function sometimes functions as a pretext for fancy. We wear a brightly colored tie or a watch because we wish to wear a great gem or plume but do not dare. 

text neutrality

Free speech risks cheapened speech. I would rather have books risk the torch of fear, to be spared by reason, than saved by disinterest.  Oppression is a shortcut to esteem of the truth. 

Gallery 734 of the Met

The Shakers worshipped in the simplicity of work, the celibate equality of male and female, and the ecstasy of form, their world an eternal classroom in which the whole of all retreats into millennial contemplation.  The lion having lain beside the lamb, the animal and sensual takes leave, and the celestial, the rational, and the humane are withal.

If I owned a home, I'd want its public rooms crowned with Shaker peg board, from which chairs could depend, beside a mirror and lamp.  But there would have to be life beneath.  A place where a cat could be, and the Shakers would never have kept a cat in these rooms, but only in their swept barns.

The walls of white, the drawers built in, the backs of chairs as straight as the projecting flue of the stove, itself low on its haunches and compact as a black piglet.  And nearby, ready to draw its warmth, a rocking chair with two-stepped stool, the better for propping a book on my knee or yours.  We'd sit silently, but together, and think the tunes of hymns, unsingably glorious.

Zwingli would have smiled to see those white walls, those silent saints, and thought of his own stripped church interiors in Amsterdam.  But then he'd hear the preaching of Sister Ann Lee, and blanch.

The bed is on wheels that do not pivot: it rolls only for ease of cleaning, not to be rearranged.  It is in its place, over floorboards of scrubbed maple.

The spools of thread adorn a crown of work, noble in wait, as pure spun as the three legs of the table beside, whose curves are so pure that they seem to descend beneath a buoyant top, like the tendrils of a jellyfish: in their form they reach down, rather than sustain over gravity, as do the four fine land-living legs holding up the crown of spools.

fusilier and sailor

Luck, chance and fortune encourage virtue when they are capricious but do not shift randomly by the moment. Fortunately they are more often winds than static, and they are indirectly the measure of virtue: the virtues are those ways by which we sail with or against the winds of fortune. The vices, on balance, are the virtues of chaos.  Where there is regnant evil, chaos has been. Where the underlying entropic forces have given way to a more patterned fortune, virtue climbs slowly to the throne.