"The world would be better off if people tried to become better, and people would be better if they stopped trying to become better off. For when everyone tries to become better off, nobody is better off. But when everyone tries to become better everyone is better off."
Peter Maurin, Easy Essays, The Catholic Worker, 1933
"I was satisfied that I wasn't personally to blame and that I hadn't known about those things. I wasn't aware of the extent of the crimes. But one day I went past the memorial plaque which had been put up for Sophie Scholl in Franz Josef Strasse, and I saw that she was born the same year as me, and she was executed the same year I started working for Hitler. And at that moment I actually sensed that it was no excuse to be young, and that it would have been possible to find things out."
Traudl Junge, Im toten Winkel - Hitler's Sekretärin, 2002
“How can we expect righteousness to prevail when there is hardly anyone willing to give himself up individually to a righteous cause? Such a fine, sunny day, and I have to go.”
Sophie Scholl, Last Words Before Execution, February 22, 1943
"Love does not make you weak, because it is the source of all strength— but it makes you see the nothingness of the illusory strength on which you depended before you knew it."
Léon Bloy, The Pilgrim of the Absolute
"The demon's target is not the possessed; it is us the observers— everyone in this house. The point is to make us despair, to reject our humanity, to see ourselves as bestial, vile and putrescent, without dignity, ugly, unworthy."
William Peter Blatty, The Exorcist, May 1971
"If heaven is seeing and in turn being seen, transformed and made new by the beatific face of pure love in resplendent glory, then hell must be seeing, at last and forever after, their own dark and miserable soul as it really is, alone."
Jesse, Death By Overdose, 24 February 2015
"Each day we are becoming a creature of splendid glory, or one of unthinkable horror.”
C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, 1952
Stocks retreated a bit, from yesterday's transparently mechanical optimism.
The market rises. The abuse of power is affirmed. QED.
This is the market as god, the new morality of the bestial class.
Gold and silver bounced around a bit.
The Dollar chopped its way to unchanged.
VIX showed a little consciousness.
I am struggling to believe we are going to come back from this.
We seem to have lost our sense of ideals, and of history, our humanity, in worshiping the idol of the markets.
We see the rising lust to possess and ravage innocence.
On the one hand the political elite offer us power, the tooth and claw of the beast.
And on the other, performative humanity, with the tooth and claw of the beast.
We live in a garden of beasts.
I would like to think we are seeing the worst, but doubts remain.
It comes down to a matter of faith.
It is always, at the heart of love, down to love.
Have a pleasant evening.
