[b]Evelyn Waugh
Your colleague, Captain Grimes, has been convicted before me on evidence that leaves no possibility of his innocence - of a crime…which I can neither understand nor excuse. I dare say I need not particularise.[/b]
Not, as it were, that the particulars matter.
A conservative is not merely an obstructionist who wishes to resist the introduction of novelties; nor is he, as was assumed by most 19th-century parliamentarians, a brake to frivolous experiment. He has positive work to do … Civilization has no force of its own beyond what is given from within. It is under constant assault and it takes most of the energies of civilized man to keep going at all … If [it] falls we shall see not merely the dissolution of a few joint-stock corporations, but of the spiritual and material achievements of our history.
True, but not too conservative. Or, for that matter, liberal.
One of the problems of the vacation is money, father.
Oh, I shouldn’t worry about a thing like that at your age.
You see, I’ve run rather short.
Yes? said my father without any sound of interest.
In fact I don’t quite know how I’m going to get through the next two months.
Well, I’m the worst person to come to for advice. I’ve never been ‘short’ as you so painfully call it. And yet what else could you say? Hard up? Penurious? Distressed? Embarrassed? Stony-broke? On the rocks? In Queer Street? Let us say you are in Queer Street and leave it at that. Your grandfather once said to me, ‘Live within your means, but if you do get into difficulties, come to me. Don’t go to the Jews.’
This then gets passed down through the generations.
Well, you see, she was saintly but she wasn’t a saint. No one could really hate a saint, could they? They can’t really hate God either. When they want to hate Him and his saints they have to find something like themselves and pretend it’s God and hate that. I suppose you think that’s all bosh.
Bosh being the least of it. You know, for some.
It was dead contrary to the common experience of such encounters, when time is found to have built its own defensive lines, camouflaged vulnerable points, and laid a field of mines across all but a few well-trodden paths, so that, more often than not, we can only signal to one another from either side of the tangle of wire.
And not just on the Korean Peninsula.
Modernization is just another jungle closing in.
At least until Don Trump drains the swamp.