The Compleat Heretic's Epigraphs 2015
This page was last modified on 2 January 2016.
Contents
17 January 2015
17 February 2015
8 March 2015
31 March 2015
30 April 2015
29 May 2015
14 June 2015
30 June 2015
16 September 2015
25 September 2015
10 December 2015
28 December 2015
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Matt Wallace, "An Interview with a Pro-Life Atheist"
Wallace Stevens, "The Snow Man"
Wallace Stevens, "Sunday Morning"
T. S. Eliot, "Little Gidding"
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, 910
William Shakespeare, The Tempest
Wallace Stevens, "Sunday Morning"
Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, 185
Wallace Stevens, "Sunday Morning"
Matt Wallace, "Being All I Could Be; or, Descent into Madness"
Wallace Stevens, "Sunday Morning"
T. S. Eliot, "Little Gidding"
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17 January 2015
As a pro-life Secular Humanist atheist, my opposition to abortion is not based on "Christian values" or any religious considerations. My primary motivation is my high regard for life and its uniqueness. Unlike Christians and other religionists, I realize that the choice isn't between this mortal life and some purported postmortal "eternal life," but between life and death, existence and nonexistence, being and not being. Even in its totality, with joy and sorrow, pleasure and pain, triumph and failure, life is preferable to the alternative which is no alternative at all. As an atheist, I understand that which affirms life is good and is to be supported and that which denies life is evil and is to be opposed. Abortion is the denial of life to its individual victims and a denial of life writ large. Abortion is the ultimate denial of life. I oppose abortion not because "the Bible tells me so," but, in the words of the tagline of my nontheistic/nonreligious pro-life website, Atheist and Agnostic Pro-Life League, "because life is all there is and all that matters, and abortion destroys the life of an innocent human being." I oppose abortion because it is a denial of both the humanity and the human rights of the most innocent and most vulnerable members of the human family. I oppose abortion because to do otherwise would be a denial of my own humanity.
— Matt Wallace, "An Interview with a Pro-Life Atheist"
42 Years of Life Denied: Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton (22 January 1973)
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17 February 2015
One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;
And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter
— Wallace Stevens, "The Snow Man," lines 1-6
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8 March 2015
We live in an old chaos of the sun,
Or old dependency of day and night,
Or island solitude, unsponsored, free,
Of that wide water, inescapable.
— Wallace Stevens, "Sunday Morning," lines 110-113
Happy Vernal Equinox! And woe unto you who is not of the Sun, for we live in an old chaos of the sun!
(It's the real reason for the season, you know . . .)
In honor of the Spring Equinox, 20 March 2015, 1845 EDT
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31 March 2015
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
— T. S. Eliot, "Little Gidding," lines 239-242
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30 April 2015
Type of my disciples.— To those human beings who are of any concern to me I wish suffering, desolation, sickness, ill-treatment, indignities—I wish that they should not remain unfamiliar with profound self-contempt, the torture of self-mistrust, the wretchedness of the vanquished: I have no pity for them, because I wish them the only thing that can prove today whether one is worth anything or not—that one endures.
— Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, 910 (Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale, trans.)
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29 May 2015
I pray thee mark me.
I, thus neglecting worldly ends, all dedicated
To closeness and the bettering of my mind
With that which but by being so retired
O'er-priced all popular rate . . .
— William Shakespeare, The Tempest, Act 1, Scene 2, lines 88-92
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14 June 2015
We live in an old chaos of the sun,
Or old dependency of day and night,
Or island solitude, unsponsored, free,
Of that wide water, inescapable.
— Wallace Stevens, "Sunday Morning," lines 110-113
Happy Summer Solstice! And woe unto you who is not of the Sun, for we live in an old chaos of the sun!
In honor of the Summer Solstice, 21 June 2015, 1238 EDT
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30 June 2015
Author's paradoxes. – The so-called paradoxes of an author to which a reader takes exception very often stand not at all in the author's book but in the reader's head.
— Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, 185 (R. J. Hollingdale, trans.)
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16 September 2015
We live in an old chaos of the sun,
Or old dependency of day and night,
Or island solitude, unsponsored, free,
Of that wide water, inescapable.
— Wallace Stevens, "Sunday Morning," lines 110-113
Happy Autumnal Equinox! And woe unto you who is not of the Sun, for we live in an old chaos of the sun!
In honor of the Fall Equinox, 23 September 2015, 0421 EDT
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25 September 2015
On 28 September 1985, I raised my right hand and swore this oath of enlistment in the U.S. Army:
"I, James Matthew Wallace, do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; and that I will obey the orders of the President of the United States and the orders of the officers appointed over me, according to regulations and the Uniform Code of Military Justice."
I immediately realized that I had just sworn away the next eight years of my life and maybe even my very existence. And even more astonishingly, I was completely at peace with the notion. As the other enlistees parroted "So help me God" to complete their oaths, I was overwhelmed by the sense that I had just died. Without hesitation, I internally ratified this intuition, "So be it." In retrospect, the Hebrew equivalent would have been more succinct and just as appropriate: Amen.
— Matt Wallace, "Being All I Could Be; or, Descent into Madness"
In honor of the thirtieth anniversary of my Enlistment in the United States Army . . .
and the twenty-second anniversary of my Honorable Discharge from the United States Army . . .
THIS WE'LL DEFEND!
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10 December 2015
We live in an old chaos of the sun,
Or old dependency of day and night,
Or island solitude, unsponsored, free,
Of that wide water, inescapable.
— Wallace Stevens, "Sunday Morning," lines 110-113
Happy Winter Solstice! And woe unto you who is not of the Sun, for we live in an old chaos of the sun!
(It's the real reason for the season, you know . . .)
In honor of the Winter Solstice, 21 December 2015, 2348 EST
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28 December 2015
What we call the beginning is often the end
And to make an end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from.
— T. S. Eliot, "Little Gidding," lines 214-216
Happy Old Year! Happy New Year!
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