The Compleat Heretic's Epigraphs 2016
This page was last modified on 30 December 2016.
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2 January 2016
 I absolutely cannot see how one can later make up for having failed to go to a good school at the proper time. Such a man does not know himself; he walks through life without having learned to walk; his flabby muscles reveal themselves with every step. Sometimes life is so merciful as to offer this hard schooling once more later: sickness for years perhaps, that demands the most extreme strength of will and self-sufficiency; or a sudden calamity, affecting also one's wife and child, that compels one to a form of activity that restores energy to the slack fibers and toughness to the will to live. The most desirable thing is still under all circumstances a hard discipline at the proper time, i.e., at that age at which it still makes one proud to see that much is demanded of one. For this is what distinguishes the hard school as a good school from all others: that much is demanded; and sternly demanded; that the good, even the exceptional, is demanded as the norm; that praise is rare, that indulgence is nonexistent; that blame is apportioned sharply, objectively, without regard for talent or antecedents.
One needs such a school from every point of view: that applies to the most physical as well as to the most spiritual matters; it would be fatal to desire to draw a distinction here! The same discipline makes both the good soldier and the good scholar; and looked at more closely, there is no good scholar who does not have the instincts of a good soldier in his makeup. To be able to command and also proudly to obey; to stand in the ranks, but also capable at any time of leading; to prefer danger to comfort; not to weigh the permitted and the forbidden on a shopkeeper's scales; to be a foe more of the petty, sly, parasitic, than of the evil. What does one learn in a hard school? Obeying and commanding.
— Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, 912 (Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale, trans.)
On 2 January 1986, as a 24-year-old college-boy PFC, I began my four-year enlistment.
And though I've spent far more of the past 30 years sitting in a college classroom than
wearing a military uniform, the United States Army was the best school I ever attended.
THIS WE'LL DEFEND!
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13 March 2016
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 2016, 0030 EDT
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31 March 2016
In the presence of extraordinary actuality, consciousness takes the place of imagination.
— Wallace Stevens, Adagia I
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18 June 2016
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, 20 June 2016, 1834 EDT
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2 August 2016
She asked for my love and I gave her a dangerous mind
— David Bowie, "Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps)"
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16 September 2016
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, 22 September 2016, 1021 EDT
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18 December 2016
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 2016, 0544 EST
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30 December 2016
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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