suppose hundred years
hence we’re better off – nothing …
here to surprise us

Let us, for the sake of argument, suppose that a hundred years hence we are all of us, on the average, eight times better off in the economic sense than we are to-day. Assuredly there need be nothing here to surprise us.

Now it is true that the needs of human beings may seem to be insatiable. But they fall into two classes—those needs which are absolute in the sense that we feel them whatever the situation of our fellow human beings may be, and those which are relative in the sense that we feel them only if their satisfaction lifts us above, makes us feel superior to, our fellows. Needs of the second class, those which satisfy the desire for superiority, may indeed be insatiable; for the higher the general level, the higher still are they. But this is not so true of the absolute needs—a point may soon be reached, much sooner perhaps than we are all of us aware of, when these needs are satisfied in the sense that we prefer to devote our further energies to non-economic purposes.

Now for my conclusion, which you will find, I think, to become more and more startling to the imagination the longer you think about it.

I draw the conclusion that, assuming no important wars and no important increase in population, the economic problem may be solved, or be at least within sight of solution, within a hundred years. This means that the economic problem is not—if we look into the future—the permanent problem of the human race.

From the essay, Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren (1930) in Essays in Persuasion by John Maynard Keynes, Macmillan and Co. LTD, London, 1931.

I guess there were a few important wars since 1932.

And the world population has doubled from 3.5 to 8 billion since 1931 (and you wonder why it is hard to find a spot at the beach).

So I guess Mr. Keynes is off the the hook that we would solve the economic problem.

Are we 8 times better off than we were in 1932?

Assuredly there need be nothing here to surprise us.

good deal too strange to
be believed, nothing is too
strange to have happened

Thomas Hardy was one of those writers who was able to produce and publish many long novels and over 900 poems but at the same time keep a commonplace book of random thoughts and ideas as they came to him.

Mr. Hardy left several volumes of his commonplace notebooks after his death and four of them were compiled and published as The personal notebooks of Thomas Hardy : with an appendix including the unpublished passages in the original typescripts of the Life of Thomas Hardy (New York : Columbia University Press. 1979).

In the introduction, the editor, a Richard H. Taylor states, “In these notebooks Hardy is not addressing himself to his public or his friends or posterity, but to his own immediate purposes. The notes they contain are varied and there is much to delight the reader responsive to the nuances of Hardy’s imagination.”

Now here is my point.

Mr. Hardy wrote in his notebook on Feb 12, 1871, “Though a good deal is too strange to be believed, nothing is too strange to have happened.“

There is a footnote to this entry that states, “A principle very evident in Hardy’s prose fiction.”

And the footnote goes on to quote Mr. Hardy saying, “The real, if unavowed, purpose of fiction is to give pleasure by gratifying the love of the uncommon in human experience, mental or corporeal.“

When Mr. Hardy wrote down Though a good deal is too strange to be believed, nothing is too strange to have happened, he apparently was thinking of its application to fiction and telling a good story.

I put it to you that when you read, Though a good deal is too strange to be believed, nothing is too strange to have happened, all you have to is consider the news today, OH BOY.

The British Army has just won the war!

Climate.

Politics.

My life.

TOO STRANGE!

Well that was Mr. Hardy thinking back in 1871.

Though a good deal is too strange to be believed, nothing is too strange to have happened.

After all this is the feller who when he died, was cremated and his ashes were buried in Westminster Abby.

But, his heart was removed and buried in Stinsford, West Dorset District, Dorset, England.

Well most of it.

According to one account, “His heart was buried at Stinsford churchyard in Dorset, and when his corpse was being prepared for this operation the doctor was called away urgently, just after he had removed the heart and left it in a dish beside the body. When he returned, he found his cat had eaten part of it. So the cat was killed, too, and buried alongside the remains of the heart in the ornate container prepared for it.”

Though a good deal is too strange to be believed, nothing is too strange to have happened.

time to time a twinge
unacknowledged wish to be
a better person

Once a year at least, we all enjoy Dickens’ happy absurdity of taking a tough, malicious, shrewd businessman and making him over, overnight, into a genial, gregarious, almost saintly old man.

No matter how much A Christmas Carol may be dismissed as a rollicking good story but a deeply sentimental one, I believe it has stayed alive for a hundred and sixty years because in even the most cynical, rational, irreligious human, there is from time to time a twinge, even an unacknowledged wish, to be a better person.

From Ringing the Changes 4 January, 2002 in Letter from America. Vol 2, by Cooke, Alistair, London, Penguin, 2007.

Mr. Cooke, for me, is something of a pair with Orson Welles, as someone always being there at the beginning of so much of the American past.

Just less well remembered.

Mr. Cooke died today back in 2004.

I would not have known that but that I had been searching out something about Thomas Hardy for another post in FINDAGAVE and on that website it announced that Mr. Cooke had died on this day in 2004.

It brought to mind what I knew of his burial.

If you know anything about Mr. Cooke and his television program America, or his hosting of Masterpiece Theater or his weekly audio Letter From America for the BBC, you might have picked up on the fact that for a good part of his life he lived in an apartment that overlooked Central Park.

Central Park was such a reoccurring theme in all of his writers and appearances that when he died, his children felt that it would be appropriate to have his ashes scattered in Central Park.

Then those ugly rules, regulations and permissions raised their ugly head.

Rather than fight this triumvirate, the family just went around them.

On the morning of the funeral, the children met at the apartment.

One of them stopped at Starbucks and grabbed a stack of large, okay, vente or grande, I still don’t know, cups.

The ashes of Mr. Cooke where then poured into the cups and the family strolled through the park , leaving the remains of Mr. Cooke behind.

Not a bad way for a man who wrote that in even the most cynical, rational, irreligious human, there is from time to time a twinge, even an unacknowledged wish, to be a better person.

I hope you rest in peace.

bellum omnium
contra omnes, the war
of all against all

From the Praefatio of De Cive or The Philosophicall Rudiments Concerning Government and Society. Or, A Dissertation Concerning Man in his severall habitudes and respects, as the Member of a Society, first Secular, and then Sacred. Containing The Elements of Civill Politie in the Agreement which it hath both with Naturall and Divine Lawes. In which is demonstrated, Both what the Origine of Justice is, and wherein the Essence of Christian Religion doth consist. Together with The Nature, Limits and Qualifications both of Regiment and Subjection By Thomas Hobbes (1642).

… ostendo primo conditionem hominum extra societatem civilem, quam conditionem appellare liceat statum naturae, aliam non esse quam bellum omnium contra omnes; atque in eo bello jus esse omnibus in omnia.

Or in english* …

… I demonstrate, in the first place, that the state of men without civil society (which state we may properly call the state of nature) is nothing else but a mere war of all against all; and in that war all men have equal right unto all things.

The state of men without civil society (which state we may properly call the state of nature) is nothing else but a mere war of all against all.

And in that war all men have equal right unto all things.

A state of nature were all have equal rights to all.

A mere war against all against all.

Mr. Hobbs wrote that in 1642.

Today we all got a gun.

Someone better say a prayer for our democracy.

*BTW it is recorded in History that Judge Augustus Woodward wrote the Territorial Constitution of the Territory of Michigan in Latin and when folks complained he reissued it with two columns. Latin on the left and English on the right with the sub heading, ‘For the lesser Educated.’ Judge Woodward (as in Woodward Avenue in Detroit) went on to found what became the University of Michigan.

imagination
and sentiment delimit
the novelist’s realm

Imagination and sentiment, which quite properly delimit the dimensions of the novelist’s realm, are a dangerous medium, however, through which to approach the subject of battle.

Historians, traditionally and rightly, are expected to ride their feelings on a tighter rein than the man of letters can allow himself.

From The Face of Battle by John Keegan, Pimlico, 2004.

Historians, traditionally and rightly, are expected to ride their feelings on a tighter rein than the man of letters can allow himself.

Hmmmmmmm.

Imagination and sentiment, which quite properly delimit the dimensions of the novelist’s realm, are a dangerous medium, however, through which to approach the subject of battle.

Hmmmmmmmm.

It happened so with a group of Sheridan’s scouts, who captured a Captain Stump, famous as a Rebel raider, a man they had long been seeking. He had been wounded, and when he was caught they took his weapons away and brought him to Major Young, who commanded the scouts, and Major Young had a certain respect for this daring guerilla, so he told him:

“I suppose you know we will kill you. But we will not serve you as you have served our men—cut your throat or hang you. We will give you a chance for your life. We will give you ten rods’ start on your own horse, with your spurs on. If you get away, all right… . But remember, my men are dead shots.”

Captain Stump was bloody and he had been hurt, but he was all man. He smiled, and nodded, and rode a few feet out in front of the rank of his captors—skinny young men, 130 pounds or less, unmarried, the pick of the Yankee cavalry. Major Young looked down the rank, and called out: “Go!”

A cavalryman wrote about it afterward:

“We allowed him about ten rods’ start, then our pistols cracked: and he fell forward, dead.”

From A Stillness at Appomattox by Bruce Catton.

According to Wikipedia, Oliver Jensen, who succeeded Catton as editor of American Heritage, wrote that “No one ever wrote American history with more easy grace, beauty and emotional power, or greater understanding of its meaning, than Bruce Catton… There is a near-magic power of imagination in Catton’s work [that] almost seemed to project him physically onto the battlefields, along the dusty roads and to the campfires of another age.”

There is a near-magic power of imagination in Catton’s work that while it traditionally and rightly, is expected to ride their feelings on a tighter rein than the man of letters can allow himself, imagination and sentiment, seems to project him physically onto the battlefields, along the dusty roads and to the campfires of another age.