Legacy Road Quotes
“We have placed too much hope in political and social reform, only to find that we were being deprived of our most precious possession: our spiritual life. If humanism were right in declaring that man were born to just be happy, he would not be born to die. But since his body is doomed to die, certainly his task on earth must be of a more spiritual nature. It cannot be unrestrained enjoyment of everyday life. It cannot be the search for the best ways to obtain material goods and then cheerfully get the most out of them. We cannot avoid reassessing the fundamental definitions of human life and society. Is it true that man is above everything? Is there no superior spirit about him? Is it right that man’s life and society’s activities should be ruled by material expansion, above all?
Alexander Solinitsyn
Harvard Commencement Address
“The storybook definition of happiness tells of desires fulfilled; the truer version involves striving toward meaningful goals….goals that relate the individual to a larger context of purposes. Storybook happiness involves a bland idleness: the truer conception involves seeking and purposeful effort. Storybook happiness involves every form of pleasant thumb twiddling; true happiness involves the full use of one’s powers and talents. Both conceptions of happiness involve love, but the storybook conception puts great emphasis on being loved, the truer version more emphasis on the capacity to give LOVE.”
John Gardner
Self Renewal
C.S Lewis Conversion
Jack: A Life of C. S. Lewis
by George Sayer
But it was difficult for Jack to see the point of becoming a full, communicating member of a church. Although he accepted God, the historicity of the Gospels, and probably Jesus as the Son of God, he felt uneasy about other Christian concepts. He had no understanding of the sacramental system and could not see the relevance of concepts similar to those found in pagan mythologies--for instance, the ideas of sacrifice, propitiation, the shedding of blood, communion, and redemption.
What changed his thinking more then anything else was conversation he had on September 19, 1931, with J. R. R. Tolkien and Hugo Dyson, his guests at dinner that evening at Magdalen College. After the port had been drunk, they strolled around Addison's Walk and talked about myths. Jack said that he loved reading and thinking about myths, but that he could not regard them as being at all true. Tolkien's view was radically different. He said that myths originate in God, that they preserve something of God's truth, although often in a distorted form. Furthermore, he said that, in presenting a myth, in writing stories full of mythical creatures, one may be doing God's work. As Tolkien talked, a mysterious rush of wind came through the trees that Jack felt to be a message from the deity, although his reason told him not to be carried away. Tolkien went on to explain that the Christian story was a myth invented by a God who was real, a God whose dying could transform those who believed in him. If Jack wanted to find the relevance of His story to his own life, he must plunge in. He must appreciate the myth in the same spirit of imaginative understanding that he would bring to, say, a Wagnerian opera. It was not until three o'clock in the morning that Tolkien went home to his wife. Dyson continued talking with Jack, striding up and down the arcades of New buildings. His main point was that Christianity works for the believer. The believer is put at peace and freed from his sins. He receives help in overcoming his faults and can become a new person. (pp. 225)
William Faulkner.
Nobel Peace Prize Acceptance Speech
I feel that this award was not made to me as a man, but to my work--a life's work in the agony and sweat of the human spirit, not for glory and least of all for profit, but to create out of the materials of the human spirit something which did not exist before. So this award is only mine in trust. It will not be difficult to find a dedication for the money part of it commensurate with the purpose and significance of its origin. But I would like to do the same with the acclaim too, by using this moment as a pinnacle from which I might be listened to by the young men and women already dedicated to the same anguish and travail, among whom is already that one who will some day stand where I am standing.
Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only one question: When will I be blown up? Because of this, the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat.
He must learn them again. He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid: and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed--love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice. Until he does so, he labors under a curse. He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, of victories without hope and, worst of all, without pity or compassion. His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart but of the glands.
Until he learns these things, he will write as though he stood among and watched the end of man. I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure: that when the last ding-dong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his inexhaustible voice, still talking. I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet's, the writer's, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet's voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.
Anyone who proposes to do good must not expect people to roll stones out of his way, but must accept his lot calmly if they even roll a few more upon it. A strength, which becomes clearer and stronger through its experience of such obstacles, is the only strength that can conquer them.
Albert Schweitzer
