Given the damned depressing hole we have dug for ourselves, I offer this quotation from Joyce Cary's The Horse's Mouth, 1944:
“For the people is just as big a danger as the government. I mean, if you let it get on your mind. Because there’s more of it. More and worse and bigger and emptier and stupider. One man is a living soul, but two men are an indiarubber milking machine for a beer engine, and three men are noises off and four men are an asylum for cretins and five men are a committee and twenty-five are a meeting, and after that you get to the mummy-house at the British Museum, and the Sovereign People and Common Humanity and the Average and the Public and the Majority and the Life Force and Statistics and the Economic Man, brainless, eyeless, wicked spawn of the universal toad sitting in the black bloody ditch of eternal night and croaking for its mate which is the spectre of Hell.”
4 comments:
Mr. Cary was a very wise man.
Or was it Gulley Jimson who said this? I have not read The Horse's Mouth for a number of years, and have not seen Alec Guiness's film of the same name since the first time—many years ago.
However, I see that Amazon offers to rent it for $4, or sell me a copy for $15. What a bargain!
T.
PS: I am also rereading "The March of Folly", by Barbara Tuchman, and have gotten to the part about Dulles and the runup to Viet Nam. Damned Republicans!
I'm going to have to read the book one of these damn days. But the film - with a screenplay adaptation by its lead actor, Alec Guinness - is one my small list of films I want to see again...and again.
A wise man you are, Miguel, but we already knew that.
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