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boxcar dreamers

@boxcarwild / boxcarwild.tumblr.com

“I feel nothing for the game where beauty goes unrecognised”
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boxcarwild
freebroccoli
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freebroccoli
The real test is this. Suppose one reads a story of filthy atrocities in the paper. Then suppose that something turns up suggesting that the story might not be quite true, or not quite so bad as it was made out. Is one’s first feeling, “Thank God, even they aren’t quite so bad as that,’ or is it a feeling of disappointment, and even a determination to cling to the first story for the sheer pleasure of thinking your enemies as bad as possible? If it is the second then it is, I am afraid, the first step in a process which, if followed to the end, will make us into devils. You see, one is beginning to wish that black was a little blacker. If we give that wish its head, later on we shall wish to see grey as black, and then to see white itself as black. Finally, we shall insist on seeing everything–God and our friends and ourselves included–as bad, and not able to stop doing it: we shall be fixed for ever in a universe of pure hatred.
- C. S. Lewis
#c. s. lewis#quotes#christianity#cs lewis
boxcarwild
blackswaneuroparedux
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blackswaneuroparedux

The Vikings are the last great example of a non-Christian European people to whom turning the other cheek and loving your neighbour sounded like utter gibberish. Their philosophy was almost unrelentingly pessimistic, shot through with an inevitable sense of doom and decline. They saw the world as a dark, cold, cruel place: a place of terrible savagery and dreadful misfortune, where trust was at a premium and betrayal and disaster were never far away, rather like the House of Commons.

Yet they were not nihilists. They thought there was tremendous merit in standing your ground and fighting your corner, sword in hand and a smile on your lips. In one of the most enduring Scandinavian tales, the epic of Ragnar Lodbrok, our hero ends up in the Northumbrian king’s snake-pit, the serpents’ venom coursing through his veins. But instead of moaning and groaning about his mental health, Ragnar raises his voice in one last, defiant song. “I am ready to die,” he roars. “The servants of Odin are calling me home. With the gods by my side I shall drink my ale. My days are done; my life is over. Laughing shall I die!” And then he does die. But what a way to bow out.

- Dominic Sandbrook, Adventures in Time: Fury of the Vikings (2022)

#dominic sandbrook#europe#vikings#the northman