Mr. Churchyard Is Having a Birthday!!!!


I've certainly lauded him before (see my earlier week celebrating the ABSURD), but his 200th demands special attention: Happy Birthday S.!!!

A few more selected quotes from his papers and journals:

  • It is said that experience makes a man wise. That is a very unreasonable thing to say. If there were nothing still higher than experience, experience would make him mad.
  • In our time book-scribbling is so wretched and people write about things they have never really given thought to, let alone experienced. So I've decided to read only the writings of those who were executed or faced danger in some other way.
  • In every generation most people, even among those who are said to dabble in thought (professors and the like), live and die in the illusion that there is, and if it were granted them to live longer, would persist, a continued straightforward ascent of increasing comprehension. How many experience at all the maturity of discovering that there comes a critical point where it turns the other way, and from then on it is a matter of an increasing grasp of the fact that there is something one cannot grasp.
  • Suppose I had married her. Let us assume it. What then? In the course of half a year or less she would have gone to pieces. There is -- and this is both the good and the bad in me -- something spectral about me, something that makes it impossible for people to put up with me every day and have a real relationship with me. Yes, in the lightweight cloak in which I usually appear, it is another matter. But at home it will be evident that basically I live in a spirit world.

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