Agnostics

"I read Hemingway's posthumous Paris memoirs, rumoured to have been written by his wife (`Out of the question,' Toni assured me, `they're so badly written they must be authentic')."

"You need one of those slave-driving old studio bosses if you ask me, not a sensitive graduate who went into movies because he liked the clouds in Antonioni and then turned himself into a nouvelle vague Deutscher all hot for Truthspiel."

"Now, Stuart, as you will discover if you have not done so already, believes that the principal raison d'etre of food is to conceal from public view the hideous pattern on the plate beneath."

"He understood that his plan would be immeasurably strengthened by broad public support. So he shaped his proposals around the principle that "benefit in return for contributions, rather than free allowances from the State, is what the people of Britain desire". Everyone would put something in, and everyone would get something out. Beveridge appealed both to altruism and self-interest. This is often described as a welfare "contract" or "bargain". But that would be to misunderstand why the welfare state used to be so popular. As the Labour MP Jon Cruddas argues, it was popular because it represented an emotional connection, a way of thinking about the type of society that Britain was after the war — a covenant between each to look after all."

"The new liberals...wanted an "unservile state" which took on only those welfare functions which would liberate the citizenry into citizenship. Lord Beveridge was a fine example of the breed, imbued with what Mrs Thatcher might hail as Victorian values, particularly a strong sense of social responsibility and a tremendous emphasis on the relationship between freedom, knowledge and self-control."

"On my experience of his later years at least, while he was the greatest administrative genius I have seen he was almost certainly the worst administrator. He could not get on with his fellow administrators... He did not really understand politics, still less politicians, and in his tidy, administrative mind there was not always enough place for human reactions and human frailties... He was a hard master, but he certainly taught one of his research assistants the meaning of work, and the need for a thorough attack on the facts before one jumped into any theories about a subject."

"William Beveridge reads today like an Old Testament prophet: full of moral declamation and visionary objective. His 1942 report set goals to attack the five giant evils: Want, Disease, Ignorance, Squalor and Idleness. The ecstatic reception of his report (or at least the abridged version) was the response of a society in the midst of an existential war, still traumatised by the scourge of unemployment in the previous decade."

"Full Employment in a Free Society is really a sermonising tract, gloriously sweeping over difficulties human and technological to the promised land beyond. And, in the last resort, Sir William justified the practicality of his vision by simple analogy with the achievements of the wartime British economy: "The significance of war in relation to employment is that the scope of State outlay is increased immensely and indefinitely and that the State formally and openly gives up any attempt to balance its budget or limit its outlay by considerations of money". Similarly with regard to his plan for a welfare state, we are told by his daughter and biographer: "To the critics who inquired 'Can we pay for it?' the impatient reply was given, 'We can always pay for wars, this one costs £15 million a day. We will just have to afford the Beveridge Plan'.""

"Beveridge loved parties and recreation as much as he loved work and conversation. He gave much hospitality in The Lodgings, and there was always gusto and gaiety and some challenge. I saw a lot of him after his retirement in 1954. I had come to love the now benign Beveridge. He retained a sort of boyishness and excitement, and his charm and tact could be consummate."

"William Beveridge, architect of the modern welfare state, understood the danger that people might settle down to life on benefits, so proposed compulsory re-training schemes. And realising the even greater risks for school-leavers, who were not used to earning a wage, his report argued that "for boys and girls there should ideally be no unconditional benefit at all"."

"Social security must be achieved by co-operation between the State and the individual. The State should offer security for service and contribution. The State in organising security should not stifle incentive, opportunity, responsibility; in establishing a national minimum, it should leave room and encouragement for voluntary action by each individual to provide more than that minimum for himself and his family."

"The object of government in peace and in war is not the glory of rulers or of races, but the happiness of the common man."

"It was the Beveridge Report that provided the battlefield on which the decisive struggle to win a national commitment to New Jerusalem was waged and won... As appropriate for a prophet and a brilliant Oxford intellect, Beveridge thought a lot of himself, so that righteousness went hand in hand with authoritarian arrogance and skill at manipulating the press to make him the Field Marshal Montgomery of social welfare."

"Organisation of social insurance should be treated as one part only of a comprehensive policy of social progress. Social insurance fully developed may provide income security; it is an attack upon Want. But Want is one only of five giants on the road of reconstruction and in some ways the easiest to attack. The others are Disease, Ignorance, Squalor and Idleness."

"The state is or can be master of money, but in a free society it is master of very little else."

"Any proposals for the future, while they should use to the full the experience gathered in the past, should not be restricted by consideration of sectional interests established in the obtaining of that experience. Now, when the war is abolishing landmarks of every kind, is the opportunity for using experience in a clear field. A revolutionary moment in the world’s history is a time for revolutions, not for patching."

"[I]n his report on Full Employment in 1944 Beveridge urged an unquantified outlay of government funds in order to stimulate enough demand to bring about full employment, while admitting that such a policy in 1938 would have caused a balance-of-payments deficit of £130 million... Beveridge's answer to the conundrum lay in re-equipping industry and expanding output and exports, yet he offered no detailed analysis, no pondered advice, as to how these desirable objects were to be achieved; no costings of the investment needed and how it was to be funded; and he certainly failed to consider what effect the burden of the welfare state and the cost of maintaining full employment might have on such industrial investment. In any case he placed the need to modernise British industry and raise its productivity only third in priority in his "chosen route of planned national outlay"."

"The trouble in modern democracy is that men do not approach to leadership 'til they have lost the desire to lead anyone."

"Scratch a pessimist and you find often a defender of privilege."

"Ignorance is an evil weed, which dictators may cultivate among their dupes, but which no democracy can afford among its citizens."

"Here is the bread of time to come, Here is its actual stone. The bread Will be our bread, the stone will be Our bed and we shall sleep by night. We shall forget by day, except The moments when we choose to play The imagined pine, the imagined jay."

"Begin, ephebe, by perceiving the idea Of this invention, this invented world, The inconceivable idea of the sun.You must become an ignorant man again And see the sun again with an ignorant eye And see it clearly in the idea of it.Never suppose an inventing mind as source Of this idea nor for that mind compose A voluminous master folded in his fire."

"Throw away the lights, the definitions, And say of what you see in the dark That it is this or that it is that, But do not use the rotted names. How should you walk in that space and know Nothing of the madness of space, Nothing of its jocular procreations? Throw the lights away. Nothing must stand Between you and the shapes you take When the crust of shape has been destroyed."

"The death of one god is the death of all."

"I am a native in this world And think in it as a native thinks"

"The wind in which the dead leaves blow. Here I inhale profounder strength And as I am, I speak and move And things are as I think they are And say they are on the blue guitar."

"Phoebus is dead, ephebe. But Phoebus was A name for something that never could be named. There was a project for the sun and is.There is a project for the sun. The sun Must bear no name, gold flourisher, but be In the difficulty of what it is to be."

"What is beyond the cathedral, outside, Balances with nuptial song. So it is to sit and to balance things To and to and to the point of still, To say of one mask it is like, To say of another it is like, To know that the balance does not quite rest, That the mask is strange, however like."

"Poetry is the subject of the poem, From this the poem issues and To this returns. Between the two, Between issue and return, there is An absence in reality, Things as they are. Or so we say. But are these separate?"

"I play. But this is what I think."

"A substitute for all the gods: This self, not that gold self aloft, Alone, one's shadow magnified, Lord of the body, looking down, As now and called most high, The shadow of Chocorua In an immenser heaven, aloft, Alone, lord of the land and lord Of the men that live in the land, high lord. One's self and the mountains of one's land, Without shadows, without magnificence, The flesh, the bone, the dirt, the stone."

"The swarm of thoughts, the swarm of dreams Of inaccessible Utopia. A mountainous music always seemed To be falling and to be passing away."

"That I may reduce the monster to Myself, and then may be myself In face of the monster, be more than part Of it, more than the monstrous player of One of its monstrous lutes, not be Alone, but reduce the monster and be, Two things, the two together as one, And play of the monster and of myself, Or better not of myself at all, But of that as its intelligence, Being the lion in the lute Before the lion locked in stone."

"It is the sea that whitens the roof. The sea drifts through the winter air. It is the sea that the north wind makes. The sea is in the falling snow. This gloom is the darkness of the sea."

"So poisonousAre the ravishments of truth, so fatal to The truth itself, the first idea becomes The hermit in a poet’s metaphors,Who comes and goes and comes and goes all day."

"What is there in life except one's ideas. Good air, good friend, what is there in life? Is it ideas that I believe?"

"Be content — Expansions, diffusions — content to be The unspotted imbecile revery, The heraldic center of the world Of blue, blue sleek with a hundred chins, The amorist Adjective aflame..."

"First one beam, then another, then A thousand are radiant in the sky. Each is both star and orb; and day Is the riches of their atmosphere."

"A candle is enough to light the world. It makes it clear. Even at noon It glistens in essential dark. At night, it lights the fruit and wine, The book and bread, things as they are..."

"Things as they are have been destroyed. Have I? Am I a man that is dead At a table on which the food is cold? Is my thought a memory, not alive? Is the spot on the floor, there, wine or blood And whichever it may be, is it mine?"

"Mr. Stevens is the master of a style: that is the most remarkable thing about him. His gift for combining words is baffling and fantastic but sure: even when you do not know what he is saying, you know that he is saying it well."

"Stevens is a poet who argues that life is what one makes of it within the limitations of one's own sensibility."

"Stevens' way of informing us comes in language and imagery so radically different from previous times that it is difficult to recognize exactly what he means. But throughout his poetry he speaks, like the mystics, primarily of the nature of our relationship with the universe. He continually circles back to the idea that we actively participate in what the world looks like and what it means. Although cast in modern terms, this idea is profoundly spiritual and moral. Since he gives no evidence of any direct visionary experience, it's not possible to say Stevens is a "mystic" or a "contemplative" poet. But he is a major figure in modern poetry because he synthesizes the concerns of the modern world — the emphasis on the human self as maker of meaning, the emphasis on scientific rationality, the emphasis on creating new forms to replace outmoded beliefs — with the perennial concerns of the human spirit. To find meaning, or the good — or by implication, God — we need to radically adjust our conception of reality. This takes powerful acts of individual imagination, and the possibilities are immense... Contrary to all appearances, to the difficulty of his verse, and to the preoccupied, distracted interpretations of contemporary critics, Wallace Stevens' poetry is a profoundly spiritual force. Anyone interested in the spiritual problems of modern humans must reckon with it."

"I turn now not to the Bible but to Wallace Stevens"

"Blessings, Stevens; I stand with my back to grammar At an altar you never aspired to, celebrating the sacrament of the imagination whose high-priest notwithstanding you are."

"At the heart of many of Stevens's poems are harsh and unpalatable experiences revealed only gradually through his intense stylization."

"Poetry is a search for the inexplicable."

"Post-religious man, as Stevens saw him, still had a deep need for the kind of exaltation of the body and spirit which goes under different names in different religions — Christians call it grace, that is, the feeling or knowledge that the workings of God are revealed to the individual, thus lifting him or her up to a state of ecstatic consciousness. … For the romantics in general such moments of ecstasis in the midst of nature are experienced by the solitary imagination, and the bonds of society are cast away as unimportant. Stevens once said that the romantic is a falsification, and perhaps the reason for the comment was his feeling that such moments of ecstatic relation in the midst of nature had to be given a social and eventually political meaning, rather than remaining in the arena of the spirit. Stevens poetry then offers a pastoral romantic ecstasis that become the occasions for searching out the relations between the individual, his or her community and the natural world."

"Over many years (I am almost 72) so many poets have touched my imagination and opened paths for me—it hardly makes sense to list them. I have always read a great deal of poetry. Some poets—like Robert Lowell, Denise Levertov, Randall Jarrell, Jean Valentine, Audre Lorde, Hayden Carruth, Jane Cooper, June Jordan, Joy Harjo, Clayton Eshelman—have been my friends, we’ve been comrades in exchanging work and encouraging each other… But I’ve also been powerfully affected by Wallace Stevens, Hart Crane, Muriel Rukeyser, Aimé Césaire, Robert Duncan—poets I met briefly if at all."

"The world is a force not a presence."