Any explanation except one

When the course of civilization takes an unexpected turn–when, instead of the continuous progress which we have come to expect–we find ourselves threatened by evils associated by us with past ages of barbarism–we naturally blame anything but ourselves. Have we not all striven according to our best lights, and have not many of our finest minds incessantly worked to make this a better world? Have not all our efforts and hopes been directed toward greater freedom, justice, and prosperity? If the outcome is so different from our aims–if, instead of freedom and prosperity, bondage and misery stare us in the face–is it not clear that sinister forces must have foiled our intentions, that we are the victims of some evil power which must be conquered before we can resume the road to better things? However much we may differ when we name the culprit–whether it is the wicked capitalist or the vicious spirit of a particular nation, the stupidity of our elders, or a social system not yet, although we have struggled against it for half a century, fully overthrown–we all are, or at least were until recently, certain of one thing: that the leading ideas which during the last generation have become common to most people of good will and have determined the major changes in our social life cannot have been wrong. We are ready to accept almost any explanation of the present crisis of our civilization except one: that the present state of the world may be the result of genuine error on our own part and that the pursuit of some of our most cherished ideals has apparently produced results utterly different from those which we expected.

– Friedrich A. Hayek in The Road to Serfdom (1944) dedicated to “The Socialists of All Parties”

The Efflorescent Elegance of Exceptional Women

Those who have paid even cursory attention to the vocabulary of the high fashion magazines realize that English has different meanings in this specialized context from those of normal usage. For example, the word "simple" or the phrase "simple little" is generally used to denote matters that would elsewhere be cited as examples of Byzantine complexity and indirection.

The best fashion photography has often indulged a similar taste for make-believe, and harmless (or almost harmless) mendacity. Irving Penn's simple little picture of a beautiful model in a fancy dress is a masterpiece of the genre.

Superficially the picture pretends to a directness and austerity that suggest the nineteenth-century studio portrait: It is devoid of luxurious textures, stage lighting, elegant properties, or an identifiable social ambience. What remains is an almost primitively simple record of a very elegant lady.

The simplicity is of course a sham. Perhaps the essential nature of this picture can be more clearly seen if one covers with a sheet of paper the model's beautiful (and seemingly tiny) head. It is possible that only a modern viewer would be able to identify what remains as representing a woman's body, rather than the silhouette of an orchid, or a scarified tribal priestess in ceremonial headdress, or the rhizome of an iris. As a description of a dress the photograph is even more ambiguous; surely only one with prior knowledge of the fashions of 1950 could reconstruct a reasonable pattern of the dress from the information given by the picture.

The true subject of the photograph is the sinuous, vermicular, richly subtle line that describes the silhouetted shape. The line has little to do with women's bodies or real dresses, but rather with an ideal of efflorescent elegance to which certain exceptional women and their couturiers once aspired.

— John Szarkowski (1925-2007) in Looking at Photographs (1973)

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Woman in Black Dress (1950, 16 1/4 x 11) by Irving Penn (American, 1917-2009)

A mind ripe for acquisitions

“Thus the wise man, at all times and on every road, carries a mind ripe for acquisitions that ordinary folk neglect. The humblest occupation is for him a continuation of the loftiest; his formal calls are fortunate chances of investigation; his walks are voyages of discovery, what he hears and his silent answers are a dialogue that truth carries on with herself within him. Wherever he is, his inner universe is comparing itself with the other, his life with Life, his work with the incessant work of all beings; and as he comes forth from the narrow space in which his concentrated study is done, one gets the impression, not that he is leaving the true behind, but that he is throwing his door wide open so that the world may bring to him all the truth given out in its mighty activities.”

— A. G. Sertillanges in The Intellectual Life (1921) translated from French by Mary Ryan

What is it that has called you out of nothingness?

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“What is it that has called you out of nothingness to enjoy for a brief while a spectacle which remains quite indifferent to you? The conditions for your existence are almost as old as the rocks. For thousands of years men have striven and suffered and begotten and women have brought forth in pain. A hundred years ago, perhaps, another man sat on this spot; like you he gazed with awe and yearning in his heart at the dying light of the glaciers. Like you he was begotten of man and born of woman. He felt pain and brief joy as you do. Was he someone else? Was it not you yourself? What is this Self of yours? What was the necessary condition for making the thing conceived this time into you, just you and not someone else? What clearly intelligible scientific meaning can this ‘someone else’ really have? If she who is now your mother had cohabited with someone else and had a son by him, and your father had done likewise, would you have come to be? Or were you living in them, and in your father’s father … thousands of years ago? And even if this is so, why are you not your brother, why is your brother not you, why are you not one of your distant cousins? What justifies you in obstinately discovering this difference—the difference between you and someone else—when objectively what is there is the same?”

— Erwin Schrödinger in Seek for the Road, an essay collected in My View of the World (1964)

And all after lead nowhere at all

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“When they got to the room the maid was cleaning and she left and they closed the curtains and made love and slept in each other’s arms. When they woke it was evening. She came from the shower wrapped in a towel and she sat on the bed and took his hand and looked down at him. I cannot do what you ask, she said. I love you. But I cannot.

He saw very clearly how all his life led only to this moment and all after led nowhere at all. He felt something cold and soulless enter him like another being and he imagined that it smiled malignly and he had no reason to believe that it would ever leave. When she came out of the bathroom again she was dressed and he made her sit on the bed and he held her hands both of them and talked to her but she only shook her head and she turned away her tearstained face and told him that it was time to go and that she could not miss the train.”

— Cormac McCarthy in All the Pretty Horses (1992)