MarysLibrary

God's Disclaimer

At the end of King Uzziah’s reign in 740 b.c., the prophet Isaiah was tasked with warning the Jews of God’s wrath. But, in Nock’s rephrasing of the Biblical text, God gave this disclaimer: “I suppose perhaps I ought to tell you that it won’t do any good. The official class and their intelligentsia will turn up their noses at you and the masses will not even listen. They will all keep on in their own ways until they carry everything down to destruction, and you will probably be lucky if you get out with your life.”

Isaiah asked why he should even bother, then? “Ah,” the Lord said, “you do not get the point. There is a Remnant there that you know nothing about. They are obscure, unorganized, inarticulate, each one rubbing along as best he can. They need to be encouraged and braced up because when everything has gone completely to the dogs, they are the ones who will come back and build up a new society; and meanwhile, your preaching will reassure them and keep them hanging on. Your job is to take care of the Remnant, so be off now and set about it.” For Nock, the Remnant was his audience. At times, the idea of the Remnant is unapologetically elitist, but in a thoroughly Jeffersonian way. The Remnant were not the “best and brightest,” the most successful, the richest. Rather, they were those occupying the “substratum of right thinking and well doing” (in Matthew Arnold’s words). “Two things you do know, and no more: First, that they exist; second, that they will find you. Except for these two certainties, working for the Remnant means working in impenetrable darkness.”

        -- J Goldberg on Albert Jay Nock's rephrasing of Isaiah

A poem a friend posted on Facebook today . . .

‘There’s nothing great 
Nor small’, has said a poet of our day,
Whose voice will ring beyond the curfew of eve 
And not be thrown out by the matin’s bell: 
And truly, I reiterate, nothing’s small! 
No lily-muffled hum of a summer-bee, 
But finds some coupling with the spinning stars; 
No pebble at your foot, but proves a sphere; 
No chaffinch, but implies the cherubim; 
And (glancing on my own thin, veinèd wrist), 
In such a little tremor of the blood 
The whole strong clamour of a vehement soul
Doth utter itself distinct. Earth’s crammed with heaven, 
And every common bush afire with God; 
But only he who sees, takes off his shoes, 
The rest sit round it and pluck blackberries, 
And daub their natural faces unaware
More and more from the first similitude.
—Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh

Posted recently by a friend, LH, on Facebook. Browning is quoting Emerson's Epigraph to History

Reading Notebook

Sometimes as I read I come across quotes I want to remember so I write them down somewhere. I should be putting them in one place, into a Reading Notebook.

I've been reading Chasing Hillary: Ten Years, Two Presidential Campaigns, and One Intact Glass Ceiling, by  Amy Chozick.  She covered Hillary Clinton's first presidential campaign for the Wall Street Journal and in the more recent campaign she has been covering her for the New York Times. She she has known and payed close attention to the Clintons for a long time. Her insights into the thinking of these always-controversial people and their many "-gates" are excellent.

My only complaint about her book is that she is such a devoted Hillary fan. She thinks she has to work to be less negative about the Clinton campaign because the candidate is convinced the reporter hates her. It's the other way around. She should not be covering a campaign where she is so heavily biased in favor of one side. But where would the Times find a reporter who is not? At least Chozick is paying attention. Here's a quote from her book:

"I'd find myself at a rare Sunday brunch back in New York cringing at the conversations I'd overhear, about summer shares on Fire Island and gallery openings and seeing Hamilton for the second time 'with the new cast,' things I would've talked about, too, in my old life. But that was before I spent most of my days talking to people in the middle of the country who couldn't afford health care or lost their jobs when the factory closed or took out a second mortgage to pay their kid's college tuition. Everything back in New York started to seem so petty."