Words&Dirt

“It is a strange feeling to revisit this revelation as a seventy-four-year-old. When one is a twenty-five-year-old, such concepts can be experienced only academically. Age, then, is not something that can be understood; it is a preoccupation of the old, and the old is anyone older than oneself. It is a subject that has no relevance, a subject that seems a bore, an indulgence and lament of the weak-minded and feeble and querulous. As a have grown first older and now old, however, I have contemplated the dreamers’ fate more and more, and today I see it very clearly for what it is––a curse. There is a point––for me, it arrived perhaps a few years ago––when, without even realizing it, you switch over from craving more life to being resigned to its end. It happens so abruptly that you cannot help but recall the moment itself, and yet so gently that it is as if it comes to you in a dream.”

––The People in the Trees, by Hanya Yanagihara, pg. 259-60

“When recurrently the tradition of the virtues is regenerated, it is always in everyday life, it is always through the engagement by plain persons in a variety of practices, including those of making and sustaining families and households, schools, clinics, and local forms of political community. And that regeneration enables such plain persons to put to the question the dominant modes of moral and social discourse and the institutions that find their expression in these modes. It was they who were the intended and, pleasingly often, the actual readers of After Virtue, able to recognize in its central theses articulations of thoughts that they themselves had already begun to formulate and expressions of feeling by which they themselves were already to some degree moved.”

––After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, by Alasdair MacIntyre, pg. xv