#jonathan bowden

“All of our great thinkers are shooting arrows into the future. And Carlyle is one of them. . . . Don’t forget, Carlyle was denouncing what liberal Victorian values were: industrialization, ugliness, contempt for the environment, contempt for what he perceived to be the spiritual dimension of man.

   He’s not concerned with suffering, because suffering can ennoble. But it’s the meaning that’s attributed to it and the feeling that industrialization has somehow rendered the suffering of the masses meaningless. It’s the sort of aesthetic squalor with its attendant moral bankruptcy which appalled him. He is a moralist, but the interesting thing about the great thinkers in our tradition is he’s not a moralizer. He’s not wagging his finger. He’s excoriating! He’s a sort of man on the mountain who is telling you what he thinks.

   . . . Knowledge and courage! What does a man need in this life but knowledge and courage? And then he goes out into the morning to experience a great noontide. Not the end of the day, not the sorrow and the tiredness of the dark, not yet the beginning, but the noontide when the sun is up and life is golden and there is a future.”

Bowden on Mishima. 

Jonathan Bowden Lost Talks: “The Soviet Gulag”