Quote of the Day (Alfred Kazin, on a ‘Gelatinous Muddy Mess’ of Deep Winter)

“Deep winter, yellow sky last night when I went to bed and yellow sky when I woke up. All the streets and skies and buses and people merge into a gelatinous muddy mess. I am depressed by the inability to walk freely—the sky comes down on me from morning on.” —American literary critic and memoirist Alfred Kazin (1915-1998), A Lifetime Burning in Every Moment: From the Journals of Alfred Kazin (1996)

After this week’s blizzard, the roads and side streets are clear by now, but many street crossings are still a mess. You have to step gingerly lest you step into the squishy remnants of the storm. Don’t even think about walking out at night; you can’t discount the dangers of refreezing.

As they used to say on Hill Street Blues: let’s be careful out there.

Quote of the Day (Theodore Roosevelt, Warning About 'Special Interests’ vs. Democracy)

"At many stages in the advance of humanity, this conflict between the men who possess more than they have earned and the men who have earned more than they possess is the central condition of progress. In our day it appears as the struggle of freemen to gain and hold the right of self-government as against the special interests, who twist the methods of free government into machinery for defeating the popular will. At every stage, and under all circumstances, the essence of the struggle is to equalize opportunity, destroy privilege, and give to the life and citizenship of every individual the highest possible value both to himself and to the commonwealth.” —U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt (1858-1919), “The New Nationalism,” speech at Osawatomie, Kansas, August 31, 1910

Quote of the Day (Samuel Butler, on ‘True Inspiration’)

“Inspiration is never genuine if it is known as inspiration at the time. True inspiration always steals on a person; its importance not being fully recognised for some time. So men of genius always escape their own immediate belongings, and indeed generally their own age.”—English novelist and critic Samuel Butler (1835-1902), Samuel Butler's Note-Books, edited by Geoffrey Keynes and Brian Hill (1952)

Verse of the Day (W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood, on a Long-Kept Secret)

“At last the secret is out,
as it always must come in the end,
the delicious story is ripe to tell
to tell to the intimate friend;
over the tea-cups and into the square
the tongues has its desire;
still waters run deep, my dear,
there's never smoke without fire.”— English-born American poet, critic and playwright W. H. Auden (1907-1973) and Anglo-American novelist, playwright, screenwriter, memoirist, and diarist Christopher Isherwood (1904-1986), The Ascent of F6: A Tragedy in Two Acts (1936)
 
Well, in the case of The Person Formerly Known as Prince Andrew, Duke of York, that would be secrets, plural. And they are probably not all out, but so many have emerged about his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein that he has been stripped of his royal title and, as of last week, arrested on “suspicion of misconduct while in office.”
 
Before his (since terminated) marriage, this ex-royal enjoyed something of a reputation on Fleet Street of what might be called in the British Isles “a bit of a lad.” But nothing prepared the country for the firestorm surrounding e-mails and photos released from the Epstein files that further undermined Andrew’s disastrous attempt at damage control a few years ago.
 
Like Mark Twain, I have long believed that “the kingly office…is no more entitled to respect than the flag of a pirate.” But these days, I think that the British are doing far more to hold to account those in the highest positions of their country than we are here in the United States.
 
And that goes for the fellow here who would like to hold all power, with nobody to second-guess him. All his talk about the Epstein revelations having “exonerated” him only leaves most of us exasperated. If he’s really innocent, why not release the remaining 3 million documents?
 
(The image of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor that accompanies this post was extracted from a photo of him with Juan Manuel Santos, President, Republic of Colombia. It was taken on Nov. 9, 2017, on the presentation of the Chatham House Prize, and was made available by Chatham House. Since then, Andrew’s title, along with his smile, has disappeared.)

Photo of the Day: The Calm Before the Snowstorm

Like so many New Jerseyites, I waited patiently for the 12-plus inches of snow from the storm in late January to melt away. In the past week, courtesy of higher temperatures and rain, it finally receded to a more manageable level.

Then came the news that four weeks to the day of that big storm, another, with maybe even more snow and higher winds, was going to hit.

I wasn’t in the best frame of mind, then, when I drove out to Overpeck Park, not far from where I live in Bergen County, NJ, for the kind of walk I hadn’t been able to take in weeks. Despite large puddles in spots, many other area residents felt similarly and circled the large track on the field.

If anything heartened me as I thought of what was to come within 24 hours (and even as I type this, I can see the flakes following), it was that earlier this winter, the days would have been shorter and I wouldn’t have able to take the attached picture of the glorious late-afternoon sky—and that it might take less time for traces of this latest brutal storm to disappear.

Spiritual Quote of the Day (Abraham Heschel, on How the Prophet Disdains ‘Conventional Lies’)

"The prophet is a person who suffers from a profound maladjustment to the spirit of society, with its conventional lies, with its concessions to man's weakness. Compromise is an attitude the prophet abhors. This seems to be the implication of his thinking: compromise has corrupted the human species. All elements within his soul are insurgent against indifference to aberration. The prophet’s maladaptation to his environment may be characterized as moral madness (as distinguished from madness in a psychological sense)." — Polish-born American Jewish theologian Rabbi Abraham J. Heschel (1907-1972), The Prophets (1962)

Quote of the Day (Tom Robbins, on Being ‘Extremely Reverent’)

“I’m extremely reverent; it just depends what I’m looking at. From the outside, my life may look chaotic, but inside I feel like some kind of monk licking an ice cream cone while straddling a runaway horse.” —American novelist Tom Robbins (1932-2025), quoted by Rob Liguori, “ ‘I Don't Let It Snow on My Fiesta,’” The New York Times Sunday Magazine, May 25, 2014

This cropped image of Tom Robbins, in San Francisco at a reading sponsored by Booksmith, was taken on Sept. 24, 2005, by 48states (talk).