Desires and Memories

"Thou art nothing. And all thy desires and memories and loves and dreams, nothing. The little dead earth-louse were of greater avail than thou, were it not nothing as thou art nothing. For all is nothing: earth and sky and sea and they that dwell therein. Nor shall this illusion comfort thee, if it might, that when thou art abolished these things shall endure for a season, stars and months return, and men grow old and die, and new men and women live and love and die and be forgotten. For what is it to thee, that shalt be as a blown-out flame? and all things in earth and heaven, and things past and things for to come, and life and death, and the mere elements of space and time, of being and not being, all shall be nothing unto thee; because thou shalt be nothing, for ever." 

E.R. Eddison - The Worm Ouroboros

***

“All Englishmen who were in their twenties in 1905 had at least one thing in common: They’d watched the world of their childhoods die. Just as they were coming of age,electricity replaced gaslight. Cars and buses replaced horses and bicycles. Urban populations were exploding, mass media and advertising were yammering, and mechanized warfare crouched in the wings, ready and waiting. The early twentieth century looked and sounded and smelled nothing like the late nineteenth. “In those days of the eighties and nineties of the nineteenth century the rhythm of London traffic which one listened to as one fell asleep in one’s nursery was the rhythm of horses’ hooves clopclopping down London streets in broughams, hansom cabs, and four-wheelers,” Woolf would write, toward the end of his life, in the unimaginable year of1960. “And the rhythm, the tempo got into one’s blood and one’s brain, so that in a sense I have never become entirely reconciled in London to the rhythm and tempo of the whizzing and rushing cars.” Woolf felt displaced, like the hero of H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine, exiled in the future. So did everybody else—Evelyn Waugh once remarked that if he ever got a hold of a time machine, he’d put it in reverse and go backward, into the past. “

“But by the time we reach them, those green fields are always in decline. The spell never lasts. King Arthur is always dying, and theElves are always shuffling off toward Valinor, where mortals cannot follow. Narnia falls into chaos, then drowns and freezes, and the survivors retreat into Aslan’s Land. We think of fantasy and modernism as worlds apart, but somehow they always end up in the same place. They are perfectly symmetrical. Fantasy is a prelude to the apocalypse. Modernism is the epilogue.”

...

The Masai, when they were moved from their old countryto the present Masaidreservein Kenya, took with them the names of their hill s and plains andrivers and gave them to the hills and plains and rivers of the newcountry. And it is by some such subterfuge of conservatism that everyman or peoplecompelled to suffer a notable change avoids the shame of extinction.

The Great Eternal Now

Everything really is stupidly simple

And yet all around is utter confusion  

Fairy tales written may help you to see it  

Do you understand about Lewis's Alice? 

We fit all our lives into regular patterns 

All that we really know is that we're really living

Moreover, to be conservative is not merely to be averse from change (which may be an idiosyncrasy); it is also a manner of accommodating ourselves to changes, an activity imposed upon all men. For, change is a threat to identity, and every change is an emblem of extinction. But a man’s identity (or that of a community) is nothing more than an unbroken rehearsal of contingencies, each at the mercy of circumstance and each significant in proportion to its familiarity. It is not a fortress into which we may retire, and the only means we have of defending it (that is, ourselves) against the hostile forces of change is in the open field of our experience; by throwing our weight upon the foot which for the time being is most firmly placed, by cleaving to whatever familiarities are not immediately threatened and thus assimilating what is new without it becoming unrecognizable to ourselves. The Masai, when they were moved from their old country to the present Masaid reserve in Kenya, took with them the names of their hill s and plains and rivers and gave them to the hills and plains and rivers of the new country. And it is by some such subterfuge of conservatism that every man or people compelled to suffer a notable change avoids the shame of extinction.

It is commonly believed that this conservative disposition is pretty deeply rooted in what is called “human nature.” Change is tiring, innovation calls for effort, and human beings (it is said) are more apt to be lazy than energetic. If they have found a not unsatisfactory way of getting along in the world, they are not disposed to go looking for trouble. They are naturally apprehensive of the unknown and prefer safety to danger. They are reluctant innovators, and they accept change not because they like it but (as Rochefoucald says they accept death) because it is inescapable. Change generates sadness rather than exhilaration: heaven is the dream of a changeless no less than a perfect world. Of course, those who read “human nature” in this way agree that this disposition does not stand alone; they merely contend that it is an exceedingly strong, perhaps the strongest, of human propensities. And, so far as it goes, there is something to be said for this belief: human circumstances would be very different from what they are if there were not a large ingredient of conservatism in human preferences. Primitive peoples are said to cling to what is familiar and to be averse from change; ancient myth is full of warnings against innovation; our folklore and proverbial wisdom about the conduct of life abounds in conservative precepts; and how many tears are shed by children in their unwilling accommodation to change. Indeed, wherever a firm identity has been achieved, and wherever identity is felt to be precariously balanced, a conservative disposition is likely to prevail. On the other hand, the disposition of adolescence is often predominantly adventurous and experimental: when we are young, nothing seems more desirable than to take a chance; pas de risque, pas de plaisir. And while some peoples, over long stretches of time, appear successfully to have avoided change, the history of others displays periods of intense and intrepid innovation. There is, indeed, not much profit to be had from general speculation about “human nature,” which is no steadier than anything else in our acquaintance. What is more to the point is to consider current human nature, to consider ourselves. 

Michael Oakeshott, On Being Conservative

The need to make music without having to worry about the neighbors propelled him to buy this ancient manor house nestled among the mist-capped hills of the British Midlands. "Here, we could get home after a gig and jam all night or all day if we wanted," he recalls. "That made living in the country pure, selfish bliss."

 

Old Time Religion

'This was an assumption very much at variance with the British historical experience, as represented both by the first public representatives of Wicca and the magicians from whom they had drawn their ideas. Mathers had been fascinated by militarism and aristocracy. Yeat's right-wing tendencies developed into a flirtation with fascism. Crowley was a lifelong high Tory, and all Dion Fortune's expressed political and social attitudes point in the same direction. Gardner, as said, was certainly a conservative, and while Alex Sanders disclaimed an associations with specific parties, he consistently expressed admiration for hierarchy and monarchy. A writer who interviewed several Wiccan groups in the 1960s noted that most of their members were politically right-wing.'

'There was no paradox in this; for most of these people their interest in paganism and magic was part of a wider rejection of modernity, a phenomena in which for many people in the early and mid-twentieth century, industrialization, urbanization, and high technology all formed parts of a package with socialism. Their spiritual aspects matched closely with three different emotional aspects of right-wing idealogy: nostalgia for a better past, elitism and suspicion of the masses, and a free market, in magic and sex as in economics.'

Ronald Huntford, The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft