Whew, That Was Close

I almost – but not quite – missed my goal.

My goal of posting every day for a year.

Imagine my surprise this morning when I logged on to WordPress and realized I hadn’t scheduled a post for today.

Worse, I didn’t have a draft anywhere close to done, either.

Worst, my “personal work computer” decided to crash as I was typing this post, causing me to wait until I got home to finish it.

Luckily, I’m reading From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life by Jacques Barzun. Clocking in at over 800 pages of political, philosophical, and religious thought, this is not the kind of book to share for Teaser Tuesday.

However, that’s not to say there aren’t some choice morsels I’m more than happy to share with you. Mind, I’m only a few dozen pages in, yet I already know this is a book I want to own and mark up myself. $5.00 used on Amazon . . . if only I had an extra $5.00 to spend right now.

Anyway, here are some of my favorite lines so far:

Europe is the peninsula that just out from the great mass of Asia without a break and is ridiculously called a continent.

---

[Martin] Luther himself did his best work in anger, and by a reverse snobbery he kept stressing his peasant origins, although he was the son of an artisan.

---

In the [16th century] and for a good 200 years more, insult was the accepted seasoning of intellectual debate.

---

The [change in the meaning of religion] explains the moral paradox of “wars of religion” in the name of a Christ who preached the brotherhood of man. On that injunction there seemed to be a meeting of minds; it meant: “Be my brother or I will kill you.”

---

Evangelicals made the sacraments less awesome.

---

Juniors are impatient. In any movement, the second generation is likely to be dissatisfied with what it has inherited, including the confused state of affairs produced by the pioneers. The urgent duty is to create a system, a single doctrine, that will exclude the new dissenters, rally the uncertain, and make one flock of the faithful.