Electromagnetic

Haste thou, and fill the waning crescent
With beams as keen as those which pierced the shadow
Of Christian night rolled back upon the West
When the orient moon of Islam rode in triumph
From Tmolus to the Acroceraunian snow.

* * *

Wake, thou Word
Of God, and from the throne of Destiny
Even to the utmost limit of thy way
May triumph

* * *

Be thou a curse on them whose creed
Divides and multiplies the most high God!

Percy Bysshe Shelley, from Prologue to Hellas, 1821

If I saved one blow, one cruel, angry action that might otherwise have been committed, I did a woman’s work. Let them insult my maiden pride as they will — I walk pure before God! [Margaret Hale]

Gaskell, Elizabeth. North and South. Ed. Angus Easson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998, p 191.

A RADICALLY CONDENSED HISTORY OF POSTINDUSTRIAL LIFE

When they were introduced, he made a witticism, hoping to be liked. She laughed extremely hard, hoping to be liked. Then each drove home alone, staring straight ahead, with the very same twist to their faces.

The man who’d introduced them didn’t much like either of them, though he acted as if he did, anxious as he was to preserve good relations at all times. One never knew, after all, now did one now did one now did one.

Foster Wallace, David. Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 1999.

In the formulation of historico-critical problems it is wrong to conceive of scientific discussion as a process at law in which there is an accused and a public prosecutor whose professional duty it is to demonstrate that the accused is guilty and has to be put out of circulation. In scientific discussion, since it is assumed that the purpose of discussion is the pursuit of truth and the progress of science, the person who shows himself most “advanced” is the one who takes up the point of view that his adversary may well be expressing a need which should be incorporated, if only as a subordinate aspect, in his own construction. To understand and to evaluate realistically one’s adversary’s position and his reasons (and sometimes one’s adversary is the whole of past thought) means precisely to be liberated from the prison of ideologies in the bad sense of the word–that of blind ideological fanaticism. It means taking up a point of view that is “critical”, which for the purpose of scientific research is the only fertile one.

Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937). Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, edited and translated by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith. New York: International Publishers, 1971, pp. 343-344.