Andrei Navrozov, European editor of Chronicles, and a literary stylist of occasionally daunting, yet always exquisitely aesthetic prose, has a new essay up at Taki's entitled The Right to Shirk. I would commit a grave injustice were I to attempt a summarization of one of Navrozov's pieces, so perhaps the following excerpt should suffice as an appetizer:
The freedom of sloth, by my own present reckoning, is a far more incisive litmus test of social, economic and political liberty than any of the cardinal virtues of democracy, or any of the freedoms that assure them, in Roosevelt’s catalogue. Entailing as it does vagrancy, mendicancy, itinerancy of purpose and dreaminess of intent, it is that conditio sine qua non for the want of which a polity loses not only its prophets and poets, but its philosophers and scientists as well.
The question is whether a society devoted to the fearsome dogma of utility, the servant of which is instrumental reason and not the imagination, can secure those resources of creativity without which civilization is a mere name, the substance having long since departed.
But do not rely upon my meager words. Go read it, if you have not done so.
Comments (1)
Reminds me of Wislawa Szymborska who said in her Nobel Lecture:
"there are no professors of poetry."
Posted by KW | June 6, 2007 2:54 PM