#fanatacism

[sictransitgloriamvndi]

[alchemisoul]

"The people I distrust most are those who want to improve our lives but have only only one course of action."

- Frank Herbert

[hermitthrush]

Victor Hugo

Les Miserables (1862) | FANTINE, Book Eight, III. “Javert Satisfied”

Hermit Thoughts: A blissful Javert goes to arrest the revealed Jean Valjean at Fantine’s sickbed.

At that moment, Javert was in heaven.  Without a clear notion of his own feelings, yet with a confused intuition of his need and his success, he, Javert, personified justice, light, and truth, in their celestial function as destroyers of evil. He was surrounded and supported by infinite depths of authority, reason, precedent, legal conscience, the vengeance of the law, all the stars in the firmament; he protected order, he hurled forth the thunder of the law, he avenged society, he lent aid to the absolute; he stood erect in a halo of glory; there was in his victory a trace of defiance and combat; standing haughty and resplendent, he displayed in full glory the superhuman bestiality of a ferocious archangel; the fearful shadow of the deed he was accomplishing, making visible in his clenched fist the uncertain flashes of the social sword; happy and indignant, he had gnashed his heel on crime, vice, rebellion, perdition, and hell; he was radiant, exterminating, smiling; there was an incontestable grandeur in this monstrous St. Michael.

Javert, though hideous, was not base.

Probity, sincerity, candor, conviction, the idea of duty, are things that, when in error, can turn hideous, but--even though hideous-- remain great; their majesty, peculiar to the human conscience, persists in horror.  They are virtues with a single vice--error.  The pitiless, sincere joy of a fanatic in an act of atrocity preserves some mournful radiance that inspires veneration.  Without suspecting it, Javert, in his dreadful happiness, was pitiful, like every ignorant man in triumph.  Nothing could be more poignant and terrible than this face, which revealed what might be called all the evil of good.

[infiniterichesinalittleroom]

I lost myself to music at a very early age, and I remained there. It's so easy to throw that old word 'obsession' around. We often hear about, Oh, I'm obsessed with that, I'm obsessed with music, I'm obsessed with theorising about music. All of us secretly think we're musicologists and that only we know what's good and what's bad. But the word 'obsession'—which is frequently applied to me—is a pretty dangerous one, really. I did fall in love with the voices I heard, whether they were male or female. I loved those people. I really, really did love those people. For what it was worth, I gave them my life...my youth. Beyond the perimeter of pop music there was a drop at the edge of the world.

MORRISSEY • Select Magazine • July 1991

[eopederson]

Holy Love Information Centre, Knock, Mayo, 2013.

Reading recommendation: For anyone interested in Ireland, a recently published book Fintan O’Toole (2021) We Don't Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Ireland Since 1958 is a must read. O’Toole is one of the better cultural critics currently active, and his memoir qua history of Ireland since the year of his birth is an amazing document examining the vast changes which have occurred  over that period. Presenting in a captivating manner historical details largely unknown to those who are not Irish, O’Toole shows, among much else, how the Catholic Church lost its dominance even as Ireland became a “normal” West European state. I found the longish book hard to put down and finished it in a couple of days. There is a good review in the current issue of the New Yorker (11 April 2022).

Knock, by the way, houses a pilgrimage shrine similar to Fatima and Lourdes, “an approved Catholic shrine and place of pilgrimage where the faithful believe that the Blessed Virgin Mary, Saint Joseph and Saint John the Evangelist appeared on 21 August 1879” (Wikipedia). The shrine is mostly visited by Irish Roman Catholics, though Knock now has an international airport.

[inthemarginalized]

One cannot accomplish anything without fanaticism.  - Eva Perón (May 7, 1919 – July 26, 1952) 

She was an Argentine political leader She ran the Ministries of Labor and Health, founded and ran the charitable Eva Perón Foundation, championed women's suffrage in Argentina, and founded and ran the nation's first large-scale female political party, the Female Peronist Party. 

[postersbykeith]

[eopederson]

Moron Temple, St. George, Utah, 1978.