Robert Louis Stevenson

i believe that i interpret the will of the congress and of the people when i assert that we will not only defend ourselves to the uttermost but will make it very certain that this form of treachery shall never again endanger us hostilities exist there is no blinking at the fact that our people our territory and our interests are in grave danger with confidence in our armed forces and with the unbounding determination of our people we will gain the inevitable triumph so help us god I ask that the Congress declare that since the unprovoked and dastardly attack by Japan on Sunday, December 7, 1941, a state of war has existed between the United States and the Japanese Empire.

A Note on Realism by Robert Louis Stevenson.

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Deal in September 10th.

and consider any fact as welcome to admission if it be the ground of brilliant handiwork or again into the error of the modern landscape painter who is apt to think that difficulty overcome and science well displayed can take the place of what is after all the one excuse and breath of art charm a little further and he will regard charm in the light of an unworthy sacrifice to prettiness and the omission of a tedious passage as an infidelity to art we have now the matter of this difference before us the idealist his eye singly fixed upon the greater outlines loves rather to fill up the interval with detail of the conventional order briefly touched soberly suppressed in tone courting neglect but the realist with a fine intemperance will not suffer the presence of anything so dead as a convention he shall have all fiery all hot pressed from nature all charactered and notable seizing the eye the style that befits either of these extremes once chosen brings with it its necessary disabilities and dangers the immediate danger of the realist is to sacrifice the beauty and significance of the whole to local dexterity or in the insane pursuit of completion to immolate his readers under facts but he comes in the last resort and as his energy declines to discard all design abjure all choice and with scientific thoroughness steadily to communicate matter which is not worth learning the danger of the idealist is of course to become merely null and lose all grip of fact particularity or passion we talk of bad and good everything indeed is good which is conceived with honesty and executed with communicative ardor but though on neither side is dogmatism fitting and though in every case the artist must decide for himself and decide afresh and yet afresh for each succeeding work and new creation yet one thing may be generally said that we of the last quarter of the nineteenth century breathing as we do the intellectual atmosphere of our age are more apt to err upon the side of realism than to sin in quest of the ideal Upon that theory it may be well to watch and correct our own decisions, always holding back the hand from the least appearance of irrelevant dexterity, and resolutely fixed to begin no work that is not philosophical, passionate, dignified, happily mirthful, or at the last and least romantic in design.

End of a Note on Realism by Robert Louis Stevenson Read by Quaker Woodworker

The Failure of Speculative Philosophy from Knowledge and Life by Rudolf Uecken 1846-1926 Published in 1913 The Failure of Speculative Philosophy if science then does not lead us to knowledge philosophy is able to vindicate itself in relation to knowledge only in so far as it proceeds on its own specific path such a path philosophy believes to have found from of old and for centuries this path has been one of speculation This speculation consists in a mode and work of ideas which free themselves from the remainder of life, and which exercise complete sovereignty over all.

And then perhaps the most poignant moment of the movie.

We see there's an old man who's on his deathbed and he's teaching a text, We're of Hermiston by Robert Louis Stevenson, to his grandson.

And we see the boy reciting the lines back to the man and making a mistake.

And the old man corrects the mistake and the boy says the line again.

Instead of accepting these weak alternatives and wasting his brief years in useless complainings, he plucked opportunity out of the very jaws of death, found in the high Alps the conditions most favorable for activity, and poured his life out in work of such sustained interest and value that he laid the English-reading peoples under lasting obligations.

In spite of of his invalidism he achieved more than most men who live out the full period of life in complete possession of their powers in like manner disease touched robert louis stevenson in his early prime and would have daunted a spirit less gallant than his he bore himself in the presence of death as a dashing leader bears himself in the presence of an overwhelming foe he was intrepid but he was also wise he sought such alleviations as climates afforded a man in his condition, and then gave himself to his work with a kind of passionate ardor as if he would pluck the very heart out of time and toil before the night fell.

Neither of these men was blind to his condition, neither was indifferent, both loved life, and both had their moments of revolt and depression, but both found in work resource from despair, and both made the world richer not only by the fruits of self-conquest, but by the contagious power of heroic example.

Such careers put to shame the self-centered, egotistic, morbid pessimism which has found so many voices in recent years, that its cowardly outcries have almost drowned the great, sane, authoritative voices of the world.

And then I feel like we have this, a bit of a gear shift.

So the second third of the story, we go full on into the sort of, uh, Robbie Lou, Robert Louis Stevenson, Jekyll and Hyde kind of thing.

Also reminded me of the, um, the novel of the white powder by Arthur Mack.

And so it's a mad scientist, um, bit that we go into.

of.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

But also like, I think it's dead, it's, you know, lots of fun and, um interest in the way the effect on the different senses is described because you know that if it was you know lovecraft or if it was even robert louis stevenson then um the sort of the noise of a a fly they would be like it's suddenly transformed into a behemoth and all this but she it just says he could hear the little footsteps of the fly as it walked and that's somehow like It's more imaginable, but it's also like, you

know, a little

Whereupon Teach, with several others, descended to the hold, shut themselves in, and then set fire to several pots of brimstone.

for a while they stood it choking and gasping but at length had to escape to save themselves from being asphyxiated but the last to give up was the captain who was wont to boast afterwards that he had outlasted all the rest then there was that little affair in the cabin when teach blew out the candle and in the dark fired his pistols under the table severely wounding one of his guests in the knee for no other reason as he explained to them afterwards than if he did not shoot one or two of them now and then they'd forget who he was teach kept a log or journal which unfortunately is lost but the entries for two days have been preserved and are worth giving and seem to smack of robert louis stevenson in treasure island The entries, written in Teach's handwriting, run as follows.

1718.

Rum all out.

It's a little thing.

There's a Robert Louis Stevenson poem called The Swing.

And my mother read it to me.

And then anytime she pushed me in the swing, she would say the poem to me.

Right.

I did Robert Louis Stevenson.

I did J.J. Barrett, J.M. Barry.

So I did quite a lot of stuff.