Soul Values

Cyril Connolly opened The Unquiet Grave, justly his most famous book, with the words: 'The more books we read, the sooner we perceive that the only function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece. No other task is of any consequence. Obvious though this should be, how few writers will admit it, or having made the admission, will be prepared to lay aside the piece of iridescent mediocrity, on which they have embarked!'
— Stephen Spender, in the Introduction to The Writer's Dilemma, by Times Literary Supplement, p. xi.

     We are like the man who pays lip-service to culture and quiet and meditation; but who shows by his actions that the thing he really believes in is making a fortune. He is so surrounded by things that he tries to have the lot; and ends by doing nothing or tagging along behind the shaming thing that attracts his appetites. Education still points to the glorious dawn, officially at any rate, but has been brought to see, in a down-to-earth manner, that what we really want is technitions and civil servants and soldiers and airmen and that only she can supply them. She still calls what she is doing 'education' because it is a proper, a dignified word — but she should call it 'training,' as with dogs. In the Wellsian concept, the phrase she had at the back of her mind was 'Natural Philosophy'; but the overtones were too vast, too remote, too useless on the national scale, too emphatically on the side of 'knowing' rather than 'doing'.
— William Golding, from "On the Crest of the Wave," in Ibid., p. 45.

     I must be careful, but it seems to me that an obvious truth is being neglected. Our humanity, our capacity for living together in a full and fruitful life, does not reside in knowing things for the sake of knowing them or even in the power to exploit our surroundings. At best these are hobbies and toys — adult toys, and I for one would not be without them. Our humanity rests in the capacity to make value judgements, unscientific assessments, the power to decide that this is right, that wrong, this ugly, that beautiful, this just, that unjust. Yet these are precisely the questions which 'Science' is not qualified to answer with its measurement and analysis. They can be answered only by the methods of philosophy and the arts. We are confusing the immense power which the scientific method gives us with the all-important power to make the value judgements which are the purpose of human education.
     The pendulum has swung too far....
— William Golding, in Ibid., p. 47.

     "The 'soul' is indeed a vague conception and the reality of the thing to which it refers cannot be demonstrated. But consciousness is the most evident of all (invisible) facts.... The physiologists are very fond of comparing the network of our cerebral nerves with a telephone system, but they overlook the significant fact that a telephone system does not function until someone talks over it. The brain does not create thought (Sir Julian Huxley has recently pointed out this fact); it is an instrument which thought finds useful."
— Joseph Wood Krutch, from More Lives Than One, in Out On a Limb, Shirley MacLaine, p. 162.

     Now Buckminster Fuller's theory about most of what transpires within the human activity of reality being utterly invisible, unsmellable, and untouchable began to make sense. He said that ninety-nine percent of reality could only be comprehended by man's metaphysical mind, guided by something he only sensed might be the truth. He said man was metaphysical mind. And the brain was only a place to store information. He said only man's metaphysical mind could communicate. The brain could not. That man was a self-contained microcommunicating system. And that all information of everything, including God, was continually being broadcast and received through electro-magnetic waves, only we weren't aware of it because we were only using one percent of our capacities to perceive the truth.
— Shirley MacLaine, Out On a Limb, p. 279.

                                          "In Order To"

     Apply for the position (I've forgotten now for what) I had to marry the Second Mayor's daughter by twelve noon. The order arrived three minutes of.
     I already had a wife; the Second Mayor was childless: but I did it.
     Next they told me to shave off my father's beard. All right. No matter that he'd been a eunuch, and had succumbed in early childhood: I did it, I shaved him.
     Then they told me to burn a village; next, a fair-sized town; then, a city; a bigger city; a small, down-at-heels country; then one of 'the great powers'; then another (another, another) — In fact, they went right on until they'd told me to burn up every man-made thing on the face of the earth! And I did it, I burned away every last trace, I left nothing, nothing of any kind whatever.
     Then they told me to blow it all to hell and gone! And I blew it all to hell and gone (oh, didn't I!) ...
     Now, they said, put it back together again; put it all back the way it was when you started.
     Well ... it was my turn then to tell them something! Shucks, I didn't want any job that bad.
— Kenneth Patchen, Poems of Humor & Protest, p. 42.