Three quoted sayings or passages I am contemplating today.
One:
“Whoever wishes to foresee the future must consult the past; for human events ever resemble those of preceding times. This arises from the fact that they are produced by men who ever have been, and ever shall be, animated by the same passions, and thus they necessarily have the same results.” – Niccolò dei Machiavelli
Two:
“…Islam burst forth in the form of an epic: now, a heroic history is written with the sword, and in a religious context the sword assumes a sacred function; combat becomes an ordeal. The genesis of a religion amounts to the creation of a relatively new moral and spiritual type; in Islam, this type consists in the equilibrium — paradoxical from the Christian point of view — between contemplativeness and combativeness, and then between holy poverty and hallowed sexuality.
The Arab — and the man Arabized by Islam — has, so to speak, four poles, namely the desert, the sword, woman and religion. For the contemplative, the four poles become inward: the desert, the sword and woman become so many states or functions of the soul.
On the most general and, a priori, outward level, the sword represents death, the death one deals and the death one risks; its perfume is always present. Woman represents an analogous reciprocity; she is the love one receives and the love one gives, and thus she incarnates all the generous virtues; she compensates for the perfume of death with that of life. The deepest meaning of the sword is that there is no nobility without a renunciation of life, and this is why the initiatory vow of the Sufis — insofar as it relates historically to the “Pact of the Divine Acceptance” (Bay`at ar-Ridwan) — includes the promise to fight to the point of death, bodily in the case of the warrior-martyrs (shahada shuhada’) and spiritual in the case of the dervishes, the “poor” (faqir). The symbiosis of love and death within the framework of poverty and in the face of the Absolute, constitutes all that is essential in Arab nobility, so much so that we do not hesitate to say that here lies the very substance of the Moslem soul of the heroic epoch, a substance that Sufism tends to perpetuate by sublimizing it…” – Frithjof Schuon, in Images of Islam.
Three:
“Our fashion situation reflects our social and economic situation. Clothes have become more like costumes, intended more to hide than reveal who we are, or who we would like to be. An eclectic, basic, affordable style allows the super-rich to conceal their soaring exclusivity and to mimic humble circumstances, while it permits the rapidly contracting classes below them to camouflage their precarious status. The result is a place somewhere in between: a middle-class style without an actual middle class.
Call it the age of inconspicuous consumption, where the dominant style is either a preening or a self-protective understatement.
As some of our best fiction writers have grasped, in this atmosphere of concealment and masquerade, clothes have very nearly ceased to be markers of identity. Perhaps that’s why the craving for self-exposing memoirs has become even stronger than the desire for fiction. We don’t feel we really know anyone until we’ve seen them naked.”
– Lee Siegel, in a New York Times blog 10/7/2013 titled, when clothes no longer make the man.