Chamblee54

Facts

Posted in GSU photo archive, Undogegorized by chamblee54 on May 23, 2023


@Atheist_Bot “Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. – Aldous Huxley.” I was stumbling through my morning, when I saw this. Other than reading The Doors of Perception many years ago, I don’t know Aldous Leonard Huxley. The quote is plausible. This is a repost.

Atheist Quote Bot 💉💉💉 is part of the problem. “@Atheist_Bot Challenging beliefs, while respecting the believer. It’s difficult sometimes. Numbered tweets are automatic, replies are from my programmer. I don’t feed trolls” A robot, in a server, dispensing commodity wisdom on schedule. This is what passes for learning in Post-Obama America.

The Huxley wikiquote shows 14 results for “facts.” The money quote appears to be legitimate. It is from a book, published in 1927, ”Proper Studies.” “The proper study of mankind is man” The text appears to be academic and difficult. This researcher will make no effort to identify the context.

Time Must Have a Stop (1944) has another ALH fact-quote. This one may be more true than the coffee mug. “Facts are ventriloquists’ dummies. Sitting on a wise man’s knee they may be made to utter words of wisdom; elsewhere, they say nothing, or talk nonsense, or indulge in sheer diabolism.”

Time Must Have a Stop “Sebastian Barnack, a handsome English schoolboy, goes to Italy for the summer, and there his real education begins. His teachers are two quite different men: Bruno Rontini, the saintly bookseller, who teaches him about things spiritual; and Uncle Eustace, who introduces him to life’s profane pleasures.”

”The novel that Aldous Huxley himself thought was his most successful at “fusing idea with story,” Time Must Have A Stop is part of Huxley’s lifelong attempt to explore the dilemmas of twentieth-century man and to create characters who, though ill-equipped to solve the dilemmas, all go stumbling on in their painfully serious comedies (in this novel we have the dead atheist who returns in a seance to reveal what he has learned after death but is stuck with a second-rate medium who garbles his messages).” Is TMHAS about facts, or about dummies?

Bruno Rontini is the character who said the comment about facts. We do not know the context. Is this how Huxley feels, or is a foolish character speaking nonsense? The only way to know is to read Time Must Have a Stop. This sort of scholarship is too much to expect of chamblee54, or Atheist Quote Bot. Pictures today are from “The Special Collections and Archives, Georgia State University Library.”

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