The Art of Tetman Callis

“People were always getting ready for tomorrow. . . . Tomorrow wasn’t getting ready for them.” – Cormac McCarthy, The Road

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“What good is beauty, even youth? All that may be quite good and fair, But does it get you anywhere? Their praise is half pity, you can be sure. For gold contend, On gold depend All things. Woe to us poor!” – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust, Part I (from Goethe’s Faust, trans. Walter Kaufman)

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“Most of the Galician Jews, like Polish Jews residing in the General Government, died in the course of 1942 after spending months isolated from the rest of the population in ghettos created on Nazi orders. Acting on instructions of German police commanders, the Jewish and Ukrainian police rounded them up and shipped them to extermination […]

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“By early October 1939, the Polish army had ceased to exist . . . . The Red Army, which was no match for the Germans in mechanization, demonstrated its superiority to the Polish troops in the quality of its armaments, which included new tanks, aircraft, and modern guns—all products of Stalin’s industrialization effort. But to […]

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“The ‘Russian revolutionary sweep’ that Stalin wanted to combine with American efficiency came to Dniprohes with tens of thousands of Ukrainian peasants unqualified to do the job but eager to make a living. The number of workers employed in the construction of the dam and the electric power station grew from 13,000 in 1927 to […]

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“Courts acknowledge that running a prison is an inordinately difficult undertaking that requires expertise, planning, and the commitment of resources, all of which are peculiarly within the province of the legislative and executive branches of government. Courts must therefore accord substantial deference to the professional judgment of prison administrators, who bear a significant responsibility for […]

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“Prison is an expensive way of making bad people worse.” – Douglas Richard Hurd, Baron Hurd of Westwell, Her Majesty’s Principal Secretary of State for the Home Department, 1985-1989

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“Utopianism isn’t hope, still less optimism: it is need, and it is desire. For recognition, like all desire, and for the specifics of its reveries and programmes, too; and above all for betterness tout court. For alterity, something other than the exhausting social lie. For rest. And when the cracks in history open wide enough, […]

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“It is the essence of fascism to have no single fixed form—an attenuated form of nationalism in its basic nature, it naturally takes on the colors and practices of each nation it infects. In Italy, it is bombastic and neoclassical in form; in Spain, Catholic and religious; in Germany, violent and romantic. It took forms […]

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“Cosmopolitanism is not a tribal trait; it is a virtue, as much as courage or honesty or compassion. Almost without exception, the periods of human civilization that we admire as we look back have been cosmopolitan in practice; even those, like the Bronze Age, that we imagine as monolithic and traditional turn out to be […]

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“Unlike the masters of other great empires, the Mongols contributed little to the civilizations that came after them. They adopted the cultures of their subjects and when their empire disintegrated the world forgot them, but they had altered the course of history and they had left it scarred. Russia was torn away from Europe, and […]

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“No one owns anyone’s culture, and that to believe otherwise is to deprive us of the human fullness and richness we all deserve. To reconcile this insight with an equally compelling American truth—that racial injustice is our inheritance and our responsibility—is the challenge for every artist and critic, black or white.” – George Packer, “Race, […]

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“Ought we to make as many friends as possible? Or will the mot juste about hospitality, ‘not too many guests, nor yet none,’ also fit friendship in the sense that a person should neither be friendless nor have an excessive number of friends? The saying would seem to fit exactly those who become friends with […]

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“Race was—is—the fundamental American issue, underlying not only all matters of public policy (economic inequality, criminal justice, housing, education) but the very psyche of the nation.” – Nathaniel Rich, “James Baldwin & the Fear of a Nation”

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“Police killings of unarmed black children, indifference to providing clean drinking water to a majority-black city, or efforts to curtail the voting rights of minority citizens are not freak incidents but outbreaks of a chronic national disease.” – Nathaniel Rich, “James Baldwin & the Fear of a Nation”

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“If it were in my power to change the mercantile laws of literary society, I could easily spin out my existence writing and rewriting the same story in the hope that I might end up understanding it and making it clear to others.” – Ignazio Silone (quoted by Dorothy Day in The Catholic Worker, January […]

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“If we value democracy, if we want to live in a world marked by a vibrant public sphere that can generate the possibilities of hope and human betterment, then we need futures. Without futures, and without serious propositional clashes between different materialized futures, we have no politics, and we have no democracy. We merely have […]

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“Supply is supply, and demand is demand. They will be satisfied, be it with combs, fifes, rubber, whisky, tainted meat, canned peas, sex, or tobacco. For every need there is an entrepreneur, by a marvelous providence. You can find a man to bury your dog, rub your back, teach you Swahili, read your horoscope, murder […]

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“On his way the poor man finds all things against him; The earth itself closes its doors to him. You find him hated, though he does no wrong; You see hostility but not its cause. At the sight of a rich man you find the dogs Turning towards him, as they wag their tails, But […]

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“Poverty is exile in one’s native land, While wealth will make a stranger feel at home.” – The Arabian Nights (trans. Lyons, et al.)

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“While facts can be verified or refuted—and we should do so expeditiously and relentlessly—we must also recognize the possibility that more complex truths are often in the eyes of the beholder. This fact of human cognition doesn’t necessarily imply that relativism is correct or desirable; not all truths are equally valid. But because the particular […]

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“Sorrow follows whoever thinks of himself as Time’s favorite.” – The Arabian Nights (trans. Lyons, et al.)

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“Toil and hardship together with a lack of means teach a man bad manners and stupidity.” – The Arabian Nights (trans. Lyons, et al.)

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“Hasten to do whatever good deed occurs to you For generosity is not always possible. How many a man has held back from a generous action He could have done, and then has been restrained by poverty.” – The Arabian Nights (trans. Lyons, et al.)

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When a man is short of money, distressed and preoccupied, he cannot be blamed for what he says, as this does not come from his heart.” – The Arabian Nights (trans. Lyons, et al.)

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“If a rich man says something wrong, the people say: ‘You may be right, and what you say is not impossible,’ But if a poor man speaks the truth, they say: ‘You are a liar; what you say is wrong.’ Money invests a man with dignity and beauty in all lands. Money is the tongue […]

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“It is a wise man who built the first prison, as this is a tomb for the living and brings pleasure to their enemies.” – The Arabian Nights (trans. Lyons, et al.)

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“It is easy to be cynical about government—and rarely does such cynicism go unrewarded. Take, for instance, policy towards women. Some politicians declare that they value women’s unique role, which can be shorthand for keeping married women at home looking after the kids. Others create whole ministries devoted to policies for women, which can be […]

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“There is no wisdom without power. Were they to try to pawn me and my wisdom, Together with my books and my inkstand, For one day’s worth of food, it would not work And such a bargain would be thought contemptible. The poor, their state, their life, How dark they are with troubles! In summer […]

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“Of all literary genres, tragedy alone remains free from the pretensions to arithmetic that, until history caught up with them, were still indulged in by German philosophers and English novelists, who compensated for their thematic anxieties as an ostrich might—by limiting their scope to the trifling situations of everyday morality. Such moralists are nothing more, […]

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