Category: Commonplace

The Deadly Quiet Negative

Jonathan Wilson

Hot contention, raucous argument, and loud protestation cannot kill a state’s educational future. Only calm indifference, self-satisfied silence, and the deadly quiet negative will do education in. We can afford to make proper concessions among conflicting interests, formulary compromises among educational purposes, and fiscal adjustments in the name of sound economy in the state. But one big fact should be kept straight: for popular ignorance, for a state’s undereducation, there can be no price but public ignominy.

— Harry Huntt Ransom, “Educational Resources in Texas,” 1961[*]

[*] The Conscience of the University and Other Essays, ed. Hazel H. Ransom (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982), 19.

Cafe Country

Jonathan Wilson

If one lives in exile, the café becomes at once the family home, the nation, the church and parliament, a desert and a place of pilgrimage, cradle of illusions and their cemetery …. In exile, the café is the one place where life goes on.

– Hermann Kesten (1900-1996)[*]

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[*] Quoted in George Prochnik, The Impossible Exile: Stefan Zweig at the End of the World (New York: Other Press, 2014), 170.