A Very Bright Girl

Look to this day!
For it is life, the very life of life,
In its brief course
Lie all the verities and realities of your existence:

The bliss of growth,
The glory of action,
The splendor of beauty,
For yesterday is but a dream
And tomorrow only a vision,
But today well lived makes every yesterday a dream of happiness
And every tomorrow a vision of hope.
Look well, therefore, to this day! Such is the salutation of the dawn.

Kalidasa, Indian Dramatist

In old days men had the rack. Now they have the press. That is an improvement certainly. But still it is very bad, and wrong, and demoralizing. Somebody — was it Burke? — called journalism the fourth estate. That was true at the time no doubt. But at the present moment it is the only estate. It has eaten up the other three. The Lords Temporal say nothing, the Lords Spiritual have nothing to say, and the House of Commons has nothing to say and says it. We are dominated by Journalism.

Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man Under Socialism, 1891 (via Stephen Fry)

It has occured to me that when a post is too long for Twitter, I could theoretically put it here! Hmm. Yes. I see you sighing and shaking your head and to you I say hush.

Letters of Note is a fascinating site full of, wait for it, letters of note! This particular letter was written by General Dwight D. Eisenhower, then future President of the U.S. He writes about the experience of visiting a concentration camp shortly after it’s liberation. What struck me was this sentence:

I made the visit deliberately, in order to be in position to give first-hand evidence of these things if ever, in the future, there develops a tendency to charge these allegations merely to “propaganda.”

Eerily prescient, no?