Friday, March 14, 2008

The Great Minds of the Early 20th Century

As many of my posts have emphasized, I've been reading quite a bit from the works of the two-headed entity also known as the "Chesterbelloc". Because of an upcoming book club/meeting in honor of Belloc, I was trying to find out whether they liked drinking just beer and wine, or whether they also had a penchant for whiskey. Again, google directed me to the archives of the New York Times. I was very pleased to see and read this article from 1908, written by the famous socialist playwright, George Bernard Shaw. He tries to attack these two men for what they are worth. The frailty of his attack, combined with his insistence upon a teetotaling vegetarian blandness that is utterly scientific but lacking in soul and substance emphasizes how great they were to stand for an existence that was simultaneously more spiritual and more tied to this earth than any of the more godless goons of their day. However, the overall eloquence of both Shaw and the editor who writes the headline and a brief preview demonstrates that even those who stood on the proverbial wrong side of the fence seem to have been brighter than almost anyone walking on the face of this planet in our current time. Oh weeping and gnashing of teeth! At any rate, I converted the pdf of the article into a jpeg for this site. Enjoy!

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