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Quote by John Vincent Palatine

“An attentive observer of the drama that repeated itself every night might have spotted among the poor the gaunt figure of a pale, earnest young man, who, despite the easy sociability of Vienna's outcasts, wore his embitterment as if it were a precious decoration.”

Quote by John Vincent Palatine

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The Little Drummer Boy

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John Vincent Palatine

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“Being doped is a pleasure you pay for. There was always opium there for the people -- in the end it tainted their whole faith. If the Church had not always stood so watchfully behind the ruling powers, there would not have been such attacks against everything it stood for -- although of course it may have been competing with them for the first place among the rulers, as in the Middle Ages. Whenever it was a question of keeping the serfs, and then the paid slaves down, the dope-dealers came unfailingly to the help of the oppressors.”

“Nietzsche asked in 1882: 'What is the point of all the art of our works of art if we lose that higher art, the art of festivals?' The brief moment of intoxication lures us off the via dolorosa. Such spectacles also asserted the underlying continuity of European society since the Renaissance, despite steam engine, trainm and telegraph. Such was the confidence in the homology between the present day and a supposedly integrated and self-assured sixteenth century that people were still willing, in donning costumes, to turn themselves into living works of art. (This was the bourgeois response to the fantasy of the socialist Fourier, who thought people could become living artworks if they disrobed.) The contrast between the costumes and the black-and-white everyday garb of 1879, a way of dressing as if designed to be photographed, was sharp. Fourteen thousand citizens took part in Makart's extravaganza, 300,000 more looked on.”

“One of my father’s purposes in going to Vienna was to see a journalist by the name of Karl Kraus. I do not know what they discussed, though they probably concerned themselves with Jewish matters and quite possibly with the problem of the translation into literary German of the Yiddish poems of Moritz Rosenfeld, the New York garment worker-poet, whom father had ‘‘discovered.’’ I remember being taken into Kraus’s apartment in an old-fashioned Vienna apartment house, and there I remember what seemed to me a confusion and disorder which I have never seen equaled elsewhere.”

“The Bible teaches us that prayer is about our own inner relationship with the one true source of all things, our Heavenly Parents. This is essentially true about meditation as well.”