Words to remember

 
When I look at how things are going in this country right now, one of my favorite poems seems more than ever pertinent.

Preliminary explanation from this site (the highlighting is mine):

A copybook was an exercise book used to practice one’s handwriting in. The pages were blank except for horizontal rulings and a printed specimen of perfect handwriting at the top. You were supposed to copy this specimen all down the page. The specimens were proverbs or quotations, or little commonplace hortatory or admonitory sayings — the ones in the poem illustrate the kind of thing. These were the copybook headings.

(It can also be noted that when Kipling refers to “the Gods of the Market Place”, he seems to mean, not specific economic principles — our current understanding of the Market — but the fads that come and go in every age.)

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Someone once made a statement to the effect that “reality is what doesn’t go away when you stop believing in it”. Reality is what reasserts itself when the various fads collapse under their own lack of substance.

We’re in a national fad right now. I hope the collapse — when it comes, and it IS coming — won’t be too terrible.