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Quote of the Day: On the Female Brain
A well-informed mind is the best security against the contagion of folly and vice. The vacant mind is ever on the watch for relief, and ready to plunge into error, to escape from the languor of idleness. Store it with ideas, teach it the pleasure of thinking; and the temptations of the world without, will be counteracted by the gratifications derived from the world within. Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho
Ann Radcliffe, known to many as the mistress of the gothic novel, died 199 years ago, on February 7, 1823. She was 58 years old, and had lived the last couple of decades of her life in seclusion. Her death, probably from complications of asthma, was as private as most of her life, which remains–like many of her novels–a mystery to this day.
I think of her as the progenitor (progenitress?) of the “tasteful bodice-ripper” books beloved of my adolescence. Well-written, fanciful, stories with strong female characters, with a smattering of very good, and a plethora of really bad, men (sometimes it was hard to tell the difference), and in which our heroine’s journey towards figuring out which was which informed much of the story, and a streak of real morality and principle underlying the often ridiculous plot.
There was nothing vapid or moronic about Radcliffe’s heroines. Each had, or developed through the course of her travails, a healthy “world within” whose milestones and signposts saved her from destruction in the end.
An example, in many cases, of Socrates’ dictum that “the unexamined life is not worth living.”
Perhaps a salutary lesson for those women whose minds and lives often seem fixated on the external events of the moment and what they’ve just read on Twitter, Facebook, or Wikipedia.
Is there more to life than a slavish attention to social media? I think so.
What say you?
Published in General
I haven’t heard much of this author. Interesting. Thank you for this post!
Social media have unfortunately caused too many lives to be a little too examined if my Instagram feed is any indication. I now know more than I ever wanted to about my several thousand followers who are total strangers. I know what they had for lunch, how cute their kids look with chocolate frosting on their faces, and their stance on BLM. Of course these lives are examined in a more shallow way than Socrates intended. Well,except for that one woman in England whose posts tell us all about her Crohn’s Disease (don’t google it. You’ll thank me later).
Thanks to social media, I know more than I should know about total strangers than I know about my neighbors across the street.
All too true. While our virtual “friends” can’t wait to tell us about their new cars, their fancy vacations, their brilliant insights into what they found on Wikipedia five minutes ago, and everything about the “A” side of their lives and none of the “B,” I don’t get the sense they’re actually thinking about what any of it means. Except maybe what Mr. She used to call the “smell me” effect.
I think Socrates was talking about using a mirror, rather than a telescope, and suggesting that we should look within. What’s really sad is that when many do, all they see is a vacuum.
I’ll paraphrase Glenn Beck, from something I heard the other day, when he was talking about the latest outbreak of idiocy on The View:
Pretty much sums up the vast majority of what’s on social media, doesn’t it?
Maybe social media has corrupted the instincts for, and ability to, self-reflect. Besides, it’s such hard work!
Do you see any similarities with social media? The “Outer Band Individuated Teletracer”.
Hard to tell. For some of us (half of us), examining the female brain yields negative feedback. Some things men are just not meant to know.
I really like this quote, and I bolded what I think is the best part. Far too many of us have too much spare time on our hands. Idle hands and so on.
Whenever I see some of the foolishness that goes on nowadays, I wonder why someone had nothing important to do with their time.
I only know Mrs. Radcliffe through the eyes of Jane Austen, who skewered the Gothic novel in Northanger Abbey. It’s a delight, so for that I can be grateful for Udolpho.
I would love for today’s young women to enjoy real novels – like the one you describe. There are so many wonderful books and classics that generations will not know because they are not taught, not front and center like social media, and I think social media has shortened the attention span of most youth to a gnat. We went to Books-a-Million last weekend. Only a handful of folks in there – older mostly. I spotted a young woman in the “spiritual growth and philosophical aisle”. I only saw her from the back. She had a black lace dress on and was putting a heavy, hardback book back on the shelf in the section she was searching. I saw the title, “The Dark Arts”. My heart was heavy for her – that really bothered me.
There is a video game called ‘Second Life’ where people can become rich in game and purchase luxuries for their characters to flaunt.
To a degree, our online presences are second lives, and our projected selves are desperate to be loved, recognized, and respected there in a digimonde with its own rules and etiquette which frequently bleed into the real world.
I have nothing to do with twitter or facebook because these places have roaming mobs that will attack; it’s like an MMORPG where you take real psychic and social damage.
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