I read and re-read my favorite books. These are books that have affected my life deeply, and actually have something worthwhile to say. I have a selection of favorite frivolous books, that I love to read again just for fun. I may post those some other time.
Author: Heinlein, Robert A.
Title: To Sail Beyond the Sunset
Blurb: Maureen Johnson, the somewhat irregular mother of Lazarus Long, wakes up in bed with a man and a cat. The cat is Pixel, well-known to readers of the New York Times bestseller The Cat Who Walks Through Walls. The man is a stranger to her, and besides that, the is dead…
Favorite quote: ” Jubal Harshaw also pointed out to me a symptom that, so he says, invariably precedes the collapse of a culture: a declune in good manners, in common courtesy, in a decent respect for the rights of other people. “Political philosophers from Confucius to the present day have repeatedly pointed this out. But the first signs of this fatal symptom may be hard to spot. Does it really matter when an honorific is omitted? Or when a junior calls a senior by his first name, uninvited? Such loosening of protocol may be hard to evaluate. But there is one unmistakable sign of the collapse of good manners: dirty public washrooms.
“In a healthy society public restrooms, toilets, washrooms, look and smell as clean and fresh as a bathroom in a decent private home. In a sick society–” Jubal stopped and simply looked disgusted.
“He did not need to elaborate. I had seen it happen in my own timeline. In the first part of the twentieth century right through the thirties people at all levels of society were habitually polite to each other and it was taken for granted that anyone using a public washroom tried hard to leave the place as clean and neat as he found it. As I recall, decent behavior concerning public washrooms started to slip during World War II, and so did good manners in general. By the sixties and the seventies rudeness of all sorts had become commonplace, and by then I never used a public restroom if I could possibly avoid it.
“Offensive speech, bad manners, and filthy toilets all seem to go together.”
I would suggest that anyone read (slowly and actually thinking about what they are reading) the books I post. There is something to be said about improving the quality of reading material in our society.
