[Second Marriage:] the triumph of hope over experience. Died: December 13, 1784 (aged 75) Nationality: English Occupation: Author, essayist, lexicographer, biographer, poet Bio: Samuel Johnson, often referred to as Dr Johnson, was an English author who made lasting contributions to English literature as a poet, essayist, moralist, literary critic, biographer, editor and lexicographer. Johnson was a devout Anglican and committed Tory, and has been described as arguably the most distinguished man of letters in English history. The Samuel Johnson Sound Bite Page: Marriage Quotes The Samuel Johnson Sound Bite Page 76. Adultery; Marriage He talked of the heinousness of the crime of adultery, by which the peace of families was destroyed. He said, "Confusion of progeny constitutes the essence of the crime; and therefore a woman who breaks her marriage vows is much more criminal than a man who does it. A man, to be sure, is criminal in the sight of God; but he does not do his wife a very material injury, if he does not insult her; if for instance, from mere wantonness of appetite, he steals privately to her chambermaid.

Sir, a wife ought not to greatly resent this. I would not receive home a daughter who had run away from her husband on that account. A wife should study to reclaim her husband by more attention to please him. Sir, a man will not, once in a hundred instances, leave his wife and go to a harlot, if his wife has not been negligent of pleasing." Boswell: Life 78. Marriage When I censured a gentleman of my acquaintance for marrying a second time, as it shewed a disregard of his first wife, he said, "Not at all, Sir. On the contrary, were he not to marry again, it might be concluded that his first wife had given him a disgust to marriage; but by taking a second wife he pays the highest compliment to the first, by shewing that she made him so happy as a married man, that he wishes to be so a second time." Boswell: Life On second marriages: "The triumph of hope over experience." Boswell: Life 139.

Marriage "Marriage is the best state for a man in general; and every man is a worse man, in proportion as he is unfit for the married state." Boswell: Life 186. Marriage "I believe marriages would in general be as happy, and often more so, if they were all made by the Lord Chancellor, upon a due consideration of characters and circumstances, without the parties having any choice in the matter." Boswell: Life 187. Marriage Boswell: "Pray, Sir, do you not suppose that there are fifty women in the world, with any one of whom a man may be as happy, as with any one woman in particular?" Johnson: "Ay, Sir, fifty thousand." Boswell: Life 192. Marriage "Marriage, Sir, is much more necessary to a man than to a woman; for he is much less able to supply himself with domestick comforts." Boswell: Life "It is commonly a weak man who marries for love." Boswell: Life 205.

Marriage I repeated to him an argument of a lady of my acquaintance, who maintained, that her husband's having been guilty of numberless infidelities, released her from conjugal obligations, because they were reciprocal. Johnson: "This is miserable stuff, Sir. To the contract of marriage, besides the man and wife, there is a third party -- Society; and, if it be considered as a vow -- GOD: and, therefore, it cannot be dissolved by their consent alone. Laws are not made for particular cases, but for men in general. A woman may be unhappy with her husband; but she cannot be freed from him without the approbation of the civil and ecclesiastical power. A man may be unhappy, because he is not so rich as another; but he is not to seize upon another's property with his own hand." Boswell: "But, Sir, this lady does not want that the contract should be dissolved; she only argues that she may indulge herself in gallantries with equal freedom as her husband does, provided she takes care not to introduce a spurious issue into his family.

You know, Sir, what Macrobius has told us of Julia." Johnson: "This lady of yours, Sir, I think, is very fit for a brothel." Boswell: Life 460. Marriage; Solitude "Many other evils infest private life. Some are the slaves of servants whom they have trusted with their affairs. Some are kept in continual anxiety by the caprice of rich relations, whom they cannot please and dare not offend. Some husbands are imperious, and some wives perverse: and as it is always more easy to do evil than good, though the wisdom or virtue of one can very rarely make many happy, the folly or vice of one may often make many miserable." [Princess Nekayah] "If such be the general effect of marriage," said the prince, "I shall, for the future, think it dangerous to connect my interest with another, lest I should be unhappy by my partner's fault." "I have met," said the princess, "with many who live single for that reason; but I have never found that their prudence ought to raise envy.

They dream away their time without friendship, without fondness, and are driven to rid themselves of the day, for which they have no use, by childish amusements or vicious delights. They act as beings under the constant sense of some known inferiority, that fills their minds with rancor; and their tongues with censure. They are peevish at home, and malevolent abroad; and, as the outlaws of human nature, make it their business and their pleasure to disturb that society which debars them from its priveleges." Johnson: Rasselas Note: If you haven't read it yet, please read this note of caution regarding quotes from Rasselas. Link 462. Celibacy; Charity; Involvement; Marriage; Stoicism; Solitude "To live without feeling or exciting sympathy, to be fortunate without adding to the felicity of others, or afflicted without tasting the balm of pity, is a state more gloomy than solitude; it is not retreat, but exclusion from mankind.

Marriage has many pains, but celibacy has no pleasures." Johnson: Rasselas [Princess Nekayah] Note: If you haven't read it yet, please read this note of caution regarding quotes from Rasselas. 467. Marriage "Marriage is evidently the dictate of nature; men and women are made to be companions of each other, and therefore I cannot be persuaded but that marriage is one of the means of happiness." Johnson: Rasselas [Rasselas] Note: If you haven't read it yet, please read this note of caution regarding quotes from Rasselas. 468. Marriage "I know not ... whether marriage be more than one of the innumerable modes of human misery.

When I see and reckon the various forms of connubial infelicity, the unexpected causes of lasting discord, the diversities of temper, the oppositions of opinion, the rude collisions of contrary desire where both are urged by violent impulses, the obstinate contests of disagreeable virtues where both are supported by consciousness of good intention, I am sometimes disposed to think, with the severer casuists of most nations, that marriage is rather permitted than approved, and that none, but by the instigation of a passion too much indulged, entangle themselves with indissoluble compacts." Johnson: Rasselas [Princess Nekayah] Note: If you haven't read it yet, please read this note of caution regarding quotes from Rasselas. 470. Marriage "Such is the common process of marriage. A youth and maiden exchange meeting by chance, or brought together by artifice, exchange glances, reciprocate civilities, go home, and dream of one another. Having little to divert attention, or diversify thought, they find themselves uneasy when they are apart, and therefore conclude that they shall be happy together.

They marry, and discover what nothing but voluntary blindness had before concealed; they wear out life in altercations, and charge nature with cruelty." Johnson: Rasselas [Rasselas] Note: If you haven't read it yet, please read this note of caution regarding quotes from Rasselas. 556. Marriage "There is no observation more frequently made by such as employ themselves in surveying the conduct of mankind, than that marriage, though the dictate of nature, and the institution of Providence, is yet very often the cause of misery, and that those who enter into that state can seldom forbear to express their repentance, and their envy of those whom either chance or caution hath withheld from it." Johnson: Rambler #18 (May 19, 1750) 558.

Marriage; Virtue "...Marriage is the strictest tie of perpetual friendship, and there can be no friendship without confidence, and no confidence without integrity; and that he must expect to be wretched, who pays to beauty, riches, or politeness, that regard which only virtue and piety can claim." Johnson: Rambler #18 (May 19, 1750) 618. Marriage; Youth "It is ... common to hear both sexes repine at their change [Marriage], relate the happiness of their earlier years, blame the folly and rashness of their own choice, and warn those whom they see coming into the world against the same precipitance and infatuation. But it is to be remembered, that the days which they so much wish to call back, are the days not only of celibacy but of youth, the days of novelty and improvement, of ardour and of hope, of health and vigour of body, of gaiety and lightness of heart.

It is not easy to surround life with any circumstances in which youth will not be delightful; and I am afraid that, whether married or unmarried, we shall find the vesture of terrestrial existence more heavy and cumbrous the longer it is worn." Johnson: Rambler #45 (August 21, 1750) 620. Marriage "Every man recounts the inconveniences of his own station, and thinks those of any other less, because he has not felt them. Thus the married praise the ease and freedom of a single state, and the single fly to marriage from the weariness of solitude." Johnson: Rambler #45 (August 21, 1750) 622. Anger; Marriage "Wives and husbands are ... incessantly complaining of each other; and there would be reason for imagining that almost every house was infested with perverseness or oppression beyond human sufferance, did we not know upon how small occasions some minds burst into lamentations and reproaches, and how naturally every animal revenges his pain upon those who happen to be near, without any nice examination of its cause.

We are always willing to fancy ourselves within a little of happiness, and when, with repeated efforts, we cannot reach it, persuade ourselves that it is intercepted by an ill-paired mate, since, if we could find any other obstacle, it would be our own fault that it was not removed." Johnson: Rambler #45 (August 21, 1750) 623.

Marriage "When I see the avaricious and crafty taking companions to their tables and their beds, without any inquiry but after farms and money; or the giddy and thoughtless uniting themselves for life to those whom they have only seen by the light of tapers at a ball; when parents make articles for their children without inquiring after their consent; when some marry for heirs to disappoint their brothers, and others throw themselves into the arms of those whom they do not love, because they found themselves rejected where they were more solicitous to please; when some marry because their servants cheat them, some because they squander their own money, some because their houses are pestered with company, some because they will live like other people, and some only because they are sick of themselves; I am not so much inclined to wonder that marriage is sometimes unhappy, as that it appears so little loaded with calamity; and cannot but conclude that society has something in itself eminently agreeable to human nature, when I find its pleasures so great that even the ill choice of a companion can hardly overbalance them." Johnson: Rambler #45 (August 21, 1750) The Triumph of Hope Over Experience The Triumph of Hope

 Over Experience March 28, 2014 By Matt Forney 15 Comments Hi!

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed and follow me on Gab and Instagram . Thanks for visiting! NOTE: This article was originally published at Alternative Right on November 5, 2013. I’m re-posting it here as the site is now defunct. New York, you’re perfect, oh please don’t change a thing Your mild billionaire mayor’s now convinced he’s a king So the boring collect, I mean all disrespect In the neighborhood bars I’d once dreamt I would drink LCD Soundsystem, “New York, I Love You But You’re Bringing Me Down” In three months of campaigning, New York City Public Advocate and presumptive mayor-elect Bill de Blasio has accomplished the impossible: making Mike Bloomberg look good. Given that the diminutive Jewish billionaire has managed to piss off just about everyone during his decade-plus reign as the Big Apple’s Il Duce, that’s no small deal. Between his fascistic anti-gun policies, his war on sodas and other fattening foods, neutering the city’s term limit law in a blatant power grab and using the NYPD as his personal Praetorian Guard, it’s a wonder that Gracie Mansion hasn’t been torched by an angry mob yet.

But while it’s obvious that Bloomberg is a power-mad little dork with a Napoleon complex, you can’t argue with results. Under both his and Rudy Giuliani’s aegis, New York has rebounded from the horror years of the seventies and eighties to become America’s most prosperous metropolis. Crime has hit amazing new lows, the cities’ most stagnant slums are being gentrified back into polite society, and despite being the epicenter of world finance, it’s weathered the second Great Depression pretty well. Even the destruction wrought by Hurricane Sandy last year couldn’t stop New York. And therein lies the problem. New York City has become a victim of its own success. Giuliani and Bloomberg’s efforts to make the city fit for human habitation have attracted white leftists who enjoy a safe, prosperous New York but can’t comprehend what makes it possible. It’s these cretins—pasty white hipsters, Gawker readers and people who watch Girls—who form the backbone of Bill de Blasio’s constituency. And with New York’s traditional white working and middle classes largely pushed out to the suburbs, there’s nobody left to stop them.

Samuel Johnson once described a second marriage as “the triumph of hope over experience,” and that sums up the ascendancy of Bill de Blasio. Despite not having a single accomplishment to his name during his tenure as Public Advocate, de Blasio not only surged from last place to beat four far more qualified candidates (yes, even Anthony Weiner is more qualified to be mayor) in the Democratic primary in September, he did so by a large enough margin to avoid a runoff election. Particularly shocking was the collapse of Christine Quinn, City Council Speaker, married lesbian and Bloomberg’s heir apparent; she went from jockeying with Weiner for first place to finishing a distant third. De Blasio’s Republican opponent, former MTA chairman and deputy mayor Joe Lhota, has been trailing in the polls by a double-digit margin the entire campaign, all but ensuring de Blasio’s victory in today’s election. Bill de Blasio is so far to the left that he’s being openly compared to Ken Livingstone , the ex-communist former mayor of London. His platform consists of wiping out New York’s already endangered middle class with more taxes and regulations.

His speeches have been fueled by open cultural Marxist rhetoric in part due to his wife, a perpetually angry black lesbian with—surprise, surprise—an axe to grind against the Evil White Patriarchy. He was a devoted supporter of the Sandinistas and spent his honeymoon in Cuba in violation of U.S. law. Repeated polls have shown that de Blasio’s support comes from voters who think the city needs a break from the Giuliani-Bloomberg era… even when those same polls show that New Yorkers are pretty happy with Bloomberg’s work as mayor. But as Looney Tunes as de Blasio’s platform is, he’s ultimately the symptom, not the problem. What’s happening in New York is the end result of a decades-long process on the part of America’s elite class, the final displacement of the middle- and working-class whites who built this nation. Indeed, New York was where our leftist overlords first discovered that they could use blacks and immigrants to disenfranchise whites permanently and ensure themselves a never-ending string of electoral victories. To see this, we’ll have to go back to the sixties, when it all began. *** Ironically, it was a Republican, John Lindsay, who birthed the modern leftist coalition.

Mayor of New York from 1966 to 1973, Lindsay was a trust fund baby from the Upper East Side who entered politics because he had nothing better to do with his time. “Daddy, I’m BORED! I wanna run for Congress!” He won the mayoralty in 1965 in part due to a wave of anti-incumbent frustration; twenty years of Democratic machine rule had resulted in economic stagnation and a massive budget deficit. Unfortunately for Lindsay, he hitched his political wagon to a horse that was being sent to the glue factory; the progressive wing of the GOP. Under Eisenhower and New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller, the Republicans had abandoned all pretense of being an opposition party and were trying to out-left the Democrats on most every issue. Just the year prior though, Rockefeller had seen his presidential ambitions crushed by conservative Barry Goldwater, an obscure Arizona senator with only a fraction of his money and name recognition. Goldwater lost the general election in a landslide, but the GOP saw the writing on the wall.

The decreasing relevance of New York and New England on the national stage (in the 1970 census, New York would be eclipsed by California as the most populous state) signaled to Richard Nixon and others that the party’s future depended on conservatives. Even in Lindsay’s backyard, the Rockefeller Republicans were in decline. During his first campaign, National Review founder William Buckley ran against him with Conservative Party support and drew 13 percent of the vote, nearly throwing the election to Democrat Abraham Beame . (Five years later, Buckley’s brother James would unseat liberal Republican Senator Charles Goodell running on the Conservative line.) It was in part the support of the Liberal Party that enabled Lindsay to squeak out a win. His perpetual incompetence as mayor—the infamous 1966 transit strike, the 1969 Nor’easter and his implementation of a local income tax being his most notable screw-ups—further eroded his base of support. Keeping New York free of race riots was his only real success. Lindsay’s stupidity finally caught up with him in 1969. Running for reelection, he was soundly defeated in the Republican primary by conservative John Marchi, despite having greater name recognition and the support of the state GOP establishment.

At the same time, the Democratic nomination was won by City Comptroller Mario Procaccino, who represented New York’s traditional white working class: economically leftist but socially conservative. While Lindsay had secured the nomination of the Liberals, without a major party endorsement, his political career was over. Lindsay saved himself with bread and circuses. He specifically bought the votes of blacks and Latinos by dramatically increasing the city’s welfare rolls , creating countless patronage jobs and ratcheting up spending. During his mayoralty, the city budget more than doubled, from less than $5 billion in 1967 to over $10 billion in 1974. At the same time, Lindsay endeared himself to wealthy white/Jewish leftists by touting his progressive credentials. With Procaccino and Marchi splitting the middle-/working-class white vote, Lindsay was returned to power in November with a decisive plurality . If this sounds familiar, it’s because it’s the exact same game plan that President Obama used to win reelection last year. Naturally, Lindsay’s second term as mayor was as disastrous as his first.

As the city’s deficit spiraled out of control and crime skyrocketed, middle- and working-class New Yorkers continued to flee to the suburbs, exacerbating the city’s economic woes. And despite plummeting approval ratings, Lindsay was so arrogant that he launched a campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1972, only withdrawing after repeated poor showings in the early primaries. He declined to seek reelection in 1973 (reportedly breaking down in tears when his term ended), leaving his successor Abraham Beame to clean up his mess; it was Beame who was famously forced to beg President Ford for a federal bailout . *** John Lindsay’s legacy of anti-white discrimination and reckless spending endured long after he left office, with crime and white flight continuing to rise during the seventies and eighties. It wasn’t until Rudy Giuliani’s election in 1993 when things finally began to turn around. The Crown Heights riot in 1991—and Mayor David Dinkins’ limp response to it—convinced New York leftists that maybe, just maybe, their melanin-rich coalition partners didn’t like them very much.

Under Giuliani’s “ broken windows ” policing, violent crime took a nosedive, the long-despised “squeegee men” were put out to pasture, and New York finally began to climb out of the hole that Lindsay had stuffed it in. Bloomberg won election in 2001 in part by promising to continue Giuliani’s policies. But in the year 2013, Crown Heights and the blackout of 1977 are ancient history. Anyone who remembers what an uninhabitable hellhole New York City was prior to Giuliani is either dead, living elsewhere or is otherwise outnumbered by the clueless Midwestern hipsters attracted by the city’s relative safety and prosperity. Gawker staffers screech about the “racism” of the NYPD’s now-dead stop-and-frisk policy, oblivious to the fact that it’s precisely those policies that kept New York from becoming a coastal Detroit. They whine about gentrification ruining “vibrant” minority neighborhoods (read: violent ghettos) despite the fact that without that gentrification, they’d still be stuck in their crappy little cul-de-sacs back in Wisconsin.

They’re not just biting the hand that feeds them, they’re tearing it off and shoving it into a meat grinder. *** The average voter is a self-absorbed moron; he votes for the candidate who reminds him most of himself. We’ve seen this with both George Bush, a Connecticut blue blood who adopted a fake Texas cowboy persona (to the point where he hired a voice coach during the 2004 election so he could maintain his Southern drawl), and Barack Obama, a stuttering nerd who puts on airs of being a sophisticated intellectual. But what about Bill de Blasio? What does his ascendancy say about his supporters? Answer: they’re a bunch of androgynous, narcissistic freaks. For starters, “Bill de Blasio” isn’t even the man’s real name; he was born Warren Wilhelm, Jr. in 1961. The name change came about because his daddy was mean to him: an irascible and violent alcoholic, he split from de Blasio’s mother when his son was eight.

In the typical petulance shown by men raised by single mothers, de Blasio chose to spit on his father’s memory by adopting his mother’s maiden name in 1983, barely four years after his father committed suicide when he was diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer. Stay classy, Bill. But no amateur psychoanalysis of Bill de Blasio is complete without mentioning his domineering lesbian wife, Chirlane McCray (and yes, even after he adopted his mother’s maiden name, she still wouldn’t take his name). Prior to her marriage to the doughboy from Cambridge, McCray was best known for a 1979 Essence article in which she spoke about her experiences as a homosexual woman of color . De Blasio’s account of how he wooed her reads like one of Heartiste’s “Beta of the Month” horror stories as reinterpreted by Dostoevsky’s Underground Man, as he steadfastly refused to take no for an answer : He flirted with her mercilessly, she said, calling nonstop and trying to steal an unwelcome kiss. “I actually told him, ‘Slow this down,’ ” Ms. McCray said. Her resistance became less diplomatic: “Back off.” But a romance blossomed: Mr.

de Blasio, five years her junior, won over her family with an overnight visit that earned him a new moniker: “Brother Bill.” For Ms. McCray’s lesbian friends, her engagement to Mr. de Blasio, in 1993, was a stunning turn. Not all of them could stomach it. One of them refused to attend the wedding. It’s obvious that the only reason why de Blasio didn’t get slapped with sexual harassment charges was because McCray took pity on the little weirdo. That and she probably realized that being an ugly black dyke meant that the only way she’d ever gain political power was by piggybacking off someone more telegenic. Hey, it worked for Hillary Clinton! McCray has already been getting the Michelle Obama treatment from the New York media , who are inexplicably praising for her Chris Rock-in-drag looks, her unreadable slam poetry, and her courageous confrontation of the “patriarchal” Bloomberg… on Twitter. For his part, de Blasio hasn’t been shy about flaunting her and their multiracial kids whenever the cameras are rolling, making all the multiculti white liberals melt in glee.

No one is apparently concerned that she has her husband’s testicles in a vice grip. Behind every weak man is a woman who gets her kicks from emasculating him. By her own admission, McCray asserts such a level of control over de Blasio that even Hillary Clinton would tell her to get a grip. She not only edits his speeches and has all but run his mayoral campaign , she actually threatened to divorce him in 2002 if he didn’t endorse the candidates she approved of. Additionally, McCray exhibits all the signs of narcissistic personality disorder , fueled by her grandiose personality, resentment of men, and tall tales of racist oppression she supposedly suffered growing up: “I had never had a deep sense of belonging anywhere,” recalled Chirlane McCray, whose husband, Bill de Blasio, is now the front-runner to become the next mayor of New York.

“I always felt I was an outsider.” Now, this onetime student of powerlessness, a woman whose early identity was profoundly shaped by feelings of alienation — because of her race, her gender and her evolving sexuality — is emerging as the ultimate insider: a mastermind behind the biggest political upset of the year and a sought-after voice as the city re-evaluates what it most wants from its first family. This is the couple that leftists have chosen to deify: a codependent momma’s boy and a rage-filled harridan with a never-ending list of grievances against white America. McCray is so dishonest she can’t even give a straight answer on her sexual orientation . C’mon lady, it’s not complicated: you can like penises, vaginas or both. It’s not a freaking Sudoku puzzle! But alas, nothing short of a major felony will stop Chirlane McCray now. Joe Lhota is a good man and a competent administrator, but he’s playing to a constituency that no longer exists in New York: the white working and middle classes.

De Blasio’s supporters are so deluded that they actually think violent crime can be contained without stop-and-frisk , even while thugs are openly mocking NYPD beat cops to their faces now that stop-and-frisk has been declared unconstitutional . John Lindsay smiled from hell. *** Despite all this, there is a potential silver lining in Bill de Blasio’s coronation: it might jump-start New York’s moribund art and music scene. While hipsters have become a popular target for derision on the Internet in recent years, the idea that the prosperity of the Giuliani-Bloomberg era has made New York uncool and lame has been a simmering trope in indie music for a lot longer. As the above-quoted lyrics show, James Murphy was mocking the hipster invasion way back in 2007. Recently, former Talking Heads frontman David Byrne penned a scathing editorial lamenting the growing sterility of the city’s creative culture . Byrne’s former bandmates, Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth, also rhapsodized the lost glory of the 70’s music scene in their recent album Downtown Rockers .

As much as I like being able to walk to the 7-Eleven at night without worrying about getting mugged, Byrne and company have a good point. For my money, the late seventies and early to mid-eighties was the high point of American culture, and most of it came from New York. The Big Apple of John Lindsay and Ed Koch may have been an overgrown slum, but it also begat many of our greatest artists, musicians and writers: Lou Reed, Andy Warhol, Sonic Youth, Suicide, Lydia Lunch, Richard Kern, Jim Carroll and Talking Heads themselves. The neutered New York of today has given us Paul Auster , Matt & Kim, and Lena Dunham . Gee, there’s a real tough decision right there. I obviously never witnessed the Lindsay-Koch-Dinkins era firsthand, but my mother’s family came out of Brooklyn, and her descriptions of seventies New York when I was a kid were astounding. The problem with excessive comfort is that all great art comes out of struggle and conflict.

The navel-gazing nature of Lena Dunham’s work, the carping and petty obsessions of Gawker and its sister sites, and the generally self-indulgent nature of hipster culture are all products of excessive comfort. None of these overgrown babies have ever experienced true pain in their lives and it shows. So while Bill de Blasio will no doubt be a complete disaster for New York, if his incompetence scares all the hipsters back to their cozy Minnesota suburbs, I say bring it on. As Orson Welles put it, thirty years of bloodshed in Italy gave us the Renaissance; five centuries of peace in Switzerland gave us the cuckoo clock. If you want to raise a family, go move to some boring backwater like Des Moines; New York City is not for amateurs. I’m spending the next week down in NYC. I plan on having a damn good time. Read Next: Alternate Reality News: Anti-Fat Discrimination Bill Passes Senate, Unlikely to Survive House Get My Free E-Book Learn how to start a blog and make money from day one with this short guide. Also receive twice-monthly updates highlighting my best articles as well as news and special offers you won't find anywhere else.

First Name ‘The triumph of hope over experience’ - Stabroek News ‘The triumph of hope over experience’ By Email Print Tweet Share At the dawn of the New Year, most of us will have come through the past couple of weeks of religious observance, companionship and revelry, with great hopes for ourselves, our families and even our troubled country. Perhaps it is a reflection of the goodwill generated by the Christmas season and the general joy with which the vast majority of Guyanese celebrate the holidays; perhaps it is a simple manifestation of our common humanity and the optimism that keeps us going against all the evidence and all the odds. We Guyanese – at least those of us still here, hanging on to this under-populated, under-developed and politically immature nation – are nothing if not optimists. We have to be. Otherwise, we would find ourselves wallowing in a Slough of Despond and most of us would have emigrated with our relatives and friends to seek greener pastures. No doubt, more will decamp this year, but there are clearly many who still believe in the bounty of this land and the mythical promise of our Guyana, El Dorado.

The great Englishman of letters, Samuel Johnson, is said to have described second marriage as “The triumph of hope over experience.” In several respects, much the same could be said of any optimism breaking out with the New Year. But with 2014 barely three days old, we fear that we may have nothing more than cold water to pour over whatever hopefulness lingers past the New Year hangover. We recall that a little over two years ago, in the face of the political uncertainty surrounding the new parliamentary dispensation and in the full glow of Christmas cheer, we had floated the suggestion of the President hosting a dinner for the country’s parliamentarians, regional councillors and leading politicians, so that they could break bread together and celebrate their commonality, with a view to forging a new beginning (‘Companionship and commensality,’ December 23, 2011). That was, obviously, in light of the prevailing poisoned political atmosphere, hopelessly naïve and idealistic.

We recall also that, a week later, we had posited that citizen pressure and the force of public opinion could serve to reinforce the message of the November 2011 elections, that it could not be business as usual and that the politicians were obliged to negotiate a new course based on fresh thinking and improved governance (‘New Year dreams,’ December 30, 2011). As a practical step, we had called for the holding of local government elections, “to buttress our democratic evolution and to build citizen participation in the political process from the bottom up rather than seek to maintain the top-down system that perpetuates patronage and tribalism.” And in wishing for a reinvigorated civil society with the full and active participation of the youth, we had also opined that “[c]ritical to making our democracy truly functional will be the opening up of channels for the people to make their voices heard and the creation of mechanisms for engagement with the politicians at both the local government and national levels, outside of party structures.” Much of this, of course, anticipated the objectives of the USAID-funded Leadership and Democracy (LEAD) project.

But, as we all know, the government has rejected this project and, with it, any pretext of building a genuinely modern, inclusionary, democratic state. Indeed, very little of the change we hoped for two years ago has happened. If anything, the political situation has deteriorated to such an extent that our individual and collective security is arguably threatened more than at any other time in our post-Independence existence. Official obfuscation, the blame game and political gridlock are the order of the day and it is difficult to envisage how the different parties will “work together,” as the President seems to wish. Experience would suggest that the situation is hopeless. But even as we contemplate the failures of the past and the challenges before us, we know that we all – the President, cabinet, opposition and citizenry – have, somehow or the other, to find the way for hope to triumph. 'The triumph of hope over experience' - the meaning and origin of this phrase Famous Last Words Browse phrases beginning with: The triumph of hope over experience Meaning A literal view of the subject of remarriage. Origin This remark is reported to have been said by Samuel Johnson in James Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson, 1791.

The occasion was Johnson's hearing of a man who had remarried soon after the death of a wife to whom he had been unhappily married. Project MUSE - Love and Marriage in 18th-Century Britain Love and Marriage in 18th-Century Britain Wendy Moore (bio) William Hogarth graphically depicted the pitfalls of arranged marriage in his cautionary cartoon series Marriage à-la-mode, published in 1745. Samuel Johnson famously described second marriages as the "triumph of hope over experience." The Georgians' fixation with wedlock was no accident. The secret of a successful marriage was one of the most hotly debated topics in the salons and coffee-houses of 18th-century England, and the outcome of this febrile discourse set the tone for our modern-day Western approach to marriage based on the ideal of a harmonious, companionable partnership founded in mutual love. 1 The shift in ideas about marriage was profound. At the beginning of the 18th century most marriages among landed or moneyed families were essentially financial arrangements designed to cement powerful alliances and exchange or acquire land and property.

Although people in working-class and agricultural communities were more or less free to choose their own partners for life—albeit generally within the same narrow economic group and geographical area—the vast majority of marriages among aristocratic, wealthy, and middle-class families were arranged by parents with the prospective bride and bridegroom having little or no say. Children were often betrothed in infancy and married in their teens, frequently to partners they barely knew and sometimes with disastrous consequences. Lord Halifax in his Advice to a Daughter, published in 1688, made the prospects plain when he explained: "It is one of the Disadvantages belonging to your Sex, that young Women are seldom permitted to make their own Choice." 2 But if Lord Halifax—and presumably his daughter—was prepared to accept such an arrangement, others were not. In a scathing indictment of marriage published in 1700, the writer Mary Astell demanded to know: "If Marriage be such a blessed State, how comes it, may you say, that there are so few happy marriages?" 3 She remained a spinster.

When the 23-year-old Lady Mary Pierrepont was betrothed by her father in 1712 to an Irish aristocrat she had never met, she described her wedding arrangements as "daily preparations for my journey to Hell." 4 Rather than descend into eternal torment, she eloped and married her lover, Edward Wortley Montagu, just days before the planned ceremony. Click for larger view View full resolution From William Hogarth's Marriage à-la-mode, "The Toilette Scene," 1745. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division [reproduction number, LC-USZ62-112875]. As a growing number of thwarted young lovers voted with their feet, so criticism of arranged marriages increased during the first half of the 18th century. Hogarth's popular series of six scenes, which depict the tragic outcome of a marriage contracted by money-grasping parents and silver-tongued lawyers between a debauched young earl and the daughter of a rich merchant, reflected the mood.

The writer Hester Chapone characterized such matches as "Smithfield bargains," in reference to the famed London meat market, and exclaimed, "so much ready money for so much land, and my daughter flung in into the bargain!" 5 At the same time, the emphasis on self-expression, free will, and personal feelings in early 18th-century novels such as Daniel Defoe's Roxana (1724) and Samuel Richardson's Pamela (1740) was blamed for undermining the concept of arranged marriages and fueling expectations of romantic love. 6 Whether the rising popularity of novels really influenced views on marriage or simply reflected changing opinion can probably never be determined. But certainly the former was the perception among disapproving older generations. François Fénelon, Archbishop of Cambray, in his Instructions for the Education of a Daughter, translated into English in 1713, warned of the dangers of girls reading "romances" and then being "astonished, not to find in the World real Persons, who may answer to these Romantick Heroes." 7 Pressure from disgruntled parents, cheated out of advantageous matches by runaway couples, eventually led to the 1753 Marriage Act.

Regulating marriage by the state for the first time in England with a series of rules standardizing weddings, the act stipulated that parental consent was required for couples wishing to marry under the age of 21. Undeterred, many young lovers simply left the country, eloping to Scotland, where the act did not apply, to get married at Gretna Green, the first village across the border. Evidently the rising tide of unease, both among the couples concerned and within society in general, had become an unstoppable force. By the mid-1700s, relatively few parents still attempted to force through matches to which their offspring patently objected. Marrying for love, rather than money, had become the norm. Yet if the typical romantic novel of the period ended happily, the outcome of this fundamental change in society's attitudes toward marriage did not bring universal joy. While most couples united in arranged marriages accepted their allotted spouses with more or less pragmatic resignation, the romantic hopefuls who now walked down the aisle in anticipation of marital bliss sometimes found their optimism sadly deluded. Reality, they discovered, did not necessarily reflect fiction. Many young couples lived to regret their surrender to the first flush of love in the cold light of married life.

But one woman who suffered perhaps more than any other as a result of her misguided notions of romantic love was Mary Eleanor Bowes, the Countess of Strathmore (1749-1800). Mary Eleanor was the only daughter of an extremely wealthy coal entrepreneur, George Bowes, who owned mines, land, and property in northeast England. Educated to an unusually high standard at the behest of her doting father, Mary enjoyed a life of privilege and tendered ambitions both in science, as an amateur botanist, and literature, as a poet and playwright. She would go on to write a play, The Siege of Jerusalem, [End Page 8] published privately in 1774, and to organize an expedition to southern Africa to bring back new botanical species. Mary's patronage of the arts and sciences was made possible by the fact that when her father died in 1760 she became, at the age of 11, the richest heiress in Britain—and possibly in Europe—with a fortune estimated at between £600,000 and £1,040,000 (roughly $115 to $214 million in today's terms).

Bereft of her financially astute father, deserted by her grieving mother, and a prime target for fortune hunters, the teenage Mary was left virtually free to seek her own perfect match in the fraught and confusing Georgian marriage market with only an elderly aunt as her lax chaperone. Steeped in the romantic literature that she adored, Mary had no doubts that she intended to marry for love. After dallying with a succession of eager suitors, at 16 Mary fixed her sights on the handsome 28-year-old John Lyon, the 9th Earl of Strathmore. Initially her mother objected, not least on the grounds of the Scottish earl's straitened circumstances. But Mary's conviction that he was her ideal lifetime partner—based on "Lord Strathmore's beauty, which was then very great" and a "vision" in which he appeared to her—eventually held sway. 8 Legal negotiations to finalize the marriage contract, which transferred Mary's fortune to the Strath-more family in accordance with Georgian custom and law while also transferring the Bowes name to the earl in accordance with George Bowes's will, took a full eighteen months. The marriage forged the Bowes Lyon name.

One of the couple's five children, Thomas, would become great-great-grandfather of Elizabeth Bowes Lyon, the late Queen Mother. But even before she walked down the aisle, Mary had realized that she was marrying the wrong man. Distant and aloof, the earl discouraged Mary's literary and scientific interests and barred her from meeting her bluestocking friends, while for her part Mary took no interest in the racing, gambling, and drinking circles that the earl frequented. Mary found, she would later say with understatement, "our tempers, dispositions, and turns different." 9 Although Mary had become mistress of a fairytale palace—the Strathmores' pink-turreted Glamis Castle near Dundee in Scotland—the fairytale happy marriage eluded her. But along with so many 18th-century couples who married with idealistic notions of romantic love only to find their union miserable, incompatible, or otherwise mismatched, they had little hope of escape. While getting married in 18th-century England—then as now—was a disarmingly simple procedure, ending a marriage was a distinctly more difficult challenge.

Prior to the establishment of a divorce court in the middle of the 19th century, England was the only Protestant country in Europe without a specific divorce law. Paradoxically, given his success in extricating himself from wedlock, Henry VIII was to blame. Although the Tudor king successfully declared three of his own marriages null and void, Henry had declined to introduce a divorce law granting his subjects the same privilege. Laws permitting divorce on various grounds were introduced from the mid-16th century onward in Germany, Scandinavia, the Netherlands, Scotland, and even some of the English colonies in America. But for the vast majority of unhappy couples in England, death—of oneself or one's other half—remained the only means of release from a violent, adulterous, or otherwise unbearable marriage. Alternatives inevitably developed. Desertion, bigamy, or wife-sale proved the last resort for some. Less prosaically, some couples negotiated legal deeds of separation, although these were not always fool-proof in a court of law, especially when it came to agreements over women's rights to property or income. More secure were legal separations obtained through the ecclesiastical courts.

Known as divorce a mensa et thoro—literally from bed and board—such rulings sanctioned separation but did not permit remarriage. Granted on grounds of extreme cruelty or repeated adultery, they were difficult, expensive, and time-consuming to obtain, especially for women. The vast majority of the plaintiffs were wealthy members of the gentry or aristocracy, and two-thirds were male. Only a tiny handful of powerful, rich, and well-connected couples succeeded in winning a full divorce. A total of just 132 such divorces was granted up to 1800; none of these were initiated by women. With divorce therefore almost impossible and separation spelling social disaster, Mary Eleanor Bowes knew she had made her marital bed and would have to lie in it. But when the earl died of tuberculosis nine years later, Mary shed few tears. A decidedly merry widow, mistress of her own fortune once again and free to pursue her scholarly interests, she might have learned her lesson. But for Mary, like others, hope triumphed over experience. Having taken a lover shortly before the earl's death and now pregnant with his child, Mary laid plans to marry secretly abroad.

Older and possibly wiser, the rakish entrepreneur George Gray might have made a dependable second husband. But when a charming Irish soldier breezed into town that summer, Mary fell quickly under his spell. A handsome figure in his scarlet uniform, "Captain" Andrew Robinson Stoney flattered Mary with expensive presents and inveigled himself into her social circle. When Stoney insisted on fighting a duel to defend Mary's honor with the editor of a newspaper that had published vindictive reports of her liberal lifestyle, Mary was entranced. As Stoney lay apparently mortally wounded, she acceded to his dying wish: the pair married on January 17, 1777. Almost immediately, the stricken soldier affected a dramatic recovery. In reality a cash-strapped lieutenant who had helped his first wife to an early grave, Stoney—who changed his name to Bowes according to George Bowes's will—had inserted the scurrilous newspaper reports himself and faked the duel. For the next eight years, Bowes squandered Mary's riches and laid waste her estate while subjecting her to systematic physical and mental torture.

Portraying himself in public as the indulgent husband of a wayward wife, behind closed doors Bowes beat, whipped, kicked, and punched Mary, burned her face and tore out her hair, and threatened her with swords and with knives, while controlling every aspect of her daily life from the food she ate to the clothes she wore. Meanwhile, he seduced or raped the maids, sired countless illegitimate children, and invited prostitutes to the house. Despite this catalogue of brutality, Mary had little choice but to remain in the marital home. Devoid of independent income, cut off from family and friends, she had scant hope of prosecuting a successful divorce suit. It was only with the help of several courageous servants, and in fear of her life, that Mary finally fled the house and went into hiding in 1785. With help from lawyers who championed her campaign without fees, support from the tenants and miners of her family estate, and eyewitness accounts volunteered by her loyal servants, Mary embarked on an audacious court battle to end her marriage, reclaim her fortune, and regain custody of her children. Mary's divorce suit through the ecclesiastical courts, on grounds of cruelty and adultery, attracted widespread public and press interest.

Described by the Times as "the great cause depending between the Countess of Strathmore and Mr. Bowes," the case was decided in Mary's favor in 1786. But her celebrations were short-lived. Having appealed against the judgment, Bowes kidnapped Mary in broad daylight in a London street and kept her prisoner for eight days, all the while trying to force her at gunpoint to drop her case. Eventually rescued by country folk, she went on not only to win two further and final rounds of the divorce suit but even to regain control of her fortune and win back her two children of the second marriage. Sentenced to three years in jail for the kidnapping and never able to repay the debts he had accrued during the court battles, Bowes spent the remainder of his life in prison. Unrepentant, he kept a mistress with him in jail, essentially the prisoner of a prisoner, who bore him five more children and suffered as dismally as his former wives. A liar, a cheat, a bully, and a coward, Bowes would become the model for William Makepeace Thackeray's anti-hero in his first significant work of fiction, The Luck of Barry Lyndon.

Retiring to rural isolation, Mary Eleanor Bowes never became romantically involved [End Page 9] again. She died in 1800, having asked for a figure of Justice to stand guard at her tomb in Westminster Abbey. Although Mary won landmark cases, it was many more years before women enjoyed equal rights within marriage. In 1857 the Matrimonial Causes Act established a divorce court in which both sexes could seek a full divorce. The only grounds were adultery, and women still had to prove further injustice, such as cruelty, desertion, or sodomy. In 1923 women were awarded equal rights in seeking divorce, but only in 1969 was the principle of divorce for incompatibility recognized. It was 1870 before women were allowed to keep income they earned during marriage and 1882 before this was extended to all property. In 1839 the Infant Custody Act gave courts discretion to award custody of children under seven to mothers, but it was not until 1925 that mothers and fathers were viewed equally in custody battles.

Question: Who described a second marriage as "The triumph of hope over experience"?
Answer: SAMUEL JOHNSON