Section 05 On Advertisement

On Nothing & Kindred Subjects

by Hilaire BELLOC (1870 - 1953)

“I knew a man once, Maurice, who was at Oxford for three years, and after that went down with no degree. At College, while his friends were seeking for Truth in funny brown German Philosophies, Sham Religions, stinking bottles and identical equations, he was lying on his back in Eynsham meadows thinking of Nothing, and got the Truth by this parallel road of his much more quickly than did they by theirs; for the asses are still seeking, mildly disputing, and, in a cultivated manner, following the gleam, so that they have become in their Donnish middleage a nuisance and a pest; while he--that other--with the Truth very fast and firm at the end of a leather thong is dragging her sliding, whining and crouching on her four feet, dragging her reluctant through the world, even into the broad daylight where Truth most hates to be.” - Hilaire Belloc

Listen next episodes of On Nothing & Kindred Subjects:
Section 06 On a House , Section 07 On the Ilness of my Muse , Section 08 On a Dog and a Man Also , Section 09 On Tea , Section 10 On Them , Section 11 On Railways and Things , Section 12 On Conversations in Trains , Section 13 On the Return of the Dead , Section 14 On the Approach of an Awful Doom , Section 15 On a Rich Man Who Suffered , Section 16 On the Child Who Died , Section 17 On a Lost Manuscript , Section 18 On a Man Who was Protected by Another Man , Section 19 On National Debts , Section 20 On Lords , Section 21 On Jingoes In the Shape of a Warning Being , Section 22 On a Winged Horse and the Exile Who Rode Him , Section 23 On a Man and His Burden , Section 24 On a Fisherman and the Quest of Peace , Section 25 On a Hermit Whom I Knew , Section 26 On an Unknown Country , Section 27 On a Faery Castle , Section 28 On a Southern Harbour , Section 29 On a Young Man and an Older Man , Section 30 On the Departure of a Guest , Section 31 On Death , Section 32 On Coming go an End