The Churchill School of Adulthood — Lesson #3: Live Romantically

Great article on rejecting the coldhearted, cynical arrogance of rationalism and embracing the passion and romance of life. Strangely appropriate on Christmas Eve, when we celebrate the most romantic and passionate of all acts: the epic moment of decision in the great battle between Good and Evil and the climactic moment of the eternal love story.

Favorite quotes:

While we commonly use “romantic” these days to describe the ardor of relationships, today we’re talking about Romanticism with a big R: a life philosophy that prizes the rejection of pure rationalism in favor of intuition, imagination, and emotion; the embrace of nonconformity and sincerity; a tendency towards nostalgia; and the celebration of curiosity, spontaneity, and wonder.

His friend Violet Bonham Carter attributed this quality to his lack of formal education (he attended a military academy instead of a liberal arts college). Churchill, she observed, lacked the jaded cynicism that one often picks up at a university along with a sheepskin, and was invigorated by simple truths that others found cliché. “To Winston Churchill,” Carter wrote, “everything under the sun was new—seen and appraised as on the first day of Creation. His approach to life was full of ardor and surprise. Even the eternal verities appeared to him to be an exciting personal discovery.”

Any man, who had the courage and will, could make himself a hero and join the fight.

Winston “venerated tradition, but ridiculed convention.”

Churchill perhaps bucked societal norms most, however, simply in how genuine he was. The man that people heard on the radio, who they saw in Parliament, was exactly the same man at home. He truly was without guile. He never put on a front, took positions he did not believe in, or evinced to be other than what he was. He refused to even sign his letters “Sincerely” unless he was really, truly sincere about the missive’s message.

One thing is for sure: he felt things deeply. “I’m a blubberer,” he gladly confessed to friends, and Manchester says that “no man wept more easily.” Reminiscing with old comrades could make him misty-eyed and he would freely mourn the deaths of his beloved pets. Even composing emotional segments of his speeches could prompt a torrent of tears – both from him and his secretaries. As one of them recalled, “I would be weeping and he would be weeping, and all the while he was dictating in his marvelous voice and I’d be tap-tapping away, the both of us weeping.”

Churchill did for the War what his contemporary, Lewis, did for Christianity: transformed it idealogically by putting it into terms that others could not only understand, but feel, and know in their hearts to be true and right.

Also, anyone who's ever escaped from a POW camp is axiomatically a badass. No further qualifications required.

From "The Art of Manliness". Full article here:

The Churchill School of Adulthood — Lesson #3: Live Romantically