Samuel Butler

"Aged buildings are usually pulled down or restored. Aging people desperately try to act and look young because novelty, youth, and beauty are equated in our minds with what is desirable. Mankind alone refuses nature's model and is bothered by the realization that "life is a way of dying slowly." But, by ignoring or evading the lure of decay, are we simply trying to escape from the truth?". "Midas Dekkers argues that things are at their most beautiful when they deteriorate, provided they are given the chance. With the idiosyncratic erudition of the European intellectual - Roberto Calasso and Umberto Eco come to mind - Dekkers stresses that our aversion to decay and mortality makes our lives shallow. This is the meditative essay as Fellini might have written it; Dekkers asserts that ancient Rome's days of decline were its finest. The Way of All Flesh is at once a wonderfully witty book about the inevitable ruin of everything from bodies to works of art to ideals and a profound meditation on what it means to outlive one's usefulness, when the wheel of fortune has gone full circle."--BOOK JACKET.

Jacques Maritain (18 November 1882 - 28 April 1973) was a French Catholic philosopher. Raised as a Protestant, he converted to Catholicism in 1906. An author of more than 60 books, he helped to revive St. Thomas Aquinas for modern times and is a prominent drafter of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

In 'Erewhon', Higgs, a young Englishman, wanders into a long-isolated utopia : In 'Erewhon revisited', Higgs's now-grown son sets out to visit Erewhon himself.

Higgs has made his fortune with sales of his original travelogue Erewhon. When his wife dies, his long-held desire to return to the country overwhelms him, and even his friends agree that a change of scenery would be a good idea. Soon after his departure he returns back home to England unexpectedly early and deeply unwell, and so it’s down to his son John to piece together what happened during his fleeting visit to Erewhon. Written nearly thirty years after the first book, Erewhon Revisited is Samuel Butler’s attempt to reason about the ongoing effect Higgs’ first visit—and dramatic exit—would have had on the closed society of Erewhon. The playful satire of the first book remains, but this time focused on a new target: religion. This focus did the book no favors among the establishment of the day, but after partnering with George Bernard Shaw’s imprint it was finally published in 1901. While never as critically or commercially successful as the first book, it remains a fascinating read.

Samuel Butler's Erewhon, or Over the Range was published anonymously 1872. In this satire of Victorian society, the main character Higgs discovers an unknown country, the seeming utopia called Erewhon, Nowhere backwards with the "h" and "w" transposed. The starting chapters detailing the discovery of Erewhon were based on Butler's experiences in New Zealand as a young man. Butler was possibly the first to write about the idea that machines might one day develop consciousness through the process of Darwinian Selection.