I had read some of Nock's essays, in Harper's or the Atlantic Monthly, while still in school, but it was his Memoirs of a Superfluous Man, which I read soon after it came out in 1944, that made me a confirmed Nockian and was probably one of the influences that led to my publishing books. The first of our two works by him was a journal from the years 1934 and 1935, the only unpublished manuscript, except some letters, that Nock did not destroy before his death in 1945. … Nock was a shrewd, keen observer, well aware of what was going on. Roosevelt and Hitler, for neither of whom Nock had any use whatever, had come into power the year before the journal begins; Mussolini was preparing for his Ethiopian adventure; and the politicians were helplessly wrestling with economic and social problems completely beyond their power of understanding, with armaments and war in the background as the simple and inevitable solution. Nock comments on it all with his usual directness and realism, and always in his clear classic English...

What It Means

This is a placeholder explanation generated by the low-overhead model. It interprets "I had read some of Nock's essays, in Harper's or the Atlantic Monthly, while still in school, but it was his Memoirs of a Superfluous Man, which I read soon after it came out in 1944, that made me a confirmed Nockian and was probably one of the influences that led to my publishing books. The first of our two works by him was a journal from the years 1934 and 1935, the only unpublished manuscript, except some letters, that Nock did not destroy before his death in 1945. … Nock was a shrewd, keen observer, well aware of what was going on. Roosevelt and Hitler, for neither of whom Nock had any use whatever, had come into power the year before the journal begins; Mussolini was preparing for his Ethiopian adventure; and the politicians were helplessly wrestling with economic and social problems completely beyond their power of understanding, with armaments and war in the background as the simple and inevitable solution. Nock comments on it all with his usual directness and realism, and always in his clear classic English..." in the context of "Henry Regnery, Memoirs of a Dissident Publisher (1985), p. 52" to mean that wisdom is timeless.