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‘Most of the people I like,’ she said, ‘listen to the same sort of music I do—it’s how we find out what we have in common.’ Most of the people I like do not listen to the same sort of music as I do—mainly, I think, because the sort of music I really like is inimical to any kind of social message, to any message or meaning other than a common humanity, a hunger for life in all its miasma, a coming to grips with what is and what is not, which yet avoids complaint. Life is hard, this music says, it is complicated and dangerous and it hurts a very great deal—but it is also, inexplicably, the most beautiful, the most fantastic thing you will ever know, so make the most of it, dear fool, while you can.
Get a radio or phonograph capable of the most extreme loudness possible, and sit down to listen to a performance of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony or of Schubert’s C-Major Symphony. But I don’t mean you just sit down and listen. I mean this: Turn it on as loud as you can get it. Then get down on the floor and jam your ear as close into the loudspeaker as you can get it and stay there, breathing as lightly as possible, and not moving, and neither eating nor smoking nor drinking. Concentrate everything you can into your hearing and into your body. You won’t hear it nicely. If it hurts you, be glad of it. As near as you will ever get, you are inside the music; not only inside it, you are it; your body is no longer your shape and substance, it is the shape and substance of the music.
Is what you hear pretty? or beautiful? or legal? or acceptable in polite or any other society? It is beyond any calculation save and dangerous and murderous to all equilibrium in human life as human life is; and nothing can equal the rape it does on all that death; nothing except anything, anything in existence or dream, preceived anywhere remotely towards its true dimension.
(2002.108, p. 17f., [Let us now praise famous men])
For a minute the opening balanced from one side to the
other. Like a walk or a march. Like God strutting in the night. The outside
of her was suddenly froze and only that first part of the music was hot
inside her heart. She could not even hear what sounded after, but she
sat there waiting and froze, with her fists tight. After a while the music
came again, harder and loud. It didn’t have anything to do with God. This
was her, Mick Kelly, walking in the daytime and by herself at night. In
the hot sun and in the dark with all the plans and feelings. This music
was her—the real plain her.She could not listen good enough
to hear it all. The music boiled inside her. Which? To hang on to certain
wonderful parts and think them over so that later she would not forget—or should she let go and listen to each part that came without thinking
or trying to remember? Golly! The whole world was this music and she could
not listen hard enough. Then at last the opening music came again, with
all the different instruments bunched together for each note like a hard,
tight fist that socked at her heart. And the first part was over.This music did not take a long time or a short time. It did not have anything
to do with time going by at all. She sat with her arms held tight around
her legs, biting her salty knee very hard. It might have been five minutes
she listened or half the night. The second part was black-colored—a
slow march. Not sad, but like the whole world was dead and black and there
was no use thinking back how it was before. One of those horn kind of
instruments played a sad and silver tune. Then the music rose up angry
and with excitement underneath. And finally the black march again.But maybe the last part of the symphony was the music she loved best—glad and like the greatest people in the world running and springing up
in a hard, free way. Wonderful music like this was the worst hurt there
could be. The whole world was this symphony, and there was not enough
of her to listen.
(2001.90, p. 101 [The Heart is a Lonely Hunter])
Cf. A Clockwork Orange, e.g. the abuse of Beethoven. Is it more than mere coincidence that these descriptions are of Beethoven rather than some other song-writer?
Something about Kurt Weill. About Aristotle’s Rhetoric, and Fellini’s La Strada, about Der Blaue Engel or Byzantium.
Also something about wishing that Richard Burton played the part of Humbert Humbert in Kubrick’s Lolita, that more people resembed Peter Sellers, that someone, soon, would write a really good experimental novel that was, at the same time, a really good novel.
About Matteo Ricci. And Cicero. Simonides. That Plato was against books because they ruined the memory; later, in Florence, books were praised as an aid to memory, for holding all the things which would be otherwise forgotten—even Plato’s works (the sole intact corpus from antiquity) exists because of papyri rolls and vellum codices.
‘An eloquent man, child, and one who loved his country,’ puer ait, long after he was called Augustus (Logios anêr, ô pai, logios kai philopatris, Plut.Cic.49.3). He called him pater then had him proscribed — pater patriae, patria potestas.
That last doesn’t quite follow, does it? Well, it is one non sequitur among the many.
The British are a humorous people; on the coach to Heathrow the driver urged us to ‘notice, please, ladies and gentlemen, that your seats are equipped with seatbelts. As you no doubt are keenly aware, there have been a spate of road accidents involving buses. In one of the latest, five people died, fifty-five were seriously injured, and five walked away. Guess who among them was wearing a seatbelt. Thank you for choosing this coach service, and please enjoy your flight.’
Just as the bus pulled into the central coach station at Heathrow, I realized Tariq was sitting just behind me—on his way home to Berlin for the holidays. We chatted as acquaintances do, mainly of papyrology, which is perhaps a bit unusual, and bid each other a safe journey.
I was at the airport three hours early. This was stupid, but I am not a good traveler and prefer to be far, far too early for everything than be too late for anything. There were exquisitely dressed women in the line, whose scarves were knotted to show the label, whose clothes were pressed and pleasing to behold—it seemed almost a shame to hear the London bray in their voices (though it was not, admittedly, unexpected). There was also a beautiful young couple; they were so perfect it would be too simple to despise them. Men in tweed were everywhere and everyone seemed swaddled in wool. Even myself.
We were met at the airport by Peggy the drug sniffing puppy. ‘Please set your shoulder bags on the ground, so Peggy can sniff them,’ said the handler, who spoke to people with the same encouraging tones she used for the puppy (‘What do you smell, Peggy, huh? What do you smell?’). That said, it was the fastest I’ve ever been through immigrations—how empty the airport seemed.
I am trying to find a way to explain this place, and failing completely. It’s not because the place is inconstant, or over-large, or complicated, or anything like that, but just that it is, in fact, so very simple that there is no way to explain it without making it seem more complicated than it actually is. As we all know, descriptions should try to present things as they actually are, so it would be pointless of me to tease out some rough and tangled observations as though they managed to get at the thing itself. Since I am thus unable to fulfill even this bare minimum of a writer’s qualifications, I shall desist and offer up a few irrelevant quotations instead.
The pursuit of poetry has helped many a man live to a ripe old age, whereas countless others have died young by seeking more to eat than they really needed. (2002.105, p. 289)
They were all wreathed in fronds of oak, and their hands were full of fragrant herbs or flowers, so that if anyone had encountered them, he would only have been able to say: ‘Either these people will not be vanquished by death, or they will welcome it with joy.’ (ibid, p. 648)
My dear M—
Just a quick note. Why is it that you only talk to people on days when you are feeling so muddle-headed that you cannot be witty and amusing even on topics you find of interest? You sound now like one of those desperate females eager to say something, anything, just to fill the silence. Also, your gestures have grown constrained: unconvincing and simply wrong. Stop it. Even so—as always—I remain
… or, Limericks in Honor of Diodorus Siculus
That clever old gent Diodorus
Has written a history for us:
At forty-odd books,
It’s given strange looks
By all who dare wade in the morass.
A Sicilian once wrote a story
Omitting all details if gory,
‘O dear Diodorus
Please, this time, don’t bore us!’
Cry readers at every foray.
In telling of Great Alexander,
Diodorus takes care not to slander—
For he’s always uncritical,
If not apolitical,
And guilty of trying to pander.
In the year were children born, were wars waged, and markets opened. In the year were ships sunk, were markets falling, were deserts crossed, was oil spilt more freely than wine. In the year were plagues driven through towns and cities, were roads built, were bridges burnt; in that year, too, were pestilences common and the crops were eaten by locusts. In the year were roads torn up, laid low again, were monarchs deposed and democracies installed. In the year were democracies torn up, monarchs imposed, and roadsigns installed. In the year were maps made of the territory, were trees felled, were houses built. In the year were fields mown, burned, were towns razed, were nations ravaged. In the year were feasts held, were festivities celebrated, were plays open; then, too, were symphonies performed, the lyre and kithara sounding, and the flute, too. In the year were allegiences pledged, was treachery prevalent, were deals forced. In the year were aged slaughtered, were temples burnt. In the year were people left in peace, just briefly, to scratch a little living from the uneven land. Then came the year in which children were born, wars were waged, and markets again were opened.
And that, they say, was history.
I am a part of all that I have met;
Yet all experience is an arch wherethrough
Gleams that untraveled world whose margin fades
Forever and forever when I move.
How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnished, not to shine in use!
As though to breathe were life! Life piled on life
Were all too little, and of one to me
Little remains; but every hour is saved
From that eternal silence, something more,
A bringer of new things; and vile it were
For some three suns to store and hoard myself,
And this gray spirit yearning in desire
To follow knowledge like a sinking star,
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.
I was thinking this morning of pasting some old photographs of the sea into a little book, and annotating them with lines from Homer. As though the wine-dark sea (oinopa ponton) were not already a desperate cliché. As I said, this set me to thinking, mainly about place, but also about time. For what does the salt Pacific have to do with Aegean; and what has Hecuba to do with me, or I with Hecuba? Very little, I believe.
72. — Things which seem in poor taste: too many personal effects cluttering up the place where one is sitting; too many brushes in an ink-box; too many Buddhas in a family temple; too many children in a house; too many words in meeting someone; too many meritorious deeds recorded in a petition. Things which are not offensive, no matter how numerous: books in a book cart, rubbish in a rubbish heap.
127. — It is best not to change something if changing it will not do any good.
187. — In any art the specialist, even if he is unskillful, is always superior to the most talented amateur. This is the difference between the man who is habitually cautious and never rash, and the man who does whatever suits his pleasure. This is true not only of the arts and crafts; the source of succcess in the actions and calculations of daily life is to be dull and cautious. To be clever and willful is the source of failure.
NB — Of all the books I own, this is the one which I have happened to take with me most often on my (admittedly limited) travels. To carry around these short, opinionated essays is like carrying a container of clean, clear water, which provides refreshment at the end of a long day and serves as ballast when the going becomes difficult.
So I’ve been trying to sort it out; the social life of my house-mates, I mean. Not that I’m interested. Because I’m not. But as a means of distraction. Diversion, that’s it. So there are three other girls. Well. Two girls, I would say, and one young woman, which may be too fine a distinction, I’m not quite sure. Where was I? Right. Social life. So I’m going to just leave out the personalities of these three females. That’s what people do, isn’t it, elide the means to achieve the ends. I’ve been trying to figure out which of them have boys and, if so, to which variety of the human male they belong. So far as I can see, the human male is of two types, the visible and the invisible. The visible male is territorial and will seize the possessions, the living quarters, the life and very soul of any female they chance to meet, assuming, of course, that the aforementioned female has not alienated them with petulant complaints or refusals of physical comforts. I hope we understand each other. So, for instance, the girl at the landing is possessed of a visible male. Or she was a week ago on Saturday, I’m not so sure now. He might have been on loan. He nosed about the kitchen at midday, chased her up and down the stairs a few times, and made his presence generally known. I don’t think he peed on the walls, but his territory was pretty well marked. What, then, of the invisible male? I saw one once, accidentally. The young woman (who lives near the girl at the landing, but down a little hall) had caught him, in the Netherlands or in London, I don’t know because I didn’t ask and, being invisible, the young man made no offers. He didn’t say much of anything, in fact, in the short time I followed the pair up the stairs, except to apologize for not holding the door; in this he was profuse, if quiet. I mentioned three females, though, didn’t I? Hmm. The girl at the top of the stairs is not, to my knowledge, possessed of a boy, visible or no. Or girl, for that matter. Though the seemingly non-existant boy/girl may, in fact, just live a short drive away. Again, I don’t ask. But I’m trying to figure out what sort of conclusions to draw from this non-inquiry into the character of my house-mates’ boys. And I can’t think of one, so there it is.
In an abrupt change of pace, I set aside the works of Walter Burkert just as he was about to show once and for all how human behavior really works, and read a mystery novel until all hours of the night. I had given up on the entire ‘reading in bed’ thing—there never seemed to be any time, I was tired, and the who really wants to read a technical excursus on Greek sacrifice in bed anyway? (Though I have heard that some scholars, when sick and confined to bed, pass the tedious hours by reading the works of the famous French epigraphist Louis Robert, and this instils in them such a profound desire to get up and work and travel that their recovery is rapid.)
Anyway, though, I’ve suffered a relapse and was reading P. D. James as a bedtime story. I was astonished at how straightforward it was—no narrative or stylistic tricks to obscure the meaning or the plot, no hidden depth of character, no unexpected descriptions. It was quite refreshing. It did, however, set me to wondering about genre. A comparison, I think, of these womanish mysteries might be helpful; and the ‘academic’ mysteries in particular might prove fruitful. There is an interesting similarity of tone between Dorothy Sayers’ Gaudy Night, James’s An Unsuitable Job for a Woman, the Sarah Caudwell mysteries, and even Donna Tartt’s lamentable Secret History. Is this similarity due to genre, the gender of the author, the academic setting, or the vaguely feminist-ish slant of the text? The answer is probably just ‘yes’ to all counts, and I leave it to you to sort out the particulars yourself.
For words have a weight beyond their meaning, the sound of the stithy drawing measure from the iron of Elizabethan poetry, skirting the Joycean quicksilver to forge a something other than consciousness—a feeling, then, a fear. The chthonic sibilance and uneven lisp hammering out associations and leaving nothing but the need to hear.
Within this field, which no single scholar can create but which each scholar receives and in which he then finds a place for himself, the individual researcher makes his contribution. Such contributions, even for the exceptional genius, are strategies of redisposing material within the field. Even the scholar who unearths a once-lost manuscript produces the ‘found’ text in a context already prepared for it, for that is the real meaning of finding a new text.
So you could imagine it like a spider and a vacuum cleaner — except you’ve got to imagine that the spider wants to be sucked into the vacuum cleaner. So there’s the spider on the carpet, the world, and then there’s the vacuum cleaner, which is the kingdom of god. Now there is that point where the spider has just entered the vacuum cleaner, but is not in fact in the dustbag — this might be called purity of heart. But the spider has not entered the kingdom of god until it has actually reached the dustbag, its journey is not complete until it’s in the dustbag — and that’s the point about salvation.
Clouds, 2:30 p.m.
That it seems nothing is happening. I spend each and every day following the same routine, the dull rhythm of the week waxing and waning, more timely than the moon. Waking up at 5:30 in the morning, the darkness still swirling like the fog, I stumble, tumble down the stairs, make dark coffee and a bowl of muesli, ascend again carrying the bowl balanced on top of the coffeecup and read for two hours; e.g. Orientalism or Purity and
Danger or De Officiis. Around seven-thirty-five
I set aside the books, dress, wash the dishes, prepare for the day. By eight it’s light outside, people are waiting for the bus—I could see them, the faint and fuzzy outlines of knit caps and wool coats, if I looked out the window. Still, I read a bit more, then leave for the library at eight-twenty-five or so, a slow walk, watching traffic.
That I’m always too early for the library to open: readers not admitted before 9 a.m. says the sign in sententious san-serif. The guard leans back in his booth, thumbing a paper, watching the clock. At 8:57 there’s usually a line of old men in tweed jackets, hunch-backed from centuries of poor posture, and the young Germans, silent with scarves. And that woman, whom I’m afraid of, because she reminds me of myself. Always alone, twitchy, nervous, fully covered always with black skirts and jackets, her hair piled atop her head as she learned when she was Edwardian. She snaps her gum, though (which is anyhow forbidden) and talks to herself when others can see and swears at the staff, which I could never do—not openly at least.
That I spend the day migrating from library to lecture to library again, returning to my narrow room by way of the post-box, which is usually empty. That the most meaningful and complete thoughts I utter in the day are ‘please’ and ‘thank-you.’ That I could stumble after people, engage them in idle chit-chat, how’s the weather, it sure is cold, that I could coil around them like a serpent—but they seem so happy, and so beautiful, just as they are. And so we pass in silence.
The room of maps and diagrams
Library, 11:36 a.m.
The room of Chinese Paintings
Ashmolean Museum, 1:26 p.m.
Dear C,
In response to your application ‘to be treated like a living, breathing human being for a change, and not some benumbed automaton’ we regret to inform you that all such positions are filled at the present time. This is by no means a reflection of your qualifications to be human. We have simply had an amazing group of candidates this year, and we assure you that the choices were not easy to make. Although we cannot offer you true humanity at present, we encourage you to apply again at some later date. Best wishes for your future success and happiness.
I have to remind myself it was only a book – mass-market paperback, pristine condition though bought used.
I lent it to an acquaintance; I do not say she was a friend, because she was
not. She was an acquaintance. At the time I would have compared her to a whirlwind, for wherever she went chaos and confusion invariably followed. She had a talent for capturing the affection, the admiration, perhaps even the love of other people. Though lacking beauty in any strict sense of the word, her energy and heedlessness – a sort of helplessness born of irresponsibility – drew people to her. In this sense, she was attractive.
She had no difficulty in asking favors, either, and people almost instinctively granted them. That, in fact, was how I met her. She asked if she could sleep in my room, because she had forgotten her key and needed a place to stay until her roommate returned to open the door. At the time, I shrugged, having no objections. That was the first favor she asked, and it seems to me there were so many others I cannot remember them all.
There was, for instance, the time she came to dinner, uninvited, with the latest young man in tow. An eager puppy of a fellow, he was embarrassed to intrude, but so besotted with her he could not help but follow withersoever she led. At the time, the sight amused. I fed them rice and other foods, made them tea, and chatted idly over the sound of Prokofiev.
She often called on me, after that, to accompany them, as chaperone, and prevent the young man from making a scene or asking too many questions. It would not do, you see, if he made a fuss when she asked him to drive her to Boston, to visit one of her lovers at MIT. It would not do at all. A third (or perhaps a fourth?) was needed to diffuse the tension; and such was I. How could I mind, though, when they were young and vivacious, and the boy had such a beautiful neck?
She wanted to borrow the book, to read over the weekend. She was not what I would call a reader, for she read neither widely nor disrciminately, but she liked to have read what her friends had read – if the title piqued her interest. With no misgivings, I lent her the book.
When she returned the book a month later, I didn’t recognize it. The cover was mangled and torn, the pages dog-eared, thumbed (was that a spider I see squashed there at the cover – oh, it is, how nice), and the spine broken. All the life had gone out of it; the very words on the page seemed weary and plaintive, their phosphorescence worn away. The book, in its mute injury, seemed nearly as bitter and exhausted as that young man, the boy with the beautiful neck, who hadn’t even lasted the winter at her heels.
I didn’t get a chance to finish it, she said, I didn’t have time.
I handed the book back to her. Take all the time you need. I’ve finished with it long ago.
My dearest M—
Heartfelt apologies for not writing sooner; as you know, I’ve been a bit busy. I am astonished to find that you have yet to make any new friends. Is there a reason for this, or are you simply idling? Philosophers through the millennia have pointed out the necessity of forming friendships, both for one’s health and for one’s happiness; and you know that—what’s your excuse? I had held out hopes that you were not socially benighted, but it appears you are more inept than even I had imagined. It sounds cruel, I know, but I am more than a little frustrated at your lack of amiability.
And then there’s the question of intelligence. A few people have told you you’re ‘smart’—I trust you’ve realized that this just means they can’t lie well enough to pay any other compliment such as, ‘gosh, you’re sweet,’ or ‘gee, you are really nice, you know?’ etc. because (setting aside, momentarily, your myriad failings in appearance and demeanor) you’re not that smart. Okay. Let’s rephrase: you’re an idiot, but your’re smart enough to see, to some extent, how much of an idiot you are. (I don’t mean you have a Socratic level of self-knowledge, either, so stop smirking.) You are merely clever. And of all human failings cleverness, I’ve come to find, is one of the worst. Nonetheless, I remain
Entrance, chair, sun, shadow.
They took us into the store rooms of the Ashmolean, bright blue metal shelves crammed with funerary monuments, busts of Romans (or Sir Arthur Evans), and sculptures of every sort of absurdity. We are to look at inscriptions. And here we see an inscription from Smyrna; it is quite nice actually—the person carving it was quite skillful. It’s typical of Hellenistic inscriptions, you see, the letter forms. You have to be careful, but sometimes it helps to touch the stone, to feel where the letters might be…What do you notice especially? Ah, yes, the round letters are quite small; yes, the omicrons and omegas seem to hover, there, in the middle of the line. And here you see how the pi, there, the right vertical is only half as long as the left… Ah. At the end of the strokes—see, here—there are decorative turns; serifs, really.
Now let’s take a look at this one. Yes, it is quite dark, isn’t it. Local marble, from Crete. A treaty between Hierapytna and Priasnos. Oh, about the second century—so a little later than the one we were just looking at. And do the letter forms seem different to you? Hmm. Yes. The cross-bar on the alpha is curved down, as a decorative touch. On the mu as well. And see how the top and bottom bars of the sigma slant away—quite different from the other, where they were nearly parallel.
Now. I’m going to show you how to make a squeeze of an inscription. What you need is water, and paper—filter paper, like coffee filters, with a high fiber content, very strong and absorbant. Yes. And you’ll need a brush and sponge. Now what you’ve got to do is to make sure the surface of the inscription is covered in water—like that; then you press the paper against it, and make sure the paper is completely saturated. Then you’ve got to try to remove the air-pockets, yes, like that. No. Just tap the brush against the surface—see how it pushes the paper into the letters. What? Does it damage the inscription? Well, ah, yes, a little. One does not want to make very many squeezes of the same stone… Yes. There you’ve got it. Now we’ll leave
that to dry. How long? Well, if you’re on site, in the heat and sun of Turkey or Greece—half an hour; here, we’ll have to leave it overnight…
Hellenistic figure of a mime
Louvre (from Rostovtzeff, SEHHW)
Of John the Baptist: ‘he was as clean as a baby.’
‘Stupidity is also a blemish.’
Rapid, fluid interchange: ‘ ‘No, not boring…’
‘You have too good manners to say that.’ ‘Or indeed to feel it, in such a case as this.’ ’
The questioner’s voice wobbles across the scope of the query, his voice at a falsetto pitch of ignorance: ‘Then are these ritual baths for the, uh, incidental impurities that, uh, just come up?’
‘ ‘So they believed the temple would be rebuilt, then?’ ‘And how…’ ’
England, 12 November, 7:24 a.m.
When I remember something I would rather forget, or when some unpleasant action or unwitting stupidity of mine forces its way forward into the present from the past, I think I don’t feel well. Oh happy past, which can so disorder the present.
A people that grows accustomed to sloppy writing is a people in process of losing grip on its empire and on itself. And this looseness and blowsiness is not anything as simple and scandalous as abrupt and disordered syntax. It concerns the relation of expression to meaning. Abrupt and disordered syntax can be at times very honest, and an elaborately constructed sentence can be at times merely an elaborate camouflage.
From The Book of the Knight of La Tour-Landry:
There be suche men that lyethe and makithe good visage and countenaunce to women afore hem, that scornithe and mockithe hem in her absence. And therefor it is harde to knowe the worlde that is now; and ther [for] the resones that y haue saide you, y partede and yede oute of the gardein, and fonde in my way .ij. prestes and .ij. clerkes that y had. And I saide to hem that y wolde make a boke of ensaumples, for to teche my doughtres, that thei might vnderstonde how thei shulde gouerne hem, and knowe good from euelle. And so y made hem extraie me ensaumples of the Bible and other bokes that y hade, as the gestis of kingges, the croniclez of Fraunce, Grece, of Inglonde, and of mani other straunge londes. And y made hem rede me eueri boke; And ther that y fonde a good ensaumple, y made extraie it oute. And thanne y made this boke. But y wolde not sette it in ryme,
but in prose, forto abregge it, and that it might be beter and more pleinly to be understonde. And y made this boke for the gret loue that y hade to my saide
doughtres, the whiche y loued as fader aught to loue his childe, Hauing hertely
ioye to finde wayes to stere and turne hem to goodness and worshippe, and to loue and serue her creatoure, And to haue loue of her neigheboures and of the worlde.
(Fol. 1b, col. 1)
‘Entrance into the sanctuary is allowed:
From the unlawful things you are never clean.’(1)
I wonder, sometimes, when I will take pictures of the town and offer up something more interesting, or more varied, than ‘Sunset, Grayfriars.’
I am very fond of sunsets.
Mortals are easily tempted to pinch the life out of
their neighbor’s buzzing glory, and think that such killing is no murder.
And yet from the story itself the reader sees that Dorothea’s ‘buzzing glory’ about Casaubon is misguided, that he is a senseless, selfish old twig, and not much of a scholar, either (even if he would read the Germans). Is that, then, still ‘murder’ to set aright one who has gone astray? Yes—if the temptation to reprove is itself misguided, and is born, as here, from selfishness and spite.
Explorers of the past are never quite free. The past
is their tyrant. It forbids them to know anything which it has not itself, consciously or otherwise, yielded to them.
* Livy II.49.12, of the Veientes in the early fourth century before the common era; they had been driven back to their camp by the Romans, from whom they ‘on bended knees’ (supplices) sought peace. Doubtless Livy was not literal; an entire army of grovelling Veientes seems unlikely. One assumes they sent messengers.
I know it is in bad taste to quote from one’s own letters, but this really is too absurd:
Am reading some of the letters exchanged by Mommsen(1) and Wilamowitz,(2) the latter always offering to be of service in scrounging up inscriptions. I do wish I could totter about Italy complaining about the lack of classical inscriptions and misplacing German friends…
Found out, too, that Mommsen’s a funny looking bird, with beady eyes and bad hair, while Wilamowitz looks the perfect Prussian. Curious, tho’, that I never knew Wilamowitz married Mommsen’s daughter. I wonder if she was a funny looking bird with beady eyes and bad hair. Hmmm — probably…
In order to write the much-lamented Cicero essay, I happened to check two small pamphlets out of the library, both Teubner editions of short works by Sallust (or an anonymous author in the style of Sallust). Both had been edited by A. Kurfess (who also edited the Teubner edition of Sallust’s other works [1956]) and had belonged to the library of the great Latinist R. A. B. Mynors, best known for his edition of Vergil. In design they appeared identical: the smoke-blue paper cover of a Teubner Latin text (sun-stained and pale), same ordered type, same distinctive logo, each containing a single signature of approximately 15 sheets. When opened, though, the two volumes could not be more dissimilar. The paper of the In Ciceronem(1)
is a creamy off-white, a strong, smooth, with a high cotton rag content; the text
is clear, small, and unmuddled, with a generous apparatus criticus and notes at
the bottom of each page. The Epistulae ad Caesarem,(2) on the other hand, is printed in a flat, unpromising type, with insufficient ink, on rusting pulp; the notes are scanty, as though space were limited and they dared not crowd out the text or pad the volume to greater length.
The publishing house of B. G. Teubner, Leipzig, published Kurfess’ edition of Sallust’s In Ciceronem in 1914; the companion
volume, Epistulae ad Caesarem, was not published until
1921.
For no good reason1 I’ve been reading The Cambridge Companion to Emily Dickinson (ed. W. Martin, CUP: 2002). It is somewhat refreshing to find books which do not concern Cicero. And it is interesting to step outside the charmed circle of academics and then to peer back in, as though through windows. For one can see then, very clearly, the absurd. As, for instance, a professor of 19th C. American literature vexed that Miss Dickinson ‘completely ignored the largest mass execution in the legal history of the United States, in 1863, when thirty-eight Santee Sioux Indians were hanged in Mankato, Minnesota, for their roles in an uprising sparked by chronic shortages in food, clothing, and fuel’ (194).
Two facts leap from that sentence: 1863 and Mankato, Minnesota. Students of American history will doubtless be familiar with the Civil War (1861-1865) which lamentably preoccupied much of the eastern seaboard. Lamentably, of course, because they should have been outraged by massacres of Native Americans. One should note that, at the time, Miss Dickinson was probably in a little town in Massachusetts, a town whose only claim to fame, then as now, was the college. Not to argue on the laws of geographical improbability, but it seems rather unlikely, given the state of the media in that day (which delighted in the lurid rather than the likely) and age, that the news would have reached across those thirteen hundred miles in any form other than: ‘Uprising supressed! Law strikes against Terror! The savage and violent…’ I do not think it laudable, I merely suggest it as a possibility.
But I lose my way. I would like to address the issue raised by P. B. Bennett’s chapter entitled ‘Emily Dickinson and her American women poet peers’ (pp.215-35). Bennett laments the lack of interest displayed by ‘Dickinson scholars’ for the poetry of Dickinson’s contemporaries (which is, apparently, only now ‘beginning to attract the serious attention it deserves’
[215f.]). These contemporaries were the ‘daughters of the first sizable generation of feminist activists’ and ‘were all consummate professionals’ such as: Frances Butler Kemble, Julia Ward Howe, Lucy Larcom, the Cary sisters, Rose Terry Cooke, Helen Hunt Jackson (nota bene), Harriet Prescott Spofford, Celia Thaxter, Louise Chandler Moulton, Sarah Piatt, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Ella
Wheeler Wilcox, Edith M. Thomas, Lizette Woodworth Reese (216), to say nothing of the Grimkés.
These were women with a message, whose writing was their livelihood, who were (as in the case of Sarah Piatt2 capable of publishing some of ‘the most powerful American political poems the century produced’ (217). That is the crux, then, isn’t it? In an age when art is supposed to have a message, a meaning, a moral (or at the very least, an agenda), it is dastardly, retrograde of a poet not to follow along, it shows that one is, ‘politically speaking […] no progressive’ (218). Dickinson, so Bennett argues, had ‘literary agency’ in spades, though she ‘lacked a sense of social and political agency altogether’ (218). She was a ‘bodiless’ poet, who wrote for God (232), who, then, must be read in the context of these other women’s work if she is to be ‘interesting’ (234).3
I’ve lost my way again. For I merely I wanted to say was simply that Dickinson is a great poet because she is not political, because she explores the personal and the private. And greater still, she combines this exploration with linguistic experimentation and an icy diction, a crispness and clarity of thought and word, which is as refreshing as it is ambiguous. She does not deny meanings; her work is the variaorum. Whereas the other women Bennett discussed seem to have written from desire, Dickinson, at least as I read her, wrote from necessity—a necessity not less powerful for being interior.4
Undue Significance a starving man attaches
To Food—
Far off—He sighs—and therefore—Hopeless—
And therefore—Good—Partaken—it relieves—indeed
But proves us
That Spices fly
In the Receipt—It was the Distance—
Was Savory—
[↩]
It is blustery enough the house trembles.
Books take up space, and libraries, being confined by walls, must occasionally weed the shelves of injudicious pamphlets and books unborrowed through the centuries. That this should astonish
or dismay comes as something of a surprise. That, however, is not my theme.
I would like to return to the metaphor of libraries as gardens. It is apt,
for they are confined spaces and can be crowded with tangled growth or marked by unnatural bareness. A library can provide the mind with nourishment, pleasure, yet prove a source of tedium and dismay. The scarcely confined leaves must be cared for and tended, kept free of mold and pests, all to achieve their purpose: to be perused, consumed, devoured, enjoyed.(1)
If it were not for books, I would not know what ‘paradise’ meant. An odd word, perhaps, with which to be unfamiliar. I had thought paradise meant some vale of pleasure, a painless respite, an ideal spot, peopled with diverse colors, soothing sounds, and beauties beyond compare. The word ‘paradise’ however, entered the western world through Xenophon, a writer best known for his simplicity, which was not always admirable. He had the misfortune to be writing at the same time as Thucydides, whose density and critical acumen he was unable to equal, and Plato, whose wit and dash and fervor were something altogether foreign to the somewhat earnest Xenophon. Yet such comparisons are not the point.
For I meant to write of paradise. As cleverer people than I doubtless knew, the word paradise comes from the Avestan word pairidaêza,
‘a walled garden,’ which Xenophon transliterated into Greek as paradeisos.(2) He was referring, of course, to the famed gardens of Cyrus the Great, which were orderly, carefully tended (apparently by the Great King himself), and utterly delightful (or so the notion seemed to Xenophon, who, one should observe, was not alive at the time). So one must tend to one’s gardens, where ever and whatever they may be.(3)
[Bloom] claims to be of the school of aesthetic critics, remarking that, in an ideological age, ‘I feel quite alone these days in defending the autonomy of the aesthetic.’ Yet he himself doesn’t seem to have a clue about how to produce anything approaching the aesthetically pleasing in his own writing. In an interview in the Paris Review, he declared that he never revises his prose, and nothing in his work refutes this impressive claim. Any critic ready to avail himself of such gargoylesque words as ‘psychokabbalistic’ and ‘pneumognostic,’ who can refer to a passage in Montaigne as an ‘apotropaic talisman,’ and can write about the cosmos having been ‘reperspectivized by Tolstoy,’ may be many things, but he ain’t no aesthete.
At the New York Times they agree that Harold Bloom is a noodle; they hint, though, that despite his failings, he is very clever.
Archaeologists are a fiesty bunch. Take, for instance, this argument
about Troy. How many people, really, would exchange insults about the size of ancient Troy? How big was Troy, really? Huge? Perhaps. Just the citadel? Maybe. Can we say? Depends about what era you’re talking about, I suppose. Like most cities, what once was Troy waxed and waned, expansion following on destruction, following on expansion, and so on. But Homer’s Troy? What about that? To which one poses the questions: who was Homer? When did he write (or
sing)? Why? For whom? These fellows haven’t established the historicity
of Homer and yet they, like Schliemann, implicitly pin their hopes on the validity
of that entity we call Homer.(1) Looking for ‘Priam’s Troy’… of all the nerve. One might as well pin that phrase ‘the face that launched a thousand ships’ on Homer, too, while one is at it.(2)
My favorite comment comes, however, from Dr. Rose, of the University of Cincinnati: ‘We all got along beautifully until a few years ago.’
And there, my friends, you have the history of the world—always getting along just beautifully until a few (thousand) years ago.
How to explain it. The impermeable, invisible barrier which seeps between people, flowing between them so gradually that they do not notice until its inspissation is undeniable and no community is possible between them.
Smoke and steam rolling off the slanting roofs atop the restaurants of Cowley, rolling down into the lamplight.
Walking through the rain, avoiding umbrellas—nodding, sleepy, thwack, thwack, thwack of damp shoes on pavement yet damper.
Publius Clodius Pulcher, like the emperor Gaius, is alleged to have been quite close to his sisters. Cicero did not like him—Clodius, that is; he never met Gaius.
How Rome came to acquire a monopoly of Aeneas, how his mythical connection with neighbouring Latin cities, especially Lavinium and Alba, grew up over the succeeding centuries, and how the chronological complication resulting from an attempt to harmonize the rival legends of Aeneas (traditionally c. 1175 BC) and Romulus (traditionally c. 750 BC) were resolved are intriguing questions but lie outside the period of this study. The relevant point is that as Rome evolved into a city, so she acquired a pedigree of the noblest descent.
This pessimism pervaded the political atmosphere, and contributed in varying degrees to the new religions in which so many of the best, as well as the most wretched, took refuge, and which in the end burst the old forms and created a new civilization. But to return toCicero… .
A golden bell and a pomegranate, a golden bell
and a pomegranate, upon the hem of the robe roundabout.
And if, dear my reader, you can tell me where that’s from, can pick and pin it to its origins… well, I shall be very much impressed.1
ita ut tintinabulum sit aureum et malum rursumque tintinabulum aliud aureum et malum punicum
[↩]
The child was small, with glasses, and carried a bright bouquet of Gerbera daisies wrapped in cellophane. He offered a pint of ice cream to his mother.
Mother: No, dear, put it back; we don’t need ice cream today.
Child: Why not?
At the top of the theater, the benches are steep, unpadded, unbacked. The voice of the Vice-Chancellor rises dimly droning, and the broken light from the windows moves across the faces of the students on the (padded) seats below.
Socrates was married, you know, and his wife, Xanthippe, was a shrew.
Perhaps that’s why he liked to sit in the cobbler’s shop and talk with young aristocrats about the meaning of words.
‘The only thing I know is that I don’t know anything.’
How many a man has said that, in the course of history, to his family, his lovers, his friends?
No wonder you had to get your own back, toying with the feeble minds of arrogant boys, who were not the sons of masons, but of millionaires. Crito, Meno—what were they but foils, the mirror of your unspoken dreams.
Make a virtue of necessity, and so rob from it its force. How Spartan of you, oh most patriotic of Athenians…
Dearest M—
I write this to you in the spirit of friendly criticism and, as you know you could stand much improvement, I trust you will not take what I say amiss. This beginning has put you on your guard—though I cannot see your face from where I sit, yet I can feel it has involuntarily tightened, assumed a wariness, which is not unexpected. It is as habitual as it is unbecoming. Unbecoming—how quaint a word. You have always been fond of quaint and archaic words, so I shall speak to you in your own idiom, rather than vainly attempting to adopt the modes and manners of modern English, as she is spoken today.
By now you are wondering why I have bothered to write to you, seeing as I intend to consume sentence after sentence with idle preamble. At present, I merely wish to inform you that I shall take closer note of your actions in the future, and offer such advice as seems timely and appropriate. I dare say I will not write often, but when I do, it will be to a purpose, no matter how veiled. I felt it would be courteous to tell you of my intentions, before you have the opportunity to misconstrue them.
An observation in parting: you realize, of course, that you will probably be saddled with the adjective ‘charming’ for the rest of your days. I am aware that this annoys you, but if you pause to think about it, there are surely worse adjectives to be associated with, insipid and listless though ‘charming’ may be. You could, if you choose, aim for tedious, or impertinent, or suave—I think, however, we can agree that none of these really suit. Pensive, perhaps, or shy—but these fall under the quieter shades of charming. Ponder this awhile, and know I remain, &c., &c.,
Hauptstr., Dresden Neustadt
(4 September 2002)
The fountain in Albertplatz is no longer populated by naked children; it is too cold. The couples who sit together on the benches are older, in their late twenties, thirties, forties, fifties, and so forth. The benches themselves look tired, their once glossy paint worn dull by the rain, the flood, the countless sandbags.
The cafes at either end of the street are sparsely populated, and the aproned man grilling wurst for the restaurant looks bored, lonely and cold, wisps of smoke wreathing lazily about his head.
VW, rain, Dresden
We stood in the sun, which was sharp and swimmingly white, though not quite directly overhead. The only thing brighter than the sunlight was the dust, which swirled and eddied low around our feet, stirred by the rare breezes. The olive trees and other low, scrubby plants were soaked in this dust, and seemed nearly as parched as we were.
We stood attentively and looked at every bit of stone drawn to our attention there at Palaikastro. The Canadian guide, though humorous, was large and menacing, and our coterie, though not always the most sensible, knew when to be on good behavior. Huge, who was not Canadian, listened to his comrade, and nodded sagely when the Canadian made a good point, or dryly entered a caveat on the more fanciful hypotheses. Once the tour was over, we were free to look around. Accordingly, we dissolved in clumps of threes and fours, and drifted across the level excavated plain towards the pools of shade.
‘Look,’ said the boy with the slender ankles, ‘it’s a lustral basin.’
I looked. It was a moderately deep trough cut in stone, which could conceivably have been used for a purifying bath prior to sacrifice. I looked at the bathtub. ‘Do you really think so? ’ I said, ‘it looks look a bathtub.’
‘First rule of archaeology: ritual is always the explanation. No
one wants to know how, or if, the Minoans bathed…’ his voice trailed off. Archaeology was his field, the little puddle of knowledge in which he chose to splash—ergo he wordlessly implied, his explanation was probably pretty near the mark, at least so far as current scholarship was concerned.
But the day was hot, and my nose was sunburnt, and I, the purported historian, was feeling difficult—that particular rule was only amusing the first time one heard it. ‘But I might want to know.’ Might being the operative word.
He was silent a moment. He looked from me to the alleged lustral basin and back again. Now he, too, was looking for an explanation. Whether he was successful or not I cannot say, for after awhile he shook his head, and sneered. ‘You would.’
They live on the top floor of the house on the corner; there are windows on two sides of their apartment, and the roof slants steeply. They have no balcony. He has long, dark blond hair, which he usually wears in a ponytail. He is in his early thirties and works in a shop, selling knickknacks with an African theme. He looks as though he might drink wheat-grass juice. He drives a rust-colored car, probably an Opel. The car is parked in a vacant lot across the street from their apartment.
She is his girlfriend, or his wife. She is roughly the same age and height as he is, skinnier, with short, dark hair. She likes to wear black tank-tops, dark jeans, and boots. During thunderstorms they lean out the window together and watch the rain. She clings to him and plays with his hair. She is pregnant.
They own a puppy. It is a slightly more vivid rust-color than the car. It will not be a large dog. When they unlock the street door, they take the puppy off its leash. It pees against the building before following them inside. The leash is blue and patterned; the pattern is too small to see from my window.
St. Someone, Kathedrale, Dresden
Finally it became a matter of principle, this standing about doing nothing. I watched and waited and wondered when the flies would land, when the process of decay would become incontrovertible. The inexplicability of it almost startled me; but it was, I think, beautiful.
In what later became a notorious media event, librarian Marvin S________ was found to be breeding bookworms in the library’s basement. When questioned by authorities, Mr S________ declared:
It is for the cause of science; and if I am permitted to advance the light of understanding even one inch against the dark of ignorance, my efforts shall not have been in vain. Them little buggers were my life’s work, and I could not allow anything to stop me.
It took exterminators three weeks to rid the building of the infestation. More than 17,000 volumes are believed to have been destroyed by Mr S________’s bookworms, including the library’s copies of rare works such as Q. Tavail’s Amores (with Hedgehog) and L. P. Flackeray’s On the Sketchy Side.
Mr S________’s lawyers have informed us that the results from this research will be published in the journal Science.
‘I can always tell when you’re reading somewhere in the house,’ my mother used to say. ‘There’s a special silence, a reading silence.’ I never heard it, this extra degree of hush that somehow travelled through walls and ceilings to announce that my seven-year-old self had become about as absent as a present person could be. The silence went both ways. As my concentration on the story in my hands took hold, all sounds faded away. My ears closed. Flat on my front with my chin in my hands or curled in a chair like a prawn, I’d be gone. I didn’t hear doorbells ring, I didn’t hear supper time called, I didn’t notice footsteps approaching of the adult who’d come to retrieve me.
In a case like this, it would have been a godsend, I thought, had either of the three gentlemen, Captains Burton, Speke, or Grant, given some information on these points; had they devoted a chapter upon, ‘How to get ready an Expedition for Central Africa.’ The purpose of this chapter, then, is to relate how I set about it…
* * *
When I was around five years old, my father took a sabbatical from the institution and drove the family in a brown Ford van throughout the western United States. We stopped at numerous national parks — Yellowstone, Yosemite, the Grand Canyon, the Grand Tetons, even the Badlands: you get the picture. My grandparents on my mother’s side happened to come along for part of the drive, and my grandfather, who had been a sailor and had a childlike sense of humor (how the two relate, I cannot say), decided to indulge in a prank. One night — in Yellowstone, I think — he drew bear tracks in the dirt leading from the scrubby forest to a hopping irregular waltz outside the tent walls. I cannot remember if I was fooled by the trick, though I do remember that my grandfather took great pride in the incident, which leads me to believe that perhaps I was.
As I was hiking up Hunchback mountain yesterday afternoon, though, I recalled that my grandfather was on the other side of the country, which led me to believe that the fresh bear tracks I saw in the mud were indeed the genuine article. I pondered them for a moment with some interest, then turned, walked back down the hill and out of the woods.
* * *
The greatest pleasure I find in life is reading. In the past few weeks I have
found much longed-for enrichment in such a quantity of books as I had thought myself unable to consume. Yet it is true that one hungry will, if possible, eat and the thirsty will, given the chance, drink—so I must slake that desire, that
need, which for me is greater than all others. I am most content when reading, for then I am least and yet most myself.
‘What does that have to do with the urge of the senses?’ Ubertino asked. ‘It was a mystical experience, and the body was our Lord’s.’
‘Perhaps I am accustomed to Oxford,’ William said, ‘where even mystical experience was of another sort…’
‘All in the head.’ Ubertino smiled.
And yet again it rains, the water beading on the wooden decks, the birds taking cover in the trees.
* * *
‘I can always tell when you’re reading somewhere in the house,’ my mother used to say. ‘There’s a special silence, a reading silence.’ I never heard it, this extra degree of hush that somehow travelled through walls and ceilings to announce that my seven-year-old self had become about as absent as a present person could be. The silence went both ways. As my concentration on the story in my hands took hold, all sounds faded away. My ears closed. Flat on my front with my chin in my hands or curled in a chair like a prawn, I’d be gone. I didn’t hear doorbells ring, I didn’t hear supper time called, I didn’t notice footsteps approaching of the adult who’d come to retrieve me.
The greatest pleasure I find in life is reading. In the past few weeks I have
found much longed-for enrichment in such a quantity of books as I had thought myself unable to consume. Yet it is true that one hungry will, if possible, eat and the thirsty will, given the chance, drink—so I must slake that desire, that
need, which for me is greater than all others. I am most content when reading, for then I am least and yet most myself.
‘What does that have to do with the urge of the senses?’ Ubertino asked. ‘It was a mystical experience, and the body was our Lord’s.’
‘Perhaps I am accustomed to Oxford,’ William said, ‘where even mystical experience was of another sort…’
‘All in the head.’ Ubertino smiled.
And yet again it rains, the water beading on the wooden decks, the birds taking cover in the trees.
When I was around five years old, my father took a sabbatical from the institution and drove the family in a brown Ford van throughout the western United States. We stopped at numerous national parks — Yellowstone, Yosemite, the Grand Canyon, the Grand Tetons, even the Badlands: you get the picture. My grandparents on my mother’s side happened to come along for part of the drive, and my grandfather, who had been a sailor and had a childlike sense of humor (how the two relate, I cannot say), decided to indulge in a prank. One night — in Yellowstone, I think — he drew bear tracks in the dirt leading from the scrubby forest to a hopping irregular waltz outside the tent walls. I cannot remember if I was fooled by the trick, though I do remember that my grandfather took great pride in the incident, which leads me to believe that perhaps I was.
As I was hiking up Hunchback mountain yesterday afternoon, though, I recalled that my grandfather was on the other side of the country, which led me to believe that the fresh bear tracks I saw in the mud were indeed the genuine article. I pondered them for a moment with some interest, then turned, walked back down the hill and out of the woods.
In a case like this, it would have been a godsend, I thought, had either of the three gentlemen, Captains Burton, Speke, or Grant, given some information on these points; had they devoted a chapter upon, ‘How to get ready an Expedition for Central Africa.’ The purpose of this chapter, then, is to relate how I set about it…
When you want to make money by Pegasus (as he must, perhaps, who has no other saleable property), farewell poetry and aerial flights: Pegasus only rises now like Mr. Green’s balloon, at periods advertised beforehand, and when the spectators’ money has been paid. Pegasus trots in harness, over the stony pavement, and pulls a cart or a cab behind him. Often Pegasus does his work with panting sides and trembling knees, and not seldom gets a cut of the whip from his driver.
Do not let us, however, be too prodigal of our pity upon Pegasus. There is no reason why this animal should be exempt from labour, or illness, or decay, any more than any of the other creatures of God’s world. If he gets the whip, Pegasus very often deserves it…
At Oxford his personality expanded and developed in a remarkable way. Never in the strict sense of the word a clever man—even by the academic standard (he took only a third in Mods. and a second in Greats, and worked hard for them, too)—he became an extraordinarily well-educated one. His passion for literature was intense. He was one of those rare individuals who actually liked reading the really great men. It is always something of a shock to find a man reading Milton and Spenser, Homer and Lucretius, Shakespeare and Chaucer for fun, but West read them all and liked them. It was all of a piece with his discriminating literary judgment that he disliked Virgil intensely.
It starts in the morning with laundry. No — that’s not quite it. It starts when they knock on my door at eight a.m. and I am not yet awake; in truth, I had opened my eyes to face the world at a quarter to seven, but the world at that point seemed irrelevant to my pursuits, and my eyes closed of their own accord.
So it starts with a knock on the door. I roll, quite literally, out of bed,
instinct alone responsible for the presence of my feet below my head, which allows, with some twisting, an upright posture. The blankets, too, tumble to the floor and I look at them and realize that I have not spent the night under the blanket I had curled under at midnight, but under the quilt on top of which I had fallen asleep. Momentarily, this seems odd.
Another knock at the door, now sharper, less patient. I fumble at the door,
trying to open it, but it will not budge, the knob won’t turn—because it’s locked. I twist the lock and the door swings open, sticking only slightly. And there is the day, waiting to begin.
Warrington and Paley had been competitors for University honours in former days, and had run each other hard; and everybody said now that the former was wasting his time and energies, whilst all people praised Paley for his industry. There may be doubts, however, as to which was using his time best. The one could afford time to think, and the other never could. The one could have sympathies and do kindnesses; and the other must needs be always selfish. He could not cultivate a friendship or do a charity, or admire a work of genius, or kindle at the sight of beauty or the sound of a sweet song—he had no time, and no eyes for anything but his law-books. All was dark outside his reading-lamp. Love, and Nature, and Art (which is the expression of our praise and sense of the beautiful world of God), were shut out from him. And as he turned off his lonely lamp at night, he never thought but that he had spent the day profitably, and went to sleep alike thankless and remorseless. But he shuddered when he met his old companion Warrington on the stairs, and shunned him as one that was doomed to perdition.
Awoke at 4:40 this morning owing to the heat of the room and the ichiness of my feet, on which the mosquitoes had seen fit to bestow their generous attentions.
Today’s events will run as follows: up moderately early, read, breakfast, partake of massive quantities of milky tea, drive to college, attend the social events of both the History and Classics departments, smile, quiver, stammer, leave with all possible haste, return to the apartment, seethe with righteous indignation, dine and to bed. Failing that, enjoy oneself.
Necessary skills: polite smirking, self-deprecation, feigned deference, patience, and immunity to any sense of shame.
The fortress of Galata was captured, and entry to the port of Constantinople won by force of arms. Our troops were greatly cheered by this success, and praised our Lord with thankful hearts. The people of the city, on the other hand, were greatly depressed.
Quickly, quickly to college. Mortification. The dean read out more than five
hundred names within the close confines of the lecture hall — we sat and chattered and waited.
CLASS PICTURE — a dully composed image of a people who can scarce bear the sight of each other sitting very close together and squinting into the sun.
In reality there is perhaps no one of our natural Passions so hard to subdue as Pride. Disguise it, struggle with it, beat it down, stifle it, mortify it as much as one pleases, it is still alive, and will every now and then peep out and show itself […] even if I could conceive that I had compleatly overcome it, I should probably be proud of my Humility.
Laundry. The sun shining brightly, but with high clouds.
She stood straight and calm,
Her somewhat narrow forehead braided tight
As if for taming accidental thoughts
From possible pulses…
Sunshine and late rising, then baroque.
Her early impressions were incurable. She prized the frank, the open-hearted, the eager character beyond all others. Warmth and enthusiasm did captivate her still. She felt that she could so much more depend upon the sincerity of those who sometimes looked or said a careless or a hasty thing, than of those whose prescence of mind never varied, whose tongue never slipped.
Reading Halliwell’s book on Aristotle’s Poetics
(University of Chicago Press, 1999): mimêsis, katharsis, etc. I paced across the deep red of the carpet, carefully keeping within the wool boundary, my attention buried in the book; to leave the rug would be to fall into the abyss of daily life — and also to risk running into the furniture.
Am cutting up useless old photographs into tidy little squares, whether to
make a mosaic or to rid myself of memories, I cannot really say. The little blocks of color, near one inch squared, look orderly and unnatural on the un-vacuumed carpet.
Some people remake themselves everyday. I admire their energy, for even with a lifetime I doubt I shall have completed this self to my satisfaction.
Another means of preserving health, to be attended to, is the having a constant supply of fresh air in your bed-chamber. It has been a great mistake, the sleeping in rooms exactly closed, and in beds surrounded by curtains. No outward air that may come in to you is so unwholesome as the unchanged air, often breathed, of a close chamber. As boiling water does not grow hotter by longer boiling, if the particles that receive greater heat can escape; so living bodies do not putrefy, if the particles, so fast as they become putrid, can be thrown off.
Freedom of thought — freedom from thought — thoughtful, thoughtless liberty.
Suppers are not bad, if we have not dined; but restless nights naturally follow hearty suppers after full dinners. Indeed, as there is a difference in constitutions, some rest well after these meals; it costs them only a frightful dream and an apoplexy. Nothing is more common in the newspapers, than instances of people who, after eating a hearty supper, are found dead abed in the morning.’
No, never use a girl as the point of projection, dear! Girls are still traditionally supposed to be idiots.
And who was it that said ‘A man’s reach should exceed his grasp’ and where (and why) on earth did I hear of it?*
* ‘…or what’s a heaven for?’ — Robert Browning, of course, though I did not discover this until much later; where I first heard it, though, I still cannot say.
A man’s power to connect his thought with its proper symbol, and so to utter it, depends on the simplicity of his character, that is, upon his love of truth, and his desire to communicate it without loss. The corruption of man is followed by the corruption of language. When simplicity of character and the sovereignty of ideas is broken up by the prevalence of secondary desires, the desire of riches, of pleasure, of power, and of praise,—and the duplicity and falsehood take place of simplicity and truth, the power over nature as an interpreter of the will, is in a degree lost; new imagery ceases to be created, and old words are perverted to stand for things which are not; a paper currency is employed, when there is no bullion in the vaults.
Time passes with a measured and memorable wing during the first period of a sojourn in a new place, amoung new characters and new manners. Every person, every incident, every feeling touches and stirs the imagination. The restless mind creates and observes at the same time. Indeed there is scarcely any popular tenet more erroneous than that which holds that when time is slow, life is dull. It is very often, and very much the reverse. If we look back on those passages of our life which dwell most upon the memory, they are brief periods full of action and novel sensation.
There’s a similar passage in Mann’s The Magic Mountain, though naturally there it goes on for several pages of crystalline detail (about soup, if I recall, and the eternal intern eternally bringing the eternal soup — a ripe rummy passage). An interesting book, Sybil, but Disraeli was not much of a novelist; it reads like spirited and somewhat artless version of Brontë’s Shirley, or an abridged and more explicitly class-based Wives and Daughters. The historical asides are nearly Trollope-ian, but lack the narrative luster, and the character development bears the savor of the eighteenth century, being simple, readily understood, but somewhat lacking in local color.
‘What’s all this about sin, eh?’
‘That,’ I said, very sick. ‘Using Ludwig van like that. He did no harm to anyone. Beethoven just wrote music.’ And then I was really sick and they had to bring a bowl that was in the shape of like a kidney.
‘Music,’ said Dr Brodsky, like musing. ‘So you’re keen on music. I know nothing about it myself. It’s a useful emotional heightener, that’s all I know. Well, well. What do you think about that, eh, Branom?’
‘It can’t be helped,’ said Dr Branom. ‘Each man kills the thing he loves, as the poet-prisoner said. Here’s the punishment element, perhaps. The Governor ought to be pleased.’
Musing on music — water the wetter, the wetter the water. ‘And
each man kills the thing he loves, by all let this be heard. The coward does it
with a kiss, the brave man with a sword.’
The workmen spoke in iambic pentameter, a swift and toneless sequence of stressed and unstressed, not languid or melodic, but with a choppy sharpness, unconscious precision and imprecise annoyance. Curiously, the word ‘fuck’ could take any metrical position, as the sentiment or the phrase required.
History is not a discipline but something that is not yours — which is the main definition of beauty. Hence, the sentiment, for it is not going to love you back.
How tiresome it must be, to reduce the essential story of the world to nothing by a case of unrequited longing. Yet, as we know, it is not progress, we do not tread with uneven step toward some unblighted sweet perfection — so the sickly sway of modern romanticism will have to do.
This gives me the shivers, because I don’t think it’s actually about painting:
In these places, though the stroke may be incomplete, yet the intention is carried out. Only when you realize that there are two styles of painting, the free and the detailed, may you join in discussions about painting.
This, on the other hand, makes me very, very happy:
He said that, when people paid a high price for fruit which had been ripened early, they must despair of seeing the fruit ripen
at the proper season. And, being once asked in what consisted the virtue of youth, he said, ‘In doing nothing to excess (to mêden agan)’.
A funny color has settled on the trees, a noxious youthful green promising both the plentitude of fall and the mishaps of summer. Idle much of the morning. And the rest of the day, too.
O mind of man that does not know the end
or future fates, nor how to keep the measure
when we are fat with pride at things that prosper!
There are moments when in connection with the sensitively imaginative or morbidly anachronistic—the mentality assailed
and the same time not of any great strength and the problem confronting it of sufficient force and complexity—the reason not actually toppling from its throne, still totters or is warped or shaken—the mind befuddled to the extent that for the time being, at least, unreason or disorder and mistaken or erroneous counsel would appear to hold against all else. In such instances the will and the courage confronted by some great difficulty which it can neither master nor endure, appears in some to recede in precipitate flight, leaving only panic and temporary unreason in its wake.
Sweltering. Not that it’s warm or anything—just my poor brain tottering under the weight of the semester’s coming end. Even so.
How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable
Seem to me all the uses of this world!
Still reading Waley’s translation of Genji, with which we ‘are not best pleased,’ to borrow Waley’s idiom. (There are also several printers’ errors sprinkled liberally throughout the text, tho’ in our generous spirit we pretend not to mind them — but I hear there’s a new translation on the market…) However:
A simple Chinese verse is surely not much to ask of a professional poet; but they all wore an expression of the deepest gloom. One expects elderly scholars to be somewhat odd in their movements and behaviour, and it was amusing to see the lively concern with which the Emperor watched their various but always uncouth and erratic methods of approaching the Throne (171f.).
Spent an hour-and-a-half wandering around the Bridge St. Cemetery yesterday afternoon, obviously taking pictures. Yes, I felt rather conspicuous, being, as I was, obtrusively alive. However. It was sunny, relatively warm, and faintly breezy—the sun was still a few hours from setting and an amiable solitude had settled over everything and if I’d had a lighter book than C. Starr’s The Economic and Social Growth of Early Greece: 800-500 B.C., I might have sat down and done a bit of reading.
Woke this morning to the chiding of the sun. One always knows that it shall
be a bad—or, at the very least, trying—day when distant instances
of extreme combustion seem to have gained the power of speech.
Moving on, however, to other things. Why is it that, as I read some few of
Aemilia Lanyer’s (thought by some to be Shakespeare’s ‘Dark Lady’ — my copy had been annotated by a student with feminist leanings, who had not yet learnt to avoid the ballpoint pen when marking up books) poems in the bath this morning, I had the sudden desire to read Horace? Me nec femina nec puer iam nec spes animi credula mutui nec certare iuvat mero nec vincire novis tempora floribus…
Now there’s a word I don’t like: spiritual. Heard in these contexts: ‘I’m not religious or anything, but I am very spiritual…’ -or- ‘yeah, you know, he’s all spiritual and shit.’ Spritual people supposedly tap into the grand essence that is, the great non-materialistic who-knows-what, all without the aid of organized religion. In general, they are rather wheat-grassy, herbal, and unwashed. Only the last adjective is essential. Spiritual people are the Great Unwashed. But that, of course, is hitting rather below the belt.
It’s supposedly about truth, justice, and the beauty of things, inner
oneness and all that crap, but really, it’s just about getting a bigger
piece of the pie. Yes, in the cosmic bakery that is beyond human understanding,
there is the pie of holy consequence—usually reserved for gun-toting Christians, political parties, and other fundamentalists, it has of late become of especial interest to the Spiritual.
Don’t get me wrong. There are sincerely spiritual people. Just not very many.
Went last night to coffee and a film with J. We saw Iris
(a wretched film) and whispered, and pointed: ‘that’s All Souls,’
‘St. Giles!’ ‘My library!’
That was not the most interesting portion of the evening, however.
She has been accepted to all nine of the neuroscience programs to which she applied (each offering a stipend of $24,000 per annum or so—the bias towards the sciences is outrageously unfair). She has narrowed her favorites to Stanford and Washington University in St. Louis. I am a snob. I think she should go to Stanford. ‘It’s the #1 neuroscience program in the country,’ she explained. But she hesitates. Because there’s a boy. Who has not been accepted to any of his graduate programs (as of yet). This, I think, is silly. Not that he’s been rejected, but that she would make a decision of no small importance based on a person with whom she has not had a real (i.e. not long-distance) relationship — and if he hasn’t been tied down to any particular location, well then I see no reason why he couldn’t totter towards Palo Alto.
So I, in my sagacity, said to her, ‘Boys are fickle, they change, grow old, are here one minute and gone the next; but a university—a university is forever.’
This met with giggles. I’m not sure why.
And god said let there be work. And there was work. And then god said, no,
really, let there be good work. And then the workers complained that that wasn’t in their contract. They decided to go on strike. Union management sat in circles, each rubbing their palms in greedy satisfaction. And it was good.
And when young dawn with her rose-red fingers walks o’er the dew of yon high eastern hill, the night had waned and with it their allotted time among the shades. Of course we merely allude to avoid making any statement of our own. Everything else is indeterminate. Notes of wandering scientist:
It seems sad that on the one hand such exquisite creatures [as the bird of paradise] should live out their lives and exhibit their charms only in these wild inhospitable regions, doomed for ages yet to come to hopeless barbarism; while, on the other hand, should civilized man ever reach these distant lands, and bring