Genocide, after all is an exercise in community building. A vigorous totalitarian order requires that the people be invested in the leaders’ scheme, and while genocide may be the most perverse and ambitious means to this end, it is also the most comprehensive. In 1994, Rwanda was regarded in much of the rest of the world as the exemplary instance of the chaos and anarchy associated with collapsed states. In fact, the genocide was the produce of order, authoritarianism, decades of modern political theorizing and indoctrination, and one of the most meticulously administered states in history. And strange as it may sound, the ideology – or what Rwandans call ‘the logic’ – of genocide was promoted as a way not to create suffering but to alleviate it. The specter of an absolute menace that requires absolute eradication binds leader and people in a hermetic utopian embrace, and the individual – always an annoyance to totality – ceases to exist.
– Philip Gourevitch
We wish to inform you that tomorrow
we will be killed with our families, p. 95.
The method of handling notes is not a makeshift device necessitated by the use of the old plates but it one that I have used in several previous books and found advantageous. In my opinion the text of a book should be written and presented for continuous reading. Calling the reader’s attention to footnotes merely distracts him. If he wishes to check up on the author or acquire additional information, he should do so at the end of the chapter by turning to the notes then. I have therefore constructed text and notes on what might be called parallel tracks, identifying the place of each note by means of the page reference and some significant words. In the case of quotations, I have given the first words in quotation marks.
– George R. Stewart
(Names on the Land, p. 443)
The important thing for the remembering author is not what he experienced, but the weaving of his memory, the Penelope work of recollection. Or should one call it, rather, a Penelope work of forgetting? […] And is not his work of spontaneous recollection, in which remembrance is the woof and forgetting the warp, a counterpart to Penelope’s work rather than its likeness? For here the day unravels what the night was [sic] woven. When we awake each morning, we hold in our hands, usually weakly and loosely, but a few fringes of the tapestry of a lived life, as loomed for us by forgetting. However, with our purposeful activity and, even more, our purposive remembering each day unravels the web and the ornaments of forgetting.
– Walter Benjamin
(Illuminations
‘The Image of Proust’, p.202)
Even today, the majority of people in poor countries learn all their language skills without any paid tutorship, without any attempt whatsoever to teach them how to speak. And they learn to speak in a way that nowhere compares with the self-conscious, self-important, colorless mumbling that, after a long stay in villages in South America and Southeast Asia, always shocks me when I visit an American college. I feel sorrow for those students whom education has made tone deaf; they have lost the faculty of hearing the difference between the desiccated utterance of standard television English and the living speech of the unschooled. What else can I expect, though, from people who are not brought up at a mother’s breast, but on formula? On canned milk, if they are from poor families, and on a brew prepared under the nose of Ralph Nader if they are born among the enlightened?
– Ivan Illich, ‘The War Against Subsistence’
(in Shadow Work, p. 66)
Though ethnie and nationality might be distinguished in any number of ways – size, attachment to territory, secular versus religious identity, ‘soft’ versus ‘hard’ boundaries – the most fundamental difference is not some ‘objective’ characteristic internal to the group, but rather the discursive universe in which it operates and realizes itself. A modern nationality, with all its familiar qualities and political claims – popular sovereignty, ethnicity as a basis for political independence, and a claim on a particular piece of real estate – are only possible within the modern (roughly post-American revolution)1 discourse of nationalism. Whatever Greeks in the classical period, or Armenians in the fifth century, were, they could not be nations in the same sense as they would be in the age of nationalism. The discourses of politics of earlier times must be understood and respected in their own particularity and not submerged in understandings yet to come.
– Ronald Suny,
(The Revenge of the Past, p. 13)
When you reached your goal, you were locked in again, each having first been handed a small piece of paper, the size of two railway tickets. (At the Lubyanka this was not particularly interesting. The paper was blank and white. But there were enticing prisons where they gave you pages of books – and what reading that was! You could try to guess whence it came, read it over on both sides, digest the contents, evaluate the style – and when words had been cut in half that was particularly essential! You could trade with your comrades. In some places they handed out pages from the once progressive Granat Encyclopedia, and sometimes, it’s awful to say it, from the classics, and I don’t mean belles-lettres either. Visits to the toilet thus became a means of acquiring knowledge.)
– Solzhenitsyn
(Gulag Archipelago, p. 204)
a window to walk away
in
Aram Saroyan, from Aram Saroyan (1968)
Another man speaks satirically of those people who out of restlessness or curiosity embark on long journeys, who keep no diaries and write no descriptions, who carry no notebooks; who go to see things, and who either don’t see them or forget what they have seen; who are only anxious to look at unfamiliar towers or steeples, and cross rivers that are not called Seine or Loire; who leave their native land merely in order to return to it, who like being away from home, and hope some day to be travelled men; and his satire is justified, it deserves listening to.
– La Bruyère,
‘Of Fashion’, p. 252.
ἀρχαιολογία δέ τίς ἐστι περὶ τοῦ ἔθνους τοῦδε τοιαύτη· Ἄρμενος ἐξ Ἀρμενίου πόλεως Θετταλικῆς, ἣ κεῖται μεταξὺ Φερῶν καὶ Λαρίσης ἐπὶ τῇ Βοίβῃ, καθάπερ εἴρηται, συνεστράτευσεν Ἰάσονι εἰς τὴν Ἀρμενίαν· τούτου φασὶν ἐπώνυμον τὴν Ἀρμενίαν οἱ περὶ Κυρσίλον τὸν Φαρσάλιον καὶ Μήδιον τὸν Λαρισαῖον, ἄνδρες συνεστρατευκότες Ἀλεξάνδρῳ· τῶν δὲ μετὰ τοῦ Ἀρμένου τοὺς μὲν τὴν Ἀκιλισηνὴν οἰκῆσαι τὴν ὑπὸ τοῖς Σωφηνοῖς πρότερον οὖσαν, τοὺς δὲ ἐν τῇ Συσπιρίτιδι ἕως τῆς Καλαχηνῆς καὶ τῆς Ἀδιαβηνῆς ἔξω τῶν Ἀρμενιακῶν ὅρων. καὶ τὴν ἐσθῆτα δὲ τὴν Ἀρμενιακὴν Θετταλικήν φασιν, οἷον τοὺς βαθεῖς χιτῶνας οὓς καλοῦσιν Θετταλικοὺς ἐν ταῖς τραγῳδίαις, καὶ ζωννύουσι περὶ τὰ στήθη καὶ ἐφαπτίδας, ὡς καὶ τῶν τραγῳδῶν μιμησαμένων τοὺς Θετταλούς· ἔδει μὲν γὰρ αὐτοῖς ἐπιθέτου κόσμου τοιούτου τινός, οἱ δὲ Θετταλοὶ μάλιστα βαθυστολοῦντες, ὡς εἰκός, διὰ τὸ πάντων εἶναι Ἑλλήνων βορειοτάτους καὶ ψυχροτάτους νέμεσθαι τόπους ἐπιτηδειοτάτην παρέσχοντο μίμησιν τῇ τῶν ὑποκριτῶν διασκευῇ ἐν τοῖς ἀναπλάσμασιν· καὶ τὸν τῆς ἱππικῆς ζῆλόν φασιν εἶναι Θετταλικὸν καὶ τούτοις ὁμοίως καὶ Μήδοις. τὴν δὲ Ἰάσονος στρατείαν καὶ τὰ Ἰασόνια μαρτυρεῖ, ὧν τινα οἱ δυνάσται κατεσκεύασαν παραπλησίως ὥσπερ τὸν ἐν Ἀβδήροις νεὼν τοῦ Ἰάσονος Παρμενίων.
– Strabo, Geography, 11.14.121
Our ancestors wrote prose in long, beautiful sentences, convoluted like curls; although we still learn to do it that way in school, we write in short sentences that cut more quickly to the heart of the matter; and no one in the world can free his thinking from the manner in which his time wears the cloak of language. Thus no man can know to what extent he actually means what he writes and in writing, it is far less that people twist words than it is that words twist people.
Robert Musil, ‘The Paintspreader’,
in Posthumous Papers of a Living Author, p. 67
I was sitting on the side of my bed in my pyjamas, thinking about getting up, but not yet committed. I didn’t feel very well, but I didn’t feel as sick as I ought to, not as sick as I would feel if I had a salaried job. My head hurt and felt large and hot and my tongue was dry and had gravel on it and my throat was stiff and my jaw was not untender. But I had had worse mornings.
Before the meeting ended, which was not long after, I was set thinking of Despard-Smith’s use of the phrase ‘the men’. That habit went back to the ’90’s: most of us at this table would say ‘the young men’ or ‘the undergraduates’. But at this time, the late 1930’s, the undergraduates themselves would usually say ‘the boys’. It was interesting to hear so many strata of speech round one table. Old Gay, for example, used ‘absolutely’, not only in places where the younger of us might quite naturally still, but also in the sense of ‘actually’ or even ‘naturally’ – exactly as though he were speaking in the 1870’s. Pilbrow, always up to the times, used an idiom entirely modern, but Despard-Smith still brought out slang that was fresh at the end of the century – ‘crab’, and ‘josser’,1 and ‘by Jove’. Crawford said ‘man of science’, keeping to the Edwardian usage which we had abandoned. So, with more patience it would have been possible to construct a whole geological record of idioms, simply by listening word by word to a series of college meetings.
* Defined by the OED thus:
A simpleton; a soft or silly fellow. So, in flippant or contemptuous use, a fellow, an (old) chap.
Date range from 1886 to 1946, but clustering around 1900 (corroborating Snow).
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Housman in his old age was a remote figure, one of the great men of Cambridge, and the subject of occasional speculation. Stories circulated about him and continue to circulate. Here is one, with a better pedigree than most as it comes from an ex-pupil of Housman’s friend, Andrew Gow:
The philosopher Wittgenstein, who had rooms above Housman, had no private lavatory; Housman had. Wittgenstein had to go downstairs and cross Whewell’s Court to find one. Once, when Wittgenstein had an attack of diarrhoea, he asked through his bedmaker if he might make use of Housman’s lavatory. But the answer came back that Housman was a philosophical hedonist, and therefore refused Wittgenstein’s request.
The tutor was glad and proud at the sight. His face in his drunken daze – for the Commander kept his cup filled – was awfully thin. He was too great an eccentric to have found employment commensurate with his learning, and he lived in poverty and neglect, but Genji had singled him out that way because he saw something in him. The man seemed destined for even greater things in the future…
The Count said a great many civil things to me upon the occasion; and added, very politely, how much he stood obliged to Shakespeare for making me known to him – But, a-propos, said he, Shakespeare is full of great things he forgot a small punctilio of announcing your name – it puts you under a necessity of doing it yourself.
¶ THERE is not a more perplexing affair in life to me, than to set about telling any one who I am – for there is scarce any body I cannot give a better account of than myself; and I have often wish’d I could do it in a single word – and have an end of it. It was the only time and occasion in my life I could accomplish this to any purpose for Shakespeare lying upon the table, and recollecting I was in his books, I took up Hamlet, and turning immediately to the gravediggers scene in the fifth act, I laid my finger upon YORICK, and advancing the book to the Count, with my finger all the way over the name – Me voici! said I.
– Laurence Sterne
A Sentimental Journey
(‘The Passport – Versailles– 1–2)
Athos, Olympus, Ætna, Atlas, made
These hills seem things of lesser dignity,
All, save the lone Soracte’s height, display’d
Not now in snow, which asks the lyric Roman’s aidFor our remembrance, and from out the plain
Heaves like a long-swept wave about to break,
And on the curl hangs pausing: not in vain
May he, who will, his recollections rake
And quote in classic raptures, and awake
The hills with Latian echoes…
Then how vncertaine our estates would be, how vncomfortable our selues, how dangerous and pernicious it would be for the state of euery common-wealth, all men may easily iudge, yet God to preuent these inconueniences, for the further benefit of mankind, as hee hath giuen vs a voice to expresse the minde vnto the eare, so hee hath giuen vs hands to frame letters or markes for the voice to expresse the minde vnto the eyes. So that the eyes and eares are as it were the receiuers of message sent vnto the heart, the hands and voice as deliuerers of message sent from the heart: And though the voice be a more liuely kind of speech, yet in respect it is but onely a sleight accident made of so light a substance as the ayre, it is no sooner vttered but it is dissolued, euery simple sound doth expell and extinguish the sound going before it, so that the eare can haue but one touch of the ayre beating vpon it to declare the speech vnto the mind: but the hand though it giue a dumbe and a more dull kind of speech, yet it giues a more durable. A letter is a grosser substance, and therefore is of more continuance than a sound: what is once written still continueth when the hand ceaseth. If the eyes haue not satisfied the mind at one view, they may looke on it againe, yea till they haue satisfied it’s desire: And by this meanes of noting and charactring of the voice, all things worthy of memory are defended form iniury of forgetfulnesse…*
* A learned and wise person would refer to Plato and the evolution of views on literacy & orality & memory, but at present I am too feeble – the spirit, as they say, is willing, but the flesh is weak. Also, the cisterns in the following passage please me:
…perchance I may be charged with presumption both in respect of my selfe, and in respect of my yeers, in that I professe to be a teacher of a science to others, hauing as it were but newly learned my letters my selfe: Whereunto I answer, that I learned not this my arte out of the books and workes of learned men, neither would my small meanes afford me to be acquainted with their great volumes, only out of a volume of Gods owne guift and making did I take this small Manuscript, euen to all men hath he giuen the same impression, whereby the truth hereof may be examined: yet certainly the vnripenesse of my yeeres, and want of other learning, had wholly withheld me from publishing thereof, so that it might haue died with my selfe and haue benefited no man, had I not considered that euery one of what estate, degree, or condition soeuer, is bound in duety to reueale whatsoeuer may be beneficiall to his country; assuring my selfe that God doth not giue either knowledge or riches to any priuate person meerly for his own particular vse, but imploieth those on whom he bestoweth such guifts, as Cisternes and conduits to conuey and impart them likewise to others. Yet he therein so prouideth that themselues also be neuer empty. This consideration therefore caused me to thinke it were far better, though with boldnesse to set foorth that portion of knowledge which God had giuen me, then with a dastard-like feare for the causes afore remembred to conceale the benefit; Hauing therefore laboured to finde out the true ground of speech, that the manifold errors therein might be made manifest, and so auoided (f.A6v–A7).
1. – I could sit forever with a man, provided that what he said did not grate on my ears, that he had charm, and that he did not talk very much. […] The mark of an excellent man is that he writes easily in an acceptable hand, sings agreeably and in tune, and, though appearing reluctant to accept when wine is pressed on him, is not a teetotaler.
– from the Tsurezuregusa of Kenkō
(trans. D. Keene)
…for certainly Life is so Pretious, as it ought not to be Ventured, where there is no Honour to be Gain’d in the Hazard, for Death seems Terrible, I am sure it doth to Me, there is nothing I Dread more than Death, I do not mean the Strokes of Death, nor the Pains, but the Oblivion in Death, I fear not Death’s Dart so much as Death’s Dungeon, for I could willingly part with my Present Life, to have it Redoubled in after Memory, and would willingly Die in my Self, so I might Live in my Friends; Such a Life have I with you, and you with me, our Persons being at a Distance, we live to each other no otherwise than if we were Dead, for Absence is a Present Death, as Memory is a Future Life; and so many Friends as Remember me, so many Lives I have, indeed so many Brains as Remember me, so many Lives I have, whether they be Friends or Foes, onely in my Friends Brains I am Better Entertained; And this is the Reason I Retire so much from the Sight of the World, for the Love of Life and Fear of Death…
* See also the Duchess of Newcastle’s autobiography.
[↩]
Yet what, said she, is to be expected from our persuit of happiness, when we find the state of life to be such, that happiness itself is the cause of misery? Why should we endeavour to attain that, of which the possession cannot be secured? I shall henceforward fear to yield my heart to excellence, however bright, or to fondness, however tender, lest I should lose again what I have lost…
…eorum virorum cogitata non solum ad mores corrigendos, sed etiam ad omnium utilitatem perpetuo sunt praeparata, athletarum autem nobilitates brevi spatio cum suis corporibus senescunt; itaque neque cum maxime sunt florentes neque posteritati hi, quemadmodum sapientium cogitata hominum vitae, prodesse possunt.
The researches of these men are an everlasting possession, not only for the improvement of character but also for general utility. Indeed, the fame of athletes soon wanes with their bodily powers; and neither when they are most vigorous, nor afterwards for posterity, can they do for human life what is done by the researches of the learned.
The student may read Homer or Æschylus in the Greek without danger of dissipation or luxuriousness, for it implies that he in some measure emulate their heroes, and consecrate morning hours to their pages. The heroic books, even if printed in the character of our mother tongue, will always be in a language dead to degenerate times; and we must laboriously seek the meaning of each word and line, conjecturing a larger sense than common use permits out of what wisdom and valor and generosity we have. The modern cheap and fertile press, with all its translations, has done little to bring us nearer to the heroic writers of antiquity. They seem as solitary, and the letter in which they are printed as rare and curious, as ever. It is worth the expense of youthful days and costly hours, if you learn only some words of an ancient language, which are raised out of the trivialness of the street, to be perpetual suggestions and provocations. It is not in vain that the farmer remembers and repeats the few Latin words which he has heard. Men sometimes speak as if the study of the classics would at length make way for more modern and practical studies; but the adventurous student will always study classics, in whatever language they may be written and however ancient they may be. For what are the classics but the noblest recorded thoughts of man? They are the only oracles which are not decayed, and there are such answers to the most modern inquiry in them as Delphi and Dodona never gave. We might as well omit to study Nature because she is old. To read well, that is, to read true books in a true spirit, is a noble exercise, and one that will task the reader more than any exercise which the customs of the day esteem. It requires a training such as the athletes underwent, the steady intention almost of the whole life to this object.
The crusades were a proper time to observe human nature – the pursuit of holiness for the sake of money, the use of torture for the sake of identity, a time of passionate care and commitment. Those who distributed pain were politicians; those who profited, saints. Either way life was not easy; unless you died young, which was recommended (79).
* * *
It had been a cold summer. I was living in London in a bed-sitting room at the top of four flights of stairs.
There was a peculiar outbreaks of violence at this time. A professor of Greek murdered his father at a crossroads; in Spain, a matador stuck his sword through a horse. (135)
Now and then a man may arise among us who in any calling, whether it be in law, in physic, in religious teaching, in art, or literature, may in his professional enthusiasm utterly disregard money. All will honour his enthusiasm, and if he be wifeless and childless, his disregard of the great object of men’s work will be blameless. But it is a mistake to suppose that a man is a better man because he despises money. Few do so, and those few in doing so suffer a defeat. Who does not desire to be hospitable to his friends, generous to the poor, liberal to all, munificent to his children, and to be himself free from the carking fear which poverty creates? The subject will not stand an argument;—and yet authors are told that they should disregard payment for their work, and be content to devote their unbought brains to the welfare of the public. Brains that are unbought will never serve the public much.1
* The next sentence is: ‘Take away from English authors their copyrights, and you would very soon take away from England her authors.’ Far be it from me to point out the flaws in his thinking, but is Victorian England known for its dearth of authors? (cf. New Grub Street)
[↩]
I shall say but little at present of their Learning, which for many Ages hath flourished in all its Branches among them: But their Manner of Writing is very peculiar; being neither from the Left to the Right, like the Europeans; nor from the Right to the Left, like the Arabians; nor from up to down, like the Chinese; nor from down to up, like the Cascagians; but aslant from one Corner of the Paper to the other, like Ladies in England.
περὶ δὲ τούτου φιλοτιμότερον εἰπεῖν προήχθην, διότι Τίμαιος ὁ τῶν πρό γε αὐτοῦ συγγραφέων πικρότατα κατηγορήσας καὶ συγγνώμην οὐδεμίαν τοῖς ἱστοριογράφοις ἀπολιπὼν αὐτὸς εὑρίσκεται σχεδιάζων, ἐν οἷς μάλιστα ἑαυτὸν ἀποπέφαγκεν ἀκριβολογούμενον. δεῖ γάρ, οἶμαι, τοὺς συγγραφεῖς ἐν μὲν τοῖς ἀγνοήμασι τυγχάνειν συγγνώμης, ὡς ἂν ἀνθρώπους ὄντας καὶ τῆς ἐν τοῖς παροιχομένοις χρόνοις ἀληθείας οὔσης δυσευρέτου, τοὺς μέντοι γε κατὰ προαίρεσιν οὐ τυγχάνοντας τοῦ ἀκριβοῦς προσηκόντως κατηγορίας τυγχάνειν, ὅταν κολακεύοντές τινας ἢ δι’ ἔχθραν πικρότερον προσβάλλοντες ἀποσφάλλωνται τῆς ἀληθείας.
Notions and scruples were like spilt needles, making one afraid of treading, or sitting down, or even eating.
Even if we venture bravely to paint like them, it’ll amount to the same thing, In the end, our methods will die out, our colors will fade. No one will care about our books and our paintings, and those who do express interest with a sneer, with no understanding whatsoever, why there’s no perspective—or else they won’t be able to find the manuscripts at all. Indifference, time, and disaster will destroy our art. The Arabian glue used in the bindings contains fish, honey and bone, and the pages are sized and polished with a finish made from egg white and starch. Greedy, shameless mice will nibble these pages away; termites, worms and a thousand varieties of insect will gnaw our manuscripts out of existence. Bindings will fall apart and pages will drop out. Women lighting their stoves, thieves, indifferent servants and children will thoughtlessly tear out the pages and pictures. Child princes will scrawl over the illustrations with toy pens. They’ll blacken people’s eyes, wipe their runny noses on the pages, doodle in the margins with black ink…
Since there are more Fools in the World than Wise Men, and even among those who pass for Wise, that is, who have Abilities to be truly so, too many abuse and warp their Understanding to petty and evil Designs, and to such Trials and Artifices as appear the readiest way to attain them. Since Riches and Power are what Men covet, supposing these can procure them all they wish; Hopes to gain more, or at least to secure what one has, will always be a handle by which Human Nature may be mov’d, and carry’d about as the cunning Manager pleases.
Who is not exerting at the time for exertion,
Young, strong, possessed of laziness,
With mind filled with confused notions, indolent, lethargic—
Does not find the way to wisdom.
An upright young man, with an ardent heart, but without wealth, and temperamentally incautious, such as you are, will always be a tool of faction, or a victim of the powerful. And if in public affairs you can keep youself uncorrupted by the general nastiness, oh! you will be highly praised. But then you will be killed by calumny, that dagger in the night. Your prison will be forsaken by your friends, and your tomb scarcely honoured by a single sigh.
Tamburlaine. What god soever holds thee in his arms,
Giving thee nectar and ambrosia,
Behold me here, divine Zenocrate,
Raving, impatient, desperate and mad,
Breaking my steeled lance, with which I burst
The rusty beams of Janus’ temple doors,
Letting out death and tyrannising war,
To march with me under this bloody flag!
And, if thou pitiest Tamburlaine the Great,
Come down from heaven and live with me again!Theridamas. Ah, good my lord, be patient! she is dead,
And all this raging cannot make her live.
If words might serve, our voice hath rent the air;
If tears, our eyes have watered all the earth;
If grief, our murdered hearts have strained forth blood.
Nothing prevails, for she is dead, my lord.Tamburlaine. For she is dead! thy words do pierce my soul:
Ah, sweet Theridamas, say so no more;
Though she be dead, yet let me think she lives,
And feed my mind that dies for want of her.
Where’er her soul be, thou shalt stay with me,
Embalm’d with cassia, amber greece, and myrrh,
Not lapt in lead, but in a sheet of gold,
And, till I die, thou shalt not be interr’d.
Then in as rich a tomb as Mausolus
We both will rest and have one epitaph
Writ in as many several languages
As I have conqered kindoms with my sword.
This cursed town will I consume with fire,
Because this place bereft me of my love;
The houses, burnt, will look as if they mourn’d….
The art of literature consists exactly in this passage from the Eye to the Voice. From the wealth of nature to that thin shadow of words, that gramophone. The Readers are the people who see things and want them expressed. The author is the Voice, or the conjuror who does tricks with that curious rope of letters, which is quite different from real passion and sight.
The prose writer drags meaning along with the rope. The poet makes it stand on end and hit you.
One wonders, though, how the ‘thin shadow of words’ became a ‘gramophone’ in the duration of one word, two spaces, and a comma. Although he set up the image, a bit, in the preceeding sentence, he does nothing to support it, so it does not add much to the sense of his argument. Hulme being an Imagist, I suppose the meaning should lag, as thunder does, behind the lightning-flash of images; yet allow me to be momentarily catholic in my taste—I thought it simply sloppy.
Which just goes to show how easy it is to miss the point of the excerpt, which is, of course, the wonderful image of the ropes.
From the Alexiad of Anna Comnena:
…he gave them no pretext for war and did not use compulsion on them; nevertheless, if they did cause trouble, he checked them. After all, it is the mark of a bad general, when all is peaceful, purposely to provoke his neighbours to war—for peace is the end of all wars. Invariably to prefer war instead of peace, always to disregard the good end, is typical of foolish commanders and foolish political leaders, the mark of men who work for the destruction of their own state (2003.11, 12.v).
From the Journals of Charlotte Forten Grimké, black abolitionist and activist (2003.3):
Tuesday, June 15, 1858. Have been under-going a thorough self-examination. The result is a mingled feeling of sorrow, shame and self-contempt. Have realized more deeply and bitterly than ever in my life my own ignorance and folly. Not only am I without the gifts of Nature, wit, beauty and talent; without the accomplishments which nearly every one of my age, whom I know, possesses; but I am not even intelligent. And for this there is not the shadow of an excuse. Have had many advantages of late years; and it is entirely owing to my own want of energy, perseverance and application, that I have not improved them. It grieves me deeply to think of this. I have read an immense quantity, and it has all amounted to nothing, because I have been too indolent and foolish to take the trouble of reflecting. Have wasted more time than I dare think of, in idle day-dreams, one of which was, how much I should know and do before I was twenty-one. And here I am nearly twenty-one, and only a wasted life to look back upon. —Add to intellectual defects a disposition whose despondancy and fretfulness have constantly led me to look on the dark side of things, and effectually prevented me from contributing to the happiness of others; whose contrariness has often induced me to do those things which I ought not to have done, and to leave undone those which I ought to have done, and wanted to do,—and we have as dismal a picture as one could look upon; and yet hardly dismal enough to be faithful. Of course, I want to try to reform. But how to begin!
To go with Grimké—Phillis Wheatley: ‘What would happen, then, if we ceased to stereotype Wheatley, to cast her in this role or that, but, instead, read her, with all the resourcefulness that she herself brought to her craft?’ (New Yorker)
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.
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)
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.
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
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ego hoc feci mm–mmx
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