Water in the millrace, through a sluice of stone,
plunges headlong into that black pond
where, absurd and out-of-season, a single swan
floats chaste as snow, taunting the clouded mind
which hunger to haul the white reflection down.The austere sun descends above the fen,
an orange cyclops-eye, scorning to look
longer on this landscape of chagrin;
feather dark in thought, I stalk like a rook,
brooding as the winter night comes on.
– Sylvia Plath,
‘Winter Landscape, with Rooks’
A short story I like:
They have a small bedroom. The bed is small, but they are not fat and they love each other. She sleeps with her knees neatly inside his knees and when they get up they do not get in each other’s way. She says, ‘Put on the shirt with the blue patterns like little spotted plates,’ and he says, ‘Put on the white skirt that you wear the purple jacket with.’ They have no prejudices against colours but like what they have.
Their other room is not larger, but it is cleverly arranged, with a table for this and a table for that. He makes the sandwiches at one table while at another she writes a letter to a friend who needs money. She writes promptly to say they have no money and sends their love. It is not true that they have no money; but they are both out of work and must be careful with the little money they have. They are thinking of renting an office and selling advice on all subjects, for they are very intelligent people . The idea seems like a joke, and they talk about it jokingly; but they mean it.
They go to a large park. It costs little to get there and they know the very tree they want to sit under. It is more like a business trip than a holiday. They eat their lunch in a methodical way and afterwards look through the grass around them as a mother looks through her child’s hair to see if it is clean. Then they think about their affairs and change their minds many times.
– Laura Riding Jackson
(‘Privateness’)
Byzantine diplomacy was very expensive. Dowries, gifts, subsidies to whole nations, all involved the treasury in enormous sums. Even economic blockades, sometimes effectively employed towards the Saracens, were costly for the Empire also. The Government was moreover perfectly willing to pay its enemies direct not to invade its territory. Lawless princes across the frontier thus became clients, almost wage-earners, much preferring a regular income of Byzantine gold to the uncertain takings of a raid. At times even, if Byzantium was for some reason unwilling to undertake a war, a yearly some of money would go to Baghdad or Preslav. The Calif or the Tsar might call it a tribute, if he chose. To the Emperor it was merely a wise investment; when he was ready to fight the payment would cease. But it all depended on a full treasury. So long as the money was there Byzantine diplomacy flourished. But when Constantinople was no longer the financial centre of the world then there came the decline.
– Steven Runciman
(Byzantine Civilization, p. 129)
Upon a Sunday morning, then, my father was walking round the lake which he had caused to be created, regretting that he had not moved the old river bed further back, and thinking out possible fantasies in stone, torrents to fall through the hanging woods above, pavilions upon islands and decorative effects generally (a few years before, he had determined to have all the white cows in the park stenciled with a blue Chinese pattern, but the animals were so obdurate and perverse as in the end to oblige him to abandon the scheme). The lake is shaped like an hourglass or a figure-of-eight, and a bridge spans its waist. In this bridge my father met Arthur Waley advancing towards him. Each took his hat off ceremoniously and said to the other, ‘How much I wish we were going in the same direction!’ and passed on. Half an hour later they met again at the same place, having pursued their contrary courses as though they were planets whose goings and comings are immutably fixed by the sun, and repeated the salutation.
– Sir Osbert Sitwell,
(Left Hand, Right Hand!, p. 220)
We always associate the word ‘book’ with printing, and think of it in terms of format and typographical convenience, but such mechanical criteria do not apply to notebooks, whose beginning and end are determined only by the unity of the poetic impulse which gives birth to a given series of poems. In other words, a notebook is the same as a ‘book’ in the sense in which it was understood by Charents, Pasternak and M. himself. The only difference was that M. did not have to stick to some particular length or structure – often artificial – which is required for a published book. But the word ‘notebook’ itself, as I have said, arose in our usage quite accidentally, owing to the fact that we were forced to write in school exercise books. It has the drawback of being too concrete in its meaning, as well as reminding one of Schumann’s ‘Notebooks’. The only thing in its favor is that it faithfully reflects the way in which we had been thrown back into a pre-Gutenberg era.
– Nadezdha Mandelstam
(Hope Against Hope, p. 193)
This people lives on the smell of wild apples that grow there; and if they go far from home, they take some of these apples with them, for as soon as they lose the smell of them they die.
– Travels of Sir John Mandeville (p. 181)
There is something outrageous in a person’s misdirecting a traveller who has lost his way and then leaving him to himself in error, yet what is that compared with causing someone to go astray in himself? The lost traveller, after all, has a consolation that the country around him is constantly changing, and with every change is born a new hope of finding a way out. A person who goes astray inwardly has less room for manoeuvre; he soon finds he is going round in a circle from which he cannot escape.1
– Kierkegaard, Either/Or
(but taken from The Seducer’s Diary, p.6).
In Jerusalem, I had spent much of my time among the books of Gulbenkian library, following the loose threads of Armenian history. But the massacres, I put off until the end. What I’d been reluctant to start absorbed me at once; it was that that I had been afraid of. Everything else seemed meaningless when set against the reports of 1915.
Leaving the library after those sessions, I struggled for understanding. I wanted the courtyard outside to look different. I felt dazed and curiously grubby – as though simply by reading about it, I had participated in the obscenity.
Philip Marsden, The Crossing Place, p. 66
In 1938 let us say, a bloke with small means wants the best of Europe. Once he cd. have done a great deal on foot. I dare say he still can. In 1911 there was an international currency (20 franc pieces) twenty such in jug-purse and no god-damned passports. (Hell rot Wilson AND the emperor, I think it was Decius.) If a man can’t afford to go by automobile, and if he is content with eating and architecture, the world’s best (as I have known it) is afoot from Poitiers, from Brives, from Périgord or Limoges. In every town a romanesque church or château. No place to stay for any time, but food every ten miles or fifteen or twenty. When I say food, I mean food. So, at any rate, was it. With fit track to walk on.
I do not say walk in Italy. The sane man will want his Italy by car. Even if it is public omnibus. The roads go over the Appenines, they go over the Bracca. They go over, where trains bore through. It is not a country to walk in because food is a FRENCH possession, when on foot one wants it. […] The dust on Italian roads, the geographic or geological formation of the peninsula all say go by car. Don’t try to walk it. You have enough foot work when you get to the towns. You have a concentration of treasures that will need all your calf muscles, all your ankle resistence.
– Ezra Pound,
Guide to Kulchur p. 111f.
A book, June 2002.
There is the fear of exposure (as if one would be exposed as, really, nothing), or the general theme of exposing (the debutante ritual, or the pretense of initiating someone into ‘something’ that isn’t really ‘there’). There is the anxiety of being out of place (an ‘American in Europe’) especially and so the constant wariness about shame, the experience of shame, and then the cycle of revenge and ressentiment so occasioned. There are the bizarre attachments and dependencies, the doubles and twins, the Masters and Slaves, dead authors and living researchers, and other such pathologies of social dependence. There is the constant reality or presence of the unspoken, unsaid because unsayable but nevertheless real (as in Isabel’s final knowledge, or Strether’s), the fascination with secrets and obsessions about hidden, crucial meanings not yet found, the ghosts and the question of their reality, and so on. All these are reflections of this situation, of modernity as the collapse of reliable forms of sense-making, and the beginning of a kind of sociality that reflects precisely this uncertainty and often desperation and paranoia.
But memory’s sudden release of the genie held captive inside matter, like a spirit bottled by an evil witch, is much more often for me both generator and principle of a happy feverish fugue than the quietism of a Proustian illumination. Resparked, the precious images kept so long in darkness – all of them – ignite and set each other ablaze; a flaming line zig-zags across a dozing world and sows it with light as it travels the secret fissures – an experience, a reading, a decisive encounter that prompts another – that have, year after year, marked it with my initials. The virtue of genuine contact with something that had at one time captivated me is that it awakens, reanimates, and binds with streaks of lightning everything I have ever loved.
– Julien Graqc, The Narrow Waters, p. 33f.
There was something about her good friend T. S. Eliot that seemed to amuse Marianne [Moore]. On Eliot’s first visit to Brooklyn after his marriage to Valerie, his young wife asked them to pose together for her for a snapshot. Valerie said, ‘Tom, put your arm around Marianne.’ I asked if he had. Marianne gave a short deprecatory laugh and said, ‘Yes, he did, but very gingerly.’ Toward the last, Marianne entrusted her Eliot letters for safekeeping with Robert Giroux, who told me that with each letter of the poet’s she had preserved the envelope in which it had come. One envelope bore Marianne’s Brooklyn address in Eliot’s handwriting, but no return address or other identification. Within, there was a sheet of yellow pad paper on which was drawn a large heart pierced by an arrow, with the words ‘from an anonymous and grateful admirer.’
– Elizabeth Bishop, ‘Efforts of Affection’, pp. 153f.
The first time I heard Marianne [Moore] read poetry in public was at a joint reading with William Carlos Williams in Brooklyn. I am afraid I was a little late. There was a very small audience, mostly in the front rows, and I made my way as self-effacingly as I could down the steep red-carpeted steps of the aisle. As I approached the lower rows, she spotted me out of the corner of her eye and interrupted herself in the middle of a poem to bow and say, ‘Good evening!’ She and Dr. Williams shared the rather small high stage and took turns reading There were two high-backed chairs, far apart, and each poet sat down between readings. The decor seemed to be late-Victorian Gothic; I remember a good deal of red plush, dark wood, and Gothic points, knobs, and incised lines. Marianne, wearing a hat and a blue dress, looked quite small and seemed nervous. I had the impression that Williams, who was not nervous in the slightest was generously trying to put her at her ease. As they changed places at the lectern, he would whisper to her and smile. I have no recollection of anything that was read, except for a sea-monster poems of Williams’s, during which he gave some loud and realistic roars.
– Elizabet Bishop, ‘Efforts of Affection’, p. 142.
Once again, why Spinoza?
When I was talking to Dime T. from Ohrid, Macedonia, one afternoon about parapsychology, he asked me: ‘Why do you think you are writing about Spinoza?’ Had it been a conversation with a philosopher, I would have said something like: ‘Because of his unique philosophy, because of his divergence from Descartes’ doctrine about God’s free will, and the body-soul dichotomy.’ Had I talked to a literary theoretician, I would have answered her: ‘I have long wanted to try a new narrative approach – to write a novel as a conversation taking place between the reader and a character.’ But I knew I was talking to someone who knew the truth even before I said anything. So I chose not to say anything (I later learned that he knew the truth even when I had forgotten it). I felt I had to answer his question honestly, but I did not know the answer. ‘You’ve been so lonely, Goce. Why?’ Dime T. said, answering the query, and carried me back to the time I seemed to have forgotten, where there still existed ‘the subdued sickness of pain’ (Kristeva).
‘A writer,’ says Vladimir Nabokov, ‘is born in solitude.’ He is not only born in solitude – he also exists in solitude. Writing itself is an act of solitude. Or perhaps a need to overcome solitude. A need for conversations. Hence this Conversation with Spinoza.
Hence Spinoza.
– Goce Smilevski, Conversation with Spinoza, pp. 135f.
It was a book I enjoyed, partially because it engaged absorbingly with Spinoza’s philosophy (which I should perhaps mention that I have never read and know nothing about), but also because it asks the questions historians and literary critics are always asking about individuals in the past, without presuming that the most seductive answer is any more true than another. For me, the lapses (lapsus) were situational – i.e. those moments (some three or four) when the author placed the composition of the novel (not of the life of Spinoza) in a historical context.
He had told me himself more than once that he never got up before twelve, and seldom earlier than one. Constitutionally the laziest young devil in America, he had hit on a walk in life which enabled him to go the limit in that direction. He was a poet. At least, he wrote poems when he did anything; but most of the time, as far as I could make out, he spent in a sort of trance. He told me once that he could sit on a fence, watching a worm and wondering what on earth it was up to, for hours at a stretch.
He had his scheme of life worked out to a fine point. About once a month he would take three days writing a few poems; the other three hundred and twenty-nine days of the year he rested. I didn’t know there was enough money in poetry to support a chappie, even in the way in which Rocky lived; but it seems that, if you stick to exhortations to young men to lead the strenuous life and don’t shove in any rhymes, American editors fight for the stuff. Rocky showed me one of his things once. It began:–
Be!
Be!
The past is dead.
To-morrow is not born.
Be to-day!
To-day!
Be with every nerve,
With every muscle,
With every drop of your red blood!
Be!It was printed opposite the frontispiece of a magazine with a sort of scroll round it, and a picture in the middle of a fairly nude chappie, with bulging muscles, giving the rising sun the glad eye.
– P.G. Wodehouse, ‘The Aunt and the Sluggard’
We find under the weather a layer of sun, wrapped tidily around that parcel of time we call today.
The year therefore rounded itself as a receptacle of retarded knowledge – a cup brimming over with the sense that now at least she was learning.
– Henry James,
What Maisie Knew, ch. IX
Between the limits of affection and antipathy for the author’s personality, the relationship of author and reader may take a score of different forms: admiration and respect without affection, as in the case, perhaps, of Thomas Hardy; exasperated affection as in the case of Kipling; devotion for Jane Austen; sheer worship or utter dislike for Dickens – with every reader and every author the relationship varies somewhat; but consciously or unconsciously, on both sides, it exists.
The writer himself addresses himself to a certain public – it may be a very vague entity at the back of his mind or it may be a definitely conceived mentality – and he adjusts his emphasis accordingly.
A work of fiction, in fact, involves a triple relationship between author, characters, and reader; and not, as one is sometimes inclined to assume, a relationship merely between reader and characters.
For the aim of the author is not simply to recount certain imaginary happenings to certain imaginary people. It is to communicate to the reader the excitement evoked in himself by the contemplation of some character or incident or aspect of life; to induce in the reader a mood related to his own, to reach through the mind of the reader to his emotions, to play on his feelings as an orator or as an actor plays on the feelings of his audience.
But it is also to control the reader’s judgment through his imagination; to induce him to adopt for the time being certain values, a code, that is not his normal code. He, the reader, may indeed wriggle a trifle as he does so; or he may, on the other hand, deceive himself into imagining that these bold, dashing views or this acute sensibility, this tolerant broadmindedness or passionate sympathy for the unhappy and the oppressed, are a natural expression of his own temperament.
– H.W. Leggett.
(The Idea in Fiction, p. 116f.)
I was working one day for a poetry competition and had written one line – ‘Beauty makes crime noble’ – when I was interrupted by a criticism flung at me from behind by T.S. Eliot. ‘What does that mean? How can crime be noble?’ He had, I noticed, grown a mustache.
– Graham Greene
A World of My Own, p. 10
A new way of making and accumulating money, a dizzying new form of social mobility tied to this new economy, a new culture obsessively dedicated to work and financial success, consumerism, a cult of celebrity and fame, a mass culture based on journalism and advertising, a new conception of individuals as untrustworthy centers of self-interest, a new sort of dependence on the views of others for social esteem, and many other factors mean that things have not simply changed, they have changed in an unprecedented way. […] Even cynical, collective assumptions about greed and venality, much in vogue in the early modern philosophical tradition, do not have much effective purchase, however widespread their presence. One would need some sense of one’s own advantage and interest, and some reliable way of anticipating the pursuit of such interests in others, even for that sort of collectivity to function. The modern context, understood by James at a first pass as a massive failure in very much of a common normative structure, makes the assignment of or understanding of determinate meaning – psychological insight, honest self-description, genuinely shared social understanding, reliable act and intention descriptions of all kinds – nearly impossible and certainly very difficult. In such a historical context, any moral judgments of the sort we were just talking about also seem very much threatened, invitations instead – exactly as Hegel once predicted – to hypocrisy, a pretense about criteria of judgment no one can or wants to or knows how to meet, and ‘hard-heartedness’, a non-hypocritical but nearly pathological insistence on a selflessness that renders all actual action unworthy because self-interested.
– Robert Pippin,
Henry James & Modern Moral Life, p. 57
The adequacy of the cultural categories of, in this case, university England, to provide a frame of intelligible reasonings, creditable values, and familiar motivations for such oddities as poison oracles, ghost marriages, blood feuds, and cucumber sacrifices recommends those categories as of somehow more than parochial importance. Whatever personal reasons E-P may have had for being so extraordinarily anxious to picture Africa as a logical and prudential place – orderly, straightforward and levelheaded, firmly modeled and open to view – in doing so he constructed a forceful argument for the general authority of a certain conception of life. If it could undarken Africa, it could undarken anything.
– Clifford Geertz,
Works and Lives:
The Anthropologist as Author,
p. 70
The sweetest and most inoffensive path of life leads through the avenues of science and learning; and whoever can either remove any obstructions in this way, or open up any new prospect, ought so far to be esteemed a benefactor to mankind. And though these researches may appear painful and fatiguing, it is with some minds as with some bodies, which being endowed with vigorous and florid health, require severe exercise, and reap a pleasure from what, to the generality of mankind, may seem burdensome and laborious. Obscurity, indeed, is painful to the mind as well as to the eye; but to bring light from obscurity by whatever labour, must needs be delightful and rejoicing.
– David Hume
Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding
§I.6
Daily experience shows that it is energetic individualism which produces the most powerful effects upon the life and action of others, and really constitutes the best practical education. Schools, academies, and colleges, give but the merest beginnings of culture in comparison with it. Far more influential is the life-education daily given in our homes, in the streets, behind counters, in workshops, at the loom and the plough, in counting- houses and manufactories, and in the busy haunts of men. This is that finishing instruction as members of society, which Schiller designated ‘the education of the human race,’ consisting in action, conduct, self-culture, self-control, – all that tends to discipline a man truly, and fit him for the proper performance of the duties and business of life, – a kind of education not to be learnt from books, or acquired by any amount of mere literary training. With his usual weight of words Bacon observes, that ‘Studies teach not their own use; but that is a wisdom without them, and above them, won by observation;’ a remark that holds true of actual life, as well as of the cultivation of the intellect itself. For all experience serves to illustrate and enforce the lesson, that a man perfects himself by work more than by reading, – that it is life rather than literature, action rather than study, and character rather than biography, which tend perpetually to renovate mankind.
– Samuel Smiles. Self Help.
Perfectly.
To Mervyn Noseigh, M.A.
Dear Mr. Noseigh:
When you put the question to me so baldly – ‘What led you to become a writer?’ – I am momentarily nonplussed. On what level do you expect me to answer? The objective? If so, I became a writer because it looked like easy money. But that won’t look well in your PhD thesis, so let us try the subjective approach.On this level, I became a writer because I suffered the early conditioning of the Unconscious that makes writers. That is to say, my Oedipus Complex was further complicated by the Warmfläsche-reaktion.
You know how this works. Think of the Infantile World as a Huge Bed; on one side lies Mum, on the other side lies Dad, and in the middle is Baby Bunting. The normal thing, of course, is for B.B. to work out his Oedipus Complex; he wants to kill Dad and mate with Mum – thereby fitting himself for some normal occupation like the Civil Service. But sometimes B.B., for reasons still unknown to science, turns from Mum and snuggles up to Dad who quite understandably shoves B.B. down to the bottome of the bed and warms his feet on him as if he were a hot-water bottle (or Warmfläsche). Thus, in the very dawn of his existence, B.B. acquires that down-trodden cast of mind that marks the writer.
Very often Dad kicks B.B. right out of bed onto the bold linoleum, bringing about that sense of Utter Rejection which turns B.B. into a critic.
I can hardly wait to read your thesis.
Reverently,
Samuel Marchbanks (your topic)
– Robertson Davies
Samuel Marchbanks’ Almanack, p. 135
Of course what I am trying to do with that quotation is avoid introducing the following audio clip from a lecture by Jorge Luis Borges, about books:
Apartment building, SE PDX.
These days I spend a lot of time crossing bridges. Partly because we moved across the river from practically everything we are interested in; partly because, well because my feet are getting itchy again.
It’s amazing how deadlines work – one puts things off, doesn’t think about them, and then the time creeps up when one either does or one doesn’t and usually one does.
And still one does not, no one does not in one’s heart believe in mute inglorious Miltons. If one has succeeded in doing anything one is certain that anybody who really has it in them to really do anything will really do that thing.
– Gertrude Stein
(Everybody’s Autobiography, p. 9).
Good writers are so rare that if I were a critic, I would only try to point out what I think makes them reliable and enjoyable. For how can anyone explain the mystery of creation?
Hemingway can take any amount of criticism – from himself; he is his own severest critic, but, like all his fellow-writers, he is hypersensitive to the criticism of others. It’s true that some critics are terribly expert in sticking the sharp penpoint into the victim and are delighted when he squirms. Wyndham Lewis succeeded in making Joyce squirm. And his article on Hemingway entitled ‘The Dumb Ox’, which the subject of it picked up in my bookshop, I regret to say, roused him to such anger that he punched the heads off three dozen tulips, a birthday gift. As a result, the vase upset its contents over the books, after which Hemingway sat down at my desk and wrote a check payable to Sylvia Beach for a sum that covered the damage twice over.
– Sylvia Beach,
Shakespeare and Company (1956) p. 83.
Hemingway referred to himself as Shakespeare and Company’s ‘best customer’ – and, indeed, seems to be the only author mentioned in Beach’s book who actually purchased anything. Curious.
It was a most comfortable house to visit. Gertrude Stein liked it, she could stay in her room or in the garden as much as she liked without hearing too much conversation. The food was excellent, scotch food, delicious and fresh, and it was very amusing meeting all of the Cambridge dignitaries. We were taken into all the gardens and invited into many of the homes. It was lovely weather, quantities of roses, morris-dancing by all the students and girls and generally delightful. We were invited to lunch at Newnham, Miss Jane Harrison, who had been Hope Mirlees’ pet enthusiasm, was much interested in meeting Gertrude Stein. We sat up on the dais with the faculty and it was very awe inspiring. The conversation was not however particularly amusing. Miss Harrison and Gertrude Stein did not particularly interest each other.
We had been hearing a good deal about Doctor and Mrs. Whitehead. They no longer live in Cambridge. The year before Doctor Whitehead had left Cambridge to go to London University. They were to be in Cambridge shortly and they were to dine with the Mirlees’. They did and I met my third genius.
It was a pleasant dinner. I sat next to Housman, the Cambridge poet, and we talked about fishes and David Starr Jordan but all the time I was more interested in watching Doctor Whitehead.*
– Gertrude Stein
(The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. p. 145)
The passage is remarkable in the prose of Gertrude Stein for its use of commas, on which:
He did however plead for commas. Gertrude Stein said commas were unnecessary, the sense should be intrinsic and not have to be explained by commas and otherwise commas were only a sign that one should pause and take breath but one should know of oneself when one wanted to pause and take breath. However, as she liked Haweis very much and he had given her a delightful painting for a fan, she gave him two commas. It must however be added that on rereading the manuscript she took the commas out (132).
* And now for a note, for your amusement. On reading Toklas’ What is Remembered, one finds a different version:
The Mirrlees were giving dinner parties for Gertrude and at one of them I sat next to A.E Housman. He said to me, Since you are from California, tell me about your great ichthyologist, Dr. David Starr Jordan. Oh, I said, he was a friend of my grandfather. So I told him all I knew about the president of Leland Stanford University (83).
Also, Dr. Whitehead was not at that particular dinner, but at a later one. Doubtless, however, someone has already done a careful comparison of the differences in their accounts, so I will say no more.
An exaggerated personal morality is often mistaken for a social morality, and until it attempts to minister to a social situation its total inadequacy is not discovered. To attempt to attain a social morality with a basis of democratic experience results in a loss of the only possible corrective and guide, and ends in an exaggerated individual morality but not in social morality at all. We see this from time to time in the care-worn and over-worked philanthropist, who has taxed his individual will beyond the normal limits and has lost his clew to the situation among a bewildering number of cases. A man who takes the betterment of humanity for his aim and end must also take the daily experiences of humanity for the constant correction of his process. He must not only test and guide his achievement by human experience, but he must succeed or fail in proportion as he has incorporated that experience with his own. Otherwise his own achievements become his stumbling-block, and he comes to believe in his own goodness as something outside of himself. He makes an exception of himself, and thinks that he is different from the rank and file of his fellows. He forgets that it is necessary to know of the lives of our contemporaries, not only in order to believe in their integrity, which is after all but the first beginnings of social morality, but in order to attain to any mental or moral integrity for ourselves or any such hope for society.
– Jane Addams,
Democracy and Social Ethics (p. 176f)
I like the change in the last sentence from the general ‘he?’ to the personal ‘our’. Speaking personally, I’ve been trying to get a grip on social morality in two places, and both have done me good.
The hand press printer should make his own ink, as the painter should make his own paints. Ink is not a raw material. Oils and pigments are the raw material of ink; patience in grinding is the only virtue required in the craftsman. Of patience there is this to be said. To be patient is to suffer. By their fruits men know one another, but by their sufferings they are what they are. And suffering is not merely the endurance of physical or mental anguish, but of joy also. A rabbit caught in a trap may be supposed to suffer physical anguish: but it suffers nothing else. The man crucified may be supposed to suffer physical and mental anguish, but he suffers also intense happiness and joy. The industrialist workman is often simply as a rabbit in a trap; the artist is often as a man nailed to a cross. In patience souls are possessed. No lower view of the matter will suffice.
– Eric Gill, ‘Essay on Typography’ (p. 84).
At the long dinner table laid in the garden were the various traveling guests, the grown-up daughters, and the younger children with their governess. The countess presided over the usual European dinner served by men, but the count and the daughter, who had worked all day in the fields, ate only porridge and black bread and drank only kvas, the fare of the hay-making peasants. Of course we are all accustomed to the fact that those who perform the heaviest labor eat the coarsest and simplest fare at the end of the day, but it is not often that we sit at the same table with them while we ourselves eat the more elaborate food prepared by someone else’s labor. Tolstoy ate his simple supper without remark or comment upon the food his family and guests preferred to eat, assuming that they, as well as he, had settled the matter with their own consciences.
– Jane Addams
Twenty Years at
Hull-House, p. 194f.
After about two hours of reading or discussion, we would go for a walk and then have tea at Lyons, or in the restaurant above the Regal cinema. Sometimes he came to my house in Searle street for supper. Once after supper, Wittgenstein, my wife and I went for a walk on Midsummer Common. We talked about the movements of the bodies of the solar system. It occurred to Wittgenstein that the three of us should represent the movements of the sun, earth, and moon, relative to one another. My wife was the sun and maintained a steady pace across the meadow; I was the earth and circled her at a trot. Wittgenstein took the most strenuous part of all, the moon, and ran around me while I circled my wife. Wittgenstein entered into this game with great enthusiasm and seriousness, shouting instructions at us as he ran. He became quite breathless and dizzy with exhaustion.
– Norman Malcolm
Ludwig Wittgenstein: a Memoir
(p. 51f.)
This library is a catacomb in which each book is a tomb; and I who disturb its quietness visit the grim place like an improvident necromancer. I revive, as the whim takes me, one or another of the dead, where but for my unwholesome arts would decay peacefully each uncharmed compost of rags and glue and oak and macerated wood splinters. I offer an initiatory strange sacrifice, of time and eyesight…
– James Branch Cabell, These Restless Heads, (p. 195)
Which reminds me of a passage in Kenneth Dover’s autobiography (which I read after drifting through Martha Nussbaum’s review of it), where he says that death is like the returning of a book to the stacks, and so he is unable to get worked up over the act of dying, though he had empathy enough for any suffering caused by it. Since I imprudently returned that book to the library, though, I am unable to provide an exact citation, and the reader must be content with the knowledge that the sentences in question occurred about a third of the way through, on the top part of the right hand page.
At this point Schopenhauer interrupts the thread of his discourse to speak at length upon an example of false fame. Those who are at all acquainted with the philosopher’s views will not be surprised to find that the writer thus held up to scorn is Hegel; and readers of the other volumes in this series will, with the translator, have had by now quite enough of the subject. The passage is therefore omitted.
– T. Bailey Saunders,
note to Schopenhauer’s
essay On Reputation.
Many a strange phrase strays about third-rate fiction to puzzle literal-minded readers. There is, for example, a remark often made, he wiped his glasses. This means that he felt emotion, and the implication is that the moisture which rose to the eyes in consequence of the emotion had settled on and dimmed the glasses. But I am informed by those who wear glasses that this is not what actually occurs, and that, when tears gather in the eyes, they do not spray out horizontally so as to wet the glasses, but either remain in the eyes unfallen until reabsorbed, or roll vertically down the cheeks; nor do they give out steam or mist; therefore this process of wiping the glasses is not called for more at lachrymose moments than at others. If this is, as seems probable enough, the case, then either those who use this phrase do not know it, or, knowing it, they ignore it, and deliberately use the words he wiped his glasses as a convenient (because indirect) way of saying ‘tears were in his eyes.’
– Rose Macaulay
Catchwords and Claptrap, pp. 39–40.
Since Macaulay assures us the fiction in question is third-rate, perhaps I should not suggest that she is, in this passage, psychologically obtuse. So: tears, in ordinary circumstances, do not dampen glasses – agreed. He does not, therefore, need to ‘wipe his glasses’ – fair enough. A question: in moments of distress how many people do only what they need to do? No one, in order to distract himself and draw attention away from his emotional state, would cough when his throat does not need clearing, nor would he, say, remove his glasses (thus taking an opportunity to look down and hide his face) and ‘clean’ them? Not in third-rate fiction, of course; there a spade is always an implement used in the course of cultivation for the purpose of upturning earth; but a snob is still a snob.
Esmeralda! now we rest
Here, in the bewitched and blest
Mountain forests of the West.Here the very air is stranger.
Damzel, anchoret, and ranger
Share the woodland’s dream and dangerAnd to think I deemed you dead!
(In a dungeon, it was said;
Tortured, strangled); but instead –Blue birds from the bluest fable,
Bear and hare in coats of sable,
Peacock moth on picnic table.Huddled roadsigns softly speak
Of Lake Merlin, Castle Creek,
And (obliterated) Peak.Do you recognize that clover?
Dandelions, l’or du pauvre?
(Europe, nonetheless, is over).Up the turk, along the burn
Latin lilies climb and turn
Into Gothic fir and fern.Cornfields have befouled the prairies
But these canyons laugh! And there is
Still the forest with its fairies.And I rest where I awoke
In the sea shade – l’ombre glauque –
Of a legendary oak;Where the woods get ever dimmer,
Where the Phantom Orchids glimmer –
Esmeralda, immer, immer.
– Vladimir Nabokov
Poems*
* All in copyright; if its owners insist,
I will very sadly cease and desist.
Men in the decline of life have in all ages declaimed against a passion which they have ceased to feel, but with as little reason as success. Those who from coldness of constitutional temperament have never felt what love is, will surely be allowed to be very incompetent judges with regard to the power of this passion to contribute to the sum of pleasurable sensations in life. Those who have spent their youth in criminal excesses and have prepared for themselves, as the comforts of their age, corporeal debility and mental remorse may well inveigh aginst such pleasures as vain and futile, and unproductive of lasting satisfaction. But the pleasures of pure love will bear the contemplation of the most improved reason, and the most exalted virtue. Perhaps there is scarcely a man who has once experienced the genuine delight of virtuous love, however great his intellectual pleasure may have been, that does not look back to the period as the sunny spot in his whole life, where his imagination loves to bask, which he recollects and contemplates with the fondest regrets, and which he would most wish to live over again. The superiority of intellectual to sensual pleasures consists rather in their filling up more time, in their having a larger range, and in their being less liable to satiety, than in their being more real and essential.
– Thomas Malthus,
An Essay on the
Principle of Population
For the aesthetic purpose the lawn is a cow pasture; and in some cases to-day – where the expensiveness of the attendant circumstances bars out any imputation of thrift – the idyl of the dolicho-blond* is rehabilitated in the introduction of the cow into a lawn or private ground. In such cases the cow made use of is commonly of an expensive breed. The vulgar suggestion of thrift, which is nearly inseparable from the cow, is a standing objection to the decorative use of this animal. So in all cases, except where luxurious surroundings negative this suggestion, the use of the cow as an object of taste must be avoided.
– Thorstein Veblen
The Theory of the Leisure Class
(p. 134)
* A more subtle thinker or more careful writer could make something of this, but I’d rather not; extensive apologetics for racist nastiness is left to the reader’s imagination.
Treacherous and poisonous, the plague of dusk spread, passed from one object to another, and everything it touched became black and rotten and scattered into dust.
– Bruno Schulz, ‘The Night of the Great Season’
from Cinnamon Shops (p.129).
Virginia and Adrian Stephen playing cricket in Cornwall, ca. 1886;
plate 37i from the Stephen Family Photo Album.
I finished by the way The Electra of Sophocles, which has been dragging on down here, though it’s not so fearfully difficult after all. The thing that always impresses me fresh is the superb nature of the story. It seems hardly possible not to make a good play of it. This perhaps is the result of having traditional plots which have been made & improved & freed from superfluities by the polish of innumerable actors & authors & critics, till it becomes like a lump of glass worn smooth in the sea. Also, if everyone in the audience knows beforehand what is going to happen, much finer & subtler touches will tell, & words can be spared. At anyrate my feeling always is that one can’t read too carefully, or attach enough weight to every line & hint; & that the apparent bareness is only on the surface. There does, however, remain the question of reading the wrong emotions into the text. I am generally humiliated to find how much Jebb is able to see; my only doubt is whether he doesn’t see too much – as I think one might do with a bad modern English play if one set to work. Finally, the particular charm of Greek remains as strong & as difficult to account for as ever. One feels the immeasurable difference between the text & the translation with the first words. (…) It’s strange to notice how, although the conventions are perfectly false & ridiculous, they never appear petty or undignified, as our English conventions are constantly made to do. Electra lived a far more hedged in life than the women of the mid Victorian age, but this has no effect upon her, except in making her harsh & splendid. She could not go out for a walk alone; with us it would be a case of a maid & a hansom cab.
– Virginia Woolf, Diaries
I.184, 19.viii.1918
I observe the following bit of dialogue betwen André Breton and Robert Desnos, or I read it as if it were a fragment of a play with stage directions:
A.B. (to Robert Desnos). The seismoteric tradition…
R.D. (turns into a stack of plates).
– Michel Leiris, Nuits sans Nuit et quelques Jours sans Jour.
A sleepless night, drowsing over Samson Agonistes. Dalila dandled forth, almost more specious than Helen among the Trojan Women, and the blind man missing his apotheosis, but not heroization. And then there are certain beautiful infelicities; I hesitate to say Milton loses his tone, but perhaps he clings rather too fiercely:
Chorus. But we had best retire, I see a storm?
Samson. Fair days have oft contracted wind and rain.
Chor. But this another kind of tempest brings.
Sam. Be less abstruse, my riddling days are past (1061–4).
Also:
Sam. Boast not of what thou wouldst have done, but do
What then thou wouldst, thou seest it in thy hand.
Harapha. To combat with a blind man I disdain,
And thou hast need much washing to be touched (1104–7).
It is a comfort to find I am not the only one nodding.1 One feels a certain sympathy with Bentley at such passages (forgoing, however, all ‘happy Conjectures’).
ἦ καὶ κυανέῃσιν ἐπ’ ὀφρύσι νεῦσε Κρονίων·
ἀμβρόσιαι δ’ ἄρα χαῖται ἐπερρώσαντο ἄνακτος
κρατὸς ἀπ’ ἀθανάτοιο· μέγαν δ’ ἐλέλιξεν Ὄλυμπον.
[↩]
The moulded cabbage-leaf jugs for which Worcester is famous are very plentifully available in blue and white, often with the mask spout, as are also all the vine-leaf dessert and tiny pickle-dishes, pierced baskets, comports, salad bowls, soup tureens, butter-dishes, sauce-boats; there are even such items as knife and fork handles, knife rests, salt spoons, tea-caddy spoons and a pierced variety of the latter which are claimed to be egg-draining spoons. Tea jars take on several shapes, oval, round or square, sometimes with ribbed moulding; and teapots come in many shapes, some peculiar to Worcester, others of universal adoption.
Started reading The Museum of Unconditional Surrender by Dubravka Ugrešić. The novel proper begins as follows:
1. ‘Ich bin müde,’ I say to Fred. His sorrowful, pale face stretches into a grin. Ich bin müde is the only German sentence I know at the moment (3).*
I note this only because ‘Ich bin müde’ was also the first German sentence I was ever able to recall on the spur of the moment, without a pause for parsing. This amuses me now – as it amused me then – because it is curious to approach a new language with expressions of fatigue.
* translated by Celia Hawkesworth.
My Aunt Philip’s aunt, Mrs. Pring, complained bitterly to my aunt of the parson of her village (of which she was squire) who had come to see her during a serious illness, ‘and you know, my dear,’ she said, ‘he read the bible to me, just as if I had been any old woman in the village’.
Her gardener, Curtis, had consulted her as to how and where some cabbages were to be planted. Later on the gardener came again with a suggestion which was obviously an improvement. ‘Curtis’, said she, ‘if I tell you to plant the cabbages with their leaves in the ground and their roots in the air you will be pleased to do so.’ And yet, as she said to my aunt, she knew Curtis’s way was much better, but she was not going to have settled questions re-opened, and she was going to be mistress of her own house.
Waterfront park, ca. 6.30 a.m.
I looked, as if for the first time. I looked at people and at the order of things for the first time and I saw, I saw simply, and understood simply, understood with every last drop of me all of it – how people have set things up – isn’t the real thing. And so it will not be that way, because I do not wish it.
The richer the character, the harder and slower in general is its development.* Two boys were once of the same class in our Edinburgh school; John ever trim precise and dux, Walter ever slovenly confused and dolt: in due time John became Baillie Waugh, and Walter became Sir Walter Scott.
The quickest and completest of all vegetables is – the Cabbage.
* Cf. Plutarch, Cato Minor, (1.3)
Books to be packed.
She sat rather glumly looking at her own hands, her chin drawn in as though suffering from indigestion, or a surfeit of English.
I am, as it were, at sea. The most difficult part of packing books is deciding which ones I am most likely to want to read or refer to in the near future. Should Vita Sackville-West’s Joan of Arc go in the suitcase, or Kafka’s Briefe an Felice? Ought The Book of Memory make the two-month voyage by boat in a box, or Ovid’s Tristia or the Teubner Odyssey? Alas – but one of the many problems in shaping one’s ‘old course, in a Country new’.*
Compounding these difficulties, I accidentally purchased The Old English Baron, The Vampyre, and Melmoth the Wanderer – I justify the frivolity (and added baggage) with feeble flutterings about my invalid mind in need of distraction and repose. This sort of mental hypochondria has helped me overcome the guilt of many an ill-judged book-purchase before, and I do not think it will fail me now. (Although how the Gothic is supposed to help strengthen my intellect I have not, as yet, discovered; at least it’s not Ann Radcliffe.)
* Is there meant to be a pun, do you think, on course and corse? Probably. You with the Arden Lear ready to hand, yes, you in the back, sir: would you mind checking the notes for me?
Also, I was going to be terribly pretentious (in the manner of Gissing) and write ‘eheu’ for ‘alas’; congratulate me, please, on my restraint.
Martha’s Vineyard.
The rough brick wall bore in chalk the legend: ‘PROPERTY IS THEFT’; heedless, I read ‘PROPERTIUS IS DEFT’, which seemed a strange idea. Also, apropos of nothing:
He is a small, broad-shouldered man, with the thin, dead-looking fair hair, mild eyes, and bulging, over-heavy forehead of the German vegetarian intellectual. He wears sandals and an open-necked shirt.
καὶ μικρὸν μὲν ἀνεκάθισεν, ἀνθρώπων τοσούτων ἐπερχομένων, καὶ διέβλεψεν εἰς τὸν ᾿Αλέξανδρον. ὡς δ’ ἐκεῖνος ἀσπασάμενος καὶ προσειπὼν αὐτὸν ἠρώτησεν, εἴ τινος τυγχάνει δεόμενος, ‘μικρὸν’ εἶπεν· ‘ἀπὸ τοῦ ἡλίου μετάστηθι’.
τὸ μὲν γὰρ ἀνθρώπους ὄντας παραλόγως περιπεσεῖν τινι τῶν δεινῶν οὐ τῶν παθόντων, τῆς τύχης δὲ καὶ τῶν πραξάντων ἐστὶν ἔγκλημα, τὸ δ’ ἀκρίτως καὶ προφανῶς περιβαλεῖν αὑτοὺς ταῖς μεγίσταις συμφοραῖς ὁμολογούμενόν ἐστι τῶν πασχόντων ἁμάρτημα. διὸ καὶ τοῖς μὲν ἐκ τύχης πταίουσιν ἔλεος ἕπεται μετὰ συγγνώμης καὶ ἐπικουρία, τοῖς δὲ διὰ τὴν αὑτῶν ἀβουλίαν ὄνειδος καὶ ἐπιτίμησις συνεξακολουθεῖ παρὰ τοῖς εὖ φρονοῦσιν.
* Yes, yes, it’s a famous passage – I’ve not wit enough at present to be obscure.
Note to self: do not forget Cicero’s haircut & Clodius’ hubristas (Cicero, 30.6–7); also the macrons & Diogenes’ ‘littleness’.
Postcard (from the editor of the text to his godmother)
found in a copy of ‘Urne Buriall’
and ‘The Garden of Cyrus’
… according to the notion I have of reason, neither the written treatises of the learned nor the set discourses of the eloquent are able of themselves to teach the use of it. It is the habit alone of reasoning which can make a reasoner. And men can never be better invited to the habit than when they find pleasure in it. A freedom of raillery, a liberty of decent language to question everything, and an allowance of unraveling or refuting any argument without offence to the arguer, are the only terms which can render such speculative conversations any way agreeable. For to say truth, they have been rendered burdensome to mankind by the strictness of the laws prescribed to them and by the prevailing pedantry and bigotry of those who reign in them and assume to themselves to be dictators in these provinces.
So I settled down at once as a full-fledged anarchist.
Figure to yourself a group of naked cottages with bald slate roofs untempered by the years – no moss, no house-leeks – dropped down at random in a sticky clay cabbage-field – and you see our colony. […] Most of these young men were good fellows in their way – very simple-hearted anarchists. I do not credit it that they could have blown up a Tsar, or even dropped a bomb into a suburban letter-box. They confined themselves to cabbages and passionate denunciation of the oppressors.
|
Henry James. The Sacred Fount. New Directions, 1995 (1901) |
In conversation with Ford Obert, R.A., the nameless novelist narrator of The Sacred Fount notes the following:
It might have been my mere fancy – but it was my fancy – that he looked at me a trifle harder. ‘How on earth can I tell what you’re talking about?’ (145).
Readers might feel inclined to ask the same question; that’s the great joy of the novel – trying to figure out if one can tell what on earth James (or the narrator or, indeed, any of the other characters) is talking about.
No. 35 Holywell St.
I will be to you wine in the cellar and the more modestly or rather indolently I retire into the backward Bin, the more falerne will I be at the drinking…
I have been very idle lately; both from the overpowering idea of our dead poets and from abatement of my love of fame. I hope I am a little more of a Philosopher than I was, consequently a little less of a versifying Pet-lamb.
quis autem non magis solos esse, qui in foro turbaque quicum conloqui libeat non habeant, quam qui nullo arbitro vel secum ipsi loquantur, vel quasi doctissimorum hominum in concilio adsint, cum eorum inventis scriptisque se oblectent?
From my new copy of A. S. F. Gow’s
A. E. Housman, a Sketch.*
It was Housman’s custom to spend three weeks or a month every summer in France, choosing each year a new district, exploring it by car, and studying the architecture, the local dishes and the local wines. Usually he flew to Paris, but in 1929, when the fifth volume of his Manilius was nearing completion, he went by train. He was asked why, and replied that the percentage of accidents was much higher in air-travel, and that, until his Manilius was complete, his life was too valuable to risk unnecessarily (55f).
* In addition to their inability to clear up typographical errors in monographs, OUP seems to be divesting itself of its library; which is bad for them, but good for me.
Mortality is fatal
Gentility is fine
Rascality, heroic
Insolvency, sublime[…]
A coward will remain, Sir
Until the fight is done;
But an immortal hero
Will take his hat and run…
Put down the apple Adam
And come away with me
So shal’t thou have a pippin
From off my Father’s tree!
[↩]
To abolish seduction is a mother’s goal.
She will replace it with what is real: products.
Demeter’s victory
over Hades
does not consist in her daughter’s arrival from down below,
it’s the world in bloom –
cabbages lures lambs broom sex milk honey!
These kill death.
She schools the flighty pupils of her eyes,
With levell’d lashes stilling their disquiet;
And puts in leash her pair’d lips lest surprise
Bare the condition of a realm at riot.
If he suspect that she has ought to sigh at
His injury she’ll avenge with raging shame.
She kept her love-thoughts on most lenten diet,
And learnt her not to startle at his name.
…once we have recognised that knowledge in itself is good for man, we shall need to invent no pretexts for studying this subject or that; we shall import no extraneous considerations of use or ornament to justify us in learning one thing rather than another. If a certain department of knowledge specially attracts a man, let him study that, and study it because it attracts him; and let him not fabricate excuses for that which requires no excuse, but rest assured that the reason why it most attracts him is that it is best for him. The majority of mankind, as is only natural, will be most attracted by those sciences which most nearly concern human life; those sciences which, in Bacon’s phrase, are drenched in flesh and blood, or, in the more elegant language of the Daily Telegraph, palpitate with actuality. The men who are attracted to the drier and the less palpitating sciences, say logic or pure mathematics or textual criticism, are likely to be fewer in number; but they are not to suppose that the comparative unpopularity of such learning renders it any the less worthy of pursuit. Nay, they may if they like console themselves with Bacon’s observation that ‘this same lumen siccum doth parch and offend most men’s watery and soft natures’ and infer, if it pleases them, that their natures are less soft and watery than other men’s. But be that as it may…
Also, ibidem:
I do not believe that the proportion of the human race whose inner nature the study of the classics will specially transform and beautify is large; and I am quite sure that the proportion of the human race on whom the classics will confer that benefit can attain the desired end without that minute and accurate study of the classical tongues which affords Latin professors their only excuse for existing.
‘As is’
he she we they you you you I her so pronouns begin the dance called washing whose name derives from an alchemical fact that after a small stillness there is a small stir after great stillness a great stir
Agfa Silette. Agfa Ultra 100, 3.4/30
8 May 2004
locus ille animi nostri stomachus ubi habitabat olim concalluit. privata modo et domestica nos delectent, miram securitatem videbis; cuius plurimae mehercule partes sunt in tuo reditu. nemo enim in terris est mihi tam consentientibus sensibus.1
Incidentally, does it worry anyone else that most of the Greek phrases C. uses in his letters only occur very rarely in the entirety of the extant Greek corpus and usually in authors dating after the second century CE? Far be it from me to insinuate from silence, but it does look a bit odd.
Shackleton Bailey’s translation:
That place in my mental anatomy which used to contain my spleen grew a tough skin long ago. Providing only that my private and domestic circumstances give me pleasure, you will find my equanimity quite remarkable. It largely depends, believe me, on your return. There is no one in the world with whom I hit it off quite so happily.
[↩]
— 65, catch your cabbage!
Everyone laughed. Mr M’Coy, who wanted to enter the conversation by any door, pretended that he had never heard the story. Mr Cunningham said:
— It is supposed – they say, you know – to take place in the depot where they get these thundering big country fellows, omadhauns, you know, to drill. The sergeant makes them stand in a row against the wall and hold up their plates. He illustrated the story by grotesque gestures.
— At dinner, you know. Then he has a bloody big bowl of cabbage before him on the table and a bloody big spoon like a shovel. He takes up a wad of cabbage on the spoon and pegs it across the room and the poor devils have to try and catch it on their plates: 65, catch your cabbage.
Nihil mihi nunc scito tam deesse quam hominem eum, quocum omnia, que me cura aliqua adficiunt una communicem, qui me amet, qui sapiat, quicum ego cum loquar nihil fingam, nihil dissimulem, nihil obtegam. abest enim frater ἀφελέστατος et amantissimus. †Metellus† non homo, sed ‘litus atque aër’ et ‘solitudo mera’. tu autem, qui saepissime curam et angorem animi mei sermone et consilio levasti tuo, qui mihi et in publica re socius et in privatis omnibus conscius et omnium meorum sermonum et consiliorum particeps esse soles, ubinam es? ita sum ab omnibus destitutus ut tantum requietis habeam quantum cum uxore et filiola et mellito Cicerone consumitur. nam illae ambitiosae nostrae fucosaeque amicitiae sunt in quodam splendore forensi, fructum domesticum non habent. itaque cum bene completa domus est tempore matutino, cum ad forum stipati gregibus amicorum descendimus, reperire ex magna turba neminem possumus, quocum aut iocari libere aut suspirare familiariter possimus.
A Man may make a Remark –
In itself – a quiet thing
That may furnish the Fuse unto a Spark
In dormant nature – lain –Let us divide – with skill –
Let us discourse – with care –
Powder exists in Charcoal –
Before it exists in Fire –
Only a fool would use a cleaver to lance a boil.
Τῆς αὐταρκείας καρπὸς μέγιστος ἐλευθερία.
Freedom is the finest product of self-sufficiency.1
Yes, yes, I know karpos means ‘fruit’ or ‘harvest’ – but I don’t really like the idea of autarkeia (another tangled concept, but there’s no helping it) reaping the whirlwind. If you don’t like the translation of megistos (lit. greatest, largest) as ‘finest’, well, there it is – those who live by the LSJ die in the middle of Liddell.
[↩]
Happily Miss Carridge was a woman of few words. When body odour and volubility meet, then there is no remedy (43).
* * *
Her mind was so collected that she saw clearly the impropriety of letting it appear so (79).
…the judgement that someone is unliterary is like the judgement ‘This man is not in love’, whereas the judgement that my taste is bad is more like ‘This man is in love, but with a frightful woman’. And just as the mere fact that a man of sense and breeding loves a woman we dislike properly and inevitably makes us consider her again and look for, and sometimes find, something in her we had not noticed before, so, in my system, the very fact that people, or even any one person, can well and truly read, and love for a lifetime, a book we had thought bad, will raise the suspicion that it cannot really be as bad as we thought. Sometimes, to be sure, our friend’s mistress remains in our eyes so plain, stupid and disagreeable that we can attribute his love only to the irrational and mysterious behaviour of hormones; similarly, the book he likes may continue to seem so bad that we have to attribute his liking to some early association or other psychological accident. But we must, and should, remain uncertain. Always, there may be something in it that we can’t see.
What, bred at home! Have I taken all this pains for a creature that is to lead the inglorious life of a cabbage, to suck the nutritious juices from the spot where he was first planted? No, to perambulate this terraqueous globe is too small a range; were it permitted, he should at least make the tour of the whole system of the sun. Let other mortals pore upon maps, and swallow the legends of lying travellers…
Idem classi praefectus circumvehens Peloponnesum, Laconicen populatus, classem eorum fugavit, Corcyram sub imperium Atheniensum redegit sociosque idem adiunxit Epirotas, Athamanas, Chaonas omnesque eas gentes, quae mare illud adiacent. quo facto Lacedaemonii de diutina contentione destiterunt et sua sponte Atheniensibus imperii maritimi principatum concesserunt, pacemque iis legibus constituerunt, ut Athenienses mari duces essent. quae victoria tantae fuit Atticis laetitiae, ut tum primum arae Paci publice sint factae eique deae pulvinar sit institutum.
A mild, a compliant, an unutterably tranquil and harmless old lady, who never by any chance suggested the idea that she had been actually alive since the hour of her birth. Nature has so much to do in this world, and is engaged in generating such a vast variety of co-existent productions, that she must surely be now and then too flurried and confused to distinguish between the different processes that she is carrying on at the same time. Starting from this point of view, it will always remain my private persuasion that Nature was absorbed in making cabbages when Mrs. Vesey was born, and that the good lady suffered the consequences of a vegetable preoccupation in the mind of the Mother of us all.
Among the Romanes a Poet was called Vates, which is as much as a diviner, foreseer, or Prophet, as by his conjoyned words Vaticinium, and Vaticinari, is manifest, so heavenly a title did that excellent people bestowe uppon this hart-ravishing knowledge, and so farre were they carried into the admiration thereof, that they thought in the chanceable hitting uppon any of such verses, great foretokens of their following fortunes, were placed. Whereupon grew the word of Sortes Vergilianae, when by suddaine opening Virgils Booke, they lighted uppon some verse of his, as it is reported by many, whereof the Histories of the Emperours lives are full.
Sometimes I like to start my mornings by playing sortes Vergilianae — which is not, in my arrogant opinion, very different from reading one’s horoscope or doing the crossword. My question is usually something along the lines of ‘what should I do today’. I play this little game not, incidentally, because I like Vergil. I loathe Vergil. But I like my allusive actions to be apt in their aping of the antique.
This morning’s result was the following:
At Venus aetherios inter dea candida nimbos
And meanwhile Venus, goddess radiant amid the aery clouds…
This could have several meanings, I think:
I don’t like any of these options; so here’s a bibliography of Vergilian influences — may it protect you therefrom.
χρύσειοι
<δ’> ἐρέβινθοι
ἐπ’ ἀϊόνων
ἐφύοντο1
and golden chickpeas were growing on the
banks
I once sat through a lecture wherein the speaker claimed that the presence of an imperfect verb was sufficient to prove the presence of a narrative. Though that notion seems a bit silly to me, I have no real opinion on the matter, just as I have no opinion about Carson’s translation of this fragment (not that there’s any real room for error, mind). I simply like that it mentions chickpeas.2
Scaliger was far from untouched by the religious troubles of his day, but the way they bedevilled the scholarship of the sixteenth century is more starkly illustrated in the case of his friend and younger contemporary Casaubon. Born in Geneva of refugee Protestant parents, obliged to learn his Greek hiding in a cave in the French mountains, unable to avoid being drawn into the wrangle because of his distinction as a scholar and forced to spend much of his time and talents on arid polemic, this great French scholar finally found rest as a naturalised Englishman in Westminster Abbey. With him the French scholarship of the period ended, as it had begun, on a chalcenteric((A word which should be used more often in casual conversation; literally, bowels of bronze — hence tough, vigorous or sturdy.)) note. He was a man of vast industry and erudition, but had the rarer gift of being able to use his learning as a commentator to illumine rather than impress. He appears to have chosen to work on those texts that offered the most scope to his wide knowledge, such as Diogenes Laertius, Strabo, and Athenaeus. His choice of difficult and often diffuse texts, with which most students of of the classics have but a passing acquaintance, means that his services are not always recognized. For Casaubon is still with us. His Animadversiones on Athenaeus formed the core of Schweighäuser’s commentary of 1801, Strabo is still usually cited by reference to Casaubon’s pages, his notes on Persius loom large in Conington’s commentary. Son-in-law to Henri Estienne and for a time sub-librarian to de Thou at the royal scripts, Casaubon was most at home in the world of books and manuscripts, able to find material for his own needs and to supply scholars all over Europe. His use of manuscript material has not been properly appraised, but he seems to have made no dramatic advances, except that his second edition of Theophrastus’ Characters (1599) added five more characters (24–8) to those then known. Some of his most distinguished work was long buried in his unfinished commentary on Aeschylus.
‘I am strong!’ he cried. It is true. Ford has no right to be strong, but he is. He never did his dumb-bells or played in his school fifteen. But the muscles came. He thinks they came while he was reading Pindar.
Coin depicting the Emperor Augustus1
from A Visual Compendium of Roman Emperors.
At last reading Ronald Syme’s famous book, The Roman Revolution (Oxford, 1939), a history of the end of the Roman Republic and the beginning of the principate. It begins slowly, with a grim overview of the career of C. Julius Caesar Octavianus (later known as Augustus) and a bit of Republican background. Once Caesar has been assassinated, though, the plot picks up. Everybody knows that the history of the years 44 to 31 bc2 is the stuff of tragedies, but in Syme’s book, with the wealth of prosopographical detail, one feels the busy-ness of the scene, how everyone knew the Republic was going to perdition and nobody could or would do anything about it. This comment on Brutus is typical:
Whatever be thought of those qualities which contemporaries admired as the embodiment of aristocratic virtus (without always being able to prevail against posterity or the moral character of another age), Brutus was not only a sincere and consistent champion of legality, but in this matter all too perspicacious a judge of men and politics. Civil war was an abomination. Victory could only be won by adopting the adversary’s weapons; and victory no less than defeat would be fatal to everything an honest man and a patriot valued. But Brutus was far away. (147f.)
That’s the real question, then, isn’t it? What do you do, as an honest man and a patriot, when your country is bent, not on self-destruction, but on the destruction of those values which make it worth defending? But there is room for neither philosophy nor morality in politics; no, and never has been, I suppose.
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.
Sometimes I go into bookstores to fortify myself with a few judicious excerpts from favored novels, viz.:
Gainful toil + useful work = wasted time. No reading. Only joy in Monteverdi & a bit of Horace and Pindar and Epicurus (‘Send me a little pot of cheese so that I can indulge in extravagance when I wish’, as per Diogenes Laertius) and Epictetus (Τῶν ἡδέων τὰ σπανιώτατα γινόμενα μάλιστα τέρπει – Those of our pleasures which come most rarely are especially delightful).
Memory, I realize, can be an unreliable thing; often
it is heavily coloured by the circumstances in which one remembers, and no doubt this applies to certain of the recollections I have gathered here.
Up, coffee, email, breakfast, library (return book), library II (read), library III (return book & photocopy), coffee & sandwich, room, read, class, which put in mind of Meredith:
…one is not altogether fit for the battle of life who is engaged in a perpetual contention with his dinner…
…which holds true for Thucydides as well; the reason it being generally so wretched is a matter of digestion, not lack of cogitation; even managed an exquisite civility to the disagreeable personages), library, check books, room, read, tea, bread, Bach, bed.
Saw a double herm of Epicurus and Diogenes the Cynic at the Museo Capitolino, which pleased me much in my soul.
At the Palazzo dei Conservatori, saw a herm of Alcibiades, which I thought particularly appropriate and a Roman statue of a toga’d man holding a scroll, whose expression was wonderful, though ineffable.
Later — Looking out over the city, a faint bluster in the air. The ruins, though sunlit, had a bleak familiarity. Curious to think of the personalities – Octavian, Domitian, et al. – who once crowded this now-barren spot. Flowers creep amongst the marble as children pry at bricks and mortar, searching for a souvenir.
Atop the Palatine, in the Farnese Gardens, oranges still clung to the trees and fountains bubbled in the winter light.
That is naturally a better reflection of my humor on that particular day than an apt description of the ancient remains.
Addendum: I found this quotation later. It expresses far more eloquently than I have done something of my experience of Rome:
My cappuccino was served, and for a moment I felt that having achieved this distinction constituted the supreme victory of my life. I surveyed the scene and immediately saw my mistake…
::
ego hoc feci mm–mmx
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