More specifically concerning: twitter
12.ii.2021
12 February 2021, around 6.24.
‘They were old maids. They weren’t cranky because they hadn’t had a man but because they’d had too many old books.’ —the gravedigger, qtd. in Ronald Blythe, Akenfield
transitory
24 April 2021, around 21.22.
Near the end of the road.
10.vii.2021
10 July 2021, around 5.45.
‘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.’ —Malthus, in the midst of being cranky about Godwin
11.vii.2021
11 July 2021, around 13.23.
‘The moment we allow ourselves to ask why some things are not otherwise, instead of endeavouring to account for them as they are, we shall never know where to stop; we shall be led into the grossest, and most childish absurdities’ —Malthus, ray of sunshine ‘Leisure is, without a doubt, highly valuable to man; but […]
25.x.2021
25 October 2021, around 6.08.
‘Good carpentry can make a secret door in any wall.’ —William James, from Essays in Psychical Research
24.xi.2021
24 November 2021, around 9.10.
Snow on the distant ridge (not shown).
9.i.2022
9 January 2022, around 12.08.
‘There are, first of all, people who have homes without offices: these are, paradoxically, either the very rich or the very poor.’ —Fredric Jameson, Raymond Chandler: The Detections of Totality
8.iii.2022
8 March 2022, around 16.38.
‘Besides, there is nothing so plain boring as the constant repetition of assertions that are not true, and sometimes not even faintly sensible’ —J.L. Austin, Sense and Sensibilia, explaining why no one reads novels.
20.iii.2022
20 March 2022, around 9.21.
‘…it is true that I long syth haue redde and herde that the beste clerkes ben not the wysest men’ —Reynard the Fox (Caxton trans.)
27.iii.2022
27 March 2022, around 13.55.
‘Nothing whatever, except a harsh and dismal superstition, prohibits enjoyment.’ —Spinoza, Ethics, pt.IV, Prop. 45, Schol. 2 (trans. George Eliot)
21.vii.2022
21 July 2022, around 8.57.
‘Arthur Symons was talking of some foreign city, carrying in his waistcoat pocket, as it were, the genius loci, anon to be embalmed in Pateresque prose. I forget whether this time it was Rome or Seville or Moscow or what…’ —Max Beerbohm, ‘First Meetings with W.B. Yeats’
5.viii.2022
5 August 2022, around 6.05.
‘All genuine thought and art is to a certain extent an attempt to put big heads on small people: so it is no wonder the attempt does not always come off.’ —Schopenhauer
peripatetic
19 August 2022, around 9.12.
From the morning walk.
6.x.2022
6 October 2022, around 16.38.
‘In their doctrine freedom of spirit is taken from man in the name of his own happiness; social eudaemonism is set up against liberty. If truth does not exist, then nothing is left but this compulsory organization of social happiness.’ —Berdyaev, Dostoevsky (trans. Attwater)
words of note
31 December 2022, around 4.52.
One encounters so many interesting words while reading, some of which are unfamiliar, some of which – though tantalizing – send one to the dictionary immediately, and some of which linger in the mind even if already known. I used to gather such things elsewhere in bits and pieces, but it seems amusing to collect […]
11.i.2023
11 January 2023, around 11.45.
‘His desire for a career as a man of letters was not matched by his ability as an editor or as a writer of verse or prose’ —Dorothy Thompson, The Dignity of Chartism