trysail
Catch Me Who Can
- Joined
- Nov 8, 2005
- Posts
- 25,593
Pay no attention to this thread. I made a New Year's resolution to collect these in one place; this is the result.
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"This shook me up considerable, because I didn't want to go back to the widow's any more and be so cramped up and sivilized, as they called it."
-Mark Twain
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Tom Sawyer's Companion)
New York, 1983
I reread it every year.
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"If a lie is necessary, why not speak it? We are all after the same thing, whether we lie or speak the truth: our own advantage. Men lie when they think to profit by deception, and tell the truth for the same reason— to get something they want, and to be better trusted for their honesty. It is only two different roads to the same goal. Were there no question of advantage, the honest man would be as likely to lie as the liar is, and the liar would tell the truth as readily as the honest man."
-Herodotus
The Histories
Book Three – The Seven Conspirators
Translated by Aubrey de Sélincourt
Revised by A. R. Burn
London, 1988
Throughout the course of my career, I observed lots of people lying, cheating, and stealing (or, at the very least, not taking great pains to tell the truth). The older I got, the worse it seemed to get. I wondered if this was actually the case or whether I was lacking a long term perspective. As you would expect, this line really struck a chord when I stumbled across it in Herodotus. I suppose it would have been nice if someone had informed me of the 11th Commandment (Don't Get Caught) back when I was an impressionable youth. The fact of the matter is that I'm a bad liar and I know it, so I suppose I'm stuck (attempting) to be honest.
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"Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race."
-James Joyce
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Norwalk, Connecticut, 1968
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"Hold to the now, the here, through which all future plunges into the past."
-James Joyce
Ulysses
New York, 1982
Incredibly lovely wordsmithing.
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"He was polite to his elders, who disliked him. Whatever his elders told him to do, he did. They told him to look before he leaped, and he always looked before he leaped. They told him never to put off until the next day what he could do the day before, and he never did. He was told to honor his mother and his father, and he honored his mother and his father. He was told that he should not kill, and he did not kill, until he got in the Army. Then he was told to kill, and he killed. He turned the other cheek on every occasion and always did unto others exactly as he would have had others do unto him. When he gave to charity, his left hand never knew what his right hand was doing. He never once took the name of the Lord his God in vain, committed adultery, or coveted his neighbor's ass. In fact, he loved his neighbor and never ever bore false witness against him. Major Major's elders disliked him because he was such a flagrant nonconformist."
-Joseph Heller
Catch 22
New York, 1955
It's tough to be a nonconformist.
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"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world, the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man."
-George Bernard Shaw
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"I am not doing well by Ernestina, who was after all a victim of circumstances; of an illiberal environment. It is, of course, its essentially schizophrenic outlook on society that makes the middle class such a peculiar mixture of yeast and dough. We tend nowadays to forget that it has always been the great revolutionary class; we see much more the doughy aspect, the bourgeoisie as the heartland of reaction, the universal insult, forever selfish and conforming. Now this Janus-like quality derives from the class's one saving virtue, which is this: that alone of the three great castes of society it alone sincerely and habitually despises itself. Ernestina was certainly no exception here. It was not only Charles who heard an unwelcome acidity in her voice; she heard it herself. But her tragedy (and one that remains ubiquitous) was that she misapplied this precious gift of self-contempt and so made herself a victim of her class's perennial lack of faith in itself. Instead of seeing its failings as a reason to reject the entire class system, she saw them as a reason to seek a higher. She cannot be blamed, of course; she had been hopelessly well trained to view society as so many rungs on a ladder; thus reducing her own to a mere step to something supposedly better."
-John Fowles
The French Lieutenant's Woman
New York, 1969
How's that for an acidic comment?
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"In character creation its masterpiece is the advertising agent who, by devising some new and super-imbecilic boobtrap, puts his hook-and-eye factory 'on the map,' ruins all other factories, marries the daughter of his boss, and so ends as an eminent man...... It is the sort of thing that awakens a response only in men who are essentially unimaginative, timorous and degraded- in brief, in democrats, bagmen, yahoos. The man of reflective habit cannot conceivably take any passionate interest in the conflicts it deals with. He doesn't want to marry the daughter of the owner of the hook-and-eye factory; he would probably burn down the factory itself if it ever came into his hands. What interests this man is the far more poignant and significant conflict between a salient individual and the harsh and meaningless fiats of destiny, the unintelligible mandates and vagaries of god. His hero is not one who yields and wins, but one who resists and fails."
-H. L. Mencken
Prejudices, Second Series. "The National Letters"
New York, 1920
Ahhhh! Mencken!
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"......Pearl argued that any man who entertained a lady for so little as two minutes was guilty of a gross offense, not only against her person but also against the peace and dignity of the human race..... [Brodel] had simply never heard that copulation could be prolonged at will- at all events, far beyond the limits he had set..... On the heels of this grotesque discussion Pearl announced the founding of an organization to be called the Society for More and Better Fucking in the Home."
-H. L. Mencken
The Diary of H.L. Mencken
New York, 1989
Membership applications are still accepted!
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"I never did like dirty tales, true or false; if they're any good, they just make you wistful; if not there's nothing more boresome in the world, I reckon."
-Thomas Berger
Little Big Man
New York, 1964
There's some truth to Jack Crabb's observation.
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"For it is part of my craft to make every swain fall in love with me. I do it for sport, for craftsmanship, on a bet, on a dare. My heart fills, my thighs ache; my silk panties moisten; the sense memories of love make me feel that I feel love though I love not- or only love my art- ah, my first acting teacher, Arnold Feibleman, would be proud of me! As would my dear feisty Vivian Lovecraft, my mentor. To make someone believe you are in love when you are not- this is my craft, my witchery. For as I gaze into Wolfgang's eyes, I fall in love with the image of my beloved self that I see there. Oscar Wilde was right: an actress is a little more than a woman, an actor a little more than a man. I cannot help myself, I am in love with the Jessica that Wolfgang is in love with! I am besotted with my craft, like a witch who turns a mouse into a lizard only to prove she can. Poor mouse, poor lizard, what do they know? Acted on as they are by the powers that be, what do they feel when time stops and the fur turns to scale. Poor creatures. Poveretti. We witches, we actresses are as wanton boys to flies; we kill them for our sport."
-Erica Jong
Serenissima, A Novel of Venice
Boston, 1987
Terrifying words from the inventor of the "zipless fuck."
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"Insensibly he formed the most delightful habit in the world, the habit of reading: he did not know that thus he was providing himself with a refuge from all the distress of life; he did not know either that he was creating for himself an unreal world which would make the real world of every day a source of bitter disappointment."
- W. Somerset Maugham
Of Human Bondage
Modern Library Edition, New York, 1942
Escapism, too, has perils.
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"It was remarkable how Dean could go mad and then suddenly continue with his soul- which I think is wrapped up in a fast car, a coast to reach, and a woman at the end of the road- calmly and sanely as though nothing had happened.
As a seaman I used to think of the waves rushing beneath the shell of the ship and the bottomless deeps thereunder- now I could feel the road some twenty inches beneath me, unfurling and flying and hissing at incredible speeds across the groaning continent with that mad Ahab at the wheel."
- Jack Kerouac
On The Road
Viking Critical Edition, New York, 1979
Oh, my, what a lovely piece of writing!
Road trip, anyone?
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"As often as we read of armies plundering, we find small bands of adventurers trying to carve out a new home somewhere in the Eastern Mediterranean and Aegean. The title they most coveted, if we can trust Homer, was 'sacker of cities.' In the Homeric epics, and still in Aeschylus, it was a leader's greatest claim to glory. Agamemnon, Achilles, Nestor ('in my youth I was one') and even Athena herself bear the title of 'sacker of cities' in Homer.
We should not overdo the search for 'modern' motives for this. In the Iliad the sacker of cities does not destroy to increase his political power, to combat inflation, to open up trade routes to the Black Sea or to the tin mines of Europe; he does not destroy to appropriate the mackerel and tunny harvests. He says he sacks cities to get booty, treasures, horses, cattle, gold, silver, fine armor and weapons- and women. We must not forget the women (after all, the legend insists that the seizure of a woman was the cause of the Trojan War). Time and again Homer tells of the fight for 'the city and its women.' When Achilles tells Odysseus of the twenty-three cities he has sacked he mentions only 'treasure and women' as his gain. This is what makes him proud, and gives him fame after his death. And the more beautiful the women, the better.
.... Such then were the goals of 'heroic' kingship. If economic necessity can partly explain such attacks- to replenish the slave labor in the 'state industries-' nevertheless it was doubtless still true that the greater the booty captured, the larger quantities of gold and silver, the finer the horses and the more beautiful the women, the greater the honour due to the conquerer."
- Michael Wood
In Search of The Trojan War
Oxford (U.K.), 1985
Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.
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"My Lord," he said, "without a debate in which both sides of a question are expressed, it is not possible to choose the better course. All one can do is accept whatever it is that has been proposed. But grant a debate, and there is a fair choice to be made. We cannot assess the purity of gold merely by looking at it; we test it by rubbing it on other gold- then we can tell which is the purer. I warned your father- Darius was my own brother- not to attack the Scythians, those wanderers who live in a cityless land. But he would not listen to me. Confident in his power to subdue them he invaded their country, and before he came home again many fine soldiers who marched with him were dead. But you, my lord, mean to attack a nation greatly superior to the Scythians; a nation with the highest reputation for valour on land and at sea. It is my duty to tell you what you have to fear from them; you have said you mean to bridge the Hellespont and march through Europe to Greece. Now suppose- and it is not impossible- that you were to suffer a great reverse by land or sea, or even both. Those Greeks are said to be great fighters- and indeed one might well guess as much from the fact that the Athenians alone destroyed the great army we sent to attack them under Datis and Artaphemes. Or if you will, suppose they were to succeed upon one element only- suppose they fell upon our fleet and defeated it, and then sailed to the Hellespont and destroyed the bridge: then, my lord, you would indeed be in peril. It is no special wisdom of my own that makes me argue as I do; but just such a disaster as I have suggested did, in fact, nearly overtake us when your father bridged the Thracian Bosporus and the Danube to take his army into Scythia...
Nothing is more valuable to a man than to lay his plans carefully and well; even if things go against him, and forces he cannot control bring his enterprise to nothing, he still has the satisfaction of knowing that it was not his fault- the plans were all laid; if, on the other hand, he leaps headlong into danger and succeeds by luck- well, that's a bit of luck indeed, but he still has the shame of knowing that he was ill prepared.
You know, my lord, that amongst living creatures it is the great ones that God smites with his thunder, out of envy of their pride. The little ones do not vex him. It is always the great buildings and the tall trees which are struck by lightning. It is God's way to bring the lofty low. Often a great army is destroyed by a little one, when God in his envy puts fear into the men's hearts, or sends a thunderstorm, and they are cut to pieces in a way they do not deserve. For God tolerates pride in none but himself. Haste is the mother of failure- and for failure we always pay a heavy price; it is in delay our profit lies- perhaps it may not be immediately apparent, but we shall find it, sure enough, as time goes on.
This, my lord, is the advice I offer you. And as for you, Mardonius, I warn you that the Greeks in no way deserve disparagement; so say no more silly things about them. By slandering the Greeks you increase the king's eagerness to make war on them, and, as far as I can see, this is the very thing you yourself most passionately desire. Heaven forbid it should happen! Slander is a wicked thing; in a case of slander two parties do wrong and one suffers by it. The slanderer is guilty in that he speaks ill of a man behind his back; and the man who listens to him is guilty in that he takes his word without troubling to find out the truth. The slandered person suffers doubly- from the disparaging words of the one and from the belief of the other that he deserves the disparagement."
- Herodotus. Translated by Aubrey de Sélincourt, revised by A.R. Burn.
The Histories- Book VII, Artabanus' Warning
London, 1988
I believe it was Henry Ford who once said, "History is bunk."
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"Kearney seemed to reserve his softer emotions for horses. He was, above all, an equestrian. He doted on his mounts and saw to it that they were always immaculately shod and curried. He loved to breed and race them. He abhorred the rough treatment of animals then prevalent in the army. Kearney was the commander of the U.S. Dragoons at Fort Leavenworth, the elite unit of mounted soldiers created in 1833 to police the Western borderlands (the name "dragoon" derived from the so-called "dragon" guns carried by a venerable French mounted outfit on which the dragoons were loosely based). Kearney had personally recruited and shaped this fabled precursor to the United States Cavalry from its very inception. It is because of this that historians would later call Kearney "the father of the American cavalry." Not surprisingly, the largest part of Kearney's training concerned the care and handling of horses. In the first manual of the U.S. Dragoons, which Kearney wrote, he urged that each soldier always be "very careful to avoid alarming or disturbing his horse." A soft-spoken man by nature, Kearney advised the dragoon to speak to his mount in a low, even voice, almost a whisper."
-Hampton Sides
Blood And Thunder, An Epic of The American West
New York, 2006
A well written and researched account of the little known first American imperial wars- the conquest of the Navajos, Mexico, California, and the Southwest.
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"Young men want to be faithful and are not; old man want to be faithless and cannot."
-Oscar Wilde
The Picture of Dorian Gray
New York, 1957
A man with a rapier wit and a nearly unequalled facility with words who, unfortunately, was done in by hubris and a lack of common sense.
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"The 1933 decision of Saudia Arabia and SOCAL to sign this concession changed forever the nature of the kingdom that Abdul Aziz founded. This planted the seed that grew to become the most important oil producer on earth. But oil success did not come overnight, and in fact may not have been expected at all. Some long time observers of Saudi Arabia have maintained that the king never would have entered into this agreement had he really believed there was any oil. Others have argued, however, that Abdul Aziz would have had to deal away his oil rights, even if he had known his oil resources were vast, to satisfy his great need for hard currency."
-Matthew R. Simmons
Twilight In The Desert, The Coming Saudi Oil Shock and The World Economy
New York, 2005
Possibly, the most important book published in 2005 and NOT READ!
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"There are hidden contradictions in the minds of people who 'love Nature' while deploring the 'artificialities' with which 'Man has spoiled Nature.' The obvious contradiction lies in their choice of words, which imply that Man and his artifacts are not part of 'Nature-' but beavers and their dams are. But the contradictions go deeper than this prima facie absurdity. In declaring his love for a beaver dam (erected by beavers for beavers' purposes) and his hatred for dams erected by man (for the purposes of man) the 'Naturist' reveals his hatred for his own race- i.e., his own self-hatred.
In the case of 'Naturists' such self hatred is understandable; they are such a sorry lot. But hatred is too strong an emotion to feel toward them; pity and contempt are the most they rate.
As for me, willy-nilly, I am a man, not a beaver, and H. Sapiens is the only race I have or can have. Fortunately for me, I like being part of a race made up of men and women- it strikes me as a fine arrangement and perfectly 'natural.'"
-Robert A. Heinlein
Time Enough For Love
New York, 1969
Heinlein, prolific science fiction author, once wrote (in the chapter titled "Excerpts From The Notebooks of Lazarus Long" from the same book), "Natural laws have no pity."
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"But, as I have noted, their innocence of literae humaniores was not necessarily a sign of stupidity, and from some of them, in fact, I learned the valuable lesson that sharp wits can lurk in unpolished skulls. I knew cops who were matches for the most learned and unscrupulous lawyers at the Baltimore bar, and others who made monkeys of the oldest and crabbedest judges on the bench, and were generally respected for it. Moreover, I knew cops who were really first-rate policemen, and loved their trade as tenderly as so many art artists or movie actors. They were badly paid, but they carried on their dismal work with unflagging diligence, and loved a long, hard chase almost as much as they loved a brisk clubbing. Their one salient failing, taking them as a class, was their belief that any person who had been arrested, even on mere suspicion, was unquestionably and ipso facto guilty. But that theory, though it occasionally colored their testimony in a garish manner, was grounded, after all, on nothing worse than professional pride and espirit de corps, and I am certainly not one to hoot at it, for my own belief in the mission of journalism has no better support than the same partiality, and all the logic I am aware of stands against it."
-H.L. Mencken
The Vintage Mencken (gathered by Alistair Cooke)
originally published in Mencken's 1942 Newspaper Days as "Reflections On Notable Cops"
New York, 1955
After his 1956 death and through the '60s, Mencken's opinions and philosophy (as well as his work) fell into some disrepute and neglect. Alistair Cooke played a critically important role in championing and successfully reviving widespread interest in Mencken's incomparable prose, wit, vocabulary, and genius.
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"This is certainly a transition phase between the Iliadic world, where men died because of external forces, and the coming world of fourth-century Athens, when Plato and Aristotle teach that men are responsible for their own fate. There is the further implication that men are agents of the gods; they are not the gods, but they do not act alone. Much of this is contradictory, but it befits an epic where old codes are being destroyed and new ones constructed."
-Wallace Gray
Homer to Joyce, Interpretations of the classic works of Western literature
(page 28, from the chapter on Homer's Odyssey)
New York, 1985
This is a most wonderful book. Wallace Gray was a professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia for thirty-two years. The book is a collection of essays that follows the thread and development of the Western literary tradition (quite literally) "From Homer to Joyce."
If you are interested in interpretative essays and the common themes between Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripedes, Aristophanes, Virgil, Gottfried, Dante, Montaigne, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Swift, Dostoevsky, Eliot, and Joyce, this is a delight.
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"Within the British Isles, the spread of RP [Received Pronunciation] by the BBC, first on radio, then on television, helped to reinforce what was an already strong connection in many people's minds between education and 'Standard English'- usually perceived as the pronunciation found in the public schools, the universities, the professions, the government, and the church. The influence of this association was, in its day, enormous, even though RP was spoken by only about 3 per cent of the British population, a tiny fraction of the world's English-speaking community. Henry Cecil Wyld, Merton Professor of English Language and Literature at Oxford from 1920 to 1945, and credited with the dictum that, "No gentleman goes on a bus", expressed a common view when he wrote of RP that it was: "The best kind of English, not only because it is spoken by those often properly called the best people, but also because it has two great advantages that make it intrinsically superior to every other type of English speech- the extent to which it is current throughout the country and the marked distinctiveness and clarity of its sounds.' Even in the United States a refined pronunciation of the King's English became desirable: in the Hollywood films of the 1930s stars playing upper-class Americans affected 'posh' accents. (The fascination was not entirely one way. Raymond Chandler, now wholly identified with Los Angeles, liked to stress his English public school education. In 1958, the year before his death, he wrote to John Houseman, a friend from his Hollywood days, 'I have had a lot of fun with the American language; it has fascinating idioms, is constantly creative, very much like the English of Shakespeare's time, its slang and argot are wonderful...') Later, in the 1950s, Wall Street and Madison Avenue executives had English secretaries to add a touch of class to their dealings with the public."
-Robert McCrum, William Cran, and Robert MacNeil
The Story Of English
New York, 1986
A best seller on the history and development of the English language?
In the immortal words of Yogi Berra, "Who woulda thunk it?"
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"Sex is something I don't understand too hot. You never know where the hell you are. I keep making up sex rules for myself, and then I break them right away. Last year I made a rule that I was going to quit horsing around with girls that, deep down, gave me a pain in the ass. I broke it, though, the same week I made it- the same night, as a matter of fact. I spent the whole night necking with a terrible phoney named Anne Louise Sherman. Sex is something I just don't understand. I swear to God I don't."
-J. D. Salinger
The Catcher In The Rye
New York, 1951
Poor, dear old Holden Caulfield. I never did quite understand him, but I've always enjoyed his observations and reflections on the thing we call life.
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"I don't believe life has a purpose. Life is a lot of protoplasm with an urge to reproduce and continue in being."
-Joseph Campbell
The Power Of Myth
New York, 1988
An opinion essentially identical to that held by both Mark Twain and H. L. Mencken.
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"You'd be surprised, neighbors, how often the Literary Life imitates Real Life when money is on the line. Damn few people in publishing, politics or poker are in the game primarily to make friends...
I offer as a general rule of thumb this observation: newspaper people almost always will have read the book under discussion, and perhaps even other books by the same author; radio interviewers may or may not be prepared, while television folks- well, I am tempted to offer a cash prize to the person able to prove to my satisfaction that any television interviewer anywhere in America has read any book whatsoever."
-Larry L. King (no, not that "Larry King.")
None But A Blockhead
New York, 1986
Ever heard of The Best Little Whorehouse In Texas? If so, this is the author.
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"While the headword section describes the headword in terms of its form (that is, how it occurs in its written and spoken forms within the language), the sense section defines its meaning or 'signification'. In OED terms, a sense is an entity that, in its simplest form, consists of a definition and a series of chronologically arranged illustrative quotations. Some words have a single, readily definable meaning, but many, particularly those which have been in existence for several centuries, have acquired new or extended meanings. A word used in a literal sense may later be applied figuratively and develop its own history, or in other cases the entire meaning or significance of the word is altered. For example, the word 'silly' first meant 'happy' or 'blessed', a 'petticoat' was originally a man's short coat, the word 'glamour' was a corruption of 'grammar' and also had an early meaning of 'magic' or 'witchcraft'. A major function of the OED is to trace the way in which such words evolved by illustrating their usage over time. Thus, for a complete understanding of a word's sense development, both the definitions and the quotations need to be read in full. Quotations also frequently illustrate the usage of variant spellings listed in the headword section, so that they support not only the senses, but the entry as a whole."
-Donna Lee Berg
A Guide To The Oxford English Dictionary
Oxford, 1993
The OED is, of course, the most stupendous and wonderful dictionary in the world. It is quite readable in its own right. The monumental task of its compilation took seventy-one years, by some measures, but the great majority of the Herculean task really began in 1877 with the appointment of Sir James Murray as editor and only concluded in 1928 with the publication of the last volume of the first edition. C.T. Onions, Henry Bradley, and William Craigie must also be credited with part of the birthing process.
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"China is backward economically and technologically, but in other respects the United States or Britain is backward by comparison with China, India, or Egypt. These Asian or African civilizations are far more coherent, and this is both a strength for them and a wall of resistance to industrialization and economic development along Western lines. Of course, Western industrial society has a coherence of its own, in that it rests on generally held assumptions about accomplishment and mastery as central to the meaning of our lives- about exploration and exploitability of material acquisitions, the value of knowledge, the value of work.
Let me be specific, since the issues come down to practical things. To run a factory requires workers and managers who want economic prosperity badly enough to spend a major part of their working lives doing things that are often boring, exhausting, and unpleasant. They also need, usually, the ability to read and write, to make complicated plans and analyses, to use sophisticated tools, to understand machinery and feel at home with it, and even to take pleasure in machines and in the concepts that lie behind them. A dependable supply of such workers and managers exists in the United States, Canada, and Western Europe, because fathers and sons have done this kind of thing since the Industrial Revolution first emerged, during the eighteenth century, in a society whose ancient and medieval engineering and technology had already been of remarkable sophistication. One reason they have done this is that even though Western societies are now secularized, they are the product of a religious civilization that insisted that constructive work in this world pleases God, will be rewarded by God, and advances the development of a history that is understood to have begun in the void from which God summoned matter, and to end in the Day of Judgement, when all will be held accountable for how they have used their talents and dealt with their fellow man. The latter-day political secularizations of this religious conception of history have changed little that is essential to it. Progressive humanists or Marxists, rationalists or scientific optimists, we in the West still go on working, as if our immortal salvation depended upon it. Our culture is teleological- it presumes purposive development and a conclusion."
-William Pfaff
Barbarian Sentiments
New York, 1989
This piece is, of course, a little dated. It's always interesting to see just how wrong forecasters frequently are. Does anyone remember the best-selling Megatrends by John Naisbitt? If you want a good laugh, find a copy and see for yourself just how absurdly wrong Naisbitt was about just about everything. But, what the hell? He sold a ton of books to the gullible and the credulous- and laughed all the way to the bank.
William Pfaff is a very bright man whose views on foreign affairs have often been prescient- for example, he did forsee the Balkan nightmare. Who among us envisioned the astonishingly rapid emergence of China as a global economic powerhouse? Granted, there were some- but not very many.
Beware of seers and entrail readers! There are well-known rules for forecasting: forecast frequently, never include dates, and (most importantly) if you're ever right- don't EVER let anybody forget it!
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"In 1378 Charles was succeeded both as Emperor and King of Bohemia by his son Wenceslaus IV, who was so ineffective and unpopular that his half-brother Sigismund seized power, holding Wenceslaus prisoner for a time, and in due course formally succeeding him in 1411. This Sigismund, who married the Hungarian queen (or king as she had to be called according to the old Magyar custom) Mary, daughter of Louis the Great, was a formidable man, a born fighter who found himself from the beginning closely involved with affairs of religion. At the turn of the century the scandal of the papacy (there were no fewer than three popes at odds with one another) had become intolerable, and Sigismund made it his first business to put an end to it. At the same time he had thrust upon him the difficult affair of John Hus, the reforming Bohemian cleric who, inspired by Wycliffe's teachings, had become a Czech national hero. It was Sigismund who gave Hus his safe conduct to attend the Council of Constance to defend himself against the charge of heresy. And it was Sigismund who was blamed for treachery when Hus was seized and tried and burnt at Constance in 1415, a martyrdom which led to a national uprising in Bohemia and the savage Hussite war which dragged on for seventeen years, laying waste a prospering land and sowing the seeds of enduring hatred. Sigismund, ruler of Hungary by marriage, relied very much on Hungerian support in crushing his Bohemian nationalist and pre-Protestant rebels, and the consequent ill-feeling between Czech and Magyar (later augmented by other actions) has endured to this day. Sigismund also received active and vigorous support from the Habsburg Duke of Austria, Albert V. And it was as a direct consequence of this that Albert II was nominated King of the Germans and crowned as the Emperor Albert II when Sigismund died in 1437. Thereafter, save for a short interval from 1742-5, the Imperial crown was to be the perquisite of the Habsburgs until the formal dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire under pressure from Napoleon in 1806. Imperial Austria was thus founded upon the humiliation of the Czechs and had its origin in support of Catholic orthodoxy against a great reforming movement which was a precursor of the Reformation proper."
-Edward Crankshaw
The Habsburgs, Portrait of A Dynasty
New York, 1971
"There was a brooding quality about many of the Habsburgs which distinguished them from the general run of monarchs..........."
Crankshaw's knowledge of Habsburg history has never been surpassed.
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"But, indeed, the dictum that truth always triumphs over persecution, is one of those pleasant falsehoods which men repeat after one another till they pass into commonplaces, but which all experience refutes. History teems with instances of truth put down by persecution. If not supressed for ever, it may be thrown back for centuries. To speak only of religious opinions: the Reformation broke out at least twenty times before Luther, and was put down. Arnold of Brescia was put down. Fra Dolcino was put down. Savonarola was put down. The Albigeois were put down. The Vaudois were put down. The Lollards were put down. The Hussites were put down. Even after the era of Luther, wherever persecution was persisted in, it was successful. In Spain, Italy, Flanders, the Austrian empire, Protestantism was rooted out; and most likely would have been so in England, had Queen Mary lived, or Queen Elizabeth had died. Persecution has always succeeded, save where the heretics were too strong a party to be effectively persecuted. No reasonable person can doubt that Christianity might have been extirpated in the Roman Empire. It spread and became predominant, because the persecutions were only occasional, lasting but a short time, and separated by long intervals of almost undisturbed propagandism. It is a piece of idle sentimentality that truth, merely as truth, has any inherent power denied to error, of prevailing against the dungeon and the stake. Men are not more zealous for truth than they often are for error, and a sufficient application of legal or even of social penalties will generally succeed in stopping the propagation of either. The real advantage which truth has, consists in this, that when an opinion is true, it may be extinguished once, twice, or many times, but in the course of ages there will generally be found persons to rediscover it, until some one of its reappearances falls on a time when from favorable circumstances it escapes persecution until it has made such head as to withstand all subsequent attempts to suppress it."
-John Stuart Mill
On Liberty
New York, 1947 (original publication, 1859)
Time and again, authors promoting freedom of expression, free markets, free enterprise, or free inquiry cite John Stuart Mill's treatise. As Mill observes, truth seekers pay a price (sometimes, the ultimate price) for their heresies. How easily we forget.
"He who tells the truth should have one foot in the stirrup."
-Armenian proverb
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"Has it been duly marked by historians that William Jennings Bryan's last secular act on this globe of sin was to catch flies? A curious detail, and not without its sardonic overtones. He was the most sedulous fly-catcher in American history, and in many ways the most successful. His quarry, of course, was not Musca domestica but Homo neandertalensis. For forty years he tracked it with coo and bellow, up and down the rustic backways of the Republic. Wherever the flambeaux of Chataqua smoked and guttered, and the bilge of idealism ran in the veins, and Baptist pastors dammed the brooks with the sanctified, and men gathered who were weary and heavy laden, and their wives who were full of Peruna and as fecund as the shad (Alosa sapidissima), there the indefatigable Jennings set up his traps and spread his bait. He knew every country town in the South and West, and he could crowd the most remote of them to suffocation by simply winding his horn. The city proletariat, transiently flustered by him in 1896, quickly penetrated his buncombe and would have no more of him; the cockney gallery jeered him at every Democratic national convention for twenty-five years. But out where the grass grows high, and the horned cattle dream away the lazy afternoons, and men still fear the powers and principalities of the air- out there between the corn-rows he held his old puissance to the end. There was no need of beaters to drive in his game. The news that he was coming was enough. For miles the flivver dust would choke the roads. And when he rose at the end of the day to discharge his Message there would be such breathless attention, such a rapt and enchanted ecstasy, such a sweet rustle of amens as the world had not known since Johann fell to Herod's axe.
There was something peculiarly fitting in the fact that his last days were spent in a one-horse Tennessee village, beating off the flies and gnats, and that death found him there. The man felt at home in such simple and Christian scenes. He liked people who sweated freely, and were not debauched by the refinements of the toilet. Making his progress up and down the Main street of little Dayton, surrounded by gaping primates from the upland valleys of the Cumberland Range, his coat laid aside, his bare arms and hairy chest shining damply, his bald head sprinkled with dust- so accoutred and on display, he was obviously happy. He liked getting up early in the morning, to the tune of cocks crowing on the dunghill. He liked the heavy, greasy victuals of the farmhouse kitchen. He liked country lawyers, country pastors, all country people. He liked country sounds and country smells.
I believe this liking was sincere- perhaps the only sincere thing in the man. His nose showed no uneasiness when a hillman in faded overalls and hickory shirt accosted him on the street, and besought him for light upon some mystery of Holy Writ. The simian gabble of the cross-roads was not gabble to him, but wisdom of an occult and superior sort. In the presence of city folks he was palpably uneasy. Their clothes, I suspect, annoyed him, and he was suspicious of their too delicate manners. He knew all the while that they were laughing at him- if not at his baroque theology, then at least at his alpaca pantaloons. But the yokels never laughed at him. To them he was not the huntsman but the prophet, and toward the end, as he gradually forsook mundane politics for more ghostly concerns, they began to elevate him in their hierarchy. When he died he was the peer of Abraham. His old enemy, [Woodrow] Wilson, aspiring to the same white and shining robe, came down with a thump. But Bryan made the grade. His place in Tennessee hagiography is secure. If the village barber saved any of his hair, then it is curing gall-stones down there today.
But what label will he bear in more urbane regions? One, I fear, of a far less flattering kind. Bryan lived too long, and descended too deeply into the mud, to be taken seriously hereafter by fully literate men, even of the kind who write schoolbooks. There was a scattering of sweet words in his funeral notices, but it was no more than a response to conventional sentimentality. The best verdict the most romantic editorial could dredge up, save in the humorless South, was to the general effect that his imbecilities were excused by his earnestness- that under his clowning, as under that of the juggler of Notre Dame, there was the zeal of a steadfast soul. But this was apology, not praise; precisely the same thing might be said of Mary Baker G. Eddy. The truth is that even Bryan's sincerity will probably yield to what is called, in other fields, definitive criticism. Was he sincere when he opposed imperialism in the Phillipines, or when he fed it with deserving Democrats in Santo Domingo? Was he sincere when he tried to shove the Prohibitionists under the table, or when he seized their banner and began to lead them with loud whoops? Was he sincere when he bellowed against war, or when he dreamed of himself as a tin-soldier in uniform, with a grave reserved at Arlington among the generals? Was he sincere when he fawned over Champ Clark, or when he betrayed Clark? Was he sincere when he pleaded for tolerance in New York, or when he bawled for the faggot and stake in Tennessee?
This talk of sincerity, I confess, fatigues me. If the fellow was sincere, then so was P.T. Barnum. The word is disgraced and degraded by such uses. He was, in fact, a charlatan, a mountebank, a zany without sense or dignity. His career brought him into contact with the first men of his time; he preferred the company of rustic ignoramuses. It was hard to believe, watching him at Dayton, that he had traveled, that he had been received in civilized societies, that he had been a high officer of state. He seemed only a poor clod like those around him, deluded by a childish theology, full of an almost pathological hatred of all learning, all human dignity, all beauty, all fine and noble things. He was a peasant come home from the barnyard. Imagine a gentleman, and you have imagined everything that he was not. What animated him from end to end of his grotesque career was simply ambition- the ambition of a common man to get his hand upon the collar of his superiors, or, failing that, to get his thumb into their eyes. He was born with a roaring voice, and it had the trick of inflaming half-wits. His whole career was devoted to raising those half-wits against their betters, that he himself might shine..."
- H.L. Mencken
Prejudices, Fifth Series
New York, 1926
Have you ever read an obituary like that? Mencken, of course, was a once-in-a-millenium phenomenon. We won't see his like again anytime soon.
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"Burr was talking about justice. 'When I get to run the world,' he said comfortably to the steaming lake, 'I'm going to hold the Nuremburg Trials Part Two. I'm going to get all the arms dealers and shit scientists, and all the smooth salesmen who push the crazies one step further than they thought of going, because it's good for business, and all the politicians and the lawyers and accountants and bankers, and I'm going to put them in the dock to answer for their lives. And you know what they'll say? ' 'If we hadn't done it someone else would have.' ' And you know what I'll say? I'll say, ' 'Oh, I see. And if you hadn't raped the girl some other fellow would have raped her. And that's your justification for rape. Noted.' ' Then I'd napalm the lot of them. Fizz.' "
-John Le Carré
The Night Manager
New York, 1993
A lovely riposte to the argument advanced by so many of the world's predators seeking to absolve themselves of personal responsibility for their actions. Wrong is wrong; because someone else does something or might do something wrong is not an excuse for doing something or enabling others to do something to someone else that you wouldn't want done to you.
Le Carré is always a pleasure. His stories touch upon far more than Cold War "spooks." For anyone who has ever been part of any human social organization, his accounts and observations of perfidy and our inner response to fear, uncertainty, and doubt ring true.
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"Asteroids as most people know, are rocky objects orbiting in loose formation in a belt between Mars and Jupiter. In illustrations they are always shown as existing in a jumble, but in fact the solar system is quite a roomy place and the average asteroid actually will be about a million miles from its nearest neighbor. Nobody knows even approximately how many asteroids there are tumbling through space, but the number is thought to be probably not less than a billion. They are presumed to be planets that never quite made it, owing to the unsettling gravitational pull of Jupiter, which kept- and keeps- them from coalescing.
When asteroids were first detected in the 1800s- the very first was discovered on the first day of the century by a Sicilian named Giuseppi Piazzi- they were thought to be planets, and the first two were named Ceres and Pallas. It took some inspired deductions by the astronomer William Herschel to work out that they were nowhere near planet sized but much smaller. He called them asteroids- Latin for 'starlike'- which was slightly unfortunate as they are not like stars at all. Sometimes now they are more accurately called planetoids.
Finding asteroids became a popular activity in the 1800s, and by the end of the century about a thousand were known. The problem was that no one was systematically recording them. By the early 1900s, it had often become impossible to know whether an asteroid that popped into view was new or simply one that had been noted earlier and then lost track of. By this time, too, astrophysics had moved on so much that few astronomers wanted to devote their lives to anything as mundane as rocky planetoids. Only a few astronomers, notably Gerard Kuiper, the Dutch-born astronomer for whom the Kuiper belt of comets is named, took any interest in the solar system at all. Thanks to his work at the McDonald Observatory in Texas, followed by work done by others at the Minor Planet Center in Cincinnati and the Spacewatch project in Arizona, a long list of lost asteroids was gradually whittled down until by the close of the twentieth century only one known asteroid was unaccounted for- an object called 719 Albert. Last seen in October, 1911, it was finally tracked down in 2000 after being missing for eighty-nine years.
So, from a point of view of asteroid research the twentieth century was essentially just a long exercise in bookkeeping. It is really only in the last few years that astronomers have begun to count and keep an eye on the rest of the asteroid community. As of July 2001, twenty-six thousand asteroids had been named and identified- half in just the previous two years. With up to a billion to identify, the count has barely begun.
In a sense it hardly matters. Identifying an asteroid doesn't make it safe. Even if every asteroid in the solar system had a name and known orbit, no one could say what perturbations might send any of them hurtling toward us. We can't forecast rock disturbances on our own surface. Put them adrift in space and what they might do is beyond guessing. Any asteroid out there that has our name on it is very likely to have no other.
Think of the earth's orbit as a kind of freeway on which we are the only vehicle, but which is crossed regularly by pedestrians who don't know enough to look before stepping off the curb. At least 90 percent of these pedestrians are quite unknown to us. We don't know where they live, what sort of hours they keep, how often they come our way. All we know is that at some point, at uncertain intervals, they trundle across the road down which we are cruising at sixty-seven thousand miles an hour. As Steven Ostro of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory has put it, 'Suppose that there was a button you could push and you could light up all the Earth-crossing asteroids larger than about ten meters, there would be over 100 million of these objects in the sky.' In short, you would see not a couple of thousand distant twinkling stars, but millions upon millions of nearer, randomly moving objects- 'all of which are capable of colliding with the Earth and all of which are moving on slightly different courses through the sky at different rates. It would be deeply unnerving.' Well, be unnerved because it is there. We just can't see it."
-Bill Bryson
A Short History of Nearly Everything
New York, 2003
This is an excellent book. Bryson takes the reader through a large part of the history of man's discoveries in physics, chemistry, geology, and biology in very readable prose. I first encountered Bryson when A Walk In The Woods appeared, the account of his effort to walk The Appalachian Trail. Over the years, I have walked a very goodly portion of it and was curious. I mentally marked Bryson down as a one-time, "flash in the pan" best selling author until I further sampled his wares, particularly his Notes from a Small Island, I'm A Stranger Here Myself, and Bryson's Dictionary of Troublesome Words.
By the way, Maid, notwithstanding Hollywood's periodic efforts to assure us that superheroes and methods exist to protect us from the danger of an asteroid collision, the peril is quite real. Assuming (an assumption that is, in itself, unlikely) that we were able to identify a potential collision, we no longer have a rocket booster powerful enough to intercept an asteroid's path. Not only that- according to Bryson- we actually destroyed the plans for the only rocket that we did have (the Saturn V booster) that was powerful enough to reach an asteroid! This is a problem that requires the Maid of Marvel's immediate attention!
Recall the fate of the dinosaurs?
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An Elegy for the Canon
"Those who can do canonical work invariably see their writings as larger forms than any social program, however exemplary. The issue is containment, and great literature will insist upon its self-sufficiency in the face of the worthiest causes: feminism, African-American culturism, and all the politically correct enterprises of our moment. The thing contained varies; the strong poem, by definition, refuses to be contained, even by Dante's or Milton's God. Dr. Samual Johnson, shrewdest of all literary critics, concluded rightly that devotional poetry was impossible as compared to poetic devotion: 'The good and evil of Eternity are too ponderous for the wings of wit.' 'Ponderous' is a metaphor for 'uncontainable,' which is another metaphor. Our contemporary openers-up of the Canon decry overt religion, but they call for devotional verse (and devotional criticism!) even if the object of devotion has been altered to the advancement of women, or of blacks, or of that most unknown of all unknown gods, the class struggle in the United States. It all depends upon your values, but I find it odd that Marxists are perceptive in finding competition everywhere else, yet fail to see that it is intrinsic to the high arts. There is a peculiar mix here of simultaneous over-idealization and undervaluation of imaginative literature, which has always pursued its own selfish aims."
-Harold Bloom
The Western Canon, The Books and School of The Ages
New York, 1994
I can't say it any better, so I'll just quote the dust jacket:
"Harold Bloom explores our Western literary tradition by concentrating on the works of twenty-six authors central to the Canon. He argues against ideology in literary criticism; he laments the loss of intellectual and aesthetic standards; he deplores multiculturalism, Marxism, feminism, neoconservativism, Afro-centrism, and the New Historicism."
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" 'They'll never let us back in that place- not after your scene at the press table.'
'What scene?'
'You bastard,' he said. 'I left you all alone for three minutes! You scared the shit out of those people! Waving that goddamn marlin spike around and yelling about reptiles. You're lucky I came back in time. They were ready to call the cops. I said you were drunk and that I was taking you up to your room for a cold shower. Hell, the only reason they gave us the press passes was to get you out of there.'
He was pacing around nervously. 'Jesus, that scene straightened me right out! I must have some drugs. What have you done with the mescaline?'
'The kit bag,' I said.
He opened the bag and ate two pellets while I got the tape machine going. 'Maybe you should only eat one of those,' he said. 'That acid's still working on you.'
I agreed. 'We have to go out to the track before dark,' I said. 'But we have time to watch the TV news. Let's carve up this grapefruit and make a fine rum punch, maybe toss in a blotter... where's the car?'
'We gave it to somebody in the parking lot,' he said. 'I have the ticket in my briefcase.'
'What's the number? I'll call down and have them wash the bastard, get rid of that dust and grime.'
'Good idea,' he said. But he couldn't find the ticket.
'Well, we're fucked,' I said. 'We'll never convince them to give us that car without proof.'
He thought for a moment, then picked up the phone and asked for the garage. 'This is Doctor Gonzo in eight-fifty,' he said. 'I seem to have lost my parking stub for that red convertible I left with you, but I want the car washed and ready to go in thirty minutes. Can you send up a duplicate stub? ... What... Oh?... Well, that's fine.' He hung up and reached for the hash pipe. 'No problem,' he said. 'That man remembers my face.'
'That's good,' I said. 'They'll probably have a big net ready for us when we show up.'
He shook his head. 'As your attorney, I advise you not to worry about me.' "
-Hunter S. Thompson
Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas and Other American Stories
New York, 1996
Page 28 (of The Modern Library edition)- I promise! The inimitable inventor of Gonzo Journalism did it like nobody else. As we all know, when Hunter S. Thompson died, he went out with a bang. The illustrations by Ralph Steadman are priceless.
"If you remember the '60s, you weren't there."
-R. Crumb
If Fear and Loathing doesn't make you crack a smile, check to see if you've got a pulse.
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"The normal commission charged by booksellers for executing bids at auction is ten per cent, which may seem expensive for a well-known and bibliographically uncomplicated book of high but stable market value- one, that is, which does not involve much expert examination or much expert estimation of price. But over a series of transactions 'on commission' the bookseller will probably engage a great deal more professional skill and spend a great deal more time in his customer's interest than is adequately repaid by his ten per cent. This of course is payable only on successful bids; yet for the lots on which he is outbid he will have provided equally full service- in advice as to the probable price, in COLLATION and appraisal of the material, in attendance (often with wearisome waiting between lots) at the sale and in the highly skilled business of the actual bidding."
-John Carter
ABC for Book Collectors (Fifth Edition, revised)
New York, 1988
If you are afflicted with bibliomania or merely have any interest in books or book collecting, this is an invaluable reference. Do you want to know what "quarto" or "fore-edge painting" or "remboîtage" means? If so, this is a great place to go to look those terms up- as well as anything else connected with printing, book design, book nomenclature, or collecting.
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"gerund, the This is certainly a Lost Cause, at least in the sense that very few people nowadays know what a gerund is. But just as people still use the subjunctive form without knowing the term itself– 'He insisted that she go to bed immediately'– so the gerund survives in use, although largely unrecognized. The gerund is derived from a verb, usually by adding the suffix –ing. Although remaining a verb, it acts in some respects as if it were a noun, and especially in the respect that if the action denoted is attributed to someone or something it needs to be accompanied by the possessive form. A few examples should make this clearer: it is correct to say 'We were surprised at their appearing so calm,' 'She was distressed at his leaving so suddenly,' 'I was surprised at its being so easy to do.' It would be wrong to say 'them appearing,' 'him leaving,' or 'it being."
-James Cochrane
Between You and I, A little book of bad English
Naperville, Illinois. 1994.
Cochrane, an editor employed by Penguin Books (UK), corrects the all-too frequent errors of common English usage. Want to know the difference between the proper usage of like and as? This is the place.
I can't resist one more quotation:
restaurateur The owner of a restaurant is a restaurateur, literally a "restorer." Traditionally, he promises to "restore" our spirits and our physical well-being with his excellent food and wine. Neither in English nor in French does the word restauranteur properly exist.
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"And therefore three cheers for Nantucket; and come a stove boat and a stove body when they will, for stave my soul, Jove himself cannot..."
"However, a good laugh is a mighty good thing, and rather too scarce a good thing; the more's the pity. So, if any one man, in his own proper person, afford stuff for a good joke to anybody, let him not be backward, but let him cheerfully allow himself to spend and be spent in that way. And the man that has anything bountifully laughable about him, be sure there is more in that man than you perhaps think for..."
"To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme. No great and enlarging volume can ever be written on the flea, though many there be who have tried it..."
"In this world, shipmates, sin that pays its way can travel freely, and without a passport; whereas virtue, if a pauper, is stopped at all frontiers."
-Herman Melville
Moby-Dick, or The Whale
New York, 1983. (Library Of America edition)
"Moby-Dick" can be tough slogging- there's no denying that. Nonetheless, I found it enjoyable; my nautical experience was undoubtedly helpful.
Melville's descriptions of types of men, their behavior and the influences their experiences have had upon them rings true. I found Cliff's Notes both useful and insightful. I'd be lying if I didn't admit to a little "internal validation" from the knowledge that I have read the book that contains what may be the most famous opening sentence in all of American literature.
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"If, after I depart this vale, you ever remember me and have thought to please my ghost, forgive some sinner and wink your eye at some homely girl."
-H. L. Mencken
A Mencken Chrestomathy
New York, 1949 (Eleventh printing, 1981).
If you've never read Mencken and you want an introduction, A Mencken Chrestomathy is an excellent place to start. Another collection that provides a great introduction is A Choice Of Days.
I am envious of anyone who hasn't yet read Mencken; you have a potentially life-altering treat in prospect.
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"This run on the bank (the only one I ever experienced) presented all the features, serious and comical, usual to such occasions. At one counter, happened that identical case, narrated of others, of the Frenchman, who was nearly squeezed to death in getting to the counter, and, when he received his money, did not know what to do with it. 'If you got the money, I no want him; but if you no got him, I want it like the devil!' "
-William Tecumseh Sherman
Memoirs
New York, 1990 (Library of America edition, second printing, 1990).
I was pleasantly surprised by this book, expecting a dull recital of events. To my surprise, I discovered that Sherman was a good writer and far more worldly than I anticipated. It has been observed by others that Sherman was one of the most intelligent commanders involved in the War Between The States and that he, almost alone, foresaw the long, devastating, fight to the death that it became. It drove him into depression. The observations and experience of this first practitioner of "total war" were largely ignored by the kings and generals responsible for leading Europe in World War I.
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"Following the French conquest of the Dutch Republic in 1795, Britain began seizing Dutch shipping to prevent France from using Dutch resources against her. This policy bore fruit in Commodore Peter Rainier's seizure of the Dutch East India Company's settlements at Amboyna and the Banda Islands in the East Indies in 1796 and in Vice-Admiral Sir George Elphinstone's attack on Cape Town in the Dutch colony at the Cape of Good Hope in September 1797. On October 11, 1797, a Dutch squadron of 16 ships of the line and eight frigates under Vice-Admiral Jan de Winter left the island of Texel on the northern Dutch coast and sought an engagement with British Admiral Adam Duncan. Duncan defeated Winter off Camperdown on the Dutch North Sea coast."
-Dean King, with John B. Hattendorf and J. Worth Estes
A Sea Of Words, A Lexicon and Companion for Patrick O'Brian's Seafaring Tales
New York, 1995.
This is an invaluable resource for anyone digging into Patrick O'Brian's works. Ordinary dictionaries just don't have entries for nautical terms; one can, of course, slug it out with the OED- but King's "Lexicon and Companion" is a tad lighter and, thus, easier to manage whilst one lies abed. Beyond its utility for looking up words, the book will solve geographic mysteries that are likely to perplex the modern reader. Can't find Batavia or New Holland in your Times (of London) Atlas? This is the place to look.
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"ignorantia legis neminem excusat (Lat) (ig-nor-AHN-ti-a LAY-gis NEM-in-em ex-COO-sat) ignorance of the law is not an excuse."
-Editorial Panel: John Buchanan-Brown, Jennifer Cang, John Crawley, Barbara Galushka, Brendan McCabe, Gilman Parsons, Carol Steiger, Kate Williams
Le Mot Juste, A Dictionary of Classical and Foreign Words and Phrases.
Third Vintage Books Edition, New York, 1991 (Originally published in Great Britain by Kogan Page Limited, London in 1980).
This is another extremely handy reference book. I occasionally find myself stumped by foreign phrases or an allusion to mythology. The OED can't help. This is the first place I go for help; its got entries based on phrases originating in Greek, Latin, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Russian, Hindu, Polynesian, and Yiddish (and others!). An entrepôt of useful terms.
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"This was the morose world of Andrew Mellon's boyhood, but unlike his surviving siblings, he would continue to inhabit it as an ever more solitary son until he was in his mid-forties. Sarah Jane Mellon was the presiding matriarch, and although Thomas Mellon wrote little about her in his autobiography, she was clearly a redoubtable woman for her time. She was not only rich but tough, having survived eight pregnancies between 1844 and 1860. More conventionally religious than her husband, she was responsible for getting the family to East Liberty Presbyterian Church on Sundays."
-David Cannadine
Mellon
New York, 2006.
I'm almost finished this interesting biography that, necessarily, includes a history of the family, the story of such iconic American enterprises as Alcoa, Gulf Oil, and Carborundum, Pittsburgh, and the tangential fellow Pittsburgh titans Carnegie and Frick. Unlike John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie, Andrew Mellon was born rich- and got a lot richer. It's also the story of the conception and prime benefactor of the National Portrait Gallery.
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"It was this intriguing and unexpected period which dominated the book I wrote about Delhi fifteen years ago, entitled City of Djinns, and which later ignited the tinder that led to my last book, White Mughals, about the many British who embraced Indian culture at the end of the eighteenth century. The Last Mughal is therefore my third book inspired by the capital. At the centre of it lies the question of how and why the relatively easy relationship of Indian and Briton, so evident during the time of Fraser, gave way to the hatreds and racism of the high-nineteenth-century Raj. The Uprising, it is clear, was the result of that change, not its cause.
Two things in particular seem to have put paid to this easy coexistence. One was the rise of British power: in a few years the British had defeated not only the French but also all their Indian rivals; in a manner not unlike the Americans after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the changed balance of power quickly led to an attitude of undisguised imperial arrogance.
The other was the ascendancy of Evangelical Christianity, and the profound change in attitudes that this brought about. The wills written by Company servants show that the practice of marrying or cohabiting with Indian wives, or bibis, all but disappeared. Memoirs of prominent eighteenth-century British Indian worthies which mentioned their Indian wives or Anglo-Indian children were re-edited so that the consorts were removed from later editions. No longer were Indians seen as inheritors of a body of sublime and ancient wisdom as eighteenth-century luminaries such as Sir William Jones and Warren Hastings had once believed; they were instead merely 'poor benighted heathen,' or even 'licentious pagans,' who, it was hoped, were eagerly awaiting conversion."
-William Dalrymple
The Last Mughal, The Fall of a Dynasty: Delhi, 1857
New York, 2007.
HOT DAMN! I'm on to a good read. Though I only made it through Dramatis Personae and the first nineteen pages of the introduction last night, I can tell this is going to be a thoroughly pleasant journey. It's going to be a literate, thoroughly researched relation of an obscure part of history. The only depressing aspect is that, once again (for what seems the thousandth time), it's going to be a tale of human genocide (go ask Iris Chang about it). Unfortunately, reading history really can be depressing. I keep a list of human horrors; it now has about thirty entries including (but not limited to): the Holocaust, the African/American slave trade, the Somme, Stalingrad, the settlement of Australia, the native Americans, Kampuchea, Armenia, Guadalcanal, Ireland, Rwanda, Manchuria, ........
We humans are apparently predisposed to kill one another.
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"Power soon went to the head of Maham Anga's son, Adham Khan. In the words of Abul Fazl he became increasingly 'intoxicated by youth and prosperity,' and 'the cap of his pride was blown away by the wind of arrogance.' He withheld treasure due to the emperor from captured cities and attempted to keep for himself the choicest inhabitants of captured harems. Then, one hot May afternoon in 1562, the chronicles record that he coolly walked with his guards into the imperial palace at Agra, where a rival minister was giving public audience. As the minister, the husband of another of Akbar's wet nurses, rose to greet him, Adham gestured to one of his henchmen to knife him. Sword in hand, Adham made for the adjoining harem where Akbar was asleep, but a eunuch slammed the door shut and bolted it from the inside. Nineteen-year old Akbar, now wide-awake, emerged from a side door, rushed toward Adham and smashed his fist into his face. (Akbar's chroniclers boasted that it looked as if he had been hit with a mace.) Akbar ordered Adham's still unconscious body to be thrown from the palace wall, which was more than thirty feet high, but the first fall did not kill him. Akbar had him hauled back up by his hair and flung him down again, this time headfirst. Thus, in Abul Fazl's words, 'his neck was broken and his brains destroyed. In this way the bloodthirsty profligate underwent retribution.' Akbar had emerged from behind the veil with a vengeance."
-Diana and Michael Preston
Taj Mahal, Passion and Genius at the Heart of the Moghul Empire
New York, 2007.
From the dust jacket blurb:
"While Galileo suffered under house arrest at the hands of Pope Urban VIII, the Thirty Years War ruined Europe, and the Pilgrims struggled to survive in the New World, work began on what would become one of the seven wonders of the world, the Taj Mahal. Built by the Moghul emperor Shah Jahan as a memorial to his beloved wife, Mumtaz Mahal, its flawless symmetry and gleaming presence have for centuries dazzled everyone who has seen it."
This is an enjoyable account of both the story behind the Taj and of the conquest of Hindustan by the Moghuls.
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"At ten o'clock Commissioner Manuel told the royal family that the Princesse de Lamballe had survived. He was wrong. It was the Marquise de Tourzel who was miraculously acquitted in front of the tribunal of revolutionaries, while Pauline was spirited away to safety by a mysterious English Good Samaritan. A different destiny was reserved for the Princesse. Brought before the tribunal, she refused to denounce the King and Queen. The Princesse, who had once been too sensitive to bear the tribulations of ordinary life, found in herself the strength to answer with awesome composure: ' I have nothing to reply, dying a little earlier or a little later is a matter of indifference to me. I am prepared to make the sacrifice of my life.' So she was directed to the exit for the Abbaye prison- actually a code for execution. Once outside, in the courtyard of La Force, according to the testimony of a Madame Bault who worked there, 'several blows of a hammer on the head laid her low and then they fell on her.'
Afterwords terrible stories were told of the fate of the Princesse de Lamballe; that she had been violated, alive or dead, that her breasts and private parts had been hacked off or, in another variant of savagery, her heart had been cooked and eaten. These stories were heard by many people in Paris at the time, the frequent use of the words 'fearful indignities... of a nature not to be related' and 'private infamies' as well as 'disembowelment' covering many possibilities.
Unquestionably the Princesse's head was cut off and mounted on a pike. Her naked body was also ripped open and her innards taken out, to be mounted on another pike. The corpse and the two grisly trophies were then paraded through Paris. The young Comte de Beaujolais, son of the Duc d'Orleans, who was doing his lessons at the Palais-Royal, was horrifed to see the head of 'Tante' pass by, accompanied by her lacerated body. Along the way the head was thrust into the lap of the apprentice wax modeller Marie Grosholz [the original Madame Tussaud]. She was obliged to make a cast with the 'savage murderers' standing over her although, having been art teacher to Madame Elizabeth, Marie had known the Princesse and her hands trembled almost too much for her to work.
It was now the firm intention of the crowd, fired up with wine and more wine to take the head of the Princesse de Lamballe to the Temple so that the 'Infamous Antoinette' could bestow a last kiss on those sweet lips she had loved. This makes another story plausible; that a visit was paid to a barber along the way for the Princesse's hair to be dressed. For the Princesse's original coiffure could hardly have survived the assault of the hammers outside La Force, even if she had managed to preserve it during her fortnight inside. By the time the head on its pike appeared bobbing up and down outside the dining room of the Tower, the famous blonde curls were floating prettily as they had done in life, even if the face was waxen white. As a result the head was instantly recognizable."
-Antonia Fraser
Marie Antoinette: The Journey
New York, 2001.
The next time someone observes, "Life isn't fair," or you're feeling sorry for yourself, think of poor Marie Antoinette. Born a Habsburg princess, her life ended after years of abuse and humiliation at the hands of a mob of savages. At the end, she was forced to change clothes and perform her bathroom functions in full view of her prison guards, prior to being carted to the guillotine. For her, death (really, a lynching) was a blessing. Contrary to popular belief, she did not originate the phrase and probably never said, "Let them eat cake" in response to reports of starvation in Paris.
Antonia Fraser's biography is riveting, well-researched and written. Marie Antoinette was made the scapegoat and focus of the whole French Revolution.
From the Epilogue:
"The use of an animal or bird, who has the ills of the community heaped upon it before being driven out, has a long history in civilizations around the world. The name derived from the goat of the early Jews, described in Leviticus, presented alive before the Lord 'to make an atonement with Him' and then 'let him go for a scapegoat into the wilderness.' But there were many similar procedures in other societies, some of them involving women or children, or disabled people, nearly all of them ending in some unpleasant ritual death for the 'scapegoats,' who were stoned or hurled from a cliff, as a result of which the community was supposed to be purged of sins, or otherwise plague and pestilence."
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"A further importance is given to the date of Oliver Cromwell's marriage by the fact that there is no further evidence for his 'prodigalities.' This in turn makes it easier to evaluate these earlier indulgences which can have had only shallow roots since they were so easily pulled up with the arrival of family responsibility. Youthful intemperance being neither particularly uncommon nor particularly culpable, one might profitably compare Oliver's situation in this respect to that of John Bunyan who exclaimed: 'Until I came to the state of marriage, I was the very ringleader in all manner of vice and ungodliness' - referring mainly to swearing and merry-making. Neither Bunyan's nor Cromwell's early 'ungodliness' would probably have achieved much status in the category of any true debauchee."
-Antonia Fraser
Cromwell; The Lord Protector
New York, 1974.
Long deficient in my knowledge of the English Civil War, the serendipity of simultaneously "discovering" Antonia Fraser and the fact that she had written a biography of Cromwell set me on a mission to scare up a copy of her 1974 work and amend my ignorance. The book turned out to be much more difficult to locate than I had anticipated. After a couple of fruitless efforts at book stores, one fall afternoon, prowling about my favorite used bookstore (one of the best I've ever seen, by the way- mainly because it is so well organized- the books are actually catalogued and shelved in a coherent manner. If you get the chance, stop by The Kelmscott Bookshop in Baltimore), mirabile dictu, there it was! In this region, immigrant Cavaliers were the forebears of many prominent families. As is the usual case, Antonia Fraser doesn't disappoint.
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"On his return from Liverpool Samuel exchanged his sea clothing for the latest fashions, which did not meet with any more approval in the Quaker community than his sailor garb had- except for one segment of that community, the girls. In romantic affairs he was eminently successful. Or, as his brother put it, 'I do not know that he was particularly susceptible of pure disinterested affection, but he possessed a superabundance of something which the fair sex seemed to consider a very agreeable substitute.' One of the girls he targeted was a devout Methodist, a fact that produced an instant conversion in Samuel, who became a regular member of the girl's Methodist congregation, conspicuous for the loudness of his amens and hallelujahs. He was still, it may be noted, thirteen on his return from Liverpool."
-Thomas Farel Heffernan
Mutiny On The Globe, The Fatal Voyage of Samuel Comstock
New York, 2002.
I've known of Samuel Comstock and the Globe mutiny since I was an adolescent thanks to my family's interest in matters nautical but I'd never delved into the details of the story. Roughly contemporaneous with the sinking of the Essex by a whale (the incident that served as partial inspiration for Melville's Moby Dick), the captain and officers of another Nantucket whaleship were brutally murdered by members of their crew. Samuel Comstock was a delusional psychopath; in our century, I have no doubt that he would have been connected with a Columbine-like episode. The book draws on previously unpublished sources and is a thorough re-telling of the tale; I found it quite enjoyable.
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"This shook me up considerable, because I didn't want to go back to the widow's any more and be so cramped up and sivilized, as they called it."
-Mark Twain
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Tom Sawyer's Companion)
New York, 1983
I reread it every year.
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"If a lie is necessary, why not speak it? We are all after the same thing, whether we lie or speak the truth: our own advantage. Men lie when they think to profit by deception, and tell the truth for the same reason— to get something they want, and to be better trusted for their honesty. It is only two different roads to the same goal. Were there no question of advantage, the honest man would be as likely to lie as the liar is, and the liar would tell the truth as readily as the honest man."
-Herodotus
The Histories
Book Three – The Seven Conspirators
Translated by Aubrey de Sélincourt
Revised by A. R. Burn
London, 1988
Throughout the course of my career, I observed lots of people lying, cheating, and stealing (or, at the very least, not taking great pains to tell the truth). The older I got, the worse it seemed to get. I wondered if this was actually the case or whether I was lacking a long term perspective. As you would expect, this line really struck a chord when I stumbled across it in Herodotus. I suppose it would have been nice if someone had informed me of the 11th Commandment (Don't Get Caught) back when I was an impressionable youth. The fact of the matter is that I'm a bad liar and I know it, so I suppose I'm stuck (attempting) to be honest.
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"Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race."
-James Joyce
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Norwalk, Connecticut, 1968
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"Hold to the now, the here, through which all future plunges into the past."
-James Joyce
Ulysses
New York, 1982
Incredibly lovely wordsmithing.
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"He was polite to his elders, who disliked him. Whatever his elders told him to do, he did. They told him to look before he leaped, and he always looked before he leaped. They told him never to put off until the next day what he could do the day before, and he never did. He was told to honor his mother and his father, and he honored his mother and his father. He was told that he should not kill, and he did not kill, until he got in the Army. Then he was told to kill, and he killed. He turned the other cheek on every occasion and always did unto others exactly as he would have had others do unto him. When he gave to charity, his left hand never knew what his right hand was doing. He never once took the name of the Lord his God in vain, committed adultery, or coveted his neighbor's ass. In fact, he loved his neighbor and never ever bore false witness against him. Major Major's elders disliked him because he was such a flagrant nonconformist."
-Joseph Heller
Catch 22
New York, 1955
It's tough to be a nonconformist.
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"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world, the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man."
-George Bernard Shaw
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"I am not doing well by Ernestina, who was after all a victim of circumstances; of an illiberal environment. It is, of course, its essentially schizophrenic outlook on society that makes the middle class such a peculiar mixture of yeast and dough. We tend nowadays to forget that it has always been the great revolutionary class; we see much more the doughy aspect, the bourgeoisie as the heartland of reaction, the universal insult, forever selfish and conforming. Now this Janus-like quality derives from the class's one saving virtue, which is this: that alone of the three great castes of society it alone sincerely and habitually despises itself. Ernestina was certainly no exception here. It was not only Charles who heard an unwelcome acidity in her voice; she heard it herself. But her tragedy (and one that remains ubiquitous) was that she misapplied this precious gift of self-contempt and so made herself a victim of her class's perennial lack of faith in itself. Instead of seeing its failings as a reason to reject the entire class system, she saw them as a reason to seek a higher. She cannot be blamed, of course; she had been hopelessly well trained to view society as so many rungs on a ladder; thus reducing her own to a mere step to something supposedly better."
-John Fowles
The French Lieutenant's Woman
New York, 1969
How's that for an acidic comment?
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"In character creation its masterpiece is the advertising agent who, by devising some new and super-imbecilic boobtrap, puts his hook-and-eye factory 'on the map,' ruins all other factories, marries the daughter of his boss, and so ends as an eminent man...... It is the sort of thing that awakens a response only in men who are essentially unimaginative, timorous and degraded- in brief, in democrats, bagmen, yahoos. The man of reflective habit cannot conceivably take any passionate interest in the conflicts it deals with. He doesn't want to marry the daughter of the owner of the hook-and-eye factory; he would probably burn down the factory itself if it ever came into his hands. What interests this man is the far more poignant and significant conflict between a salient individual and the harsh and meaningless fiats of destiny, the unintelligible mandates and vagaries of god. His hero is not one who yields and wins, but one who resists and fails."
-H. L. Mencken
Prejudices, Second Series. "The National Letters"
New York, 1920
Ahhhh! Mencken!
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"......Pearl argued that any man who entertained a lady for so little as two minutes was guilty of a gross offense, not only against her person but also against the peace and dignity of the human race..... [Brodel] had simply never heard that copulation could be prolonged at will- at all events, far beyond the limits he had set..... On the heels of this grotesque discussion Pearl announced the founding of an organization to be called the Society for More and Better Fucking in the Home."
-H. L. Mencken
The Diary of H.L. Mencken
New York, 1989
Membership applications are still accepted!
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"I never did like dirty tales, true or false; if they're any good, they just make you wistful; if not there's nothing more boresome in the world, I reckon."
-Thomas Berger
Little Big Man
New York, 1964
There's some truth to Jack Crabb's observation.
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"For it is part of my craft to make every swain fall in love with me. I do it for sport, for craftsmanship, on a bet, on a dare. My heart fills, my thighs ache; my silk panties moisten; the sense memories of love make me feel that I feel love though I love not- or only love my art- ah, my first acting teacher, Arnold Feibleman, would be proud of me! As would my dear feisty Vivian Lovecraft, my mentor. To make someone believe you are in love when you are not- this is my craft, my witchery. For as I gaze into Wolfgang's eyes, I fall in love with the image of my beloved self that I see there. Oscar Wilde was right: an actress is a little more than a woman, an actor a little more than a man. I cannot help myself, I am in love with the Jessica that Wolfgang is in love with! I am besotted with my craft, like a witch who turns a mouse into a lizard only to prove she can. Poor mouse, poor lizard, what do they know? Acted on as they are by the powers that be, what do they feel when time stops and the fur turns to scale. Poor creatures. Poveretti. We witches, we actresses are as wanton boys to flies; we kill them for our sport."
-Erica Jong
Serenissima, A Novel of Venice
Boston, 1987
Terrifying words from the inventor of the "zipless fuck."
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"Insensibly he formed the most delightful habit in the world, the habit of reading: he did not know that thus he was providing himself with a refuge from all the distress of life; he did not know either that he was creating for himself an unreal world which would make the real world of every day a source of bitter disappointment."
- W. Somerset Maugham
Of Human Bondage
Modern Library Edition, New York, 1942
Escapism, too, has perils.
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"It was remarkable how Dean could go mad and then suddenly continue with his soul- which I think is wrapped up in a fast car, a coast to reach, and a woman at the end of the road- calmly and sanely as though nothing had happened.
As a seaman I used to think of the waves rushing beneath the shell of the ship and the bottomless deeps thereunder- now I could feel the road some twenty inches beneath me, unfurling and flying and hissing at incredible speeds across the groaning continent with that mad Ahab at the wheel."
- Jack Kerouac
On The Road
Viking Critical Edition, New York, 1979
Oh, my, what a lovely piece of writing!
Road trip, anyone?
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"As often as we read of armies plundering, we find small bands of adventurers trying to carve out a new home somewhere in the Eastern Mediterranean and Aegean. The title they most coveted, if we can trust Homer, was 'sacker of cities.' In the Homeric epics, and still in Aeschylus, it was a leader's greatest claim to glory. Agamemnon, Achilles, Nestor ('in my youth I was one') and even Athena herself bear the title of 'sacker of cities' in Homer.
We should not overdo the search for 'modern' motives for this. In the Iliad the sacker of cities does not destroy to increase his political power, to combat inflation, to open up trade routes to the Black Sea or to the tin mines of Europe; he does not destroy to appropriate the mackerel and tunny harvests. He says he sacks cities to get booty, treasures, horses, cattle, gold, silver, fine armor and weapons- and women. We must not forget the women (after all, the legend insists that the seizure of a woman was the cause of the Trojan War). Time and again Homer tells of the fight for 'the city and its women.' When Achilles tells Odysseus of the twenty-three cities he has sacked he mentions only 'treasure and women' as his gain. This is what makes him proud, and gives him fame after his death. And the more beautiful the women, the better.
.... Such then were the goals of 'heroic' kingship. If economic necessity can partly explain such attacks- to replenish the slave labor in the 'state industries-' nevertheless it was doubtless still true that the greater the booty captured, the larger quantities of gold and silver, the finer the horses and the more beautiful the women, the greater the honour due to the conquerer."
- Michael Wood
In Search of The Trojan War
Oxford (U.K.), 1985
Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.
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"My Lord," he said, "without a debate in which both sides of a question are expressed, it is not possible to choose the better course. All one can do is accept whatever it is that has been proposed. But grant a debate, and there is a fair choice to be made. We cannot assess the purity of gold merely by looking at it; we test it by rubbing it on other gold- then we can tell which is the purer. I warned your father- Darius was my own brother- not to attack the Scythians, those wanderers who live in a cityless land. But he would not listen to me. Confident in his power to subdue them he invaded their country, and before he came home again many fine soldiers who marched with him were dead. But you, my lord, mean to attack a nation greatly superior to the Scythians; a nation with the highest reputation for valour on land and at sea. It is my duty to tell you what you have to fear from them; you have said you mean to bridge the Hellespont and march through Europe to Greece. Now suppose- and it is not impossible- that you were to suffer a great reverse by land or sea, or even both. Those Greeks are said to be great fighters- and indeed one might well guess as much from the fact that the Athenians alone destroyed the great army we sent to attack them under Datis and Artaphemes. Or if you will, suppose they were to succeed upon one element only- suppose they fell upon our fleet and defeated it, and then sailed to the Hellespont and destroyed the bridge: then, my lord, you would indeed be in peril. It is no special wisdom of my own that makes me argue as I do; but just such a disaster as I have suggested did, in fact, nearly overtake us when your father bridged the Thracian Bosporus and the Danube to take his army into Scythia...
Nothing is more valuable to a man than to lay his plans carefully and well; even if things go against him, and forces he cannot control bring his enterprise to nothing, he still has the satisfaction of knowing that it was not his fault- the plans were all laid; if, on the other hand, he leaps headlong into danger and succeeds by luck- well, that's a bit of luck indeed, but he still has the shame of knowing that he was ill prepared.
You know, my lord, that amongst living creatures it is the great ones that God smites with his thunder, out of envy of their pride. The little ones do not vex him. It is always the great buildings and the tall trees which are struck by lightning. It is God's way to bring the lofty low. Often a great army is destroyed by a little one, when God in his envy puts fear into the men's hearts, or sends a thunderstorm, and they are cut to pieces in a way they do not deserve. For God tolerates pride in none but himself. Haste is the mother of failure- and for failure we always pay a heavy price; it is in delay our profit lies- perhaps it may not be immediately apparent, but we shall find it, sure enough, as time goes on.
This, my lord, is the advice I offer you. And as for you, Mardonius, I warn you that the Greeks in no way deserve disparagement; so say no more silly things about them. By slandering the Greeks you increase the king's eagerness to make war on them, and, as far as I can see, this is the very thing you yourself most passionately desire. Heaven forbid it should happen! Slander is a wicked thing; in a case of slander two parties do wrong and one suffers by it. The slanderer is guilty in that he speaks ill of a man behind his back; and the man who listens to him is guilty in that he takes his word without troubling to find out the truth. The slandered person suffers doubly- from the disparaging words of the one and from the belief of the other that he deserves the disparagement."
- Herodotus. Translated by Aubrey de Sélincourt, revised by A.R. Burn.
The Histories- Book VII, Artabanus' Warning
London, 1988
I believe it was Henry Ford who once said, "History is bunk."
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"Kearney seemed to reserve his softer emotions for horses. He was, above all, an equestrian. He doted on his mounts and saw to it that they were always immaculately shod and curried. He loved to breed and race them. He abhorred the rough treatment of animals then prevalent in the army. Kearney was the commander of the U.S. Dragoons at Fort Leavenworth, the elite unit of mounted soldiers created in 1833 to police the Western borderlands (the name "dragoon" derived from the so-called "dragon" guns carried by a venerable French mounted outfit on which the dragoons were loosely based). Kearney had personally recruited and shaped this fabled precursor to the United States Cavalry from its very inception. It is because of this that historians would later call Kearney "the father of the American cavalry." Not surprisingly, the largest part of Kearney's training concerned the care and handling of horses. In the first manual of the U.S. Dragoons, which Kearney wrote, he urged that each soldier always be "very careful to avoid alarming or disturbing his horse." A soft-spoken man by nature, Kearney advised the dragoon to speak to his mount in a low, even voice, almost a whisper."
-Hampton Sides
Blood And Thunder, An Epic of The American West
New York, 2006
A well written and researched account of the little known first American imperial wars- the conquest of the Navajos, Mexico, California, and the Southwest.
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"Young men want to be faithful and are not; old man want to be faithless and cannot."
-Oscar Wilde
The Picture of Dorian Gray
New York, 1957
A man with a rapier wit and a nearly unequalled facility with words who, unfortunately, was done in by hubris and a lack of common sense.
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"The 1933 decision of Saudia Arabia and SOCAL to sign this concession changed forever the nature of the kingdom that Abdul Aziz founded. This planted the seed that grew to become the most important oil producer on earth. But oil success did not come overnight, and in fact may not have been expected at all. Some long time observers of Saudi Arabia have maintained that the king never would have entered into this agreement had he really believed there was any oil. Others have argued, however, that Abdul Aziz would have had to deal away his oil rights, even if he had known his oil resources were vast, to satisfy his great need for hard currency."
-Matthew R. Simmons
Twilight In The Desert, The Coming Saudi Oil Shock and The World Economy
New York, 2005
Possibly, the most important book published in 2005 and NOT READ!
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"There are hidden contradictions in the minds of people who 'love Nature' while deploring the 'artificialities' with which 'Man has spoiled Nature.' The obvious contradiction lies in their choice of words, which imply that Man and his artifacts are not part of 'Nature-' but beavers and their dams are. But the contradictions go deeper than this prima facie absurdity. In declaring his love for a beaver dam (erected by beavers for beavers' purposes) and his hatred for dams erected by man (for the purposes of man) the 'Naturist' reveals his hatred for his own race- i.e., his own self-hatred.
In the case of 'Naturists' such self hatred is understandable; they are such a sorry lot. But hatred is too strong an emotion to feel toward them; pity and contempt are the most they rate.
As for me, willy-nilly, I am a man, not a beaver, and H. Sapiens is the only race I have or can have. Fortunately for me, I like being part of a race made up of men and women- it strikes me as a fine arrangement and perfectly 'natural.'"
-Robert A. Heinlein
Time Enough For Love
New York, 1969
Heinlein, prolific science fiction author, once wrote (in the chapter titled "Excerpts From The Notebooks of Lazarus Long" from the same book), "Natural laws have no pity."
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"But, as I have noted, their innocence of literae humaniores was not necessarily a sign of stupidity, and from some of them, in fact, I learned the valuable lesson that sharp wits can lurk in unpolished skulls. I knew cops who were matches for the most learned and unscrupulous lawyers at the Baltimore bar, and others who made monkeys of the oldest and crabbedest judges on the bench, and were generally respected for it. Moreover, I knew cops who were really first-rate policemen, and loved their trade as tenderly as so many art artists or movie actors. They were badly paid, but they carried on their dismal work with unflagging diligence, and loved a long, hard chase almost as much as they loved a brisk clubbing. Their one salient failing, taking them as a class, was their belief that any person who had been arrested, even on mere suspicion, was unquestionably and ipso facto guilty. But that theory, though it occasionally colored their testimony in a garish manner, was grounded, after all, on nothing worse than professional pride and espirit de corps, and I am certainly not one to hoot at it, for my own belief in the mission of journalism has no better support than the same partiality, and all the logic I am aware of stands against it."
-H.L. Mencken
The Vintage Mencken (gathered by Alistair Cooke)
originally published in Mencken's 1942 Newspaper Days as "Reflections On Notable Cops"
New York, 1955
After his 1956 death and through the '60s, Mencken's opinions and philosophy (as well as his work) fell into some disrepute and neglect. Alistair Cooke played a critically important role in championing and successfully reviving widespread interest in Mencken's incomparable prose, wit, vocabulary, and genius.
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"This is certainly a transition phase between the Iliadic world, where men died because of external forces, and the coming world of fourth-century Athens, when Plato and Aristotle teach that men are responsible for their own fate. There is the further implication that men are agents of the gods; they are not the gods, but they do not act alone. Much of this is contradictory, but it befits an epic where old codes are being destroyed and new ones constructed."
-Wallace Gray
Homer to Joyce, Interpretations of the classic works of Western literature
(page 28, from the chapter on Homer's Odyssey)
New York, 1985
This is a most wonderful book. Wallace Gray was a professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia for thirty-two years. The book is a collection of essays that follows the thread and development of the Western literary tradition (quite literally) "From Homer to Joyce."
If you are interested in interpretative essays and the common themes between Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripedes, Aristophanes, Virgil, Gottfried, Dante, Montaigne, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Swift, Dostoevsky, Eliot, and Joyce, this is a delight.
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"Within the British Isles, the spread of RP [Received Pronunciation] by the BBC, first on radio, then on television, helped to reinforce what was an already strong connection in many people's minds between education and 'Standard English'- usually perceived as the pronunciation found in the public schools, the universities, the professions, the government, and the church. The influence of this association was, in its day, enormous, even though RP was spoken by only about 3 per cent of the British population, a tiny fraction of the world's English-speaking community. Henry Cecil Wyld, Merton Professor of English Language and Literature at Oxford from 1920 to 1945, and credited with the dictum that, "No gentleman goes on a bus", expressed a common view when he wrote of RP that it was: "The best kind of English, not only because it is spoken by those often properly called the best people, but also because it has two great advantages that make it intrinsically superior to every other type of English speech- the extent to which it is current throughout the country and the marked distinctiveness and clarity of its sounds.' Even in the United States a refined pronunciation of the King's English became desirable: in the Hollywood films of the 1930s stars playing upper-class Americans affected 'posh' accents. (The fascination was not entirely one way. Raymond Chandler, now wholly identified with Los Angeles, liked to stress his English public school education. In 1958, the year before his death, he wrote to John Houseman, a friend from his Hollywood days, 'I have had a lot of fun with the American language; it has fascinating idioms, is constantly creative, very much like the English of Shakespeare's time, its slang and argot are wonderful...') Later, in the 1950s, Wall Street and Madison Avenue executives had English secretaries to add a touch of class to their dealings with the public."
-Robert McCrum, William Cran, and Robert MacNeil
The Story Of English
New York, 1986
A best seller on the history and development of the English language?
In the immortal words of Yogi Berra, "Who woulda thunk it?"
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"Sex is something I don't understand too hot. You never know where the hell you are. I keep making up sex rules for myself, and then I break them right away. Last year I made a rule that I was going to quit horsing around with girls that, deep down, gave me a pain in the ass. I broke it, though, the same week I made it- the same night, as a matter of fact. I spent the whole night necking with a terrible phoney named Anne Louise Sherman. Sex is something I just don't understand. I swear to God I don't."
-J. D. Salinger
The Catcher In The Rye
New York, 1951
Poor, dear old Holden Caulfield. I never did quite understand him, but I've always enjoyed his observations and reflections on the thing we call life.
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"I don't believe life has a purpose. Life is a lot of protoplasm with an urge to reproduce and continue in being."
-Joseph Campbell
The Power Of Myth
New York, 1988
An opinion essentially identical to that held by both Mark Twain and H. L. Mencken.
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"You'd be surprised, neighbors, how often the Literary Life imitates Real Life when money is on the line. Damn few people in publishing, politics or poker are in the game primarily to make friends...
I offer as a general rule of thumb this observation: newspaper people almost always will have read the book under discussion, and perhaps even other books by the same author; radio interviewers may or may not be prepared, while television folks- well, I am tempted to offer a cash prize to the person able to prove to my satisfaction that any television interviewer anywhere in America has read any book whatsoever."
-Larry L. King (no, not that "Larry King.")
None But A Blockhead
New York, 1986
Ever heard of The Best Little Whorehouse In Texas? If so, this is the author.
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"While the headword section describes the headword in terms of its form (that is, how it occurs in its written and spoken forms within the language), the sense section defines its meaning or 'signification'. In OED terms, a sense is an entity that, in its simplest form, consists of a definition and a series of chronologically arranged illustrative quotations. Some words have a single, readily definable meaning, but many, particularly those which have been in existence for several centuries, have acquired new or extended meanings. A word used in a literal sense may later be applied figuratively and develop its own history, or in other cases the entire meaning or significance of the word is altered. For example, the word 'silly' first meant 'happy' or 'blessed', a 'petticoat' was originally a man's short coat, the word 'glamour' was a corruption of 'grammar' and also had an early meaning of 'magic' or 'witchcraft'. A major function of the OED is to trace the way in which such words evolved by illustrating their usage over time. Thus, for a complete understanding of a word's sense development, both the definitions and the quotations need to be read in full. Quotations also frequently illustrate the usage of variant spellings listed in the headword section, so that they support not only the senses, but the entry as a whole."
-Donna Lee Berg
A Guide To The Oxford English Dictionary
Oxford, 1993
The OED is, of course, the most stupendous and wonderful dictionary in the world. It is quite readable in its own right. The monumental task of its compilation took seventy-one years, by some measures, but the great majority of the Herculean task really began in 1877 with the appointment of Sir James Murray as editor and only concluded in 1928 with the publication of the last volume of the first edition. C.T. Onions, Henry Bradley, and William Craigie must also be credited with part of the birthing process.
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"China is backward economically and technologically, but in other respects the United States or Britain is backward by comparison with China, India, or Egypt. These Asian or African civilizations are far more coherent, and this is both a strength for them and a wall of resistance to industrialization and economic development along Western lines. Of course, Western industrial society has a coherence of its own, in that it rests on generally held assumptions about accomplishment and mastery as central to the meaning of our lives- about exploration and exploitability of material acquisitions, the value of knowledge, the value of work.
Let me be specific, since the issues come down to practical things. To run a factory requires workers and managers who want economic prosperity badly enough to spend a major part of their working lives doing things that are often boring, exhausting, and unpleasant. They also need, usually, the ability to read and write, to make complicated plans and analyses, to use sophisticated tools, to understand machinery and feel at home with it, and even to take pleasure in machines and in the concepts that lie behind them. A dependable supply of such workers and managers exists in the United States, Canada, and Western Europe, because fathers and sons have done this kind of thing since the Industrial Revolution first emerged, during the eighteenth century, in a society whose ancient and medieval engineering and technology had already been of remarkable sophistication. One reason they have done this is that even though Western societies are now secularized, they are the product of a religious civilization that insisted that constructive work in this world pleases God, will be rewarded by God, and advances the development of a history that is understood to have begun in the void from which God summoned matter, and to end in the Day of Judgement, when all will be held accountable for how they have used their talents and dealt with their fellow man. The latter-day political secularizations of this religious conception of history have changed little that is essential to it. Progressive humanists or Marxists, rationalists or scientific optimists, we in the West still go on working, as if our immortal salvation depended upon it. Our culture is teleological- it presumes purposive development and a conclusion."
-William Pfaff
Barbarian Sentiments
New York, 1989
This piece is, of course, a little dated. It's always interesting to see just how wrong forecasters frequently are. Does anyone remember the best-selling Megatrends by John Naisbitt? If you want a good laugh, find a copy and see for yourself just how absurdly wrong Naisbitt was about just about everything. But, what the hell? He sold a ton of books to the gullible and the credulous- and laughed all the way to the bank.
William Pfaff is a very bright man whose views on foreign affairs have often been prescient- for example, he did forsee the Balkan nightmare. Who among us envisioned the astonishingly rapid emergence of China as a global economic powerhouse? Granted, there were some- but not very many.
Beware of seers and entrail readers! There are well-known rules for forecasting: forecast frequently, never include dates, and (most importantly) if you're ever right- don't EVER let anybody forget it!
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"In 1378 Charles was succeeded both as Emperor and King of Bohemia by his son Wenceslaus IV, who was so ineffective and unpopular that his half-brother Sigismund seized power, holding Wenceslaus prisoner for a time, and in due course formally succeeding him in 1411. This Sigismund, who married the Hungarian queen (or king as she had to be called according to the old Magyar custom) Mary, daughter of Louis the Great, was a formidable man, a born fighter who found himself from the beginning closely involved with affairs of religion. At the turn of the century the scandal of the papacy (there were no fewer than three popes at odds with one another) had become intolerable, and Sigismund made it his first business to put an end to it. At the same time he had thrust upon him the difficult affair of John Hus, the reforming Bohemian cleric who, inspired by Wycliffe's teachings, had become a Czech national hero. It was Sigismund who gave Hus his safe conduct to attend the Council of Constance to defend himself against the charge of heresy. And it was Sigismund who was blamed for treachery when Hus was seized and tried and burnt at Constance in 1415, a martyrdom which led to a national uprising in Bohemia and the savage Hussite war which dragged on for seventeen years, laying waste a prospering land and sowing the seeds of enduring hatred. Sigismund, ruler of Hungary by marriage, relied very much on Hungerian support in crushing his Bohemian nationalist and pre-Protestant rebels, and the consequent ill-feeling between Czech and Magyar (later augmented by other actions) has endured to this day. Sigismund also received active and vigorous support from the Habsburg Duke of Austria, Albert V. And it was as a direct consequence of this that Albert II was nominated King of the Germans and crowned as the Emperor Albert II when Sigismund died in 1437. Thereafter, save for a short interval from 1742-5, the Imperial crown was to be the perquisite of the Habsburgs until the formal dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire under pressure from Napoleon in 1806. Imperial Austria was thus founded upon the humiliation of the Czechs and had its origin in support of Catholic orthodoxy against a great reforming movement which was a precursor of the Reformation proper."
-Edward Crankshaw
The Habsburgs, Portrait of A Dynasty
New York, 1971
"There was a brooding quality about many of the Habsburgs which distinguished them from the general run of monarchs..........."
Crankshaw's knowledge of Habsburg history has never been surpassed.
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"But, indeed, the dictum that truth always triumphs over persecution, is one of those pleasant falsehoods which men repeat after one another till they pass into commonplaces, but which all experience refutes. History teems with instances of truth put down by persecution. If not supressed for ever, it may be thrown back for centuries. To speak only of religious opinions: the Reformation broke out at least twenty times before Luther, and was put down. Arnold of Brescia was put down. Fra Dolcino was put down. Savonarola was put down. The Albigeois were put down. The Vaudois were put down. The Lollards were put down. The Hussites were put down. Even after the era of Luther, wherever persecution was persisted in, it was successful. In Spain, Italy, Flanders, the Austrian empire, Protestantism was rooted out; and most likely would have been so in England, had Queen Mary lived, or Queen Elizabeth had died. Persecution has always succeeded, save where the heretics were too strong a party to be effectively persecuted. No reasonable person can doubt that Christianity might have been extirpated in the Roman Empire. It spread and became predominant, because the persecutions were only occasional, lasting but a short time, and separated by long intervals of almost undisturbed propagandism. It is a piece of idle sentimentality that truth, merely as truth, has any inherent power denied to error, of prevailing against the dungeon and the stake. Men are not more zealous for truth than they often are for error, and a sufficient application of legal or even of social penalties will generally succeed in stopping the propagation of either. The real advantage which truth has, consists in this, that when an opinion is true, it may be extinguished once, twice, or many times, but in the course of ages there will generally be found persons to rediscover it, until some one of its reappearances falls on a time when from favorable circumstances it escapes persecution until it has made such head as to withstand all subsequent attempts to suppress it."
-John Stuart Mill
On Liberty
New York, 1947 (original publication, 1859)
Time and again, authors promoting freedom of expression, free markets, free enterprise, or free inquiry cite John Stuart Mill's treatise. As Mill observes, truth seekers pay a price (sometimes, the ultimate price) for their heresies. How easily we forget.
"He who tells the truth should have one foot in the stirrup."
-Armenian proverb
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"Has it been duly marked by historians that William Jennings Bryan's last secular act on this globe of sin was to catch flies? A curious detail, and not without its sardonic overtones. He was the most sedulous fly-catcher in American history, and in many ways the most successful. His quarry, of course, was not Musca domestica but Homo neandertalensis. For forty years he tracked it with coo and bellow, up and down the rustic backways of the Republic. Wherever the flambeaux of Chataqua smoked and guttered, and the bilge of idealism ran in the veins, and Baptist pastors dammed the brooks with the sanctified, and men gathered who were weary and heavy laden, and their wives who were full of Peruna and as fecund as the shad (Alosa sapidissima), there the indefatigable Jennings set up his traps and spread his bait. He knew every country town in the South and West, and he could crowd the most remote of them to suffocation by simply winding his horn. The city proletariat, transiently flustered by him in 1896, quickly penetrated his buncombe and would have no more of him; the cockney gallery jeered him at every Democratic national convention for twenty-five years. But out where the grass grows high, and the horned cattle dream away the lazy afternoons, and men still fear the powers and principalities of the air- out there between the corn-rows he held his old puissance to the end. There was no need of beaters to drive in his game. The news that he was coming was enough. For miles the flivver dust would choke the roads. And when he rose at the end of the day to discharge his Message there would be such breathless attention, such a rapt and enchanted ecstasy, such a sweet rustle of amens as the world had not known since Johann fell to Herod's axe.
There was something peculiarly fitting in the fact that his last days were spent in a one-horse Tennessee village, beating off the flies and gnats, and that death found him there. The man felt at home in such simple and Christian scenes. He liked people who sweated freely, and were not debauched by the refinements of the toilet. Making his progress up and down the Main street of little Dayton, surrounded by gaping primates from the upland valleys of the Cumberland Range, his coat laid aside, his bare arms and hairy chest shining damply, his bald head sprinkled with dust- so accoutred and on display, he was obviously happy. He liked getting up early in the morning, to the tune of cocks crowing on the dunghill. He liked the heavy, greasy victuals of the farmhouse kitchen. He liked country lawyers, country pastors, all country people. He liked country sounds and country smells.
I believe this liking was sincere- perhaps the only sincere thing in the man. His nose showed no uneasiness when a hillman in faded overalls and hickory shirt accosted him on the street, and besought him for light upon some mystery of Holy Writ. The simian gabble of the cross-roads was not gabble to him, but wisdom of an occult and superior sort. In the presence of city folks he was palpably uneasy. Their clothes, I suspect, annoyed him, and he was suspicious of their too delicate manners. He knew all the while that they were laughing at him- if not at his baroque theology, then at least at his alpaca pantaloons. But the yokels never laughed at him. To them he was not the huntsman but the prophet, and toward the end, as he gradually forsook mundane politics for more ghostly concerns, they began to elevate him in their hierarchy. When he died he was the peer of Abraham. His old enemy, [Woodrow] Wilson, aspiring to the same white and shining robe, came down with a thump. But Bryan made the grade. His place in Tennessee hagiography is secure. If the village barber saved any of his hair, then it is curing gall-stones down there today.
But what label will he bear in more urbane regions? One, I fear, of a far less flattering kind. Bryan lived too long, and descended too deeply into the mud, to be taken seriously hereafter by fully literate men, even of the kind who write schoolbooks. There was a scattering of sweet words in his funeral notices, but it was no more than a response to conventional sentimentality. The best verdict the most romantic editorial could dredge up, save in the humorless South, was to the general effect that his imbecilities were excused by his earnestness- that under his clowning, as under that of the juggler of Notre Dame, there was the zeal of a steadfast soul. But this was apology, not praise; precisely the same thing might be said of Mary Baker G. Eddy. The truth is that even Bryan's sincerity will probably yield to what is called, in other fields, definitive criticism. Was he sincere when he opposed imperialism in the Phillipines, or when he fed it with deserving Democrats in Santo Domingo? Was he sincere when he tried to shove the Prohibitionists under the table, or when he seized their banner and began to lead them with loud whoops? Was he sincere when he bellowed against war, or when he dreamed of himself as a tin-soldier in uniform, with a grave reserved at Arlington among the generals? Was he sincere when he fawned over Champ Clark, or when he betrayed Clark? Was he sincere when he pleaded for tolerance in New York, or when he bawled for the faggot and stake in Tennessee?
This talk of sincerity, I confess, fatigues me. If the fellow was sincere, then so was P.T. Barnum. The word is disgraced and degraded by such uses. He was, in fact, a charlatan, a mountebank, a zany without sense or dignity. His career brought him into contact with the first men of his time; he preferred the company of rustic ignoramuses. It was hard to believe, watching him at Dayton, that he had traveled, that he had been received in civilized societies, that he had been a high officer of state. He seemed only a poor clod like those around him, deluded by a childish theology, full of an almost pathological hatred of all learning, all human dignity, all beauty, all fine and noble things. He was a peasant come home from the barnyard. Imagine a gentleman, and you have imagined everything that he was not. What animated him from end to end of his grotesque career was simply ambition- the ambition of a common man to get his hand upon the collar of his superiors, or, failing that, to get his thumb into their eyes. He was born with a roaring voice, and it had the trick of inflaming half-wits. His whole career was devoted to raising those half-wits against their betters, that he himself might shine..."
- H.L. Mencken
Prejudices, Fifth Series
New York, 1926
Have you ever read an obituary like that? Mencken, of course, was a once-in-a-millenium phenomenon. We won't see his like again anytime soon.
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"Burr was talking about justice. 'When I get to run the world,' he said comfortably to the steaming lake, 'I'm going to hold the Nuremburg Trials Part Two. I'm going to get all the arms dealers and shit scientists, and all the smooth salesmen who push the crazies one step further than they thought of going, because it's good for business, and all the politicians and the lawyers and accountants and bankers, and I'm going to put them in the dock to answer for their lives. And you know what they'll say? ' 'If we hadn't done it someone else would have.' ' And you know what I'll say? I'll say, ' 'Oh, I see. And if you hadn't raped the girl some other fellow would have raped her. And that's your justification for rape. Noted.' ' Then I'd napalm the lot of them. Fizz.' "
-John Le Carré
The Night Manager
New York, 1993
A lovely riposte to the argument advanced by so many of the world's predators seeking to absolve themselves of personal responsibility for their actions. Wrong is wrong; because someone else does something or might do something wrong is not an excuse for doing something or enabling others to do something to someone else that you wouldn't want done to you.
Le Carré is always a pleasure. His stories touch upon far more than Cold War "spooks." For anyone who has ever been part of any human social organization, his accounts and observations of perfidy and our inner response to fear, uncertainty, and doubt ring true.
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"Asteroids as most people know, are rocky objects orbiting in loose formation in a belt between Mars and Jupiter. In illustrations they are always shown as existing in a jumble, but in fact the solar system is quite a roomy place and the average asteroid actually will be about a million miles from its nearest neighbor. Nobody knows even approximately how many asteroids there are tumbling through space, but the number is thought to be probably not less than a billion. They are presumed to be planets that never quite made it, owing to the unsettling gravitational pull of Jupiter, which kept- and keeps- them from coalescing.
When asteroids were first detected in the 1800s- the very first was discovered on the first day of the century by a Sicilian named Giuseppi Piazzi- they were thought to be planets, and the first two were named Ceres and Pallas. It took some inspired deductions by the astronomer William Herschel to work out that they were nowhere near planet sized but much smaller. He called them asteroids- Latin for 'starlike'- which was slightly unfortunate as they are not like stars at all. Sometimes now they are more accurately called planetoids.
Finding asteroids became a popular activity in the 1800s, and by the end of the century about a thousand were known. The problem was that no one was systematically recording them. By the early 1900s, it had often become impossible to know whether an asteroid that popped into view was new or simply one that had been noted earlier and then lost track of. By this time, too, astrophysics had moved on so much that few astronomers wanted to devote their lives to anything as mundane as rocky planetoids. Only a few astronomers, notably Gerard Kuiper, the Dutch-born astronomer for whom the Kuiper belt of comets is named, took any interest in the solar system at all. Thanks to his work at the McDonald Observatory in Texas, followed by work done by others at the Minor Planet Center in Cincinnati and the Spacewatch project in Arizona, a long list of lost asteroids was gradually whittled down until by the close of the twentieth century only one known asteroid was unaccounted for- an object called 719 Albert. Last seen in October, 1911, it was finally tracked down in 2000 after being missing for eighty-nine years.
So, from a point of view of asteroid research the twentieth century was essentially just a long exercise in bookkeeping. It is really only in the last few years that astronomers have begun to count and keep an eye on the rest of the asteroid community. As of July 2001, twenty-six thousand asteroids had been named and identified- half in just the previous two years. With up to a billion to identify, the count has barely begun.
In a sense it hardly matters. Identifying an asteroid doesn't make it safe. Even if every asteroid in the solar system had a name and known orbit, no one could say what perturbations might send any of them hurtling toward us. We can't forecast rock disturbances on our own surface. Put them adrift in space and what they might do is beyond guessing. Any asteroid out there that has our name on it is very likely to have no other.
Think of the earth's orbit as a kind of freeway on which we are the only vehicle, but which is crossed regularly by pedestrians who don't know enough to look before stepping off the curb. At least 90 percent of these pedestrians are quite unknown to us. We don't know where they live, what sort of hours they keep, how often they come our way. All we know is that at some point, at uncertain intervals, they trundle across the road down which we are cruising at sixty-seven thousand miles an hour. As Steven Ostro of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory has put it, 'Suppose that there was a button you could push and you could light up all the Earth-crossing asteroids larger than about ten meters, there would be over 100 million of these objects in the sky.' In short, you would see not a couple of thousand distant twinkling stars, but millions upon millions of nearer, randomly moving objects- 'all of which are capable of colliding with the Earth and all of which are moving on slightly different courses through the sky at different rates. It would be deeply unnerving.' Well, be unnerved because it is there. We just can't see it."
-Bill Bryson
A Short History of Nearly Everything
New York, 2003
This is an excellent book. Bryson takes the reader through a large part of the history of man's discoveries in physics, chemistry, geology, and biology in very readable prose. I first encountered Bryson when A Walk In The Woods appeared, the account of his effort to walk The Appalachian Trail. Over the years, I have walked a very goodly portion of it and was curious. I mentally marked Bryson down as a one-time, "flash in the pan" best selling author until I further sampled his wares, particularly his Notes from a Small Island, I'm A Stranger Here Myself, and Bryson's Dictionary of Troublesome Words.
By the way, Maid, notwithstanding Hollywood's periodic efforts to assure us that superheroes and methods exist to protect us from the danger of an asteroid collision, the peril is quite real. Assuming (an assumption that is, in itself, unlikely) that we were able to identify a potential collision, we no longer have a rocket booster powerful enough to intercept an asteroid's path. Not only that- according to Bryson- we actually destroyed the plans for the only rocket that we did have (the Saturn V booster) that was powerful enough to reach an asteroid! This is a problem that requires the Maid of Marvel's immediate attention!
Recall the fate of the dinosaurs?
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An Elegy for the Canon
"Those who can do canonical work invariably see their writings as larger forms than any social program, however exemplary. The issue is containment, and great literature will insist upon its self-sufficiency in the face of the worthiest causes: feminism, African-American culturism, and all the politically correct enterprises of our moment. The thing contained varies; the strong poem, by definition, refuses to be contained, even by Dante's or Milton's God. Dr. Samual Johnson, shrewdest of all literary critics, concluded rightly that devotional poetry was impossible as compared to poetic devotion: 'The good and evil of Eternity are too ponderous for the wings of wit.' 'Ponderous' is a metaphor for 'uncontainable,' which is another metaphor. Our contemporary openers-up of the Canon decry overt religion, but they call for devotional verse (and devotional criticism!) even if the object of devotion has been altered to the advancement of women, or of blacks, or of that most unknown of all unknown gods, the class struggle in the United States. It all depends upon your values, but I find it odd that Marxists are perceptive in finding competition everywhere else, yet fail to see that it is intrinsic to the high arts. There is a peculiar mix here of simultaneous over-idealization and undervaluation of imaginative literature, which has always pursued its own selfish aims."
-Harold Bloom
The Western Canon, The Books and School of The Ages
New York, 1994
I can't say it any better, so I'll just quote the dust jacket:
"Harold Bloom explores our Western literary tradition by concentrating on the works of twenty-six authors central to the Canon. He argues against ideology in literary criticism; he laments the loss of intellectual and aesthetic standards; he deplores multiculturalism, Marxism, feminism, neoconservativism, Afro-centrism, and the New Historicism."
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" 'They'll never let us back in that place- not after your scene at the press table.'
'What scene?'
'You bastard,' he said. 'I left you all alone for three minutes! You scared the shit out of those people! Waving that goddamn marlin spike around and yelling about reptiles. You're lucky I came back in time. They were ready to call the cops. I said you were drunk and that I was taking you up to your room for a cold shower. Hell, the only reason they gave us the press passes was to get you out of there.'
He was pacing around nervously. 'Jesus, that scene straightened me right out! I must have some drugs. What have you done with the mescaline?'
'The kit bag,' I said.
He opened the bag and ate two pellets while I got the tape machine going. 'Maybe you should only eat one of those,' he said. 'That acid's still working on you.'
I agreed. 'We have to go out to the track before dark,' I said. 'But we have time to watch the TV news. Let's carve up this grapefruit and make a fine rum punch, maybe toss in a blotter... where's the car?'
'We gave it to somebody in the parking lot,' he said. 'I have the ticket in my briefcase.'
'What's the number? I'll call down and have them wash the bastard, get rid of that dust and grime.'
'Good idea,' he said. But he couldn't find the ticket.
'Well, we're fucked,' I said. 'We'll never convince them to give us that car without proof.'
He thought for a moment, then picked up the phone and asked for the garage. 'This is Doctor Gonzo in eight-fifty,' he said. 'I seem to have lost my parking stub for that red convertible I left with you, but I want the car washed and ready to go in thirty minutes. Can you send up a duplicate stub? ... What... Oh?... Well, that's fine.' He hung up and reached for the hash pipe. 'No problem,' he said. 'That man remembers my face.'
'That's good,' I said. 'They'll probably have a big net ready for us when we show up.'
He shook his head. 'As your attorney, I advise you not to worry about me.' "
-Hunter S. Thompson
Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas and Other American Stories
New York, 1996
Page 28 (of The Modern Library edition)- I promise! The inimitable inventor of Gonzo Journalism did it like nobody else. As we all know, when Hunter S. Thompson died, he went out with a bang. The illustrations by Ralph Steadman are priceless.
"If you remember the '60s, you weren't there."
-R. Crumb
If Fear and Loathing doesn't make you crack a smile, check to see if you've got a pulse.
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"The normal commission charged by booksellers for executing bids at auction is ten per cent, which may seem expensive for a well-known and bibliographically uncomplicated book of high but stable market value- one, that is, which does not involve much expert examination or much expert estimation of price. But over a series of transactions 'on commission' the bookseller will probably engage a great deal more professional skill and spend a great deal more time in his customer's interest than is adequately repaid by his ten per cent. This of course is payable only on successful bids; yet for the lots on which he is outbid he will have provided equally full service- in advice as to the probable price, in COLLATION and appraisal of the material, in attendance (often with wearisome waiting between lots) at the sale and in the highly skilled business of the actual bidding."
-John Carter
ABC for Book Collectors (Fifth Edition, revised)
New York, 1988
If you are afflicted with bibliomania or merely have any interest in books or book collecting, this is an invaluable reference. Do you want to know what "quarto" or "fore-edge painting" or "remboîtage" means? If so, this is a great place to go to look those terms up- as well as anything else connected with printing, book design, book nomenclature, or collecting.
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"gerund, the This is certainly a Lost Cause, at least in the sense that very few people nowadays know what a gerund is. But just as people still use the subjunctive form without knowing the term itself– 'He insisted that she go to bed immediately'– so the gerund survives in use, although largely unrecognized. The gerund is derived from a verb, usually by adding the suffix –ing. Although remaining a verb, it acts in some respects as if it were a noun, and especially in the respect that if the action denoted is attributed to someone or something it needs to be accompanied by the possessive form. A few examples should make this clearer: it is correct to say 'We were surprised at their appearing so calm,' 'She was distressed at his leaving so suddenly,' 'I was surprised at its being so easy to do.' It would be wrong to say 'them appearing,' 'him leaving,' or 'it being."
-James Cochrane
Between You and I, A little book of bad English
Naperville, Illinois. 1994.
Cochrane, an editor employed by Penguin Books (UK), corrects the all-too frequent errors of common English usage. Want to know the difference between the proper usage of like and as? This is the place.
I can't resist one more quotation:
restaurateur The owner of a restaurant is a restaurateur, literally a "restorer." Traditionally, he promises to "restore" our spirits and our physical well-being with his excellent food and wine. Neither in English nor in French does the word restauranteur properly exist.
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"And therefore three cheers for Nantucket; and come a stove boat and a stove body when they will, for stave my soul, Jove himself cannot..."
"However, a good laugh is a mighty good thing, and rather too scarce a good thing; the more's the pity. So, if any one man, in his own proper person, afford stuff for a good joke to anybody, let him not be backward, but let him cheerfully allow himself to spend and be spent in that way. And the man that has anything bountifully laughable about him, be sure there is more in that man than you perhaps think for..."
"To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme. No great and enlarging volume can ever be written on the flea, though many there be who have tried it..."
"In this world, shipmates, sin that pays its way can travel freely, and without a passport; whereas virtue, if a pauper, is stopped at all frontiers."
-Herman Melville
Moby-Dick, or The Whale
New York, 1983. (Library Of America edition)
"Moby-Dick" can be tough slogging- there's no denying that. Nonetheless, I found it enjoyable; my nautical experience was undoubtedly helpful.
Melville's descriptions of types of men, their behavior and the influences their experiences have had upon them rings true. I found Cliff's Notes both useful and insightful. I'd be lying if I didn't admit to a little "internal validation" from the knowledge that I have read the book that contains what may be the most famous opening sentence in all of American literature.
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"If, after I depart this vale, you ever remember me and have thought to please my ghost, forgive some sinner and wink your eye at some homely girl."
-H. L. Mencken
A Mencken Chrestomathy
New York, 1949 (Eleventh printing, 1981).
If you've never read Mencken and you want an introduction, A Mencken Chrestomathy is an excellent place to start. Another collection that provides a great introduction is A Choice Of Days.
I am envious of anyone who hasn't yet read Mencken; you have a potentially life-altering treat in prospect.
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"This run on the bank (the only one I ever experienced) presented all the features, serious and comical, usual to such occasions. At one counter, happened that identical case, narrated of others, of the Frenchman, who was nearly squeezed to death in getting to the counter, and, when he received his money, did not know what to do with it. 'If you got the money, I no want him; but if you no got him, I want it like the devil!' "
-William Tecumseh Sherman
Memoirs
New York, 1990 (Library of America edition, second printing, 1990).
I was pleasantly surprised by this book, expecting a dull recital of events. To my surprise, I discovered that Sherman was a good writer and far more worldly than I anticipated. It has been observed by others that Sherman was one of the most intelligent commanders involved in the War Between The States and that he, almost alone, foresaw the long, devastating, fight to the death that it became. It drove him into depression. The observations and experience of this first practitioner of "total war" were largely ignored by the kings and generals responsible for leading Europe in World War I.
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"Following the French conquest of the Dutch Republic in 1795, Britain began seizing Dutch shipping to prevent France from using Dutch resources against her. This policy bore fruit in Commodore Peter Rainier's seizure of the Dutch East India Company's settlements at Amboyna and the Banda Islands in the East Indies in 1796 and in Vice-Admiral Sir George Elphinstone's attack on Cape Town in the Dutch colony at the Cape of Good Hope in September 1797. On October 11, 1797, a Dutch squadron of 16 ships of the line and eight frigates under Vice-Admiral Jan de Winter left the island of Texel on the northern Dutch coast and sought an engagement with British Admiral Adam Duncan. Duncan defeated Winter off Camperdown on the Dutch North Sea coast."
-Dean King, with John B. Hattendorf and J. Worth Estes
A Sea Of Words, A Lexicon and Companion for Patrick O'Brian's Seafaring Tales
New York, 1995.
This is an invaluable resource for anyone digging into Patrick O'Brian's works. Ordinary dictionaries just don't have entries for nautical terms; one can, of course, slug it out with the OED- but King's "Lexicon and Companion" is a tad lighter and, thus, easier to manage whilst one lies abed. Beyond its utility for looking up words, the book will solve geographic mysteries that are likely to perplex the modern reader. Can't find Batavia or New Holland in your Times (of London) Atlas? This is the place to look.
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"ignorantia legis neminem excusat (Lat) (ig-nor-AHN-ti-a LAY-gis NEM-in-em ex-COO-sat) ignorance of the law is not an excuse."
-Editorial Panel: John Buchanan-Brown, Jennifer Cang, John Crawley, Barbara Galushka, Brendan McCabe, Gilman Parsons, Carol Steiger, Kate Williams
Le Mot Juste, A Dictionary of Classical and Foreign Words and Phrases.
Third Vintage Books Edition, New York, 1991 (Originally published in Great Britain by Kogan Page Limited, London in 1980).
This is another extremely handy reference book. I occasionally find myself stumped by foreign phrases or an allusion to mythology. The OED can't help. This is the first place I go for help; its got entries based on phrases originating in Greek, Latin, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Russian, Hindu, Polynesian, and Yiddish (and others!). An entrepôt of useful terms.
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"This was the morose world of Andrew Mellon's boyhood, but unlike his surviving siblings, he would continue to inhabit it as an ever more solitary son until he was in his mid-forties. Sarah Jane Mellon was the presiding matriarch, and although Thomas Mellon wrote little about her in his autobiography, she was clearly a redoubtable woman for her time. She was not only rich but tough, having survived eight pregnancies between 1844 and 1860. More conventionally religious than her husband, she was responsible for getting the family to East Liberty Presbyterian Church on Sundays."
-David Cannadine
Mellon
New York, 2006.
I'm almost finished this interesting biography that, necessarily, includes a history of the family, the story of such iconic American enterprises as Alcoa, Gulf Oil, and Carborundum, Pittsburgh, and the tangential fellow Pittsburgh titans Carnegie and Frick. Unlike John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie, Andrew Mellon was born rich- and got a lot richer. It's also the story of the conception and prime benefactor of the National Portrait Gallery.
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"It was this intriguing and unexpected period which dominated the book I wrote about Delhi fifteen years ago, entitled City of Djinns, and which later ignited the tinder that led to my last book, White Mughals, about the many British who embraced Indian culture at the end of the eighteenth century. The Last Mughal is therefore my third book inspired by the capital. At the centre of it lies the question of how and why the relatively easy relationship of Indian and Briton, so evident during the time of Fraser, gave way to the hatreds and racism of the high-nineteenth-century Raj. The Uprising, it is clear, was the result of that change, not its cause.
Two things in particular seem to have put paid to this easy coexistence. One was the rise of British power: in a few years the British had defeated not only the French but also all their Indian rivals; in a manner not unlike the Americans after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the changed balance of power quickly led to an attitude of undisguised imperial arrogance.
The other was the ascendancy of Evangelical Christianity, and the profound change in attitudes that this brought about. The wills written by Company servants show that the practice of marrying or cohabiting with Indian wives, or bibis, all but disappeared. Memoirs of prominent eighteenth-century British Indian worthies which mentioned their Indian wives or Anglo-Indian children were re-edited so that the consorts were removed from later editions. No longer were Indians seen as inheritors of a body of sublime and ancient wisdom as eighteenth-century luminaries such as Sir William Jones and Warren Hastings had once believed; they were instead merely 'poor benighted heathen,' or even 'licentious pagans,' who, it was hoped, were eagerly awaiting conversion."
-William Dalrymple
The Last Mughal, The Fall of a Dynasty: Delhi, 1857
New York, 2007.
HOT DAMN! I'm on to a good read. Though I only made it through Dramatis Personae and the first nineteen pages of the introduction last night, I can tell this is going to be a thoroughly pleasant journey. It's going to be a literate, thoroughly researched relation of an obscure part of history. The only depressing aspect is that, once again (for what seems the thousandth time), it's going to be a tale of human genocide (go ask Iris Chang about it). Unfortunately, reading history really can be depressing. I keep a list of human horrors; it now has about thirty entries including (but not limited to): the Holocaust, the African/American slave trade, the Somme, Stalingrad, the settlement of Australia, the native Americans, Kampuchea, Armenia, Guadalcanal, Ireland, Rwanda, Manchuria, ........
We humans are apparently predisposed to kill one another.
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"Power soon went to the head of Maham Anga's son, Adham Khan. In the words of Abul Fazl he became increasingly 'intoxicated by youth and prosperity,' and 'the cap of his pride was blown away by the wind of arrogance.' He withheld treasure due to the emperor from captured cities and attempted to keep for himself the choicest inhabitants of captured harems. Then, one hot May afternoon in 1562, the chronicles record that he coolly walked with his guards into the imperial palace at Agra, where a rival minister was giving public audience. As the minister, the husband of another of Akbar's wet nurses, rose to greet him, Adham gestured to one of his henchmen to knife him. Sword in hand, Adham made for the adjoining harem where Akbar was asleep, but a eunuch slammed the door shut and bolted it from the inside. Nineteen-year old Akbar, now wide-awake, emerged from a side door, rushed toward Adham and smashed his fist into his face. (Akbar's chroniclers boasted that it looked as if he had been hit with a mace.) Akbar ordered Adham's still unconscious body to be thrown from the palace wall, which was more than thirty feet high, but the first fall did not kill him. Akbar had him hauled back up by his hair and flung him down again, this time headfirst. Thus, in Abul Fazl's words, 'his neck was broken and his brains destroyed. In this way the bloodthirsty profligate underwent retribution.' Akbar had emerged from behind the veil with a vengeance."
-Diana and Michael Preston
Taj Mahal, Passion and Genius at the Heart of the Moghul Empire
New York, 2007.
From the dust jacket blurb:
"While Galileo suffered under house arrest at the hands of Pope Urban VIII, the Thirty Years War ruined Europe, and the Pilgrims struggled to survive in the New World, work began on what would become one of the seven wonders of the world, the Taj Mahal. Built by the Moghul emperor Shah Jahan as a memorial to his beloved wife, Mumtaz Mahal, its flawless symmetry and gleaming presence have for centuries dazzled everyone who has seen it."
This is an enjoyable account of both the story behind the Taj and of the conquest of Hindustan by the Moghuls.
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"At ten o'clock Commissioner Manuel told the royal family that the Princesse de Lamballe had survived. He was wrong. It was the Marquise de Tourzel who was miraculously acquitted in front of the tribunal of revolutionaries, while Pauline was spirited away to safety by a mysterious English Good Samaritan. A different destiny was reserved for the Princesse. Brought before the tribunal, she refused to denounce the King and Queen. The Princesse, who had once been too sensitive to bear the tribulations of ordinary life, found in herself the strength to answer with awesome composure: ' I have nothing to reply, dying a little earlier or a little later is a matter of indifference to me. I am prepared to make the sacrifice of my life.' So she was directed to the exit for the Abbaye prison- actually a code for execution. Once outside, in the courtyard of La Force, according to the testimony of a Madame Bault who worked there, 'several blows of a hammer on the head laid her low and then they fell on her.'
Afterwords terrible stories were told of the fate of the Princesse de Lamballe; that she had been violated, alive or dead, that her breasts and private parts had been hacked off or, in another variant of savagery, her heart had been cooked and eaten. These stories were heard by many people in Paris at the time, the frequent use of the words 'fearful indignities... of a nature not to be related' and 'private infamies' as well as 'disembowelment' covering many possibilities.
Unquestionably the Princesse's head was cut off and mounted on a pike. Her naked body was also ripped open and her innards taken out, to be mounted on another pike. The corpse and the two grisly trophies were then paraded through Paris. The young Comte de Beaujolais, son of the Duc d'Orleans, who was doing his lessons at the Palais-Royal, was horrifed to see the head of 'Tante' pass by, accompanied by her lacerated body. Along the way the head was thrust into the lap of the apprentice wax modeller Marie Grosholz [the original Madame Tussaud]. She was obliged to make a cast with the 'savage murderers' standing over her although, having been art teacher to Madame Elizabeth, Marie had known the Princesse and her hands trembled almost too much for her to work.
It was now the firm intention of the crowd, fired up with wine and more wine to take the head of the Princesse de Lamballe to the Temple so that the 'Infamous Antoinette' could bestow a last kiss on those sweet lips she had loved. This makes another story plausible; that a visit was paid to a barber along the way for the Princesse's hair to be dressed. For the Princesse's original coiffure could hardly have survived the assault of the hammers outside La Force, even if she had managed to preserve it during her fortnight inside. By the time the head on its pike appeared bobbing up and down outside the dining room of the Tower, the famous blonde curls were floating prettily as they had done in life, even if the face was waxen white. As a result the head was instantly recognizable."
-Antonia Fraser
Marie Antoinette: The Journey
New York, 2001.
The next time someone observes, "Life isn't fair," or you're feeling sorry for yourself, think of poor Marie Antoinette. Born a Habsburg princess, her life ended after years of abuse and humiliation at the hands of a mob of savages. At the end, she was forced to change clothes and perform her bathroom functions in full view of her prison guards, prior to being carted to the guillotine. For her, death (really, a lynching) was a blessing. Contrary to popular belief, she did not originate the phrase and probably never said, "Let them eat cake" in response to reports of starvation in Paris.
Antonia Fraser's biography is riveting, well-researched and written. Marie Antoinette was made the scapegoat and focus of the whole French Revolution.
From the Epilogue:
"The use of an animal or bird, who has the ills of the community heaped upon it before being driven out, has a long history in civilizations around the world. The name derived from the goat of the early Jews, described in Leviticus, presented alive before the Lord 'to make an atonement with Him' and then 'let him go for a scapegoat into the wilderness.' But there were many similar procedures in other societies, some of them involving women or children, or disabled people, nearly all of them ending in some unpleasant ritual death for the 'scapegoats,' who were stoned or hurled from a cliff, as a result of which the community was supposed to be purged of sins, or otherwise plague and pestilence."
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"A further importance is given to the date of Oliver Cromwell's marriage by the fact that there is no further evidence for his 'prodigalities.' This in turn makes it easier to evaluate these earlier indulgences which can have had only shallow roots since they were so easily pulled up with the arrival of family responsibility. Youthful intemperance being neither particularly uncommon nor particularly culpable, one might profitably compare Oliver's situation in this respect to that of John Bunyan who exclaimed: 'Until I came to the state of marriage, I was the very ringleader in all manner of vice and ungodliness' - referring mainly to swearing and merry-making. Neither Bunyan's nor Cromwell's early 'ungodliness' would probably have achieved much status in the category of any true debauchee."
-Antonia Fraser
Cromwell; The Lord Protector
New York, 1974.
Long deficient in my knowledge of the English Civil War, the serendipity of simultaneously "discovering" Antonia Fraser and the fact that she had written a biography of Cromwell set me on a mission to scare up a copy of her 1974 work and amend my ignorance. The book turned out to be much more difficult to locate than I had anticipated. After a couple of fruitless efforts at book stores, one fall afternoon, prowling about my favorite used bookstore (one of the best I've ever seen, by the way- mainly because it is so well organized- the books are actually catalogued and shelved in a coherent manner. If you get the chance, stop by The Kelmscott Bookshop in Baltimore), mirabile dictu, there it was! In this region, immigrant Cavaliers were the forebears of many prominent families. As is the usual case, Antonia Fraser doesn't disappoint.
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"On his return from Liverpool Samuel exchanged his sea clothing for the latest fashions, which did not meet with any more approval in the Quaker community than his sailor garb had- except for one segment of that community, the girls. In romantic affairs he was eminently successful. Or, as his brother put it, 'I do not know that he was particularly susceptible of pure disinterested affection, but he possessed a superabundance of something which the fair sex seemed to consider a very agreeable substitute.' One of the girls he targeted was a devout Methodist, a fact that produced an instant conversion in Samuel, who became a regular member of the girl's Methodist congregation, conspicuous for the loudness of his amens and hallelujahs. He was still, it may be noted, thirteen on his return from Liverpool."
-Thomas Farel Heffernan
Mutiny On The Globe, The Fatal Voyage of Samuel Comstock
New York, 2002.
I've known of Samuel Comstock and the Globe mutiny since I was an adolescent thanks to my family's interest in matters nautical but I'd never delved into the details of the story. Roughly contemporaneous with the sinking of the Essex by a whale (the incident that served as partial inspiration for Melville's Moby Dick), the captain and officers of another Nantucket whaleship were brutally murdered by members of their crew. Samuel Comstock was a delusional psychopath; in our century, I have no doubt that he would have been connected with a Columbine-like episode. The book draws on previously unpublished sources and is a thorough re-telling of the tale; I found it quite enjoyable.
