Worldly Wisdom

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Maxims of Spanish Jesuit Baltasar Gracián (1601-1658):

  • When you counsel someone, you should appear to be reminding him of something he had forgotten, not of the light he was unable to see.
  • To overvalue something is a form of lying.
  • Do something well, and that is quickly enough.
  • Many owe their greatness to their enemies. Flattery is fiercer than hatred, for hatred corrects the faults flattery had disguised.
  • Those who want to look like hard workers give the impression that they aren’t up to their jobs.
  • Complaints will always discredit you. … Once divulged to others, the offenses done to us seem to make others pardonable.
  • Not believing others implies that you yourself are deceitful. The liar suffers twice: he neither believes nor is believed.
  • Better to be cheated by the price than by the merchandise.
  • Because the ignorant do not know themselves, they never know for what they are lacking. Some would be sages if they did not believe they were so already.
  • Some die because they feel everything, others because they feel nothing. Some are fools because they suffer no regrets, and others because they do.
  • Some marry the first information they receive, and turn what comes later into their concubine. Since deceit is always first to arrive, there is no room left for truth.
  • To hear a prince’s secrets is not a privilege but a burden. Many smash the mirror that reminds them of their ugliness. They cannot stand to see those who saw them.
  • Some people belong entirely to others. … They have not a day, not an hour to call their own, so completely do they give themselves to others. This is true even in matters of understanding. Some people know everything for others and nothing for themselves.
  • Many pleasant things are better when they belong to someone else. … When things belong to others, we enjoy them twice as much, without the risk of losing them, and with the pleasure of novelty.
  • Imagination travels faster than sight. Deceit comes in through the ears, but usually leaves through the eyes.
  • Freedom is more precious than the gift that makes us lose it.
  • Virtue alone is for real; all else is sham. Talent and greatness depend on virtue, not on fortune. Only virtue is sufficient unto herself. She makes us love the living and remember the dead.

“Honorable beginnings should serve to awaken curiosity, not to heighten people’s expectations. We are much better off when reality surpasses our expectations, and something turns out better than we thought it would. This rule does not hold true for bad things: when an evil has been exaggerated, its reality makes people applaud. What was feared as ruinous comes to seem tolerable.”

| Literature · Quotations · Society

Looking Back

The last item in J.G. Ballard’s 1990 collection War Fever is a story in the shape of an index, purportedly the index to the unpublished autobiography of one Henry Rhodes Hamilton, an enigmatic Zelig who gallivanted around the 20th century rubbing shoulders with dozens of influential figures:

Harriman, Averell, 432
Harry’s Bar, Venice, 256
Hayworth, Rita, 311
Hemingway, Ernest, first African safari with HRH, 234; at Battle of the Ebro with HRH, 244; introduces HRH to James Joyce, 256; portrays HRH in The Old Man and the Sea, 453
Hiroshima, HRH observes atomic cloud, 258
Hitler, Adolf, invites HRH to Berchtesgaden, 166; divulges Russia invasion plans, 172; impresses HRH, 179; disappoints HRH, 181

What does it add up to? “Is the suppressed autobiography itself a disguised roman à clef, in which the fictional hero exposes the secret identities of his historical contemporaries?” asks Ballard in an editor’s note. “Perhaps the entire compilation is nothing more than a figment of the over-wrought imagination of some deranged lexicographer.” Any clues must be hiding in the piece itself.

| Literature

Speak, Memory

A puzzling passage from Vladimir Nabokov’s 1957 novel Pnin:

Pnin’s birthday … fell on February 3, by the Julian calendar into which he had been born in St. Petersburg in 1898. He never celebrated it nowadays, partly because, after his departure from Russia, it sidled by in a Gregorian disguise (thirteen — no, twelve days late), and partly because during the academic year he existed mainly on a motuweth frisas basis.

This describes the novelist’s own confusing situation. He’d been born in Saint Petersburg on April 10, 1899, in the Julian calendar, which corresponds to April 22, 1899, in the Gregorian. (Russia didn’t adopt the Gregorian calendar until 1918.) The turn of the century added a further wrinkle: The offset between the two calendars increased from 12 to 13 days for dates occurring after February 1900. Properly this had no effect on earlier dates, so Nabokov’s birthday should always have been reckoned April 22, but some confused writers began to give it as April 23, and eventually that’s when he began to celebrate it himself — as he told interviewers, it meant he now shared a birthday with both William Shakespeare and Shirley Temple.

(Though he nowhere explains it, “motuweth frisas” refers to the days of the week, the most familiar rhythm of an academic’s life.)

| Literature

Oops

In 1848, English poet Arthur Hugh Clough named a new work The Bothie of Toper-na-Fuosich, apparently thinking this was an innocent Gaelic place name. The Literary Gazette informed him that it means “the hut of the bearded well” — it’s a Highland toast to the female genitalia.

“Red-faced and embarrassed, Clough was nevertheless ribald enough to giggle delightedly over the appallingly ludicrous way in which he had introduced such unseemliness into ‘all the drawing rooms and boudoirs (of course) of all the world,'” notes author Robindra Kumar Biswas.

On republishing the poem, Clough changed the name to the appropriately meaningless Tober-na-Vuolich.

| Literature

Open and Shut

The French constrained writing group Oulipo invented a new crime they call “plagiarism by anticipation.”

If William Shakespeare writes something, and you later write the same thing, then Shakespeare is guilty of plagiarism for anticipating your idea.

“Thus justice is done, and each is rewarded according to his merit.”

| Literature

Kudos

“Did you hear what Howells once said to a boring author who was trying to wring a compliment out of him? ‘I don’t know how it is,’ said the author, ‘I don’t seem to write as well as I used to do.’ ‘Oh, yes you do — indeed you do. You write as well as you ever did;– But your taste is improving.”

— From a letter from John Jay Chapman to Margaret Chanler, Nov. 30, 1911

| Literature · Society

O Loving Hate!

In 1988, Harvard mathematician Steven Strogatz hit on a new way to teach differential equations. Juliet loves Romeo, but Romeo is fickle: The more she warms to him, the colder he becomes, but when her interest wanes his feelings grow. She, on the other hand, tends to echo his feeling for her, returning love for love and hate for hate:

dr/dt = –aj, dj/dt = br,

where

r(t) = Romeo’s love/hate for Juliet at time t
j(t) = Juliet’s love/hate for Romeo at time t.

Positive values of r, j signify love, negative values signify hate, and the parameters a, b are positive, to be consistent with the story.

“The sad outcome of their affair is, of course, a neverending cycle of love and hate; their governing equations are those of a simple harmonic oscillator. At least they manage to achieve simultaneous love one-quarter of the time.”

The same idea can be pursued in other variations. He adds, “the term ‘many-body problem’ takes on new meaning in this context.”

(Steven H. Strogatz, “Love Affairs and Differential Equations,” Mathematics Magazine 61:1 [February 1988], 35.)

| Literature · Science & Math

Good Enough

The opening of Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s 1830 novel Paul Clifford, “It was a dark and stormy night,” has been held up as a model of bad writing for nearly two centuries. But it’s also the opening sentence of Madeleine L’Engle’s award-winning 1962 young adult science fantasy novel A Wrinkle in Time.

Apparently this was deliberate. L’Engle biographer Leonard Marcus writes, “With a wink to the reader, she chose for the opening line of A Wrinkle in Time, her most audaciously original work of fiction, that hoariest of clichés … L’Engle herself was certainly aware of the old warhorse’s literary provenance as … Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s much-maligned, much-parodied repository of Victorian purple prose, Paul Clifford.”

| Literature