Fair and Square

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Going_over_the_top_02.jpg

From Good-Bye to All That, poet Robert Graves’ 1929 account of his experiences in World War I:

Beaumont had been telling how he had won about five pounds’ worth of francs in the sweepstake after the Rue du Bois show: a sweepstake of the sort that leaves no bitterness behind it. Before a show, the platoon pools all its available cash and the survivors divide it up afterwards. Those who are killed can’t complain, the wounded would have given far more than that to escape as they have, and the unwounded regard the money as a consolation prize for still being here.

In 2003, the Journal of Political Economy reprinted this paragraph with the title “Optimal Risk Sharing in the Trenches.”

| History · Literature · Science & Math · Society

In a Word

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:William_Gaddis_1975.jpg

scribacious
adj. fond of writing

moiler
n. a toiler; a drudge

demiss
adj. downcast; humble; abject

guerdon
n. a reward, recompense, or requital

By the end of the 1960s, William Gaddis had secured an advance and an NEA grant that allowed him to work full-time on the novel J R.

“Even then, however, Gaddis would be so in need of money that he would ghostwrite articles for a dentist in exchange for root canals. His son recalls one day happening to find his checkbook, and noting the balance, meticulously calculated, of twelve cents. This was at the time when Gaddis had just won the 1976 National Book Award.”

From Joseph Tabbi’s introduction to Gaddis’ “Treatment for a Motion Picture on ‘Software'” in The Rush for Second Place: Essays and Occasional Writings, 2002.

| Language · Literature · Society

First Person

Once a woman, speaking to me of love’s delight, said: It begins with a thrill like that of a hot bath, delicious; but we desire a deeper intensity, and there comes a feeling of melting as if all the knots were loosening, and this is followed by a tearing till soul and body are about to part. We know not whether it be pain or pleasure. … A moment comes of madness, so acute that we feel we cannot live through it. We do, somehow. Afterwards, the blood weighs heavy, as if it were lead, and then comes long voluptuousness; the brain is overwhelmed in it: a throbbing ecstasy, a pulsing beat.

— George Moore, Conversations in Ebury Street, 1924

| Literature

Memoranda

Excerpts from the literary notebooks of Thomas Hardy:

  • “Loughborough used to say, ‘Do what you think right, & never think of what you are going to say to excuse it beforehand.’ — a good maxim.”
  • “Bonaparte had not the patience requisite for defensive operations, said Wellington.”
  • “Miracles, scriptural & ecclesiastical — how make a difference?”
  • “Brahms – The individual character of his ideas. … With him beauty seems to hold a place subordinate to expression.” [Grove Dictionary of Music]
  • “‘Be it so; then minimize pain.’ Words of Jeremy Bentham when his physician told him he was about to die.” [F.R.E. Dowden]
  • “Epicurean philosophy – always in vogue in declining & sickly states.” [Life of Virgil]
  • “Indirect road to honour. Virgil’s introduction to Octavius was because of his reputation as a horse doctor.”
  • “Caesar, & Brutus, tampered with the muses. Poems curiously bound, & lodged in the most famous libraries; but neither the sacredness of those places, nor the greatness of their names, cd. preserve ill poetry.”
  • “You will find, perhaps to your surprise, that nine-tenths of all human suffering endured by men is useless.” [Tolstoy]
  • “Swift says some men know books as others do lords: learn their titles & then boast of their acquaintance with them.”
  • “Like all persons who have looked a great deal at human life, Balzac had been greatly struck by most people’s selfishness.” [Henry James]
  • “A fair test of the value of an institution is this — Supposing it did not exist, should we set about to establish it?” [Montague Cookson]
  • “It is the customary fate of new truths to begin as heresies & to end as superstitions.” [Thomas Huxley]
  • “The scientific spirit is of more value than its products; & irrationally held truths may be more harmful than reasoned errors” [Huxley]
  • “The artist may be known rather by what he omits.” [Schiller]
  • “Nothing is so great as it seems beforehand.” [George Eliot]

“‘He who has to act on his own responsibility is a slave if he does not act on his own judgment.’ Saying of Sir H. Edwardes — highly valued by Livingstone.”

| Literature

A Smile More Brightened

In September 1931 the Weekend Review pointed out the “regrettable omission of any reference to tooth-brushing in the description of Adam and Eve retiring for the night” in Book IV of Paradise Lost. It challenged its readers to improve Milton’s text; polymath Edward Marsh inserted these lines:

[… and eas’d the putting off
These troublesome disguises which wee wear,]
Yet pretermitted not the strait Command,
Eternal, indispensable, to off-cleanse
From their white elephantin Teeth the stains
Left by those tastie Pulps that late they chewd
At supper. First from a salubrious Fount
Our general Mother, stooping, the pure Lymph
Insorb’d, which, mingl’d with tart juices prest
From pungent Herbs, on sprigs of Myrtle smeard,
(Then were not Brushes) scrub’d gumms more impearl’d
Than when young Telephus with Lydia strove
In mutual bite of Shoulder and ruddy Lip.
This done (by Adam too no less) the pair
[Straight side by side were laid …]

Marsh called this “the cleverest thing I ever did.” “The mordacious Telephus and Lydia are ‘of course,’ as the gossip-writers would say, from Horace, Odes, I, xiii. Martin Armstrong, who had set the competition, gave me the first prize, and was good enough to express the hope that future editors of Milton would put my lines in the appropriate place.”

(From Marsh’s 1939 memoir A Number of People.)

| Humor · Literature · Poems

The Engine

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_Engine_(Gulliver).png

Gulliver’s Travels describes a device by which “the most ignorant person, at a reasonable charge, and with a little bodily labour, might write books in philosophy, poetry, politics, laws, mathematics, and theology, without the least assistance from genius or study”:

He then led me to the frame, about the sides whereof all his pupils stood in ranks. It was twenty feet square, placed in the middle of the room. The superfices was composed of several bits of wood, about the bigness of a die, but some larger than others. They were all linked together by slender wires. These bits of wood were covered, on every square, with paper pasted on them; and on these papers were written all the words of their language, in their several moods, tenses, and declensions; but without any order. The professor then desired me ‘to observe; for he was going to set his engine at work.’ The pupils, at his command, took each of them hold of an iron handle, whereof there were forty fixed round the edges of the frame; and giving them a sudden turn, the whole disposition of the words was entirely changed. He then commanded six-and-thirty of the lads, to read the several lines softly, as they appeared upon the frame; and where they found three or four words together that might make part of a sentence, they dictated to the four remaining boys, who were scribes. This work was repeated three or four times, and at every turn, the engine was so contrived, that the words shifted into new places, as the square bits of wood moved upside down.

As it permutes sets of words, it’s arguably a forerunner of the modern computer.

| Literature · Technology

Fundamentals

In 1955, the editor of a Michigan high school newspaper wrote to E.E. Cummings, asking his advice for students who wanted to follow in his footsteps. He sent this reply:

A Poet’s Advice to Students

A poet is somebody who feels, and who expresses his feeling through words.

This may sound easy. It isn’t.

A lot of people think or believe or know they feel — but that’s thinking or believing or knowing; not feeling. And poetry is feeling — not knowing or believing or thinking.

Almost anybody can learn to think or believe or know, but not a single human being can be taught to feel. Why? Because whenever you think or you believe or you know, you’re a lot of other people: but the moment you feel, you’re nobody-but-yourself.

To be nobody-but-yourself — in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else — means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.

As for expressing nobody-but-yourself in words, that means working just a little harder than anybody who isn’t a poet can possibly imagine. Why? Because nothing is quite as easy as using words like somebody else. We all of us do exactly this nearly all of the time — and whenever we do it, we’re not poets.

If, at the end of your first ten or fifteen years of fighting and working and feeling, you find you’ve written one line of one poem, you’ll be very lucky indeed.

And so my advice to all young people who wish to become poets is: do something easy, like learning how to blow up the world — unless you’re not only willing, but glad, to feel and work and fight till you die.

Does this sound dismal? It isn’t.

It’s the most wonderful life on earth.

Or so I feel.

(From the Ottawa Hills Spectator, Oct. 26, 1955.)

| Literature · Society

“A Sound of Clinking Waiters”

“Description of things and atmosphere” from the notebooks of F. Scott Fitzgerald:

  • “The island floated, a boat becalmed, upon the almost perceptible curve of the world.”
  • “The first lights of the evening were springing into pale existence. The Ferris wheel, pricked out now in lights, revolved leisurely through the dusk; a few empty cars of the roller coaster rattled overhead.”
  • “Farther out in the water there were other lights where a fleet of slender yachts rode the tide with slow dignity, and farther still a full ripe moon made the water bosom into a polished dancing floor.”
  • “It was a cup of a lake with lily pads for dregs and a smooth surface of green cream.”
  • “A region of those monotonous apartment rows that embody the true depths of the city — darkly mysterious at night, drab in the afternoon.”
  • “Spring came sliding up the mountain in wedges and spear points of green.”
  • “The music indoors was strange in the summer; it lay uneasily upon the pulsing heat, disturbed by the loud whir of the fans.”
  • “Drawing away from the little valley, past pink pines and fresh, diamond-strewn snow.”
  • “And perhaps, on the widest and shadiest of the porches there is even a hammock left over from the hammock days, stirring gently in a Victorian wind.”
  • “Bundled up children were splattering in for tea as if the outdoors were tired of them and wanted to change its dress in quiet dignity.”
  • “Out the window, the snow on the pine trees had gone lilac in the early dusk.”
  • “The sun had gone behind Naples, leaving a sky of pigeon’s blood and gold, and as they rounded the bay and climbed slowly toward Torredell Annunziata, the Mediterranean momentarily toasted the fading splendor in pink wine.”
  • “The sea was dingy grey and swept with rain. Canvas sheltered all the open portions of the promenade deck, even the ping-pong table was wet.”
  • “Is there anything more soothing than the quiet whir of a lawnmower on a summer afternoon?”
  • “In Spring when there was no leaf dry enough to crackle and the loudest sound was a dog barking in the next county.”
  • “The deep South from the air — a mosaic of baseball diamonds set between dark little woods.”

In his 1925 story “Love in the Night,” a “limousine crawled crackling down the pebbled drive.”

| Literature

Academia

Caprices of Oxford dons, recounted in Maurice Bowra’s Memories: 1898-1939:

“In his quiet way [Wadham College Warden Joseph Wells] had an impressive authority, and it was told that once, when he heard a fearful row in the back quad, he walked up in the dark and said, ‘If you don’t stop at once, I shall light a match.’ They stopped.”

“[Oxford administrator Benjamin Parsons] Symons never admitted that he was wrong. An undergraduate was found drunk, and Symons abused another, quite innocent man for it, who said that his name was not that by which Symons had called him, but Symons would not admit it. ‘You’re drunk still. You don’t even know your own name. Go to your room at once.'”

“[Philosophy tutor Frank] Brabant kept a car and drove it badly, even by academic standards, which, from myopia, or self-righteousness, or loquacity, or absorption in other matters, are notoriously low. Once when I was with him, he drove straight into a cow and knocked it down, fortunately without damage. When the man in charge of it said quite mildly, ‘Look out where you are going,’ Brabant said fiercely, ‘Mind your own business,’ and drove on.”

See Metathesis.

| Literature · Oddities

Misc

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Samuel_Johnson_EMWEA.jpg

  • Dante’s 1305 essay “De vulgari eloquentia” contains a 27-letter word, sovramagnificentissimamente, “supermagnificently.”
  • Life Savers candies were invented by Hart Crane’s father.
  • 2746 = 2 + \sqrt{7\sqrt{4}}^{6} (Colin Rose)
  • RETROSUSCEPTION is an anagram of COUNTERRIPOSTES.
  • “Of all the reciprocals of integers, the one that I best like is 1/0 for it is a titan amongst midgets.” — Sam Linial

Lord David Cecil called Samuel Johnson “an outstanding example of the charm that comes from an unexpected combination of qualities. In general, odd people are not sensible and sensible people are not odd. Johnson was both and often both at the same time.”

| Language · Literature · Quotations · Science & Math · Trivia