Patrick: Lagniappe

I will not go on about shop.  I still dream about it at least once a week.  Francis Marloe thought this very significant when I told him once.  But Francis belongs to that sad crew of semi-educated theorizers who prefer any general blunted "symbolic" explanation to the horror of confronting a unique human history.  Francis wanted to "explain" me.  In my moment of fame, a number of other and much cleverer people attempted this also.  But any human person is infinitely more complex than this type of explanation.  By "infinitely" (or should I say "almost infinitely"? Alas I am no philosopher) I mean that there are not only more details, but more kinds of details with more kinds of relations than these diminishers can dream of.  You might as well try to "explain" a Michelangelo on a piece of graph paper.  Only art explains, and that cannot itself be explained.  We and art are made for each other, and where that bond fails human life fails.  Only this analogy holds, only this mirror shows a just image.  Of course we have an "unconscious mind" and this is partly what my book is about.  But there is no general chart of that lost continent.  Certainly not a "scientific" one.

--The Black Prince by Iris Murdoch

Patrick: Lagniappe

This is where, for Winters, the moral element comes in: the relationship of motive to emotion.  In other words, the poet must take pains to ensure that the emotional content of the language does not exceed the motivating experience.  An extreme example would be describing a hangnail with the word genocide; an actual example might be Sylvia Plath's use of fascist and Auschwitz to characterize her relationship with her father.  This kind of exorbitance--the disconnection between emotion and experience--results in sentimentality, or "unearned" emotion, which Winters saw as a moral weakness in poetry.  Winters believed the poet's duty was to represent emotion accurately.  The poem must be a rational reflection of a human experience; how else may one judge the aptness of the feeling expressed?

--Grammars of a Possible World by David Yezzi in The New Criterion (April 2008).

[Appropriately enough, given the source of publication, this description of Yvor Winters' moral element appears to be kissing cousins with T. S. Eliot's idea of the objective correlative.]

Patrick: Lagniappe

We are apt to look back upon the system of highly centralized autocracy established under Louis XIV as a curious survival from the past; Saint Simon regards it as a dazzling if dangerous innovation.  We are apt to assume that the principles of liberalism and egalitarianism which, during the eighteenth century, transformed the thoughts and feelings of mankind were a natural reaction against the rigidity, incompetence, and oppression of an outworn theory of governance: Saint Simon had his own almost medieval plan for the proper distribution of power.  Thus, whereas we see the ancien régime in the light of what came after, Saint Simon sees it in the light of what had been before.  It is as though we were able to contemplate the Age of Enlightenment, not as seen by the liberals of the nineteenth century, but as it would have appeared to a high churchman of the days of Charles I.  It is salutary to be accorded a back view of such developments when we have been trained to view them from in front.

 --Courtly Standards (Saint Simon, 1675-1755) from The Age of Reason by Harold Nicolson

Patrick: Lagniappe

"The old lady is being most foully ill-treated," he said, "by a villainous oaf of a bishop, a most uninviting fellow, gaunt and hungry-looking, with a smell of grave-mold off his breath that would turn your stomach.  I don't fancy him at all.  Himself and the King are intent on burning her as a witch.  Did you ever hear the like?" said the Devil, and a hard note crept into his voice.  "If there's one thing I can't stand," he said, "it's superstition."

--The Unfortunate Fursey by Mervyn Wall

Patrick: Lagniappe

Scrabble, if I cared to think about it, was like a lot of things I could see about life.  If you really worked at something, the chances were you'd pull it off.  The problem was that the success never seemed that good in the end.  The struggle robbed it of joy.  There was no real gain, no satisfaction.  I didn't want to work at things.  What I really wanted was to win without trying, to throw down brilliant words without even having to think, to be a natural.

I wasn't a natural.  I had a working class brain.  It took me time.  And then sometimes you just didn't get the letters, there was nothing you could do.  And sometimes they fell into place like a dream.  Luck was the real decider.  Luck was what it all came down to.  Scrabble was exactly like life.  And when luck was on your side, when it was running your way, then it was a wilder and richer thing than all the hard work in the world could ever be.

--Praise by Andrew McGahan

Patrick: Lagniappe

I thought next of how horrible it was that the play would be such a success, or, which was the same thing, would be called a success by all who might hear of it.  Jean, if she hadn't done so already, would no doubt refer to it as "old-fashioned" (her term for any setting earlier than about 1930, the year of her birth), and plenty of other people would be ready to condemn it in some such fashion, but not out loud, because it was in verse, and if anyone didn't mind condemning verse plays out loud their tongue would stick to the roof of their mouth when they remembered that it was a play be a Welshman about Wales and performed by Welshmen in Wales and therefore redolent of the spirit of Wales.  What a disgrace it was, what a reproach to all Welshmen, that so many articulate parts of their culture should be invalidated by awful sentimental lying.  All those phony novels and stories about the wry rhetorical wisdom of poetical miners, all those boring myths about the wonder and the glory and the terror of life in the valley towns, all those canonizations of literary dead beats, charlatans, and flops--all this is a part of the world where there was enough material to keep a hundred honest poets chained to the typewriter.  And then, as if Goebbels were to have lamented the decay of personal truthfulness in the Third Reich, you get chaps with the emetic impertinence to complain that Welsh culture was declining.  If stuff like The Martyr represented Welsh culture, then the sooner it shut up the better.

--That Uncertain Feeling by Kingsley Amis

Patrick: Lagniappe

The performance of The Martyr, verse drama in two acts by Gareth Probert, was getting into something I didn't want it to get into: its stride.  Though material had been presented for me to have a shot at working out what was supposed to be going on.  A few moments of whimsical prose at the beginning had hinted that the protagonist, The Martyr himself, had done something, that other people intended to do something to him because of what he'd done, and that The Monk didn't want them to do it.  Apart from this there were various linguistic clues, and I felt myself on safe ground in inferring that the whole business was rather on the symbolical side.  Words like "death" and "life" and "love" and "man" cropped up every few lines, but were never attached to anything concrete or specific.  "Death," for example, wasn't my death or your death or his death or her death or our death or their death or my Aunt Fanny's death, but just death, and in the same way "love" wasn't my, etc., love and wasn't love of one person for another or love of God or lover of black currant purée either, but just love.  There were also bits from the Bible turned back to front ("In the word was the beginning" and so on), and bits of daring jargon ("No hawkers, circulars or saints," "Dai Christ").  Dear, dear, the thing was symbolical all right.

--That Uncertain Feeling by Kingsley Amis

Patrick: Lagniappe

It could not be said that she had a heart of stone, for this usually implies some conscious rejection of pity.  Mrs Cressett's heart was more likely made of wood, as people are said to be wooden-headed; she just did not notice other people's emotions.

--Anglo-Saxon Attitudes by Angus Wilson

Patrick: Lagniappe

But one thing this lack of talent taught me.  Appreciation.  When you try to do something and can't--and admit you can't--you learn a healthy respect for it and for those who can.  In the achievements of others I learned to see what I'd learned I could not do myself, and the greater the achievement, the more humble I became before it.  And frankly, I have never regretted being unable to draw or paint, because if I could, I might not be quite as receptive to others.  But because I tried to do it and discovered my limitations, I am perhaps more tolerant of all kinds of art than one who hasn't tried--or has and won't admit his limitations.

I know an awful lot of amateurs . . . Sunday painters, they call them now . . . and it seems to follow that the less talent they have, the more intolerant they are of talent in others.  The one painter I knew as a child was a lady who sat near us in church.  She painted polite little pictures of flowers, crammed into dumpy little vases, set on the damnedest rag bag selection of fabrics.  Mother even bought one of these to give as a wedding present to the daughter of someone she didn't like very much.  Years later, when this lady found out that I was supposed to know about art, she sought me out for a chat, backstage.  Her first words were: "Now, don't tell me you like modern art, Vincent, because if you do, we won't have a word to say to each other."  Being polite by preference, and having sat so near to her in church for so many years, we did have a few words to say to each other, but not about art.  I learned a long time ago how to get out of that one .  .  . we talked about her.

--I Like What I Know by Vincent Price

[N.B.:  If only would-be writers could take Vincent's advice and never put pen to paper--or, at least, put paper to drawer and key to lock without ever venturing to revisit one's scribbling.  There's an entertaining article in The New York Times Book Review this week about the sorry state of affairs in publishing today where soon the vanity press will overtake the established one.  Certainly, anyone can put words to a page--but that does not indicate they can write.]

Patrick: Lagniappe

"Yes, but you understand, sir, we're not going down there for a dip.  We won't have time to wade the shallows with our trousers rolled up and our shoes in our hands.  We're going down there to cultivate some of the most important men in the state.  We need to stake out some key ground early.  Wasn't it Bismarck who said, 'He who holds the--something or other--controls the--something else'?  Controls the whole thing, you see.  It was Bismarck or one of those boys with a spike on his hat."

--Masters of Atlantis by Charles Portis

Patrick: Lagniappe

"I have been telling you your future!  Why don't you listen?  Do you want to know how many more times you will eat lettuce or boiled eggs?  Shall I enumerate the instances you will yell good-morning to your neighbor across the fence?  Must I tell you how many more times you will buy stockings, attend church, go to moving picture shows?  Shall I make a list showing how many more gallons of water in the future you will boil making tea, how many more combinations of cards will fall to you at auction bridge, how often the telephone will ring in your remaining years?  Do you want to know how many more times you will scold the paper-carrier for not leaving your copy in the spot that irks you least?  Must I tell you how many more times you will become annoyed at the weather because it rains or fails to rain according to your wishes?  Shall I compute the pounds of pennies you will save shopping at bargain centers?  Do you want to know all that?  For that is your future, doing the same small futile things you have done for the last fifty-eight years.  You face a repetition of your past, a recapitulation of the digits in the adding machine of your days.

--The Circus of Dr. Lao Charles G. Finney

Patrick: Lagniappe

Lord Emsworth adjusted his glasses, and the mild smile disappeared from his face, to be succeeded by a set look.  A stage-director of a moving-picture firm would have recognized the look; Lord Emsworth was 'registering' interest - interest which, he perceived from the first instant, would have to be completely simulated; for instinct told him, as Mr Peters began to talk, that he was about to be bored as he had seldom been bored in his life.

--Something Fresh by P.G. Wodehouse

Patrick: Lagniappe

Harris was born on the 14th of February 1855, according to his autobiography, which was written in his old age, and a year later, according to his statement in Who's Who.  Precision on this point, as on all other points where Harris is our sole authority, is impossible, for in writing about himself he touched nothing which he did not adorn.  His autobiography, though valuable as a self-revelation, is far more unreliable about facts even than his earlier books and talk.  It was written between ten and fifteen years after I knew him, and contains several incidents which he had told me in a more convincing form.  I have preferred any authority to it, but have been compelled to use it from time to time for his earlier years.

--Frank Harris by Hugh Kingsmill

[N.B.:  I have a soft spot for oddball book genres such as the biography of cads.  This is particularly the case where the biographer also has a soft spot for his subject which is certainly exemplified by Hugh Kingsmill, an unjustly forgotten critic and man of letters, writing of his old friend, Frank Harris, who, at one time, was regarded as the foremost critic of Shakespeare, but now, is a justly forgotten critic and man of letters.  Imagine Dr. Johnson as a fantastic rogue being followed around from scrape to scrape by his long-suffering factotum, Boswell.]

Patrick: Lagniappe

They arrived in the Geary.  The sea is right down those streets lashing and lapping.  And have to bend down to get under these clouds.  Or madam bend over, I want to tell you something.  Out here it's like soft bread and fish things burrow and hide.  I used to climb around here.  Get the tiny creatures caught in these crystal cradles of rock.  Like me.  Until they take the fearful sun away and give me a bosom of deep.

--The Ginger Man by J.P. Donleavy

Patrick: Lagniappe

For this was the favourable difference between the First World War and the second: in the first the word still had power.  It had not yet been done to death by the organization of lies, by "propaganda," and people still considered the written word, they looked to it.  Whereas in 1939 not a single pronouncement by any writer had the slightest effect either for good or evil, and up to the present no book, pamphlet, essay, or poem has stirred the masses to their core.  In 1914 a forty-eight-line poem like Lissauer's "Hymn of Hate," an inane manifesto like that of the "93 German Intellectuals," or an eight-page essay such as Rolland's Au-dessus de la Mêlée, or a novel like Barbusse's Le Feu, became an event.  The moral conscience of the world had not yet become as tired or washed-out as it is today.  It reacted vehemently to every obvious lie, to every violation of international law and of humanity, with the whole force of centuries of conviction.  A violation such as Germany's invasion of neutral Belgium, which today, since Hitler elevated lying to a matter of course, and anti-humanitarianism to law, would hardly be complained of seriously, could then still arouse the world from end to end.  The shooting of Edith Cavell and the torpedoing of the Lusitania were more harmful to Germany than a battle lost, thanks to the universal outburst of moral indignation.  And so it was by no means vain for the poet, the writer, to speak out at that time when the ear and the soul had not yet been flooded wit the incessant chattering waves of the radio.  On the contrary, the spontaneous manifestation of a great poet was a thousand times more effective than all the official speeches of the statesmen, who were known to be geared tactically and politically to the immediate moment and to speak half-truths at best.

--The World of Yesterday by Stefan Zweig

Patrick: Lagniappe

My position among my Viennese Friends was much more difficult than my official one.  Limited in their experience of Europe as whole, and living entirely within the German circle of thought, most of our writers believed that their best contribution was to strengthen the enthusiasm of the masses and support the supposed beauty of war with poetic appeals or scientific ideologies.  Nearly all the German authors, led by Hauptmann and Dehmel, felt themselves obliged, like the bards of the ancient Germani, by songs and runes to inflame the advancing warriors with enthusiasm for death.  Poems poured forth that rhymed Krieg with Sieg and Not with Tod.  Solemnly the poets swore never again to have any cultural association with a Frenchman or an Englishman; they went even further, they denied overnight that there had ever been any French or English culture.  It was all insignificant and valueless in comparison with German character, German art, and German thought.  But the savants were even worse.  The sole wisdom of the philosophers was to declare the war a "bath of steel" which would beneficially preserve the strength of the people from enervation.  The physicians fell into line and praised the prosthesis so extravagantly that one was almost tempted to have a leg amputated so that the healthy member might be replaced by an artificial one.  The ministers of all creeds had no desire to be outdone and joined in the chorus, at times as if a horde of possessed were raving, and yet all of these men were the every same whose reason, creative power, and humane conduct one had admired only a week, a month, before.

--The World of Yesterday by Stefan Zweig

Patrick: Lagniappe

"No one ever found out Charley Raunce.  Lucky Charley they call me."

"It's the lucky ones have farthest to fall," she said low.

--Loving by Henry Green

Patrick: Lagniappe

Rambling and stuccoed, the massive edifice had been jerry-built to last.  In style it managed to combine elements of both East and West.  In Jacaranda House the twain had met.  At first sight it looked as though Windsor Castle had been used for the artificial insemination of the Brighton Pavilion and from its crenellated gables to its tiled and columned verandah it succeeded with an eclecticism truly English in bringing more than a touch of the durbah to a building as functionally efficient as a gents.  Whoever had built Jacaranda House might not and almost certainly did not know what he was doing, but he must have been a positive genius even to have known how.

--Riotous Assembly by Tom Sharpe

Patrick: Lagniappe

By a law of association, from the operation of which even minds the most strictly regulated by reason are not wholly exempt, misery disposes us to hatred, and happiness to love, although there be no person to whom our misery or our happiness can be ascribed.  The peevishness of an invalid vents itself even on those who alleviate his pain.  The good humour of a man elated by success often displays itself toward enemies. 

--John Dryden from Critical, Historical and Miscellaneous Essays, vol. I by Lord Macaulay

[N.B.:  Obama's current little remark dust-up, instead of generating the latest round of tit-for-tat, would have been seen by the likes of Lord Macaulay as merely the articulation of a well-known principle most pithily encapsulated in the above quotation.]

Patrick: Lagniappe

A few prime-ministerial staffers are comparing notes with a presidential equivalent on the question of foreign travel.  When Blair goes somewhere, he relies on a staff of thirty (and five bodyguards).  When Bush goes somewhere, he relies on a staff of 800 (and 100 bodyguards); and if he visits two countries on the same trip, the figure is 1,600; three countries, and the figure is 2,400.  Having reached his destination,  Blair will throw in his lot with whatever transport is made available.  Using military aircraft, Bush takes along his own limousine, his own backup limousine, his own refueling trucks, and his own helicopters.  "Mm," murmurs a chastened Brit.  "You make our lives seem very simple."  This, shall we say , is the diplomatic way of putting it.

--On the Move with Tony Blair collected in The Second Plane by Martin Amis

Patrick: Lagniappe

"Gentlemen."  This at once provoked derision:

"We're no bloody gentlemen."

"Hark at him, Horace."

"Gentlemen, he says."  Ennis cried:

"Those of you who can read, and that can't be many, must have seen the term 'Gentlemen' often outside public lavatories.  I use the term in that sense."  And then, while they were thinking that one out, he got in swiftly with "One of the things that must be in the minds of a lot of us just now is the future of the British Empire."  There were groans; Ennis hoped they were of resignation.

--A Vision of Battlements by Anthony Burgess

Patrick: Lagniappe

I let her go.  It was nice to be mothered, nice to be bossed.  Maybe that was my problem, unresolved complexes.  I needed someone to be in control.  The difficulty was people kept offering me the opposite.  They let me do whatever I wanted, as if I knew what I was doing, as if I had credibility.  It'd ruined the few relationships I'd had.  Sooner or later the woman had started asking meaningful questions and I gave meaningless answers, and somehow they'd got taken seriously.  It occurred to me sometimes that women listened too much, they considered too much, they paid attention to the wrong things.  They didn't just look.  If a man was there with them, he was there with them.  That was the most important thing.

--Praise by Andrew McGahan

[N.B.:  A concise illustration of the pathology of the modern male mind.]

Patrick: Lagniappe

The Urbs delighted in the mimes acted by Latinus and Panniculus, which were filled with stories of kidnappings, cuckolds, and lovers hidden in convenient chests.  In these plays the actresses were permitted to undress entirely (ut mimae nudarentur) which had formerly been tolerated only during midnight games of the Floralia.  The alternative was rough house, where loud words resounded and actual blows were exchanged, until finally the scrapping became serious and blood was shed copiously.  The fact that the Laureolus remained popular for nearly two centuries is explained by the ferocity of its brigand murderer and incendiary and by his hideous punishment.  Domitian allowed the play to end with a scene in which a criminal condemned under the common law was substituted for the actor and put to death with tortures in which there was nothing imaginary.  The spectators were not revolted by the ignoble spectacle of a pitiable Prometheus derided, torn by the nails which pinned his palms and ankles to the cross, or seared by the claws of the Calydonian bear to which he had been flung as prey; in fact, Martial sings the praises of the prince who made these things possible.  So performed, the mime seemed to the Romans of the time to reach the highest perfection attainable by the means and the effects at its disposal; and indeed, the slice of life cut from the living flesh leaves far behind the most graphic horrors portrayed today. 

 --Daily Life in Ancient Rome by Jerome Carcopino (tr. from the French by E.O. Lorimer)

[N.B.:  And who thought Mouse Trap was the longest running play?  Apparently, part of the play's longevity is due to its supposed "twist" ending which is explained in the link I provided above.  If only the villain in that piece of Agatha Christie confection were to be really "twisted" and tortured onstage nightly would it have a chance of reaching Laureolus's two-century mark.]

Patrick: Lagniappe

When once the public reading became an established fashion in Rome, and was recognised as the main and almost exclusive occupation of people of letters, literature lost all dignity and all serious purpose.  The fashionable world adopted a currency which became more and more alloyed as the circle of amateurs was enlarged.  Those who were invited wished to be the inviters in their turn, and when everybody mounted the dais in rotation, it ended by every listener becoming an author.  This was in appearance a triumph of literature.  But it was a Pyrrhic victory, an insensate inflation which foreshadowed bankruptcy.  When there were as many writers as listeners, or, as we should say, as many authors as readers, and the two roles were indistinguishable, literature suffered from an incurable, malignant tumour.

 --Daily Life in Ancient Rome by Jerome Carcopino (tr. from the French by E.O. Lorimer)

[N.B.:  Ah, blogs, I hardly knew thee, Mercutio.]

Patrick: Lagniappe

The habit of writing and then of reading from volumina, whose unrolling never permitted attention to more than one passage at a time, with as little heed to what had gone before as to what was afterwards to come, had already induced such fragmentary and scrappy composition that even the best of Roman authors, judged by our standards, more or less deserve the condemnation Caligula pronounced on Seneca: 'sand without mortar' (arena sine calce).  These public readings in which the author aimed to dazzle his audience more by the brilliance of the detail than by the beauty of the general plan aggravated the evil influence of volumen and hastened the disastrous evolution which culminated in a taste so perverted that it responded only to tirades aimed at effect and to epigrammatic conceits (sententiae).  By detaching the works they seized on from their natural setting--pleadings from the law court, political speeches from the Curia, tragedy and comedy from the theatre--these public recitations completed the severance of such links as still existed between literature and life, and drained literature of that genuine human content without which no masterpiece is possible.  They were peculiarly noxious in a manner of their own, to which the moderns have hitherto been no less blind than the ancients, and which helped to kill literature itself.  For one thing, the opportunity they gave the author of gratifying his vanity gradually turned writers aside from ambitions nobler than the attainment of immediate intoxicating success before an audience stimulated by artificial enthusiasm by the presence of complaisant friends and of colleagues hoping to secure reciprocal admiration. 

 --Daily Life in Ancient Rome by Jerome Carcopino (tr. from the French by E.O. Lorimer)

[N.B.:  This book was originally published in 1939 by an Italian who may, no doubt, have been thinking of Mussolini and his fascist minions (not to mention the Nazis and Herr Goebbels).  But his criticism is timeless and applies just as well to modern-day blogs (mine the least excepted).  And so, what was Mr. Carcopino's verdict regarding this movement?  Stay tuned.]

Patrick: Lagniappe

An auditorium was, however, not indispensable to a public recital unless the author was anxious to cut a dash and influence opinion.  The more fastidious author whose reputation was already well established preferred a select audience of connoisseurs like himself.  Pliny the Younger, for instance, took pride in inviting only a handful of friends whom he could accommodate in his triclinium, or dining room, some stretched on the couches which were the permanent furniture of the room, and the others in chairs carried in for the occasion.  As for the poor devils who had neither triclinium nor the money to hire a room, they contrived to find an audience all the same.  As soon as they spied a group of people anywhere whose curiosity at least they might pique, they would mingle with them and unblushingly unroll their manuscript--in the Forum, under a portico, or among the crowd at the baths.  The recitatio had invaded even the crossroads.  Examining the contemporary literature, we soon get the impression that everyone was reading something, no matter what, aloud in public all the time, morning and evening, winter and summer.

 --Daily Life in Ancient Rome by Jerome Carcopino (tr. from the French by E.O. Lorimer)

[N.B.:  Who says that blogs and, unfortunately, spam, are recent inventions?  Au contraire.  Spam has always been with us, like fleas on dogs, and there is nothing new under the sun or on television.]

Patrick: Lagniappe

The building of the Athenaeum was merely an indication of the importance public readings had acquired in the Urbs, which was now submerged under a flood of talent.  There was nothing new about its architecture; it simply added an official monument to the numerous other halls which had long been filled with the eloquent murmur of these recitals.  Any well-educated man who was moderately well off cherished the ambition of having a room in his house, the auditorium, especially for readings.  More than one friend of Pliny the Younger embarked light-heartedly on this considerable expense--Calpurnius Piso, for instance, and Titinius Capito.  The plan of these auditoria varied little from house to house: a dais on which the author-reader would take his seat after having attended to his toilet, smoothed his hair, put on a new toga, and adorned his fingers with all his rings for the occasion.  He was then prepared to entrance his audience not only with the merit of his writing but by the distinction of his presence, the caress of his glances, the modesty of his speech, and the gentleness of his modulations.  Behind him hung the curtains which hid those of his guests who wished to hear him without being seen, his wife for example.  In front of the reader the public who had been summoned by notes delivered at their homes (codicilli) were accommodated, in armchairs (cathedrae) for people of the higher ranks and benches for the others.  Attendants told off for the purpose distributed the programmes of the séance (libelli).

--Daily Life in Ancient Rome by Jerome Carcopino (tr. from the French by E.O. Lorimer)

Patrick: Lagniappe

Was I to start reading something?  A handy man skilled and sometimes energetic enough to arouse even Jean's admiration, I'd recently knocked up and bracketed to the wall a double bookshelf which now held most of my books.  I gave them a quick look-over.  Some were philosophical works, bought during my College career and still in my possession because the only secondhand bookseller in the town had declined them.  Others were the nucleus of a collection, begun a few years previously, of modern books agreed by week-end reviewers to be significant; this project had now lapsed.  Others again were novels from the Library awaiting return and, in many cases, reading as well.  The remainder had no nameable reason for being there, or at any rate still there: a few Penguins, an Everyman Jane Austen (a College set-book, I should explain), a guide to Monmouthsire, The Letters of John Keats, The Future of Swearing.  No, it was no good; one book would tell me what I knew already, another what I couldn't understand, a third what I knew to be untrue, a fourth what I didn't want to be told about--especially that.  And the next number of Astounding Science Fiction wouldn't be out till the 20th.

--That Uncertain Feeling by Kingsley Amis

Patrick: Lagniappe

It does not matter what a man collects; if Nature has given him the collector's mind, he will become a fanatic on the subject of whatever collection he sets to make.  Mr Peters had collected dollars, he began to collect scarabs with precisely the same enthusiasm.  He would have become just as enthusiastic about butterflies or old china, if he had turned his thoughts to them, but it chanced that what he had taken up was the collecting of the scarab, and it gripped him more and more as the years went on. 

--Something Fresh by P.G. Wodehouse

Patrick: Lagniappe

Edmund Wilson once offered a felicitous phrase to describe the sense of faith in the Old Testament.  It seems that no tense of the Hebrew verb conforms precisely to our active present.  Instead there are two time senses, both of them eternal: things are either completed (the past perfect) or they are part of prophecies unfolding, a tense that Wilson calls the '"prophetic perfect," that phase of the Hebrew verb which indicates that something is as good as accomplished.'  A people who live in perpetual prophetic perfect feel neither risk nor vicissitudes of time as we feel them.  There is no emphasis on present and active risk among neighbors.

--The Gift by Lewis Hyde

Patrick: Lagniappe

"Corpulent genius" was fair enough.  "Viselike grip" was good.  It was pleasing to see his oyster eyes described as "two live coals."  The fellow had a touch, all right, but how had he come up with such things as "the absolute powers of a Sultan" and "the sacred macaws of Tamputocco" and "Peruvian metals unknown to science" and "the Master awash in his oversize bathtub" and "likes to work with young people" and "a spray of spittle"?  Why was he, Lamar Jimmerson, who never raised his voice, shown to be expressing opinions he had never held in such an exclamatory way that droplets of saliva flew from his lips?

--Masters of Atlantis by Charles Portis

Patrick: Lagniappe

I find that I keep using these expressions "hunted animals," "panic fear" and "wild with terror."  I know that repetition is bad, that good literary style calls for variety in expression, but I am afraid that I shall have to go on sinning, for how can you find a variety of expression for what is uniform?  Some people could, but I am not sure that I can.  I am too tired, too bemused, too desperate, sometimes also too angry to be able to devote time and energy to the search for shades of meaning and fine distinctions.  What I have to tell is so tragic; and even now, all these years afterward, I am sometimes so oppressed by it that I feel that I have the right to ask for your help in making good where I have failed from your own vocabulary.  As long as you understand what I mean, I do not mind if now and again you shake your head and say: "He could have said that better."

--The Legion of the Damned by Sven Hassel (translated from the Danish by Maurice Michael)

Patrick: Lagniappe

There was a time when I thought that I should only need to tell about Lengries and people would be filled with the disgust that I felt and people would be filled with the disgust that I felt and set about improving the world, begin building a life in which there was no room for torture.  Yet you cannot get people to understand what you mean unless they have themselves experienced what you have experienced, and to those you do not need to tell anything.  The others, those who went free, look at me as if they would like to tell me that I must be exaggerating, although they know that I am not, for they have lapped up the reports of the Nuremberg trials.  But they shrink from looking the whole thing square in the face, prefer to nail another layer of flooring over the rottenness in the foundations, to burn more incense, to sprinkle more scent around.

--The Legion of the Damned by Sven Hassel (translated from the Danish by Maurice Michael)