Patrick: Lagniappe

Also surround the statue were four others from antiquity: one of these was Catherine's personal favourite, Queen Artemisia, wife of the Carian Satrap King Mausolus.  The legend of her uxoriousness, both as a wife and a widow, was the one with which the Queen Mother most liked to be associated.  According to the ancient legend, upon the cremation of Mausolus Artemisia took his ashes blended with wine and drank the mixture in a formal ceremony.  This symbolised her devotion and fidelity to him, her body having become a living tomb for her husband.  She also built him an actual tomb at Halicarnassus, so magnificent it gave us the word 'Mausoleum', which was one of the seven wonders of the Ancient World.  Drinking the King's ashes also publicly legitimised Artemisia's regency and she continued to govern in his name for three years in the mid-fourth century BC.  In 1562, soon after Francis II's death when Catherine effectively became regent of France, she had commissioned Nicolas Houel to write a history of Artemisia illustrated by Antoine Caron, which formed an iconography of her reign and her right to serve as regent.

--Catherine de Medici: Renaissance Queen of France by Leonie Frieda

Patrick: Lagniappe

The Greeks took leisure seriously, a fact recorded in the subsequent history of their word for it--schole--which became scola in Latin, and school in English.   Leisure, for Aristotle, was the purpose of work--not work in the sense of any specific activity but in the general sense of ascholia (leisurelessness).  Ascholia was Aristotle's term for business, and it has its equivalent in Latin (neg-otium), and survives, too, in French.  The negociant is the one who is always busy, and who therefore has the question before him: why?  What purpose is served by business, and when is that purpose fulfilled?  For Aristotle the answer was clear: you work in order to free yourself for leisure, and in leisure you are truly free: free to pursue the contemplative life which, for Aristotle, was the highest good.

--Culture Counts by Roger Scruton

[N.B.:  That's why the saddest statement in the world today is, "I'm fulfilled by my job."  How de-humanizing.  To become a tool is one thing.  To revel in one's tool-ishness is downright foolishness.]

Patrick: Lagniappe

Aesthetic interest is of the greatest practical import to beings like us, who move on the surface of things.  To engage now with those distant parts of my life which are not of immediate concern, to absorb into the present choice the full reality of a life that stretches into distant moral space, I need insight into the meaning of things.  I need symbols in the present moment, of matters beyond the moment.  The ability to participate imaginatively in merely possible states of affairs is one of the gifts of culture: without this ability a person may not know what it is like to achieve the goals at which he aims, and his pursuit of those goals will be to a certain measure irrational.

--Culture Counts by Roger Scruton

Patrick: Lagniappe

And up from the earth beneath them came the wonderful movement of what was stirring and groaning in its sleep, of trees toughening from saplings over-night, of water breaking and rivers rising, of some momentous arousing as if a man who slept curved under the mountains and plains and the waters was awaking and brushing the pine-forests and the world's endless spider-webs from his eyes and preparing to stretch yawning from one continent to another.  The shivers of spring that ran through his blood were now an excitement in the earth, more wonderful each year because of how completely they were forgotten, and more voluptuous because of the centuries of fragrance and blossoming they had gathered into themselves. 

--My Next Bride by Kay Boyle

Patrick: Lagniappe

"I like you, Victoria," said Anthony.  "I like the way you don't say things," he said.

--My Next Bride by Kay Boyle

Patrick: Lagniappe

Only women grow up, Victoria was thinking; men go on remembering the time when their families stood on guard about them, or the books on the table, or the silver, and there was no need for explanation.  Haven't you learned that once cut out of the family's life you are a single thing given to yourself and other people, carved out separate to stand alone or not to stand at all?

--My Next Bride by Kay Boyle

Patrick: Lagniappe

The first postulate is this: "Truth Lies in Proportion."  You do not tell an historical truth by merely stating a known fact; not even by stating a number of facts in a certain and true order.  You can only tell it justly by stating the known things in the order of their value.

It has been objected by unthinking men that history is necessarily uncertain because it necessarily consists in the facts selected by the narrator, and since he can leave out what he chooses the result may be almost anything.  But this is to presuppose that the man who is telling the story is not desirous of presenting the truth.  Suppose he be so desirous, he will only achieve his object by a just selection: that is by selection according to the order of value, giving chief weight to what is most important in connection with his narrative, less weight to what is less important, and omitting, as he is bound to omit within some limits, however large, what is least important.  This is especially clear in the case of general statement on so large a matter as the establishment of a civilization, its origin, character and development. 

--The Crisis of Our Civilization by Hilaire Belloc 

Patrick: Lagniappe

Soon, soon all human joys must end:

Grim death approaches with his sickle:

Courage! There is still time, my friend,

To eat a Briggs's Breakfast Pickle.

--Meet Mr. Mulliner by P.G. Wodehouse

Patrick: Lagniappe

A sound like the sudden descent of an iron girder on a sheet of tin, followed by a jangling of bells, a wailing of tortured cats, and the noise of a few steam-riveters at work, announced to their trained ears that the music had begun.  Sweeping her to him with a violence which, attempted in any other place, would have earned him a sentence of thirty days coupled with some strong remarks from the Bench, Lancelot began to push her yielding form through the sea of humanity till they reached the centre of the whirlpool.  There, unable to move in any direction, they surrendered themselves to the ecstasy of the dance, wiping their feet on the polished flooring and occasionally pushing an elbow into some stranger's encroaching rib.

'This,' murmured the girl with closed eyes, 'is divine.'

'What?' bellowed Lancelot, for the orchestra, in addition to ringing bells, had now begun to howl like wolves at dinner-time.

--Meet Mr. Mulliner by P.G. Wodehouse

[N.B.:  That old fuss-budget, P.G., making fun of hard rock and mosh pits.  What a fuddy-duddy!  Wait a minute, this was published in 1927--he's an even bigger old fogey than I thought.  The more things change . . . .]

Patrick: Lagniappe

The chances were, therefore, that sooner or later he would find her at some night club or other.

He started, accordingly, to make the round of the night clubs.  As soon as one was raided, he went on to another.  Within a month he had visited the Mauve Mouse, the Scarlet Centipede, the Vicious Cheese, the Gay Fritter, the Placid Prune, the Cafe de Bologna, Billy's, Milly's, Ike's, Spike's, Mike's, and the Ham and Beef.  And it was at the Ham and Beef that at last he found her.

--Meet Mr. Mulliner by P.G. Wodehouse

[N.B.:  Are you starting up a new, ultra-cool, ultra-swank, ultra-sophisticated, ultra-skank new club but can't come up with a suitable moniker?  Problem solved.  No, don't thank me, thank P.G.  My preference, by the bye, is for the Vicious Cheese (or, maybe, the Mauve Mouse).]

Patrick: Lagniappe

'Sir Jasper Finch-Farrowmere?' said Wilfred.

'ffinch-ffarrowmere,' corrected his visitor, his sensitive ear detecting the capital letters.

'Ah yes.  You spell it with two small f's.'

'Four small f's.'

--Meet Mr. Mulliner by P.G. Wodehouse

Patrick: Lagniappe

Ever since his first ecstasy or vision of Christminster and its possibilities, Jude had meditated much and curiously on the probable sort of process that was involved in turning the expressions of one language into those of another.  He concluded that a grammar of the required tongue would contain, primarily, a rule, prescription, or clue of the nature of a secret cipher, which, once know, would enable him, by merely applying it, to change at will all words of his own speech into those of the foreign one.  His childish idea was, in fact, a pushing to the extremity of mathematical precision what is everywhere known as Grimm's Law--an aggrandizement of rough rules to ideal completeness.  Thus he assumed that the words of the required language were always to be found somewhere latent in the words of the given language by those who had the art to uncover them, such art being furnished by the books aforesaid.

--Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy

Patrick: Lagniappe

So much for the unhappy beginning of Jude's career as a book.  After these verdicts from the press its next misfortune was to be burnt by a bishop--probably in despair at not being able to burn me--and his advertisement of his meritorious act in the papers.

Then somebody discovered that Jude was a moral work--austere in its treatment of a difficult subject--as if the writer had not all the time said in the Preface that it was meant to be so.  Thereupon many uncursed me, and the matter ended, the only effect of it on human conduct that I could discover being its effect on myself--the experience completely curing me of further interest in novel-writing.

--Postscript from Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy

Patrick: Lagniappe

"You wonder why I will not publish?  The people will laugh at my book, or that mangled version of it which filters down to them from the universities.  The people always mistake at first the frightening for the comic thing.  But very soon they will come to see what it is that I have done, I mean what they will imagine I have done, diminished Earth, made of it merely another planet among planets; they will begin to despise the world, and something will die, and out of that death will come death.

--Doctor Copernicus by John Banville

Patrick: Lagniappe

"You think that to see is to perceive, but listen, listen: seeing is not perception!  Why will no one realise that?  I lift my head and look at the stars, as did the ancients, and I say: what are those lights?  Some call them torches borne by angels, other pinpricks in the shroud of Heaven; others till, scientists such as ourselves, call them stars and planets that make a manner of machine whose workings we strive to comprehend.  But do you understand that, without perception, all these theories are equal in value.  Stars or torches, it is all one, all merely an exalted naming; those lights shine on, indifferent to what we call them. 

--Doctor Copernicus by John Banville

Patrick: Lagniappe

There is peace here, while all Italy is in turmoil--O I know, I know you would not call it peace, but besottedness.  Yet call it what you will, our citizens, like their fellows in Firenze, are well fed and therefore well content to leave things just as they are.  That is the equation; it is as simple as that.  You may harangue them all you wish, berate them for their decadence, but they will only laugh at you--that is, so long as you are no more than a crazy astronomer with your head in the clouds.  Come down to earth and meddle in their affairs, then it will be another matter.  Fra Girolamo, the formidable Savonarola, was cherished for a time by Firenze.  The city writhed in holy ecstasy under his lash, until he began to frighten them, and then--why, then they burnt him.  You see?  No, no Jacob, there will be no autos da fe in Bologna."

--Doctor Copernicus by John Banville

Patrick: Lagniappe

"Plato in the Timaeus says that the universe is a kind of animal, eternal and perfect, whose life is lived entirely within itself, created by God in the form of a globe, which is the most pleasing in its perfection and most like itself of all figures.  Aristotle postulated as an explanation of planetary motion a mechanism of fifty-five crystalline spheres, each one touching and driving another and all driven by the primary motion of the sphere of the fixed stars.  Pythagoras likened the world to a vast lyre whose strings as it were are the orbits of the planets, which in their intervals sing beyond human hearing a perfect harmonic scale.  And all this, this crystalline eternal singing being, this you call an engine?"

"I meant no disrespect.  Only I am seeking a means of understanding and belief."  He hesitated, smiling a little sheepishly at the lofty sound of that.  "Herr Wodka--Herr Wodka, what do you believe?"

The Canon opened wide his empty arms.

"I believe that the world is here," he said, "that it exists, and that it is inexplicable.  All these great men that we have spoken of, did they believe that what they proposed exists in reality?  Did Ptolemy believe in the strange image of wheels within wheels that he postulated as a true picture of planetary motion.  Do we believe in it, even though we say that it is true?  For you see, when we are dealing with these matters, truth becomes an ambiguous concept.  In our own day Nicolas Cusanus has said that the universe is an infinite sphere whose centre is nowhere.  Now this is a contradictio in adjecto, since the motions of sphere and infinity cannot sensibly be put together; yet how much more strange is the Cusan's universe that those of Ptolemy or Aristotle?  Well, I leave the question to you."  He smiled again, ruefully.  "I think it will give you must heartache."

--Doctor Copernicus by John Banville

Patrick: Lagniappe

She led the way into the sitting room, which was beautifully cool and full of the scent of small red carnations.  The Colonel, who was not even conscious of being a hopelessly untidy person himself, nevertheless was always truck by the pervading neatness, the laundered freshness, of all parts of Miss Wilkinson's house.  It was like a little chintz holy-of-holies, always embalmed, always the same.

--Where the Cloud Breaks collected it A Month by the Lake & Other Stories by H.E. Bates

Patrick: Lagniappe

For the same reasons neither of them owned either television or radio, the Colonel having laid it down in expressly severe terms, almost as if in holy writ, that he would not only never have such antisocial devices in the house but that they were also, in a sense, degenerate: if not immoral.

--Where the Cloud Breaks collected it A Month by the Lake & Other Stories by H.E. Bates

Patrick: Lagniappe

The woman was composed mainly of a series of droops.  Her brown dress drooped from her large shoulders and chest and arms like a badly looped curtain.  A treble row of pearls dropped from her neck, from which, in turn, drooped a treble bagginess of skins.  From under her eyes drooped pouches that seemed once to have been full of something but that were now merely punctured and drained and flabby.  And from her mouth, most of the time, drooped a cigarette from which she could not bother to remove the drooping ashes.

--The Evolution of Saxby collected it A Month by the Lake & Other Stories by H.E. Bates

Patrick: Lagniappe

One of the things that success in business enabled him to do was to expend a good deal of time, care and money on his choice of clothes.  He thought a man ought not only to dress well but, rather like an animal adopting protective colouring, to dress according to his immediate surroundings.  That was why he wore simple plain blue suits at the office, sober clerical greys when he did business in London and now, on the lake, a variety of light, sunny blues, yellows, browns and greens that matched the burning autumn mountains, the honey expanses of water, the oleanders, the Italianate villas and skies.  That, he thought, was the kind of thing that kept him young.

--A Month by the Lake collected it A Month by the Lake & Other Stories by H.E. Bates

Patrick: Lagniappe

What ought to strike the newcomer to Bates's short stories is the variety of tone, the manner in which the vocabulary expands or contracts to fit the subject, and the faultless ear for human speech.  In that nothing much seems to happen--only a nuance of change in relationships, a minimal modification of attitude--Bates is seen clearly to be in the tradition of Chekhov, to whom one ought to add the Joyce of Dubliners.  The O. Henry tradition of the twist in the tail is not here; rather what we have is what Joyce called the epiphany--the showing forth of some small human truth in rather drab and ordinary human circumstances.  "She stood staring at all this for some time longer.  She had forgotten her shoes and now she dared not go back for them.  Her eyes were big and colourless.  One of her small stony lips was held tight right above the other and it might have been that she wished, after all, that she too was dead."  That is the end of "Death and the Cherry Tree."  Just a wish, not even that--just the possibility of a wish, a velleity.  It's enough.

--Introduction by Anthony Burgess to A Month by the Lake & Other Stories by H.E. Bates

Patrick: Lagniappe

'But you said so.'

'Ironically.  You should study the inflexion when I speak; it is all-important.  As important as punctuation.  Ever heard of King Charles?'

'Yes.'

'"King Charles walked and talked

Half an hour after his head was cut off."

That doesn't seem to make sense.'

'No.  How indeed could a man walk and talk half an hour after his head was cut off?'

'Precisely.  Even King Charles couldn't do it.  But put a full stop after "talked" and it makes perfect sense.  You may have heard of treaties being wrecked by a comma out of place.  And what punctuation is for the written speech, intonation is for the spoken language.  You should have listened for it.'

--Doom by William Gerhardie

Patrick: Lagniappe

'Conservatism is a subversive habit of conserving the liberties won in the past by their opponents.  If Conservatism is to be alive to-morrow, let Liberals have their way to-day.'

--Doom by William Gerhardie

Patrick: Lagniappe

Forty years ago the picture had hung proudly in the Academy.  Not, naturally, in a good light, but then not all whom the Muses called were able to withstand the intoxication of success.  If his peers had passed him by, Art, itself, had not failed him.  It was better to bring beauty to untutored eyes, and now that he was an old man he could say thing convincingly, than to hang bleakly in a gallery before a dozen students and half-hearted visitors tramping from room to room to while away the time.  His ships had been the gay cover for First Steps to History, Part II.  They had been a calendar, even a jigsaw puzzle.  Some might laugh, like that fellow Dale who sneered about "coloured photographs" just because he had never learned to draw but made splotches in red and black with his thumb he called Abstract No. 7.  What the world needed was not machinery but penitence, a return to apprenticeship, to straight lines and "taking pains."

--Beowulf by Bryher

Patrick: Lagniappe

The blow could not have fallen at a more disastrous moment.  It came when Wall Street was in a condition of suppressed "scare"--suppressed, because for a week past the great interests known to act with or to be actually controlled by the Colossus had been desperately combating the effects of the sudden arrest of Lucas Hahn, and the exposure of his plundering of the Hahn banks.  This bombshell, in its turn, had fallen at a time when the market had been "boosted" beyond its real strength.  In the language of the place, a slump was due.  Reports from the corn-hands had not been good, and there had been two or three railway statements which had been expected to be much better than they were.  But at whatever point in the vast area of speculation the shudder of the threatened break had been felt, "the Manderson crowd" had stepped in and held the market up.  All though the week the speculator's mind, as shallow as it is quick-witted, as sentimental as greedy, had seen in this the hand of a giant stretched out in protection from afar.

--Trent's Last Case by E.C. Bentley

[N.B.:  Just substitute "Bernanke" for "Manderson" (oh, and "Madoff" for "Hahn") and you too can be an expert regarding the current economic unpleasantness.  Just another benefit of reading crime classics--this one first published in 1913.]

Patrick: Lagniappe

Sipping the dregs of a julep among the patriarchs of Chartres with the Queen of Sheba in her summer dress shedding immortal grace--in what better way could a little boy learn that the austerities of living are not incompatible with the courtesy and sweetness of life?  I never heard them over their juleps express a philosophy of life, but a philosophy was implicit in all their thoughts and actions.  It probably made the Southern pattern.  Perhaps it is all contained in a remark of Father's when he was thinking aloud one night and I sat at his feet eavesdropping eagerly:

"I guess a man's job is to make the world a better place to live in, so far as he is able--always remembering the results will be infinitesimal--and to attend to his own soul."

--Lanterns on the Levee by William Alexander Percy

Patrick: Lagniappe

After the first long swallow--really a slow and noiseless suck, because the thick crushed ice comes against your teeth and the ice must be kept out and the liquor let in--Cap Mac would say: "Very fine, Camille, you make the best julep in the world."  She probably did.  Certainly her juleps had nothing in common with those hybrid concoctions one buys in bars the world over under that name.  It would have been sacrilege to add lemon, or a slice of orange or of pineapple, or one of those wretched maraschino cherries.  First you needed excellent bourbon whisky; rye or Scotch would not do at all.  Then you put half an inch of sugar in the bottom of the glass and merely dampened it with water.  Next, very quickly--and here was the trick in the procedure--you crushed your ice, actually powdered it, preferably in a towel with a wooden mallet, so quickly that it remained dry, and, slipping two sprigs of fresh mint against the inside of the glass, you crammed the ice in right to the brim, packing it with your hand.  Last you filled, the glass, which apparently had no room left for anything else, with bourbon, the older the better, and grated a bit of nutmeg on the top.  The glass immediately frosted and you settled back in your chair for half an hour of sedate cumulative bliss.  Although you stirred the sugar at the bottom, it never all melted, therefore at the end of the half hour there was left a delicious mess of ice and mint and whisky which a small boy was allowed to consume with calm rapture.

--Lanterns on the Levee by William Alexander Percy

Patrick: Lagniappe

It was when we had come back from Canada and were living in the rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs and Miss Stein and I were still good friends that Miss Stein made the remark about the lost generation.  She had some ignition trouble with the old Model T Ford she then drove and the young man who worked in the garage and had served in the last year of the war had not been adept, or perhaps had not broken the priority of other vehicles, in repairing Miss Stein's Ford.  Anyway he had not been sérieux and had been correctly severely by the patron of the garage after Miss Stein's protest.  The patron had said to him, "You are all a génération perdue."

"That's what you are.  That's what you all are," Miss Stein said.  "All of you young people who served in the war.  You are a lost generation."

"Really?" I said.

"You are," she insisted.  "You have no respect for anything.  You drink yourselves to death. . . . "

"Was the young mechanic drunk?" I asked.

"Of course not."

"Have you ever seen me drunk?"

"No.  But your friends are drunk."

"I've been drunk," I said.  "But I don't come here drunk."

"Of course not.  I didn't say that."

"The boy's patron was probably drunk by eleven o'clock in the morning," I said.  "That's why he makes such lovely phrases."

--A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway

Patrick: Lagniappe

Most of all I became entranced by the aesthetic sensibility embodied in so many Japanese words, and I was soon copying out definitions into a notebook.  Yugen--"a kind of ethereal and profound beauty, one that lurks beneath the surface of things, unamenable to direct expression."  Eiga--"the love of colour and grandeur, of pomp and circumstance."  Mujokan--the Buddhist sense of the transitoriness of worldly things.  Miyabi--courtly beauty, elegance.  Sabi--"the desolation and beauty of loneliness; solitude, quiet."  Aware--a sensitivity to "the tears in things."  Utsutsu--reality; Yume--dream.  Yume no Ukihashi--The Floating Bridge of Dreams.  This last serves as the title for the final chapter of Genji; it is, of course, life itself that is the bridge of dreams.

--Heian Holiday collected in Readings: Essays and Literary Entertainments by Michael Dirda

Patrick: Lagniappe

"He's so good looking," Clarissa said, "and a charmer.  He hasn't done much, has he?  It's awfully dangerous really for people with brains to have money and good looks.  They're practically bound to waste their talents. . . ."

--Anglo-Saxon Attitudes by Angus Wilson

Patrick: Lagniappe

Marie Hélène sat rather stiffly on one of the striped couches and talked.  "Do you think that Anouilh is passé? she asked.  "I think he has lost his elegance.  I find a terrible lack of esprit in his last play."

Timothy was having a very familiar argument with Caroline Jevington.  "My mother's quite as embarrassing as yours," he said.

"Nonsense," said Caroline, "you just listen to Mummy now."

Mrs. Jevington, large and blond but dead and elegant--the English version of Marie Hélène--was holding froth from another sofa.  "Well, I think anyone who's experienced the creative process . . ." she said.

Timothy turned to Caroline.  "Yes, you're right," he said.

Gerald, overhearing this, smiled.  They're both quite right, he thought.  Nevertheless, he decided to say nothing.  To be confidential with the very young would be unbecoming in a man of his age.

--Anglo-Saxon Attitudes by Angus Wilson

Patrick: Lagniappe

They stood on the steps of the Club as the snow fell thickly around them, incongruous in height, contrasting in costume.  Gerald disliked talking to Clun from his superior height; he guessed rightly that it increased the little man's antagonism.

--Anglo-Saxon Attitudes by Angus Wilson

Patrick: Lagniappe

He was nearly forty, the age at which most men who are to make a mark in the world have struck the first impressions.  But Rolfe had made no mark: the world had stamped him, not he the world: no rolling stone ever gathered less moss.  Nevertheless, there were three things on his side.  First was the habit of hardship, which enabled him to accept poverty in spirit which has dignified so many artists' garrets.  It is easier to tolerate the accustomed, than deprivation.  And if the outcast had no cash, he was at least immune from the quotidian responsibilities that chain the lives of the free.  Second, his excellent, still unimpaired constitution and sense of the physical, which, when he was not hungry, brought him a ready, thrilling appreciation of the world around him.  And thirdly, he possessed a genuine talent, so far hidden behind the bushels of his other aspirations but now to be revealed.  Still, when all this has been allowed, it must be admitted that he wore thin armour against fate.

--The Quest for Corvo by A.J.A. Symons

Patrick: Lagniappe

I have never seen him happier than when he had to answer an unpleasant letter.  Before he sat down, I would hear him bubbling and chortling for quite a time.  'Now for it', he would say at last; 'I'm going to flick that gentleman with my satire.'  'I cultivate the gentle art of making enemies', he would say.  'A friend is necessary, one friend--but an enemy is more necessary.  An enemy keeps one alert.'  I do believe he made enemies, or fancied he made them, for the sole pleasure of being able to 'flick them with his satire'.

--The Quest for Corvo by A.J.A. Symons

Patrick: Lagniappe

His becoming a Catholic I could easily understand.  The attraction of the Catholic Faith for the artistic temperament is a phenomenon which has been the subject of many novels and is one of the facts of psychology.  Even among Rolfe's immediate contemporaries, Francis Thompson, Aubrey Beardsley, Ernest Dowson and Lionel Johnson had followed the same path, a path which has been charted by Joris Karl Huysmans.  Rolfe had become a Catholic at twenty-six; and, shortly afterwards, aspired to priesthood.  That, undoubtedly, was more unusual than his conversion; and yet perhaps it is not surprising that one in whom nature had not implanted a love for women should embrace a celibate career.  And then Rolfe, as his books showed, was a mediaevalist, an artist, and  a scholar in temperament; so that to him the tradition of the Catholic Church, with its championship of learning and beauty, must have been a real and living thing.

--The Quest for Corvo by A.J.A. Symons

Patrick: Lagniappe

My interest in the early years of the eminent is far less than that which the tradition of biographical writing painfully imposes on its devotees.  The facts of infancy may be vital when they refer to a prodigy such as Mozart, interesting when relevant to a rebel such as Shelly, valuable when they show the growth of a man out of his place, as Poe; but in Rolfe's case I felt that his childhood was by much the least interesting part of his life.  Moreover, it is possible to reason backwards as well as forwards, to infer the child from the man; and I proposed to do so.

--The Quest for Corvo by A.J.A. Symons

Patrick: Lagniappe

Discuss it?  Persuade people?  That would be madness.  An aspiring dictator must never appeal to the critical spirit of his listeners.  He would be the first victim.  A fascist leader must carry away, inflame, arouse his listeners, inspiring contempt and hatred for those timeservers who engage in discussions.  "Talk doesn't fill your belly"--there's an effective slogan against the traditional politicians.  Whatever the fascist leader says must be said as if it were self-evident, so as not to leave room for the slightest doubt or argument.  Expressions such as "perhaps," "It may be that," "It seems to me," "Unless I am mistaken," must all be strictly avoided.  Any invitation to discuss must be rejected.  "We don't discuss the safety of the Fatherland," "We don't argue with traitors," "The unemployed want jobs, not words"--these are answers that every follower will approve.  Any other kind of behavior would be disastrous.

--The School for Dictators by Ignazio Silone (tr. William Weaver)

Patrick: Lagniappe

This parable [from the Book of Judges] says that one day the trees, having decided to choose a king, went first to the olive and said, "Rule over us."  But the olive said, "Do you want to force me to stop making oil and thus rendering honor to man and God according to my nature, to go hither and thither, always on the move, to be your leader?"  Then the trees went to the fig tree and said "Come and be our ruler."  The fig answered, "Would you have me forsake my sweetness and my good fruit and go forth into the streets of the world to concern myself with politics from morning till night?"  Then the trees turned to the vine.  "Come and rule over us," they said.  And the vine also replied, "Would you have me stop making grapes, whose juice comforts man and God in sadness, in order to place myself at your head and waste time in idle chatter?"  Finally the trees went to the bramble and proposed, "Come and rule us."  And the bramble answered at once, "If your invitation to crown me is sincere, come, my subjects, and rest in my shade; otherwise, may fire burst from my brambles and burn you all to ashes."  This parable is undoubtedly one of the most subversive passage in the Bible.  The bramble agrees to rule over the other trees because it has nothing better to do.

--The School for Dictators by Ignazio Silone (tr. William Weaver)

Patrick: Lagniappe

A ruling class in decline lives by half-measures from day to day, and keeps putting off vital issues until tomorrow.  When forced to make a decision, it appoints committees and subcommittees, which complete their investigation when the situation has already changed.  To be late in these cases means to lock the stable door after the horse is stolen. It also gives the illusion that one is dodging responsibility, washing one's hands to show future historians how white and pure they are.  For democrats in troubled countries, the height of the art of governing seems to consist in accepting slaps so as to avoid kicks, in bearing the lesser evil, in constantly thinking up new compromises for minimizing disagreements and reconciling the irreconcilable.

The enemies of democracy take advantage of this and grow daily more insolent.  They conspire in broad daylight, they store up arms, they have their followers parade in the streets in military formations, they attack--ten to one--the most hated democratic leaders.  The government, "weighing its words so as not to worsen the situation," deplores the events and hopes "for the nation's good name" that they weren't premeditated, and makes fervent appeals to the citizenry that "peace may return to all hearts."  The important thing, in the minds of the democratic leaders, is to avoid any words and measures likely to irritate the seditious elements and make the situation worse.

--The School for Dictators by Ignazio Silone (tr. William Weaver)

Patrick: Lagniappe

That's what mad people do, see everything as evidence for what they want to believe.

--The Sea, The Sea by Iris Murdoch

Patrick: Lagniappe

"Does it signify what really happened to Lawrence at Déraa?  If even a dog's tooth is truly worshipped it glows with light.  The venerated object is endowed with power, that is the simple sense of the ontological proof.  And if there is art enough a lie can enlighten us as well as the truth.  What is the truth anyway, that truth?  As we know ourselves we are fake objects, fakes, bundles of illusions.  Can you determine exactly what you felt or thought or did?  We have to pretend in law courts that such things can be done, but that is just a matter of convenience.  Well, well, it doesn't signify.

--The Sea, The Sea by Iris Murdoch

[N.B.:  This is the key to one of the deep mysteries of the craft of fiction.  Cormac McCarthy is the current literary master of this spell.  He used it to good effect in Suttree (the bits of venerated rock in the riverside cave) and again in The Road (the frozen, gnomic number on the clocks).  It also served to heighten the powerful ending to the movie, Tom Horn starring Steve McQueen as the eponymous main character.]

Patrick: Lagniappe

"We are such inward secret creatures, that inwardness is the most amazing thing about us, even more amazing than our reason.  But we cannot just walk into the cavern and look around.  Most of what we think we know about our minds is pseudo-knowledge.  We are all such shocking poseurs, so good at inflating the importance of what we think we value.  The heroes at Troy fought for a phantom Helen, according to Stesichorus.  Vain wars for phantom goods.  I hope you will allow yourself plenty of reflections on human vanity.  People lie so, even we old men do.  Though in a way, if there is art enough it doesn't matter, since there is another kind of truth in the art.  Proust is our authority on French aristocrats.  Who cares what they were really like?  What does it mean even?

--The Sea, The Sea by Iris Murdoch

Patrick: Lagniappe

"What do you think of the country, the landscape?" he asked.

"I think it is rather monotonous," said Miles.

"Yes, it is, and it will be like that until we reach the Urals, and more or less like that, with the exception of forests and marshes, till we reach Irkutsk.  But it is what we would call an 'infectious' country.  You can't say that in English, I suppose.  Some countries are like that.  They tell me Ireland is the same.  You will be infected.  Once the microbe gets into one's blood--the Russian microbe, I mean--the disease never dies; it is fatal like a love-philtre, and to the end of your life you will say, 'Russia, what is there between you and me?'  That is what Gogol, one of our writers--you don't know him in translation, no?--explains.  Russia is a country without any obvious attractions and ornaments.  There are no show sights: no Niagara, no Vesuvius, no Killarney: and on the other hand, no Parthenon, no Heidelberg Castle.  Russia has no elegant make-up, no frills; and yet any one of these villages has more charm for me than all those things put together.

--Tinker's Leave by Maurice Baring

Patrick: Lagniappe

What is a repetition?  A repetition is the re-enactment of past experience toward the end of isolating the time segment which has lapsed in order that it, the lapsed time, can be savored of itself and without the usual adulteration of events that clog time like peanuts in brittle.  Last week, for example, I experienced an accidental repetition.  I picked up a German-language weekly in the library.  In it I noticed an advertisement for Nivea Creme, showing a woman with a grainy face turned up to the sun.  Then I remembered that twenty years ago I saw the same advertisement in a magazine on my father's desk, the same woman, the same grainy face, the same Nivea Creme.  The events of the intervening twenty years were neutralized, the thirty million deaths, the countless torturings, uprootings and wanderings to and fro.  Nothing of consequence could have happened because Nivea Creme was exactly as it was before.  There remained only time itself, like a yard of smooth peanut brittle.

--The Moviegoer by Walker Percy

Patrick: Lagniappe

Afterwards in the street, she looks around the neighborhood.  "Yes, it is certified now."

She refers to a phenomenon of moviegoing which I have called certification.  Nowadays when a person lives somewhere, in a neighborhood, the place is not certified for him.  More than likely he will live there sadly and the emptiness which is inside him will expand until it evacuates the entire neighborhood.  But if he sees a movie which shows his very neighborhood, it becomes possible for him to live, for a time at least, as a person who is Somewhere and not Anywhere.

--The Moviegoer by Walker Percy

Patrick: Lagniappe

"I no longer pretend to understand the world."  She is shaking her head yet still smiling her sweet menacing smile.  "The world I knew has come crashing down around my ears.  The things we hold dear are reviled and spat upon."  She nods toward Prytania Street.  "It's an interesting age you will live in--though I can't say I'm sorry to miss it.  But it should be quite a sight, the going under of the evening land.  That's us all right.  And I can tell you, my young friend, it is evening.  It is very late.

--The Moviegoer by Walker Percy

Patrick: Lagniappe

Brush leaned against the wash basin and examined the floor.  "I don't quite know yet, he said.  "All I can say is, no wonder they made prohibition.  I didn't know liquor was like that.  You know, I felt I was the greatest preacher in the world and the greatest thinker in the world.  It made me feel as though I was ready to be the greatest President of the United States.  I forgot I had any faults in my character.

--Heaven's My Destination by Thornton Wilder

[N.B.:  This soliloquy is brought to you courtesy of the novel's main character, George Brush.  Hmmm, that name seems one letter off from the name of somebody somewhat famous who also presided over the start of a Great Depression (we're calling it the Great Recession now so as not to scare the kiddies).  Now, who could that be?  Would it be someone who might regard himself as "the greatest President of the United States"?  Coincidence?  Sure it is, son.  Here, have another bottle of Big Red and go back to your nap.]

Patrick: Lagniappe

"Hello, Queenie!" he cried.  "Hitch up your pants, Queenie; the depression's over.  They've found a plan to make the ocean fresh water.  You'll love it.

--Heaven's My Destination by Thornton Wilder

Patrick: Lagniappe

All right, Michigan, when you find this guy tell him life's a big thrill.  See?  Tell him to stick around; we're going to have some more world wars.  He'll love it.  Tell him from me the depression's only begun.  Next year's going to make this year look sky-high.

--Heaven's My Destination by Thornton Wilder

Patrick: Lagniappe

The boys at Lubyanka like to say, Give us a man, we'll build a case.  I approve of their optimism and readiness to work.  But this is a more important matter than most.  It's not enough that the crime fits the man.  The man must rise to fit the crime.

Are the defendants guilty as charged?  The answer is a no that dialectically becomes a yes.

In a certain highly literal sense of the word, most of these men are not guilty of most of these crimes.  They may, however, be guilty of many other crimes, crimes for which the state has decided to spare itself the expenses of a trial but which would have cost them their head in any case.

--The Autobiography of Joseph Stalin by Richard Lourie

[N.B.:  Oh, and Stalin wishes you a very happy May Day, too.]

Patrick: Lagniappe

I think of an actor in the ancient world.  He is a veteran of the Attic drama, a spear-carrier, an old trouper.  The crowd knows him but cannot remember his name.  He is never Oedipus, but once he has played Creon.  He has his mask, he has had it for years; it is his talisman.  The white clay from which it was fashioned has turned to the shade and texture of bone.  The rough felt lining has been softened by years of sweat and friction so that it fits smoothly upon the contours of his face.  Increasingly, indeed, he thinks the mask is more like his face than his face is.  At the end of a performance when he takes it off he wonders if the other actors can see him at all, or if he is just a head with a blank front, like the old statue of Silenus in the marketplace the features of which the weather has entirely worn away.  He takes to wearing the mask at home, when no one is there.  It is a comfort, it sustains him; he finds it wonderfully restful, it is like being asleep and yet conscious.  Then one day he comes to the table wearing it.  His wife makes no remark, his children stare for a moment, then shrug and go back to their accustomed bickering.  He has achieved his apotheosis.  Man and mask are one.

--Shroud by John Banville

Patrick: Lagniappe

Everything had been taken from me, therefore everything was to be permitted.  I could do whatever I wished, follow my wildest whim.  I could lie, cheat, steal, maim, murder, and justify it all.  More: the necessity of justification would not arise, for the land I was entering now was a land without laws.  Historians never tire of observing that one of the ways in which tyranny triumphs is by offering its helpers the freedom to fulfill their most secret and most base desires; few care to understand, however, that its victims too can be made free men.

--Shroud by John Banville

Patrick: Lagniappe

Yet for the best part, the worst part, of two years, we were frightened almost all of the time.  Fear burned in us unquenchably.  There were periods when it was no more than a smouldering coal lodged at the base of the breast bone, then suddenly it would leap up in jagged sheets of flame, leaving behind a hot fall of cinders.  These were the poles of existence for us: consuming, irresistible terror, or a sort of gluey apathy, with intervals of futile rage in between.

--Shroud by John Banville

Patrick: Lagniappe

And so the old high-sounding phrases--'the moral law', 'the will to this, that and the other' and a hundred like them--begin to sound a bit hollow, and I begin to realize that quite the most important thing in life is to possess the vague qualities of, and be upon every occasion, a 'gentleman'.  If you ask: what is a gentleman? you have asked the hardest question of life.  It is a question you can only answer by the intuition of your own mind.  Personally I 'get at' the ideal somewhat if I separate the word--a gentle man.  But that is only vague.

But if one cannot define a gentleman, much of the difficulty disappears by the ease with which we can distinguish his opposite.  God, how many we must brand: how few we can elect!

Must one's standards of judgement be necessarily personal and egotistic? or are there universals in the matter? I haven't thought it out yet.  This I know: The gentle man, unconsciously as often as consciously, fulfils our finest ideals.

--A War Diary 1915-18 collected in The Contrary Experience by Herbert Read

Patrick: Lagniappe

Frank Rutter is the one I know best and he is a very sincere friend of mine.  Age 42: married (to a wife whom men like and women hate); no children: the most charming conversationalist I ever met.  Something like this in looks--(picture)--very like R.L.S. as a matter of fact.  Has the most wonderful memory I ever met.  Can remember every character of every novel he has read--and that is every novel that is worth reading.  It is my delight to get him into a quiet corner in some cafe and over coffee and cigarettes to listen to him whilst he talks Meredith and Henry James by the hour.  I think it was our common enthusiasm over H.J. that first brought us together.

--A War Diary 1915-18 collected in The Contrary Experience by Herbert Read

Patrick: Lagniappe

It is one of my aims--to restore poetry to its true role of a spoken art.  The music of words--the linking of sounds--the cadence of phrase--unity of action.  Each poem should be exact, expressing in the only appropriate words the emotion experienced.  The fact of emotion unites the art to life.  Any 'idea', i.e. ethical or critical, or philosophy should only be basic-ground from which the beauty springs.  Or perhaps the unifying principle of a man's art viewed as a whole.

--A War Diary 1915-18 collected in The Contrary Experience by Herbert Read

Patrick: Lagniappe

"Plagiarized.  That's beautiful.  Can one plagiarize oneself?  Plunder, yes; recycle, certainly; but plagiarize?"  When he laughed, his chest emitted a discreet rumble, as though a digger were turning over the earth inside him.  "Do you really imagine," he said eventually, "that there are enough words in the world for them always to be new?  Novelty among the young is greatly overrated.  If you've worked to find the right words for what you want to say, then surely it would be foolhardy to discard them merely because of some sense of etiquette--some sense that it was rather shabby to repeat yourself.  Do I ever give a lecture twice?  Of course I do.  Do I have the same conversation more than once?  It goes without saying.  I am guilty of the tedium of repetition.  I'm sorry--you're disappointed to find you uncle is an old bore.  Alas."

--The Emperor's Children by Claire Messud

Patrick: Lagniappe

Reveille, in camp, was achieved as follows: a metal bludgeon, wielded by a footlike hand, would clatter up and down for a full minute between two parallel iron rails.  This you never got used to.  Each morning, as you girded yourself in the yard, you would stare at the simple contraption and wonder at its acoustical might.  I now know that, for some barbarous reason (the quicker detection, perhaps, of even the tiniest animal), hunger sharpens the hearing.  But it didn't just get louder--it grew in shrillness and, somehow, in articulacy.  The sound seemed to trumpet the dawn of a new dominion (more savage, more stupid, more certain) and to repudiate the laxity and amateurism of the day before.

--House of Meetings by Martin Amis

Patrick: Lagniappe

I supposed that if he ever stopped to think about it, Lev would have found me much reduced, humanly.  And this is what he seemed to be doing.  To me, by now, violence was a neutral instrument.  It wasn't even diplomacy by other means.  It was currency, like tobacco, like bread.

--House of Meetings by Martin Amis

Patrick: Lagniappe

There is a Western phenomenon called the male midlife crisis.  Very often it is heralded by divorce.  What history might have done to you, you bring about on purpose: separation from woman and child.  Don't tell me that such men aren't tasting the ancient flavors of death and defeat.

In America, with divorce achieved, the midlifer can expect to be more recreational, more discretionary.  He can almost design the sort of crisis he is going to have: motorbike, teenage girlfriend, vegetarianism, jogging, sports car, mature boyfriend, cocaine, crash diet, powerboat, new baby, religion, hair transplant.

Over here, now there's no angling around for your male midlife crisis.  It is brought to you and it is always the same thing.  It is death.

--House of Meetings by Martin Amis

Patrick: Lagniappe

Like Mr Micawber in David Copperfield I always assumed something would turn up, and it always did, right up until it didn't, and never did again.

And like David Copperfield, in David Copperfield, I was expert at the kind of hallucinatory economics that turned every snake into a ladder--whenever I dined in a fairly expensive restaurant, for instance, I calculated that I'd saved money by not dining in a very expensive one, and the money saved I tacked on to my inner bank account, as if it were money earned.  Thus I became richer every time I ate out at my own expense, and twice as much richer when I ate out at someone else's expense.  House champagne was a huge earner in the last days of my alcoholism, four bottles a day at a mere twelve quid a bottle, compared to the champagne I'd once drunk, Veuve Clicquot my favorite, at thirty-odd quid a bottle, so every time I put aside an empty bottle of house I was up another twenty-odd quid, courtesy of Veuve--calculations of this sort sustained me psychologically against al the portents, the chief of which were seemingly inexplicable surges of panic that were sometimes accompanied by little visions of humiliation, having my credit cards scissored, my cheques returned with insults, and then of larger visions, of a tramp-like figure roaming the streets, or sleeping in shop doorways . . . .

--The Smoking Diaries by Simon Gray

Patrick: Lagniappe

He also doesn't like to let on that he can't understand much of what you're saying--another characteristic of academics--the vanity of  stupidity, or the stupidity of vanity--and so a real mess of a muttered conversation ensued . . . ."

--The Smoking Diaries by Simon Gray

Patrick: Lagniappe

The Germans were greatly given to crowing and, just as the British delighted in caricatures of sauerkraut-guzzling Germans, the effete Englishman was a figure of fun in Germany and this character was the leitmotiv of a smash-hit comedy that had been playing for months in a score of theatres in cities as far apart as Hamburg and Breslau, Munich and 'Stettin.  In Frankfurt, where no theatre was large enough to contain the audiences clamouring to see it, it had transferred to the amphitheatre of the Circus Schumann which could seat four thousand people.  It was packed out almost every night.  With heavy irony the play was entitled Wir Barberen (We Barbarians) and the comedy leaned heavily on ridiculing tales of atrocities committed by the German Army which had been widely published abroad and reprinted in the German press.  No one in Germany believed them.

--1915: The Death of Innocence by Lyn MacDonald

Patrick: Lagniappe

What I remember most is going up to the line, and Ypres was burning. I was crossing number 2 pontoon bridge across the Yser Canal, and just a bit half-right was Wipers on fire.  I'll never forget it.  It was wonderful.  For the moment everything was quite still, no war on so to speak.  There was this town on fire with flames and smoke reflected in the waters of the canal, shimmering.  It was a wonderful picture.  Frightening too, but beautiful.  The whole place seemed to be on fire.

--1915: The Death of Innocence by Lyn MacDonald

Patrick: Lagniappe

There were few other battalions in the British Army which boasted a sergeant who quoted Cato (in Latin!) to raw recruits on the parade ground or, when they assembled for a night exercise, addressed them in the words of Catullus, 'Vesper adest, juvenes, consurgite [Rise up, lads, evening is coming]."  There were not many Battalions who had a quartermaster-sergeant who amused himself off-duty by turning King's Regulations into perfect iambics, and there was none in which so many legal minds were bent on dissecting these sacrosanct military laws in search of legal niceties that would admit of novel and more advantageous interpretations.

--1915: The Death of Innocence by Lyn MacDonald

[N.B.:  Here lies the kernel of a good middle-brow play in the mode of a Tom Stoppard.]

Patrick: Lagniappe

The highlight of one concert in Jedburgh was a rendering by the local doctor's wife of 'My Little Grey Home in the West'.  It had a recognisable tune, it came as a welcome change after a programme of cultural music and heroic poems, and the troops encored it three times.  They were the 1/7th Battalion of the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders and most of them had recently left some little grey home in the west of Scotland at Lord Kitchener's behest.

The tune, if not precisely catchy, was easy to play on a mouth organ and it was equally popular with soldiers holding the miserable outposts of the British line in Flanders.  But the words were not appropriate, and in Flanders they had adopted their own version:

I've a little we home in a trench,

Where the rainstorms continually drench,

There's a dead cow close by

With her feet towards the sky

And she gives off a horrible stench.

Underneath, in the place of a floor,

There's a mass of wet mud and some straw,

But with shells dropping there,

There's no place to compare

With my little we home in the trench.

--1915: The Death of Innocence by Lyn MacDonald

Patrick: Lagniappe

Why the 'This is all you are ever going to have' thought?

Perhaps, he thought, sitting staring at the blue plate where the biscuits had been, it was just that childhood's attitude of something-wonderful-tomorrow persisted subconsciously in a man as long as it was capable of realisation, and it was only after forty, when it became unlikely of fulfilment, that it obtruded itself into conscious thought; a lost piece of childhood crying for attention.

--The Franchise Affair by Josephine Tey

Patrick: Lagniappe

Charlotte looked at him in a teacherly fashion.  "You know what 'liberal arts' means?"

Pause.  Rumination.  ". . . No."

"It's from Latin?"  Charlotte was the very picture of kind patience.  "In Latin, liber means free?  It also means book, but that's just a coincidence, I think.  Anyway, the Romans had slaves from all over the world, and some of the slaves were very bright, like the Greeks.  The Romans would let the slaves get educated in all sorts of practical subjects, like math, like engineering so they could build things, like music so they could be entertainers?  But only Roman citizens, the free people?--liber?--could take things like rhetoric and literature and history and theology and philosophy?  Because they were the arts of persuasion--and they didn't want the slaves to learn how to present arguments that might inspire them to unite and rise up or something?  So the 'liberal' arts are the arts of persuasion, and they didn't want anybody but free citizens knowing how to persuade people."

--I Am Charlotte Simmons by Tom Wolfe

Patrick: Lagniappe

Screams rose up from the courtyard, the unmistakable screams, once more, of girls singing their mock distress over the manly antics of boys.  Very loud they were, too.  The boys sang their choral response of manly laughs, bellows, and yahoos.  To Charlotte, this bawling had become the anthem of the victors, namely, those girls who were attractive, experienced, and deft enough to achieve success at Dupont, which, as far as she could tell, was measured in boys.

--I Am Charlotte Simmons by Tom Wolfe

Patrick: Lagniappe

[H]e is Lusios, "the Liberator"--the god who by very simple means, or by other means not so simple, enables you for a short time to stop being yourself, and thereby sets you free.  That was, I think, the main secret of his appeal to the Archaic Age: not only because life in that age was often a thing to escape from, but more specifically because the individual, as the modern world knows him, began in that age to emerge for the first time from the old solidarity of the family, and found the unfamiliar burden of individual responsibility hard to bear.  Dionysus could lift it from him  For Dionysus was the Master of Magical Illusions, who could make a vine grow out of a ship's plank, and in general enable his votaries to see world as the world's not.  As the Scythians in Herodotus put it, "Dionysus leads people on to behave madly"--which could mean anything from "letting yourself go" to becoming "possessed."  The aim of his cult was ecstatsis--which again could mean anything from "taking you out of yourself" to profound alteration of personality.  And its psychological function was to satisfy and relieve the impulse to reject responsibility, an impulse which exists in all of us and can become under certain social conditions an irresistible craving.

--The Greeks and the Irrational by E. R. Dodds

Patrick: Lagniappe

The Greeks believed in their Oracle, not because they were superstitious fools, but because they could not do without believing in it.  And when the importance of Delphi declined, as it did in Hellenistic times, the main reason was not, I suspect, that men had grown (as Cicero thought) more sceptical, but rather that other forms of religious reassurance were now available.

--The Greeks and the Irrational by E. R. Dodds

Patrick: Lagniappe

We cannot see into the minds of the Delphic priesthood, but to ascribe such manipulations in general to conscious and cynical fraud is, I suspect, to oversimplify the picture.  Anyone familiar with the history of modern spiritualism will realise what an amazing amount of virtual cheating can be done in perfectly good faith by convinced believers.

--The Greeks and the Irrational by E. R. Dodds

Patrick: Lagniappe

First, I do not expect this particular key, or any key, to open all the doors.  The evolution of a culture is too complex a thing to be explained without a residue in terms of any simple formula, whether economic or psychological, begotten of Marx or begotten of Freud.  We must resist the temptation to simplify what is not simple.  And secondly, to explain origins is not to explain away values.  We should beware of underrating the religious significance of the ideas I have discussed to-day, even where, like the doctrine of divine temptation, they are repugnant to our moral sense.  Nor should we forget that out of this archaic guilt-culture there arose some of the profoundest tragic poetry that man has produced.  It was above all Sophocles, the last great exponent of the archaic world-view, who expressed the full tragic significance of the old religious themes in their unsoftened, unmoralised forms--the overwhelming sense of human helplessness in face of the divine mystery.

--The Greeks and the Irrational by E. R. Dodds

[N.B.:  Dodds (who beat out Bowra for the Greek studies chair at Oxford) gave the lectures that were collected in The Greeks and the Irrational at Berkeley in 1949, a year that arguably marked the height of influence for both Marx and Freud.  Now that both thinkers have been discredited, they are easy enough to dismiss.  But to have done so in such an offhanded manner as Dodds does here demonstrates either an exceptional intelligence or arrogance.  Fortunately, with Dodds, it is the former.  And The Greeks and the Irrational is rightfully regarded as his greatest work.]

Patrick: Lagniappe

'Ashe! What are you doing?'

Ashe paused for a moment to reply.

I am kissing you,' he said.

'But you musn't.  There's a scullery-maid or something looking out of the kitchen window.  She will see us.'

Ashe drew her to him.

'Scullery-maids have few pleasures,' he said.  'Theirs is a dull life.  Let her see us.'

--Something Fresh by P.G. Wodehouse

Patrick: Lagniappe

'"She travels fastest who travels alone,"' misquoted Joan.

'What is the good,' said Ashe, 'of travelling fast if you're going round in a circle?  I know how you feel.  I've felt the same myself.  You are an individualist.  You think that there is something tremendous just round the corner, and that you can get it if you try hard enough.  There isn't.  Or, if there is, it isn't worth getting.  Life is nothing but a mutual aid association.  I am going to help old Peters: you are going to help me: I am going to help you.'

'Help me to do what?'

'Make life coherent instead of a jumble.'

--Something Fresh by P.G. Wodehouse

Patrick: Lagniappe

Such was the story that occurred in the northern capital of our vast country!  Only now, on overall reflection, we can see that there is much of the implausible in it.  To say nothing of the strangeness of the supernatural detachment of the nose and its appearance in various places in the guise of a state councillor--how was it that Koralev did not realize that he ought not to make an announcement about the nose through the newspaper office?  I'm speaking here not in the sense that I think it costly to pay for an announcement: that is nonsense, and I am not to be numbered among the mercenary.  But it is indecent, inept, injudicious!  And then, too--how did the nose end up in the baked bread and how did Ivan Yakovlevich himself . . . ? no, that I just do not understand, I decidedly do not understand!  But what is strangest, what is most incomprehensible of all is how authors can choose such subjects . . . I confess, that is utterly inconceivable, it is simply . . . no, no, I utterly fail to understand.  In the first place, there is decidedly no benefit to the fatherland; in the second place . . . but in the second place there is also no benefit.  I simply do not know what it . . .

And yet, for all that, though it is certainly possible to allow for one thing, and another, and a third, perhaps even . . . And then, too, are there not incongruities everywhere? . . . And yet, once you reflect on it, there really is something to all this.  Say what you like, but such incidents do happen in the world--rarely, but they do happen.

--The Nose collected in The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol (tr. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky)

Patrick: Lagniappe

Kovalev entered just as he stretched, grunted, and said:  "Ah, now for a nice two-hour nap!"  And therefore it could be foreseen that the collegiate assessor's arrival was quite untimely; and I do not know whether he would have been received all that cordially even if he had brought him several pounds of sugar or a length of broadcloth.  The commissioner was a great patron of all the arts and manufactures, but preferred state banknotes to them all.  "Here's a thing," he used to say, "there's nothing better than this thing: doesn't ask to eat, takes up little space, can always be put in the pocket, drop it and it won't break."

--The Nose collected in The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol (tr. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky)

Patrick: Lagniappe

"How shall I approach him?" thought Kovalev.  "By all tokens, by his uniform, by his hat, one can see he's a state councillor.  Devil knows how to go about it!"

He began to cough beside him; but the nose would not abandon his pious attitude for a minute and kept bowing down.

"My dear sir," said Kovalev, inwardly forcing himself to take heart, "my dear sir . . ."

"What can I do for you?" the nose said, turning.

"I find it strange, my dear sir . . . it seems to me . . . you should know your place.  And suddenly I find you, and where?--in a church.  You must agree . . .."

"Excuse me, I don't understand what you're talking about . . . Explain, please."

"How shall I explain it to him?" thought Kovalev, and, gathering his courage, he began:

"Of course, I . . . anyhow, I'm a major.  For me to go around without a nose is improper, you must agree.  Some peddler woman selling peeled oranges on Voskresensky Bridge can sit without a nose, but, having prospects in view . . . being acquainted, moreover, with ladies in many houses: Chekhtareva, the wife of a state councillor, and others . . . Judge for yourself . . . I don't know, my dear sir . . ."  (Here Major Kovalev shrugged his shoulders.)  "Pardon me, but . . . if one looks at it in conformity with the rules of duty and honor . . . you yourself can understand . . ."

"I understand decidedly nothing," replied the nose.  "Explain more satisfactorily."

"My dear sir . . ." Kovalev said with dignity, "I don't know how to understand your words . . . The whole thing seems perfectly obvious . . . Or do you want to . . . But you're my own nose!"

The nose looked at the major and scowled slightly.

"You are mistaken, my dear sir,.  I am by myself. Besides, there can be no close relationship between us.  Judging by the buttons on your uniform, you must serve in a different department."

Having said this, the nose turned away and continued praying.

--The Nose collected in The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol (tr. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky)

Patrick: Lagniappe

He hastened into the cathedral, made his way through a row of old beggar women with bandaged faces and two openings for the eyes, at whom he had laughed so much before, and went into the church.  There were not many people praying in the church: they all stood just by the entrance.  Kovalev felt so upset that he had no strength to pray, and his eyes kept searching in all corners for the gentleman.  He finally saw him standing to one side.  The nose had his face completely hidden in his big standing collar and was praying with an expression of the greatest piety.

--The Nose collected in The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol (tr. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky)

Patrick: Lagniappe

I discovered that China and Spain are absolutely one and the same land, and it is only out of ignorance that they are considered separate countries.  I advise everyone purposely to write Spain on a piece of paper, and it will come out China.  But, nevertheless, I was extremely upset by an event that is going to take place tomorrow.  Tomorrow at seven o'clock a strange phenomenon will occur: the earth is going to sit on the moon.  This has also been written about by the noted English chemist Wellington.  I confess, I felt troubled at heart when I pictured to myself the extraordinary delicacy and fragility of the moon.  For the moon is usually made in Hamburg, and made quite poorly.  I'm surprised England doesn't pay attention to this.  It's made by a lame copper, and one can see that the fool understands nothing about the moon.  He used tarred rope and a quantity of cheap olive oil, and that's why there's a terrible stench all over the earth, so that you have to hold your nose.  And that's why the moon itself is such a delicate sphere that people can't live on it, and now only noses live there.  And for the same reason, we can't see our own noses, for they're all in the moon.  And when I pictured how the earth is a heavy substance and in sitting down may grind our noses into flour, I was overcome with such anxiety that, putting on my stockings and shoes, I hurried to the state council chamber to order the police not to allow the earth to sit on the moon.  The shaved grandees, great numbers of whom I found in the state council chamber, were all very intelligent people, and when I said, "Gentlemen, let us save the moon, because the earth wants to sit on it," they all rushed at once to carry out my royal will, and many crawled up the wall in order to get the moon; but just then the lord chancellor came in.  Seeing him, they all ran away.  I, being the king, was the only one to remain.  But, to my surprise, the chancellor hit me with a stick and drove me to my room.  Such is the power of popular custom in Spain!

--The Diary of a Madman collected in The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol (tr. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky)

[N.B.:  Oh, and happy April Fool's Day!]

Patrick: Lagniappe

"I don't see how a fine girl like you can believe that the Bible tells lies and that we come from monkeys, and that it's all right for girls to smoke cigarettes.  What becomes of the world if we let all those ideas into it?  What good is living in the world if we become like the foolish city people that believe things like that?  Why . . . why you'd just be an ordinary person if you had ideas like that!"

--Heaven's My Destination by Thornton Wilder

Patrick: Lagniappe

"God's blessing," said Sancho Pança, "be upon the man who first invented this self-same thing called sleep--it covers a man all over like a cloak."  Now there is more to me in this, and it speaks warmer to my heart and affections, than all the dissertations squeezed out of the heads of the learned together upon the subject.

--Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne

Patrick: Lagniappe

To those who do not yet know of which gender Bruscambille is--inasmuch as a prologue upon long noses might easily be done by either--'twill be no objection against the simile--to say, That when my father got home, he solaced himself with Bruscambille after the manner in which, 'tis ten to one, your worship solaced yourself with your first mistress--that is, from morning even unto night: which, by the bye, how delightful soever it may prove to the inamorato--is of little or no entertainment at all to by-standers.--Take notice, I go no father with the simile--my father's eye was greater than his appetite--his zeal greater than his knowledge--he cooled--his affections became divided--he got hold of Prignitz--purchased Scroderus, Andrea Paraeus, Bouchet's Evening Conferences, and above all, the great and learned Hafen Slawkenberius; of which, as I shall have much to say by and bye--I will say nothing now.

--Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne

Patrick: Lagniappe

My father's collection was not great, but to make amends, it was curious; and consequently he was some time in making it; he had the great good fortune however, to set off well, in getting Bruscambille's prologue upon long noses, almost for nothing--for he gave no more for Bruscambille than three half-crowns; owning indeed to the strong fancy which the stall-man saw my father had for the book the moment he laid his hands upon it.--There are not three Bruscambilles in Christendom--said the stall-man, except what are chained up in the libraries of the curious.  My father flung down the money as quick as lightning--took Bruscambille into his bosom--hired home from Piccadilly to Coleman Street with it, as he would have hied home with a treasure, without taking his hand once off Bruscambille all the way.

--Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne

Patrick: Lagniappe

--Here stands Wit--and there stands Judgment, close beside it, just like the two knobs I'm speaking of, upon the back of this self-same chair on which I am sitting.

--You see they are the highest and most ornamental parts of its frame--as wit and judgment are of ours--and like them too, indubitably both made and fitted to go together, in order, as we say in all such cases of duplicated embellishments--to answer one another.

--Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne

Patrick: Lagniappe

At one particularly extravagant banquet he burst into sudden peals of laughter.  The Consuls, who were reclining next to him, politely asked whether they might share the joke.  'What do you think?' he answerered.  'It occurred to me that I have only to give one nod and both your throats will be cut on the spot!'

--The Twelve Caesars by Suetonius (tr. Robert Graves) 

Patrick: Lagniappe

Everything that Caligula said and did was marked with equal cruelty, even during his hours of rest and amusement and banquetry.  He frequently had trials by torture held in his presence while he was eating or otherwise enjoying himself; and kept an expert headsman in readiness to decapitate the prisoners brought in from gaol.  When the bridge across the sea at Puteoli was being blessed, he invited a number of spectators from the shore to inspect it; then abruptly tipped them into the water.  Some clung to the ships' rudders, but he had them dislodged with boat-hooks and oars, and left to drown.  At a public dinner in the City he sent to his executioners a slave who had stolen a strip of silver from a couch; they were to lop off the man's hands, tie them around his neck so that they hung on his breast, and take him for a tour of the tables, displaying a placard in explanation of his punishment.  On another occasion a gladiator against whom he was fencing with a wooden sword fell down deliberately; whereupon Caligula drew a real dagger, stabbed him to death, and ran about waving the palm-branch of victory.

--The Twelve Caesars by Suetonius (tr. Robert Graves) 

Patrick: Lagniappe

The knights earned his constant displeasure for spending their time, or so he complained, at the play or the Games.  On one occasion the people cheered the wrong team; he cried angrily: 'I wish all you Romans had only one neck!'  When a shout arose in the amphitheatre for Tetrinius the Bandit to come out and fight, he said that all those who called for him were Tetriniuses too.  A group of net-and-trident gladiators, dressed in tunics, put up a very poor show against the five men-at-arms with whom they were matched; but when he sentenced them to death for cowardice, one of them seized a trident and killed each of his opponents in turn.  Caligula then publicly expressed his horror at what he called 'this most bloody murder', and his disgust with those who had been able to stomach the sight.

He went about complaining how bad the times were, and particularly that there had been no public disasters like the Varus masssacre under Augustus, or the collapse of the amphitheatre at Fidenae under Tiberius.  The prosperity of his own reign, he said, would lead to its being wholly forgotten, and he often prayed for a great military catastrophe, or for famine, plague, fire, or at least an earthquake.

--The Twelve Caesars by Suetonius (tr. Robert Graves) 

Patrick: Lagniappe

Next, Caligula extended the Palace as far as the Forum; converted the shrine of Castor and Pollux into a vestibule; and would often stand beside these Divine Brethren to be worshipped by all visitants, some of whom addressed him as 'Latian Jupiter'.  He established a shrine to himself as God, with priests, the costliest possible victims, and a life-sized golden image, which was dressed every day in clothes identical with those that he happened to be wearing.  All the richest citizens tried to gain priesthoods here, either by influence or bribery.  Flamingoes, peacocks, black grouse, guinea-hens, and pheasants were offered as sacrifices, each on a particular day of the month.  When the moon shone full and bright he always invited the Moon-goddess to his bed; and during the day would indulge in whispered conversations with Capitoline Jupiter, pressing his ear to the god's mouth, and sometimes raising his voice in anger.  Once he was overheard threatening the god: 'If you do not raise me up to Heaven I will cast you down to Hell.'

--The Twelve Caesars by Suetonius (tr. Robert Graves) 

Patrick: Lagniappe

Such is the law of our nature.  Our judgment ripens; our imagination decays.  We cannot at once enjoy the flowers of the spring of life and the fruits of its autumn, the pleasures of close investigation and those of agreeable error.  We cannot sit at once in the front of the stage and behind the scenes.  We cannot be under the illusion of the spectacle, while we are watching the movements of the ropes and pulleys which dispose it.

--John Dryden collected in Macaulay's Essays by Lord Macaulay

[N.B.:  This is why I have no time for those programs which endeavor to go "behind the scenes" in the making of some bit of cinematic flotsam and jetsam but also why I revel in the tawdriest melodrama filmed in glorious Technicolor.]

Patrick: Lagniappe

In process of time, the instruments by which the imagination works are brought to perfection.  Men have not more imagination than their rude ancestors.  We strongly suspect that they have much less.  But they produce better works of imagination.  Thus, up to a certain period, the diminution of the poetical powers is far more than compensated by the improvement of all the appliances and means of which those powers stand in need.  Then comes the short period of splendid and consummate excellence.  And then, from causes against which it is vain to struggle, poetry begins to decline.  The progress of language, which was at first favourable, becomes fatal to it, and, instead of compensating for the decay of the imagination, accelerates that decay, and renders it more obvious.  When the adventurer in the Arabian tale anointed one of his eyes with the contents of the magical box, all the riches of the earth, however widely dispersed, however sacredly concealed, became visible to him.  But, when he tried the experiment on both eyes, he was struck with blindness.  What the enchanted elixir was to the sight of the body, language is to the sight of the imagination.  At first it calls up a world of glorious illusions; but, when it becomes too copious, it altogether destroys the visual power.

--John Dryden collected in Macaulay's Essays by Lord Macaulay

Patrick: Lagniappe

These considerations account for the absurdities into which the greatest writers have fallen, when they have attempted to give general rules for composition, or to pronounce judgment on the works of others.  They are unaccustomed to analyse what they feel; they, therefore, perpetually refer their emotions to causes which have not in the slightest degree tended to produce them.  They feel pleasure in reading a book.  They never consider that this pleasure may be the effect of ideas which some unmeaning expression, striking on the first link of a chain of associations, may have called up in their own minds--that they have themselves furnished to the author the beauties which they admire.

--John Dryden collected in Macaulay's Essays by Lord Macaulay

Patrick: Lagniappe

She rose and set the brush down on the dresser and went over and reached into the closet for a dressing gown, murmuring something into it that was indistinguishable but that seemed to me to resemble the single word "God."

"God," I said, "like Alfred Hitchcock, vouchsafes us only glimpses of  Himself.  I have often thought of this.  And also that we make a game of trying to spot Him in this scene and then that, till we've squandered the revelation of the whole instead of simply accepting and enjoying what He has created."

--Overture collected in Without a Stitch in Time by Peter de Vries

Patrick: Lagniappe

My wife had commenced her morning ritual, and was brushing her hair.  She did it, as usual, sitting on the edge of her bed, from which she could see her reflection in the dresser mirror.  Perched tailorwise on mine, I could see it, too.

"I think it's 'special' myself, but that's no matter now," I said.  "Maybe you don't like the merely acoustical pun--think only the pun with a point or meaning is worth while.  Well, how's this one for size?  'Sweet are the uses of perversity.'  You don't have to laugh," I went on, when she didn't.  "The humor I'm in now isn't really humor, but more like wit.  Intellectual."

--Overture collected in Without a Stitch in Time by Peter de Vries

Patrick: Lagniappe

Everything he saw became a symbol of his own existence, from a rabbit caught in headlights to raindrops racing down a window-pane.  Perhaps it was a sign that he was going to become a poet or a philosopher: the kind of person who, when he stood on the sea-shore, didn't see waves breaking on a beach, but saw the surge of human will or the rhythms of copulation, who didn't hear the sound of the tide but heard the eroding roar of time and the last moaning sigh of humanity fizzing into nothingness.  But perhaps it was a sign, he also thought, that he was turning into a pretentious wanker.

--The Liar by Stephen Fry

Patrick: Lagniappe

'I mean, you send me off to school for most of the year and then as soon as I come back you can't wait to get rid of me.  I just hope you won't both be surprised if I lock you in an old people's home when you're old and smelly.'

'Darling!  Don't be horrid.'

'And I'll only come and visit you to give you work to do.  Shirts to iron and socks to darn.'

'Ade, that's an awful thing to say!'

'And only then will you know what it's like to be unloved by your own flesh and blood!' said Adrian, drying his hands.  'And don't giggle woman, because it isn't funny!'

'No darling, of course it isn't,' his mother said with her hand over her mouth.

--The Liar by Stephen Fry

Patrick: Lagniappe

The view that all women are alike seemed to Frank, as a piece of thinking, to err on the inadequate side.  They were indeed all different.  But in one particular all women were alike, and that was in their uniform desire to be different; and in their cheap fear of seeming cheap.  Seized by the idea of making her his wife and eager to anticipate the marriage ceremony, he was prepared to hear her say that no doubt he thought her just like any other woman, and he replied that, on the contrary, she seemed to him peculiarly, uniquely different from them all; after which assurance she behaved like all the other women, and then said:

'Now, I wonder what you'll think of me after that.'

He had not thought anything of her to start with and did not think any the worse of her now.

'Now,' he said, 'we simply must get married.'

--Doom by William Gerhardie

Patrick: Lagniappe

Frank's ideas were vague and nebulous.  Lord Ottercove, he thought, bought consols, sold them at valuation, at contango, and depreciation; bought debentures at quotation; accumulated stock, multiplied it by going into liquidation--and made a fortune.  Frank believed High Finance to be closely allied with Mysticism.  It was ineffable and inutterable: it could be revealed, but not explained; its priests were inspired.

--Doom by William Gerhardie

[N.B.:  Lord Ottercove, Lord Greenspan, the names change but the disaster remains the same.]

Patrick: Lagniappe

But love isn't an atomic bomb, so let's take a homelier comparison.  I'm writing this at the home of a friend in Michigan.  It's a normal American house with all the gadgets technology can dream (except a gadget for making happiness).  He drove me here from the Detroit airport yesterday.  As we turned into the driveway he reached into the glove pocket for a remote-control device; at a masterful touch, the garage doors rolled up and away.  This is the model I propose.  You are arriving home--or think you are--and as you approach the garage you try to work your routine magic.  Nothing happens; the doors remain closed.  You do it again.  Again nothing.  At first puzzled, then anxious, then furious with disbelief, you sit in the driveway with the engine running; you sit there for weeks, months, for years, waiting for the doors to open.  But you are in the wrong car, in front of the wrong garage, waiting outside the wrong house.  One of the troubles is this: the heart isn't heart-shaped.

--A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters by Julian Barnes

Patrick: Lagniappe

We must keep these words in their box behind glass.  And when we take them out we must be careful with them.  Men will say 'I love you' to get women into bed with them; women will say 'I love you' to get men into marriage with them; both will say 'I love you' to keep fear at bay, to convince themselves of the deed by the word, to assure themselves that the promised condition has arrived, to deceive themselves that it hasn't yet gone away.  We must beware of such uses.  I love you shouldn't go out into the world, become a currency, a traded share, make profits for us.  It will do that if we let it. 

--A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters by Julian Barnes