In Brief: Aldous Huxley on the Uninformed Citizenry

From a foreword that Aldous Huxley wrote to A Brave New World, years after the book was first published in 1932:

"Great is the truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth. By simply not mentioning certain subjects, by lowering what Mr Churchill calls an 'iron curtain' between the masses and such facts or arguments as the local political bosses regard as undesirable, totalitarian propagandists have influenced opinion much more effectively than they could have done by the most eloquent denunciations, the most compelling of logical rebuttals."

February 2019 in Books: What We'll Be Reading Next

"2019 in books: what you'll be reading this year"
The Guardian,
Saturday, January 5, 2019

John Ruskin, the Victorian art theorist, entered the world on February 8, 1819, but I confess I likely will not be reading any of his essays.

"John Ruskin" (1853/4)
by John Everett Millais
Oil on canvas, in the Ashmolean Museum
via Wikimedia Commons

TO CROSS into the American realm of letters, I've been pleased that James Baldwin has had a posthumous renaissance these past few years, or that perhaps he's never faded from view. A New Yorker originally, a public figure, black, gay — his writings, and his perspective on racism and his debates with people like the conservative William F. Buckley, are much-quoted even now. He lived and wrote at the height of the American civil rights movement, born in Harlem in 1924 and dying at the age of 63 in southern France — the country he had moved to after the Second World War.

He was, perhaps, not a raging optimist. Here's a Friday quotation, taken from Another Country (quoted in Goodreads here):

"People don't have any mercy. They tear you limb from limb, in the name of love. Then, when you're dead, when they've killed you by what they made you go through, they say you didn't have any character. They weep big, bitter tears - not for you. For themselves, because they've lost their toy."

Baldwin's book If Beale Street Could Talk has just been adapted into a film, which was released in the US last year by Barry Jenkins. (It appears in the Guardian's article because in Britain the film is coming out later, on February 8.)

"James Baldwin" [Wikipedia]

From the first edition, via Wikimedia Commons

On February 5th, I'm looking forward to Angie Thomas's — she is an American, too, but Mississippian and born in 1988 — book On the Come Up. It's apparently the story of a teenager who wants to become a rapper. Thomas's last book The Hate U Give — the winner of many prizes and the basis of a Hollywood film — has a tense and immediate prose that can appeal to an adult reader just as much as to a younger millennial, which is why I think I might like On the Come Up.

“On the Come Up by Angie Thomas review – another YA hit”
Patrice Lawrence (January 30, 2019) [Guardian, online]

via Penguin.co.uk

On February 21st, Penguin UK is coming out with a collection of Toni Morrison's essays and speeches, including her eulogy of James Baldwin, and it's called Mouth Full of Blood. (Demosthenes' stones seem more comfortable to me, where filling mouths is concerned.)

***

RETURNING to children's literature, Penguin UK is publishing an illustrated digest of Charles Darwin's important work On the Origin of Species, on February 19th. Designed in serene, bright saffron-yellow, greens, pale turquoise and senna by Sabina Radeva, the flora and fauna are presented in familiar and soothing forms.

via C.H. Beck

LASTLY, the German publisher C.H. Beck is printing Alexander von Humboldt's accounts of his expedition to Russia in the year 1829 — fifteen years after the Napoleonic Wars.

Von Humboldt's accounts of travelling along the Amazon in the early 19th century were a pleasant read. So I am looking forward to Die Russland-Expedition: Von der Newa bis zum Altai.
[Note: C.H. Beck released it last week, so it does not count as a February book, properly speaking.]

***

The Generation After Audre Lorde

Audre Lorde,

Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches

(Tantor Audio, 2016)

Brittney Cooper,
Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower
(MacMillan Audio, 2018)

Rebecca Traister,
Good and Mad: How Women's Anger Is Reshaping America
(Simon + Schuster Audio, 2018)

"Women's March - Washington DC 2017"
by S Pakhrin, Jan. 20, 2017
via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0 Licence)

Last year I joined the Our Shared Shelf reader group on Goodreads. It is an ambassadorial project that Emma Watson, who is famous for her acting work but has also undertaken women's rights work for the United Nations, began to help fulfill her UN role.

For November and December, the reader group discussed three works by American women: Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women's Anger by Rebecca Traister, Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower by Dr. Brittney Cooper, and Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches by Audre Lorde.

Voltaire on the Wars of Catholics and Protestants

In his article "Climate" from the Philosophical Dictionary (1764), Voltaire argues that the weather, the natural environment, and of course other causes greatly influence religious beliefs in different countries and regions. They influence the creed behind the religion, and they also influence the way the religion is practiced in its daily details.

He gives this nutshell summary of the Thirty Years' War — it is so frivolous and glib about a horrendous historical period that it is funny again:

"What cause detached the north of Germany, Denmark, three-quarters of Switzerland, Holland, England, Scotland, Ireland, from the Roman communion? Poverty. Indulgences and deliverance from purgatory were sold too dear to souls whose bodies had at that time very little money. The prelates, the monks devoured a province's whole revenue. People took a cheaper religion. At last, after twenty civil wars, people believed that the Pope's religion was very good for great lords, and the reformed religion for citizens."

From: Voltaire, The Philosophical Dictionary. H.I. Woolf, ed. New York: Knopf, 1924
via Hanover Historical Texts Project

***

In French:

Quelle cause a détaché le nord de l’Allemagne, le Danemark, les trois quarts de la Suisse, la Hollande, l’Angleterre, l’Écosse, l’Irlande, de la communion romaine ?... la pauvreté. On vendait trop cher les indulgences et la délivrance du purgatoire à des âmes dont les corps avaient alors très-peu d’argent. Les prélats, les moines, engloutissaient tout le revenu d’une province. On prit une religion à meilleur marché. Enfin, après vingt guerres civiles, on a cru que la religion du pape était fort bonne pour les grands seigneurs, et la réformée pour les citoyens. 

From: Voltaire, Œuvres complètes de Voltaire, Vol. 18. Garnier, 1878 (pp. vii-xi).
via Wikisource

Voltaire on the Worth of the Pyramids

Although the great, sober-minded reference works of the Enlightenment era, the 'dictionaries' of pre-Revolutionary France, are unknown territory to me, I enjoy two of the satirical dictionaries that arose then and centuries afterward: Ambrose Bierce's Devil's Dictionary, published in 1911 in the United States, and Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary, first published in 1764 in Geneva. (Being a sort of liber non grata in the French skeptic's native country.)

It's as refreshing as ever, by the way, to read books that are meant to be enjoyed by the reader.

And I'm naive — i.e., my standards might not be high — but I was charmed, surprised, and pleased by this passage in one of Voltaire's articles (which is related to the debate about whether contemporary culture is equally good as, better, or far worse than, the literature and other culture of the Romans and Greeks):

"The Chinese, more than two hundred years before our era, constructed that great wall which was not able to save them from the invasion of the Tartars. The Egyptians, three thousand years before, had overloaded the earth with their astonishing pyramids, which had a base of about ninety thousand square feet. Nobody doubts that, if one wished to undertake today these useless works, one could easily succeed by a lavish expenditure of money. The great wall of China is a monument to fear; the pyramids are monuments to vanity and superstition. Both bear witness to a great patience in the peoples, but to no superior genius. Neither the Chinese nor the Egyptians would have been able to make even such a statue such as those which our sculptors form today." ¹ °

These condemnations of ancient Chinese and Egyptian inspiration evidently aren't logically watertight. Perhaps pharaohs and emperors and other patrons, who were the ones at whose whim some of the ancient art and architecture survive into the present day, had a rather pedestrian aesthetic and perhaps their guidelines were metaphorical straight-jackets. Their legacy is no realistic reflection on the potential of ancient Chinese and Egyptians on the whole.

'Nankow Pass: Gate of the Great Wall'
in China, its Marvel and Mystery
T. Hodgson Liddell, New York: J. Lane Co. (1910)
via Wikimedia Commons

*

But I like Voltaire's skepticism of the pyramids' purpose. (And his reduction of e.g. the Great Wall of China to the embodiment of 'a great patience in the peoples.') I grew up reading about Ancient Egypt, watching televised documentaries, exploring the dynasties in school and briefly in university; all, reverentially. Less rosily, I was taught or told as an urban legend, if I remember correctly, that the Great Wall of China was built so brutally that the bones of the workers are trapped within the stones — a mirror of the Canadian Pacific Railway in the country where I grew up, where (in the 19th century) around a thousand Chinese guest workers were killed by dynamite as well as by other dangers and privations.* But what good did building the pyramids, the mastabas and the Sphinx achieve? Is uncritical admiration for them out of keeping with our respect for democratic principles and the rights of the individual? (It's true, of course, that Egyptians who were oppressed 4,000 or more years ago would have fared no better if our generation were perfectly skeptical and enlightened about the monumental building initiatives of their day.) Perhaps our thoughtless amazement at the monuments of ancient Egypt is a clue that we are more attracted to pharaonical, and other, dictatorships than we'd like to think.


1 Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary, "Ancients and Moderns"
Selected and Translated by H. I. Woolf
Mineola, NY: Dover Publications (2010), pp. 18-19

° Original French:
Les Chinois, plus de deux cents ans avant notre ère vulgaire, contruisirent cette grande muraille qui n'a pu les sauver de l'invasion des Tartares. Les Égyptiens, trois mille ans auparavant, avaient surchargé la terre de leurs étonnantes pyramides, qui avaient environ quatre-vingt-dix mille pieds carrés de base. Personne ne doute que si on voulait entreprendre aujourd'hui ces inutiles ouvrages, on n'en vînt aisément à bout en prodiguant beaucoup d'argent. La grande muraille de la Chine est un monument de la crainte; les pyramides sont des monuments de la vanité et de la superstition. Les unes et les autres attestent une grande patience dans les peuples, mais aucun génie supérieur. Ni les Chinois, ni les Égyptiens n'auraient pu faire seulement une statue telle que nos sculpteurs en forment aujourd'hui.
From: Oeuvres complètes de Voltaire, vol. VII, Paris: Furne et Cie. (1947), p. 102
[Google Books]

* "A quiz for Joe Oliver: How many died building CPR?" [Globe and Mail]
by Michael Babad, January 10, 2012

Montesquieu's Persian Letters and His Fellow Authors

The Persian Letters of Montesquieu have turned into one of the books that cause me to enter a subway train, read a few sentences, and then emerge befuddled as the train reaches my station barely — as I feel — seconds later.

It consists of an imaginary bundle of letters written by, of, or to a pair of Persian men — one younger, one older — who travel to Paris and describe the society they find. The coming excerpt from the 75th letter is not my favourite passage, since I think it is not particularly profound and not aimed at any crucial grievance in societies past or present.

I venture to think, too, that people read far fewer books than one might think from Montesquieu's representations. But it is funny enough to share generally, and personally a comfort to me for not achieving anything authorly by way of publication:

1721 Edition of the Persian Letters
From the Skoklosters Slott collection, Lake Mälaren, Sweden
via Wikimedia Commons

"La fureur de la plupart des Français, c’est d’avoir de l’esprit ; et la fureur de ceux qui veulent avoir de l’esprit, c’est de faire des livres.

"Cependant il n’y a rien de si mal imaginé : la nature semblait avoir sagement pourvu à ce que les sottises des hommes fussent passagères ; et les livres les immortalisent. Un sot devrait être content d’avoir ennuyé tous ceux qui ont vécu avec lui : il veut encore tourmenter les races futures ; il veut que sa sottise triomphe de l’oubli, dont il aurait pu jouir comme du tombeau ; il veut que la postérité soit informée qu’il a vécu, et qu’elle sache à jamais qu’il a été un sot.”

Source: Les lettres persanes, ibibliotheque.fr (Copyright Le Figaro, Éditions Garnier)

***

Rough translation: 'The rage of most of the French is to possess wit; and the rage of those who want wit, is to make books. Nevertheless there is nothing so ill conceived: nature wisely appears to have preordained that the nonsense of men be fleeting, and books immortalize it. An idiot should be satisfied with having annoyed all those who have lived with him; he wants to torment future generations still; he wants his nonsense to triumph over the oblivion by which he might have profited like the tomb; he wants posterity to be informed that he has lived, and to know forever that he was a fool.'

A Found Poem: Idyll in Southern Spain

Fachada de la Real Colegiata de San Hipólito
by Amoluc (?), via Wikimedia Commons
License: CC BY-SA 3.0

***

Poems can, at times, happen at unexpected places; and despite the tradition of Lieder and more subtle presences of literature in music, it was a surprise when I first leafed through our edition of the Chants d'Espagne by Isaac Albéniz to see the epigraph above "Córdoba."

En el silencio de la noche, que interrumpe el
susurro de las brises aromadas por los
jazmines, suenan las guzlas acompañando las

Serenatas y difundiendo en el aire melodías
ardientes y notas tan dulces como los
balanceos de las palmas en los altos cielos.

Roughly translated: In the stillness of the night, interrupted by the whisper of the breezes scented by jasmine, the gusles* resound, accompanying the serenades and diffusing into the air ardent melodies and notes as soft as the waving of the palms in the high skies.

(German-language Wikipedia: "Gusle")

(Note: In our G. Henle edition, the English translation is rendered so it is the musical notes that are 'in celestial heights' — or, as I put it, 'in the high skies' — and not the swaying palms. But I prefer to persist in my interpretation as it is!)

Paul Valéry's Féerie

Paul Valéry, 1871-1945.

Today° I made much progress in Voltaire's Zaïre and, to misquote Jane Austen's phrase, the reader can guess by the tell-tale compression of the pages that we are hastening to the final state of infelicity. But I've also taken a look at the poems of Paul Valéry. Aside from having the vague idea that he wrote in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, I made the conscious decision not to read anything about his work or his biography before I had read some of the poems; and then slipped the book that I found at home into the bag that I take to work. In the U-Bahn, therefore, I opened it for the first time: I saw my grandmother's name inked in the front, and that it had been published in 1944.

Eglinton Castle (c.1830s)
by John Fleming
via Wikimedia Commons

Then I read the poems. The 'pared-down' crystalline diction made me feel awed. I also admired the metaphors, although the meaning was often obscure and needlessly so, and the quality of the poet's mind.

I admired his 'Féerie' a lot, at any rate, even if my French is not reliable enough to understand if there is indeed a heavy erotic subtext there or not!

FÉERIE
La lune mince verse une lueur sacrée
Toute une jupe d'un tissu d'argent léger,
Sur les bases de marbre où vient l'ombre songer
Que suit d'un char de perle une gaze nacrée.

Pour les cygnes soyeux qui frôlent les roseaux
De carènes de plume à demi lumineuse,
Elle effeuille infinie une rose neigeuse
Dont les pétales font des cercles sur les eaux…

[. . .]

*

(Translated based purely on guesswork,

Earth-Centric Theory and the Regulated Mind

Arthur Conan Doyle:

His ignorance was as remarkable as his knowledge. Of contemporary literature, philosophy and politics he appeared to know next to nothing. Upon my quoting Thomas Carlyle, he inquired in the naivest way who he might be and what he had done. My surprise reached a climax, however, when I found incidentally that he was ignorant of the Copernican Theory and of the composition of the Solar System. That any civilized human being in this nineteenth century should not be aware that the earth travelled round the sun appeared to be to me such an extraordinary fact that I could hardly realize it.

Theoria solis per eccentricum sine epicyclo.
From: Harmonia macrocosmica seu atlas universalis et novus, totius universi creati cosmographiam generalem, et novam exhibens.
by Andreas Cellarius (1661)
(Wikimedia Commons)

"YOU appear to be astonished," he said, smiling at my expression of surprise. "Now that I do know it I shall do my best to forget it."

"To forget it!"

"Schema huius præmissæ diuisionis Sphærarum."
(COELVM EMPIREVM HABITACVLVM DEI ET OMNIVM ELECTORVM)
From: Peter Apian, Cosmographia, Antwerp, 1524
(Wikimedia Commons)

"You see," he explained, "I consider that a man's brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it. Now the skilful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain-attic. He will have nothing but the tools which may help him in doing his work, but of these he has a large assortment, and all in the most perfect order. It is a mistake to think that that little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent. Depend upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones."

"But the Solar System!" I protested.

"What the deuce is it to me?" he interrupted impatiently; "you say that we go round the sun. If we went round the moon it would not make a pennyworth of difference to me or to my work."

From A Study in Scarlet (1887, Project Gutenberg)
— in the Sherlock Holmes series.

Burns's Shelterless Mouse

'To a Mouse' is one of my favourite poems, which I came across during school. Robert Burns wrote it in 1785, after he indeed met by putting athwart a nest of mice amid agricultural pursuits, according to his brother. He writes it from the point of view of marauding man, with a half-affectionate disrespect that is already in the first lines. I am guessing from a knowledge of English rather than of Scots, but he is naming the mouse 'little, sleek, cowering and timorous.'

Its Scots Wikipedia entry is worth citing here:

'To a Mouse' (Scots: Tae a Moose) is a Scots poem written bi Robert Burns in 1785 that wis includit in the Kilmarnock Volume, his first settin furth o musradry.

*

I'm truly sorry Man's dominion

Has broken Nature's social union,

An' justifies that ill opinion,

                               Which makes thee startle,

Northumberland Bestiary: folio 33.
Between 1250 and 1260.
via Wikimedia Commons

***

WEE, sleekit, cow'rin, tim'rous beastie,
O, what a panic's in thy breastie!
Thou need na start awa sae hasty
Wi bickering brattle!
I wad be laith to rin an' chase thee,
Wi' murdering pattle.

The Megrim of King Richard the Third

Now is the winter of our discontent
Made glorious summer by this sun of York;
And all the clouds that lour'd upon our house
In the deep bosom of the ocean buried.
Now are our brows bound with victorious wreaths;
Our bruised arms hung up for monuments;
Our stern alarums changed to merry meetings,
Our dreadful marches to delightful measures.

— Act One, Scene One The Life and Death of Richard the Third
by William Shakespeare

"The winter of our discontent" is an ornament of Shakespeare's language that has perhaps slipped into a cliché, since it is also a label for an incident in modern British history. (Public sector strikes, inclement weather, and annoyance with the Labour government in 1978 and early 1979, which may — in their sum — have gifted us with Margaret Thatcher.)*

In itself, it is an apt label when 'everything' — public matters, private life, or anything similar — is in a difficult frame of affairs.

N.B.: Laurence Olivier's recitation of the lines is well worth finding on YouTube.

Fathering in the 18th Century: Jefferson's Letters to His Daughter

Presented without comment but much boldface for emphasis.

A letter by Thomas Jefferson to his daughter Patsy, formally named Martha after her mother, who had died in the fall of 1782.

November 28, 1783

MY DEAR PATSY — After four days journey I arrived here without any accident and in as good health as when I left Philadelphia. The conviction that you would be more improved in the situation I have placed you than if still with me, has solaced me on my parting with you, which my love for you has rendered a difficult thing. The acquirements which I hope you will make under the tutors I have provided for you will render you more worthy of my love, and if they cannot increase it they will prevent it's diminution. Consider the good lady who has taken you under her roof, who has undertaken to see that you perform all your exercises, and to admonish you in all those wanderings from what is right or what is clever to which your inexperience would expose you, consider her I say as your mother, as the only person to whom, since the loss with which heaven has been pleased to afflict you, you can now look up; and that her displeasure or disapprobation on any occasion will be an immense misfortune which should you be so unhappy as to incur by any unguarded act, think no concession too much to regain her good will. With respect to the distribution of your time the following is what I should approve.

from 8. to 10 o'clock practise music.
from 10. to 1. dance one day and draw another
from 1. to 2. draw on the day you dance, and write a letter the next day.
from 3. to 4. read French.
from 4. to 5. exercise yourself in music.
from 5. till bedtime read English, write etc.

On the Urgent Vitality of Books

"Vous les méprisez les livres [. . .]; mais songez que tout l'univers connu n'est gouverné que par des livres,

You despise books, but remember that all the known world, excepting only savage nations, is governed by books, writes Voltaire, speaking of the Veda, Koran, and Confucius's proverbs. I like this idea of books ruling the world: constitutions and declarations of independence, university textbooks, a driver's instruction manual, municipal bylaws, and even the phone book. It's certainly easier to argue their effects than to quantify what effect J.K. Rowling or Mo Yan have had on the world.

*

Si vous avez un procès, votre bien, votre honneur, votre vie même dépend de l'interprétation d'un livre que vous ne lisez jamais. [. . .]  mais il en est des livres comme des hommes, le très-petit nombre joue un grand rôle, le reste est confondu dans la foule.

In a lawsuit or criminal process, your property, your honor, perhaps your life, depends on the interpretation of a book which you never read. It is, however, with books as with men, a very small number play a great part, the rest are confounded with the multitude.

An Avian Abattoir in Covent Garden

With thanks to the commenter angelinterceptor of the Guardian website, from the article "Royal Ascot's dress code aims to banish the commoner within" by Sarah Ditum (June 19, 2012). A quick web search revealed that this is one of George Bernard Shaw's letters to the Times of London.

***

July 3, 1905

Sir,

THE OPERA management of Covent Garden regulates the dress of its male patrons. When is it going to do the same to the women?

Byron and All That's Best of Dark and Bright

ASIDE from the first, third and fourth lines I am indifferent to the poem, but sometimes one feels inclined obligingly to trot out a classic:

*

George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788-1824)
British Romantic-era poet.

She walks in beauty, like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies;
And all that's best of dark and bright
Meet in her aspect and her eyes:
Thus mellow'd to that tender light
Which heaven to gaudy day denies.

One shade the more, one ray the less,
Had half impair'd the nameless grace
Which waves in every raven tress,
Or softly lightens o'er her face;
Where thoughts serenely sweet express
How pure, how dear their dwelling-place.

And on that cheek, and o'er that brow,
So soft, so calm, yet eloquent,
The smiles that win, the tints that glow,
But tell of days in goodness spent,
A mind at peace with all below,
A heart whose love is innocent!

*

THE poem was written in 1814, and alternately attributed to the pulchritudinous inspiration of Byron's cousin-by-marriage or (the version which I heard before consulting a certain online encyclopaedia) of his half-sister Augusta.

To me the poem lies oddly with the biographical details of its indicter, since Byron as the private individual is — either through the disservices of the society through which he passed, or by the succeeding morality of the Victorian Age, or through the boredom of the academics to whom the postmortem of his life has been assigned, or due to a nature which would be considered adventurous by the standards of any time — markedly characterized by his loose and disastrous relationships, most famously with Lady Caroline Lamb, Claire Clairmont, and his wife, and less famously with divers servants.

(Perhaps his upbringing meant that Byron had a confused notion of love, and mistook affection for physical attraction. Either way, in his poems reminiscing about Harrow, he writes

Ah! Sure some stronger impulse vibrates here,
Which whispers friendship will be doubly dear
To one, who thus for kindred hearts must roam,
And seek abroad, the love denied at home.)

AT ANY RATE, the term "Byronic hero" has of course come to mean someone who is brooding and troubled and a very romantic prospect, but not someone with whom one would want to interact regularly or much at all, in reality. (Byron himself was also famously attractive, though the example of a Byronic hero who comes to mind is Edward Rochester, who was supposed to be more rugged than picturesque, so it's not an inalienable attribute.)

*

THE poem reminds me of the paintings in which da Vinci depicts women: they are all haunted in a sense by a dark backdrop, and in his greatest paintings I think he endeavours to bring out the innate gentleness of Mary, the naive enthusiasm of young Cecilia Gallerani, etc., in a way to increase their outer beauty.

On the other hand, the insistence on "purity" and "innocence" is unprepossessing, since being inexperienced, vulnerable and naïve seems much more appealing to others than an asset, and it is only a little removed from the label of wellmeaning stupidity. If Byron did not define purity and innocence as naïveté, then the problem is that he does not give much indication as to what he meant instead.

There is a similar problem with the term 'platonic love.' It appears to refer to Plato's Symposium, which I've read and interpret to mean, rather, that Plato didn't like women and thought that relationships with men were less icky and more intellectually and emotionally rewarding, than that a completely asexual relationship is the apex of love. This might be attributed in turn to the unfashionableness of female education and female pursuits outside the home in ancient Greece, and to a surfeit of acidulous ladies in his circle, notably like Xanthippe.


Various articles on Wikipedia, "George Gordon Lord Byron: She Walks in Beauty" from Representative Poetry Online [Ian Lancashire, University of Toronto]

An Early 19th-Century Pastorale

"Landscape of a Couple Alone at Sunset," (19th cent.) by Cornelis Lieste (1817-61)
Oil on panel, 60 × 79 cm, in the Collectie Rademakers
From Wikimedia Commons

Keats (1795-1821)
English poet.

TO GEORGE AND THOMAS KEATS.

[Southampton,] Tuesday Morn [April 15, 1817].

My dear Brothers—I am safe at Southampton—after having ridden three stages outside and the rest in for it began to be very cold. I did not know the Names of any of the Towns I passed through—all I can tell you is that sometimes I saw dusty Hedges—sometimes Ponds—then nothing—then a little Wood with trees look you like Launce's Sister* "as white as a Lily and as small as a Wand"—then came houses which died away into a few straggling Barns—then came hedge trees aforesaid again. As the Lamplight crept along the following things were discovered

Autumn, a Season and an Harmonie

CROWN'D with the sickle and the wheaten sheaf,
While Autumn, nodding o'er the yellow plain,
Comes jovial on

*

broad and brown, below,
Extensive harvests hang the heavy head.

*

till the ruffled air
Falls from its poise, and gives the breeze to blow.
Rent is the fleecy mantle of the sky;
The clouds fly different; and the sudden sun
By its effulgent glide gilds the' illumined field,
And black by fits the shadows sweep along

*

[Illustration: Autumn (1573) by Giuseppe Arcimboldo,
In the Musée du Louvre; via Wikimedia Commons]

Mankind as Grandiose Gnomes

Sophocles (ca. 496–405 BC)
Greek dramatist.

Πολλά τα δεινά κουδέν ανθρώπου δεινότερον πέλει.

(Spoken by the chorus in Antigone, and taken from the Gnomokologikon.)

*

MANY a wonder lives and moves, but the wonder of all is man,
That courseth over the grey ocean, carried of Southern gale,
Faring amidst high-swelling seas that rudely surge around,
And Earth, supreme of mighty Gods, eldest, imperishable,
Eternal, he with patient furrow wears and wears away
As year by year the plough-shares turn and turn,—
Subduing her unwearied strength with children of the steed.

From: Sophocles: The Seven Plays in English Verse (1906) [Project Gutenberg]
by Lewis Campbell, M.A., from the University of St. Andrews

(Children of the steed = mules)

***

BY now the dominion of man over the earth has become a trite concept, and one might argue that the dominion is inevitably imperfect and therefore an inaccurate posit.

But, given the ambiguity of 'ta deina' which can also I think be translated as 'greatnesses' or 'terrors,' Sophocles' line can be interpreted as a sharp criticism of humans' destructive capacity, which is how I was taught it. (My class looked at the quotation in isolation, so I'd forgotten that it was by Sophocles and only figured out today that it comes from Antigone.)

While that idea is then too self-hating or smotheringly moody to do be fair or uplifting, at least it is comforting to have an expression to use in 'emo,' misanthropic moments. It is nicer besides than adopting a Malthusian philosophy or saying that mankind is a scourge, by which one generally means that one should like to have other people die and somehow be given an exception for one's superior, omniscient self.

***

Picture: Sophocles Bust, National Gallery in Oslo
Photographed by Cnyborg (via Wikimedia Commons)

Voltaire and the Tiny Diamond in the Rough

Voltaire (1694-1778)
French philosopher and author

***

Il y avait autrefois un grain de sable qui se lamentait d'être un atome ignoré dans le désert; au bout de quelques années il devint diamant, et il est à présent le plus bel ornement de la couronne du roi des Indes.

From Zadig ou la Destinée, histoire orientale (1752), Voltaire, éd. Flammarion, coll. Librio, 2004, chap. « Le Brigand », p. 43 via"Voltaire," Wikiquote

*

Portrait of Voltaire (1778 copy by Catherine Lusurier of 1718 work by Nicolas de Largillière; currently in the Musée national des Châteaux de Versailles et de Trianon) via Wikimedia Commons

A Song of Autumn

Paul Verlaine (1844-1896)
French poet.

CHANSON D'AUTOMNE

Les sanglots longs
Des violons
De l'automne
Blessent mon coeur
D'une langueur
Monotone.

Tout suffocant
Et blême, quand
Sonne l'heure,
Je me souviens
Des jours anciens
Et je pleure;

Et je m'en vais
Au vent mauvais
Qui m'emporte
Deçà, delà,
Pareil à la
Feuille morte.

***

The long-drawn sobs
of the violins
of autumn
wound my heart
with monotonous
languor.

All suffocated,
pallid, when
the hour sounds,
I remember
days past
and I weep.

And I depart
on the miscreant wind
which bears me
thither, hither,
much like the
dead leaf.

(My spur-of-the-moment translation, without the rhyme of the original. Besides, a tip of the hat to Marie.)

***

From: Oeuvres de Paul Verlaine [Gutenberg.org]