From Henry IV, Part 2 (4.3.43-45), Henry advising Clarence on how to deal with Prince Hal. I’m looking into having a small sign of this made for my study door on dim days.
But, being moody, give him time and scope
Till that his passions, like a whale on ground,
Confound themselves with working.
Alternate title – ‘Then the librarians come – like vampires, some say.’ From Gene Wolfe’s Shadow of the Torturer, Severian’s meeting with the master Curator – a blind librarian presumably based on Borges.
You are familiar, I suppose, with the method by which we recruit our numbers?”
I admitted I was not.
“In every library, by ancient precept, is a room reserved for children. In it are kept bright picture books such as children delight in, and a few simple tales of wonder and adventure. Many children come to these rooms, and so long as they remain within their confines, no interest is taken in them.” He hesitated, and though I could discern no expression on his face, I received the impression that he feared what he was about to say might cause Cyby pain.
“From time to time, however, a librarian remarks a solitary child, still of tender years, who wanders from the children’s room and at last deserts it entirely. Such a child eventually discovers, on some low but obscure shelf, The Book of Gold. You have never seen this book, and you will never see it, being past the age at which it is met.”
“It must be very beautiful,” I said.
“It is indeed. Unless my memory betrays me, the cover is of black buckram, considerably faded at the spine. Several of the signatures are coming out, and certain of the plates have been taken. But it is a remarkably lovely book. I wish that I might find it again, though all books are shut to me now.
“The child, as I said, in time discovers The Book of Gold. Then the librarians come -like vampires, some say, but others say like the fairy godparents at a christening. They speak to the child, and the child joins them. Henceforth he is in the library wherever he may be, and soon his parents know him no more.
I read this volume – and only this volume – of The Book of the New Sun about 15 years ago and probably didn’t do Wolfe justice so I’ve gone back attempting to balance that judgment. It’s certainly better than I remembered (the above story especially is some delightful mythmaking) but I can’t shake the feeling – and the terms in which people always praise him remain responsible for this sense – that his prime draw is as a sort of detective game consisting half of piecing together doled out clues about the world and half of parsing through his narrator’s conflicting statements. I’ll play the game happily enough but it’s a different game than what I natively want.
I went to a university performance of Measure for Measure the other night – the first time I’d seen the play in person actually – and noticed anew the violence of a few early lines (1.2.117):
LUCIO
Why, how now, Claudio! whence comes this restraint?
CLAUDIO
From too much liberty, my Lucio. Liberty,
As surfeit, is the father of much fast,
So every scope by the immoderate use
Turns to restraint. Our natures do pursue,
Like rats that ravin down their proper bane,
A thirsty evil; and when we drink, we die.
Some editions alter the opening sense a bit by punctuating Claudio’s first lines differently (From too much liberty, my Lucio, liberty. / As surfeit is the father …) but the rest of the text is secure.
Proper bane would seem to have two tiers of meaning. One is general and follows the metaphor where we are the rats each pursuing our own (=proper) source of harm (=bane). One is particular and connects rats to ratsbane, to what is more literally their own poison. Ratsbane/Ratbane/Rat’s Bane was first attested in 1488 and is used three times elsewhere by Shakespeare.
As best I can tell from the little time I have to give to the question, ratsbane even in the 16th/17th century was typically an arsenic compound (arsenic trioxide), one of whose symptoms was increased thirst. This makes the transferred epithet of thirsty evil both appropriate and all the darker.
I was also curious here about ravin, a variant spelling of (the verb) raven and, past the obvious motivating alliteration, found an interesting suggestion in a recent Notes & Queries article (Sejanus, Measure for Measure, and Rats Bane by Adrien Streete, https://doi.org/10.1093/notesj/gjx218)
This unusual image bears close comparison with Arruntius’ response to Silius’ speech [in Ben Jonson’s Sejanus]:
We that know the evil
Should hunt the palace-rats, or give them bane;
Fright hence these worse than ravens, that devour
The quick, where they but prey upon the dead. (I.426–429)Tiberius’ followers are likened to rats whom those of Arruntius’ faction should poison because they support a ruler who inhibits liberty. Shakespeare reworks this conceit in Claudio’s speech: too much liberty has corrupted his nature which is likened to a rat that greedily devours poison. There may even be a small intertextual in-joke here. Jonson’s noun ‘ravens’, who eat both the living and the dead, are transformed by Shakespeare into the verb ‘ravin’ which, as the OED notes, means ‘the action or practice of seizing and devouring prey or food; predation’, such as a Raven would perform. It is an apt linguistic transformation and shows Shakespeare reworking a striking passage in Jonson’s play in typically imaginative fashion.
Streete also adds a footnote – The image of the rats, thirst, and poison does not appear to be proverbial. The Variorum edition of Measure for Measure quotes an example from 1605, after both plays were written—A New Variorum Edition of Shakespeare: Measure for Measure, ed. Mark Eccles (New York, 1980), 33. I don’t have access to this edition but would be curious to see the example.
Part three of what is apparently become a recurring series on bad books as food wrappings (part 1 and part 2). Here we expand to toilet paper.
Robert Herrick allusively in To his Booke
Have I not blest thee? Then go forth, nor fear
Or spice, or fish, or fire, or close-stools here.
But with thy fair Fates leading thee, Go on
With thy most white Predestination.
Nor thinkd these Ages that do hoarcely sing
The farting Tanner and familiar King,
The dancing Frier, tatter’d in the bush;
Those monstrous lies of little Robin Rush,
Tom Chipperfeild, and pretty-lisping Ned,
That doted on a Maide of Gingerbread;
The flying Pilcher and the frisking Dace,
With all the rabble of Tim-Trundell‘s race
(Bred from the dung-hils and adulterous rhimes),
Shall live, and thou not superlast all times.
No, no; thy Stars have destin’d Thee to see
The whole world die and turn to dust with thee.
He’s greedie of his life, who will not fall
When as a publick ruine bears down All.
Martial, predictably, provides at least one classical instance (12.61):
Versus et breve vividumque carmen
in te ne faciam times, Ligurra,
et dignus cupis hoc metu videri.
sed frustra metuis cupisque frustra.
in tauros Libyci fremunt leones,
non sunt papilionibus molesti.
quaeras censeo, si legi laboras,
nigri fornicis ebrium poetam,
qui carbone rudi putrique creta
scribit carmina quae legunt cacantes.
frons haec stigmate non meo notanda est.
You are afraid, Ligurra, of my writing verses against you, a brief, lively poem, and you long to seem worthy of such an apprehension. But idle is your fear and idle your desire. Libyan lions roar at bulls, they do not trouble butterflies. I advise you, if you are anxious to be read of, to look for some boozy poet of the dark archway who writes verses with rough charcoal or crumbling chalk which folk read while they shit. This brow of yours is not for marking with my brand.
And Robert Burton, as so often, is the likely connector – citing the Martial passage in his Democritus to the Reader prologue of The Anatomy of Melancholy.
By which means it comes to passe, that not only *Libraries and Shops are full of our putid Papers, but every Close-stoole and Jakes, Scribunt carmina quae legunt cacantes; they serve to put under Pies, to lap Spice in, and keepe Rost-meat from burning.
*Non tam referta bibliothecae quam cloacae. [the libraries are not as full as the drains.]
From Cultivating the Empty Field: The Silent Illumination of Zen Master Hongzhi
With Total Trust Roam and Play in Samādhi
Empty and desireless, cold and thin, simple and genuine, this is how to strike down and fold up the remaining habits of many lives. When the stains from old habits are exhausted, the original light appears, blazing through your skull, not admitting any other matters. Vast and spacious, like sky and water merging during autumn, like snow and moon having the same color, this field is without boundary, beyond direction, magnificently one entity without edge or seam. Further, when you turn within and drop off everything completely, realization occurs. Right at the time of entirely dropping off, deliberation and discussion are one thousand or ten thousand miles away. Still no principle is discernible, so what could there be to point to or explain? People with the bottom of the bucket fallen out immediately find total trust. So we are told simply to realize mutual response and explore mutual response, then turn around and enter the world. Roam and play in samādhi. Every detail clearly appears before you. Sound and form, echo and shadow, happen instantly without leaving traces. The outside and myself do not dominate each other, only because no perceiving [of objects] comes between us. Only this non-perceiving encloses the empty space of the dharma realm’s majestic ten thousand forms. People with the original face should enact and fully investigate [the field] without neglecting a single fragment.
The translator, Taigen Dan Leighton, adds – “The bottom of the bucket falling out” is a Zen image for the experience of one’s preconceptions and fixed world view suddenly and completely evaporating. After such experience one’s attitudes are transformed irrevocably, although ingrained habitual responses may still govern one’s conduct to varying extents in the context of further activity in the world.
From Elias Canetti’s The Agony of Flies
To read while the clock is audibly ticking: responsible reading. To read while all clocks have stopped: happy reading.
Lesen, während die Uhr vernehmlich tickt – verantwortliches Lesen.
Lesen während alle Uhren stehen, glückliches Lesen.
The introduction to M. Brichot in the second part of Swann’s Way. In pulling the English I found that Moncrieff took greater than usual liberties here but I like his phrasing.
For he had the sort of curiosity and superstitious worship of life which, combined with a certain scepticism with regard to the object of their studies, earns for some intelligent men of whatever profession, doctors who do not believe in medicine, schoolmasters who do not believe in Latin exercises, the reputation of having broad, brilliant and indeed superior minds. He affected, when at Mme Verdurin’s, to choose his illustrations from among the most topical subjects of the day when he spoke of philosophy or history, principally because he regarded those sciences as no more than a preparation for life, and imagined that he was seeing put into practice by the “little clan” what hitherto he had known only from books, and perhaps also because, having had instilled into him as a boy, and having unconsciously preserved, a reverence for certain subjects, he thought that he was casting aside the scholar’s gown when he ventured to treat those subjects with a conversational licence which in fact seemed daring to him only because the folds of the gown still clung.
Car il avait cette curiosité, cette superstition de la vie qui, unie à un certain scepticisme relatif à l’objet de leurs études, donne dans n’importe quelle profession, à certains hommes intelligents, médecins qui ne croient pas à la médecine, professeurs de lycée qui ne croient pas au thème latin, la réputation d’esprits larges, brillants, et même supérieurs. Il affectait chez Mme Verdurin de chercher ses comparaisons dans ce qu’il y avait de plus actuel quand il parlait de philosophie et d’histoire, d’abord parce qu’il croyait qu’elles ne sont qu’une préparation à la vie et qu’il s’imaginait trouver en action dans le petit clan ce qu’il n’avait connu jusqu’ici que dans les livres, puis peut-être aussi parce que, s’étant vu inculquer autrefois, et ayant gardé à son insu, le respect de certains sujets, il croyait dépouiller l’universitaire en prenant avec eux des hardiesses qui, au contraire, ne lui paraissaient telles, que parce qu’il l’était resté.
From Elias Canetti’s The Agony of Flies:
All human beings would have a single communal heart, no larger than the hearts we know. But that heart has to make the rounds visiting everybody, for everyone alive has a claim on it. To accommodate this heart, all humans are provided with a cavity into which the communal heart is simply placed, whereupon it immediately makes itself felt. All holy rites and important customs are connected to that heart. The receiving of the heart marks the greatest moment in anyone’s life. Each person is prepared for it for a long time in advance; he is told how rare and old the heart is; how wonderfully strange it is that it has preserved itself all that time and how it derives its indestructibility precisely from the rite of implantation. If the heart were left by itself for any length of time, instead of inside one of the innumerable cavities which await it, it would age and shrivel and lose its power. No one is allowed to possess it more than once. One carrier travels with it to the next: the heart never appears in the same town twice in a row. Whoever is carrying the heart is said to be invulnerable—who could be so blind as to mistake the carrier? He is radiant for as long as he is the chosen one. He well knows how little he deserves such good fortune, but that is of no significance. He has as much right as anyone else to this distinction, and only when he has been awarded it does he become a full-fledged human being.
Alle Menschen hätten ein gemeinsames Herz, nicht größer als die Herzen, die wir kennen. Es muß aber die Runde machen, denn wer immer zur Welt kommt, hat ein Anrecht darauf. Die Höhlung für dieses Herz liegt in den Menschen bereit, man hat es nur einzusetzen, und es macht sich sogleich bemerkbar. Die wichtigen und heiligen Sitten hängen mit dem Herzen zusammen. Es ist der größte Augenblick in jedermanns Leben, wenn er das Herz bekommt. Er wird lange darauf vorbereitet, man erzählt ihm, wie selten und alt es ist; wie sonderbar es sich erhalten hat, wie es seine Unverwüstlichkeit eben aus dem Ritus der Einsetzung beziehe. Wäre das Herz lange allein, nicht in einer der unzähligen Höhlungen, die darauf warten, es würde altern, es würde schrumpfen und seine Kraft verlieren. Niemand darf es mehr als einmal in sich haben. Ein Träger reist damit zum nächsten: zweimal hintereinander ist es nicht in derselben Stadt. Der Träger gilt als unverletzlich. Wer wäre so blind, den Träger zu verkennen, er leuchtet, solange er der Glückliche ist. Er weiß zwar, wie wenig er sein Glück verdient, aber das hat nichts zu bedeuten. Diese Auszeichnung kommt ihm wie jedem anderen zu und durch sie erst wird er ein voller Mensch.
From the Vinaya Pitaka (1, 181-182) via Edward Conze’s Buddhist Texts Through the Ages (later reprinted in Penguin Classics as Buddhist Scriptures)
Sona Kolivisa, a merchant’s son, received his going forth in the Lord’s presence, he received ordination. Because of his great output of vigour while pacing up and down, his feet split and the place for pacing up and down in became stained with blood as though cattle had been slaughtered there.
As the venerable Sona was meditating in private he thought: “The Lord’s disciples, of whom I am one, dwell putting forth vigour; but even so my mind is not freed from the outflows with no (further) clinging, and moreover there are my family’s possessions. Suppose I were to return to the low life, enjoy the possessions and do good?”
The Lord knew by mind the thoughts in the venerable Sona’s mind. He approached him and said: “Sona, formerly when you were a householder were you clever at the lute’s stringed music? ”
“Yes, Lord.”
“When the strings of the lute were too taut, was it tuneful and fit for playing? ”
“Certainly not, Lord.”
“And when they were too slack, was the lute tuneful and fit for playing? ”
“No, Lord.”
“But when the strings were neither too taut nor too slack but were keyed to an even pitch, was your lute tuneful and fit for playing? ”
“Yes, Lord.”
“Even so, Sona, does too much output of vigour conduce to restlessness and too feeble a vigour to slothfulness. Therefore, Sona, determine on evenness in vigour.”
From Elias Canetti’s The Agony of Flies, a collection of insights, imaginings, and observations compiled from his shorter works by the author himself. I struggle with a fitting description since the form is aphoristic but I think Canetti would run from the claim to broad accuracy and applicability that aphorism typically implies.
Reading seeks to propagate itself in me by reading; I never follow any outside recommendations, or if I do, then only after a very long time. I want to discover what I read. Whoever suggests a book to me knocks it out of my hands; whoever praises it spoils it for me for years. I only trust the minds I truly revere. They can recommend anything to me, and to awaken my curiosity all they have to do is to mention something in a given book. But whatever others recommend with their facile tongues is as if truly cursed. Thus it was hard for me to get to know the great books, for the greatest works long ago have entered the idolatry of the commonplace. People have the names of those books – as well as their heroes – on the tips of their tongues, and since they are so intent on stuffing themselves, they pronounce these names with their mouths full, thereby spoiling my own appetite for what would be so important for me to know.
Extracts 