From Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde:
“I incline to Cain’s heresy,” he used to say quaintly: “I let my brother go to the devil in his own way.”
The reference is to Cain’s reply to God when asked about his brother Abel – “Am I my brother’s keeper?” (Genesis 4:9).
I’ve said this at work when people ask about the progression of someone else’s project or their absence in a meeting. Like most of my answers it confuses more than responds.
From Robert Louis Stevenson’s An Inland Voyage:
No one should have any correspondence on a journey; it is bad enough to have to write; but the receipt of letters is the death of all holiday feeling.
‘Out of my country and myself I go.’ I wish to take a dive among new conditions for a while, as into another element. I have nothing to do with my friends or my affections for the time; when I came away, I left my heart at home in a desk, or sent it forward with my portmanteau to await me at my destination. After my journey is over, I shall not fail to read your admirable letters with the attention they deserve. But I have paid all this money, look you, and paddled all these strokes, for no other purpose than to be abroad; and yet you keep me at home with your perpetual communications. You tug the string, and I feel that I am a tethered bird. You pursue me all over Europe with the little vexations that I came away to avoid. There is no discharge in the war of life, I am well aware; but shall there not be so much as a week’s furlough?
From G.K. Chesterton’s Club of Queer Trades:
Few people knew him, because, like all poets, he could do without them; he welcomed a human face as he might welcome a sudden blend of colour in a sunset; but he no more felt the need of going out to parties than he felt the need of altering the sunset clouds.
From Robert Louis Stevenson’s An Inland Voyage:
For I think we may look upon our little private war with death somewhat in this light. If a man knows he will sooner or later be robbed upon a journey, he will have a bottle of the best in every inn, and look upon all his extravagances as so much gained upon the thieves. And above all, where instead of simply spending, he makes a profitable investment for some of his money, when it will be out of risk of loss. So every bit of brisk living, and above all when it is healthful, is just so much gained upon the wholesale filcher, death. We shall have the less in our pockets, the more in our stomach, when he cries stand and deliver. A swift stream is a favourite artifice of his, and one that brings him in a comfortable thing per annum; but when he and I come to settle our accounts, I shall whistle in his face for these hours upon the upper Oise.
The post-war period was a time when everyone imagined themselves to be poets and everyone imagined themselvesto be politicians; everyone supposed that one could, and indeed should, make poems out of everything, after so many years in which it had seemed that the world had been paralysed and struck dumb and reality lay on the far side of a sheet of glass, in a vitreous, crystalline and wordless stasis. Novelists and poets had fasted during the fascist years, there not being many words around that they were permitted to use, and the few that had gone on using words had picked them with the greatest possible care from the meagre lexicon of crumbs that still remained. During the fascist era, poets found themselves reduced to expressing only the arid, enclosed and sibylline world of dreams. Now there were many words in circulation once again, and once again reality seemed within reach, and those who had fasted for so long threw themselves joyfully in the harvest. And the harvest was universal because everyone decided to join in, and this caused a confusion between the language of poetry and the language of politics which seemed to have become mixed together. But then reality turned out to be no less complex and hidden and indecipherable and enigmatic than the world of dreams, and it proved still to li on the far side of a sheet of glass, and the illusion of having shattered that glass turned out to be ephemeral. Then many people turned away, disheartened and dejected, and fell back again into a bitter fast and a deep silence. So the post-war period was gloomy and full of dejection after the joyful harvest of the early days. Many withdrew and cut themselves off once more, either in the world of their dreams or in any work that would earn them enough to live on, work undertaken at random and in haste and that seemed petty and grey after so much excitement; and in any case, everyone forgot about that brief, illusory involvement in the life of their neighbour. Undoubtedly for many years no one practised their own trade any more, but everyone thought that they must and should take on a thousand others at the same time, and some years went by before everyone took up their own trade and accepted the weight of it and the daily toil and the daily solitude, which is the only way that we have of participating in the life of our neighbour, lost and confined in an equal solitude.
The Ubi Sunt sensibility hovers throughout Old English poetry but only in The Wanderer (92-96) does it take a form – and rhetorical refrain – so close to the more familiar neiges d’antan of Villon.
Hwær cwom mearg? Hwær cwom mago? Hwær cwom maþþumgyfa?
Hwær cwom symbla gesetu? Hwær sindon seledreamas?
Eala beorht bune! Eala byrnwiga!
Eala þeodnes þrym! Hu seo þrag gewat,
genap under nihthelm, swa heo no wære.
Where has the horse gone? Where the warrior? Where the treasure?
Where the seats of feasts? Where are the hall joys?
Oh, the bright cup! Oh, the mailed warrior!
Oh, the prince’s glory! How that time departed,
grew dark under the night helmet as if it hadn’t been
(tr. Robert E. Bjork)
Tolkien lends a modified version of these lines to Aragorn in the Two Towers as he speaks of Rohan – “Where now the horse and the rider? Where is the horn that was blowing?”
Sum sceal on beore þurh byreles hond
meodugal mæcga; þonne he gemet ne con
gemearcian his muþe mode sine,
ac sceal ful earmlice ealdre linnan,
dreogan dryhtenbealo dreamum biscyred,
ond hine to sylfcwale secgas nemnað,
mænað mid muþe meodugales gedrinc. (51-57)One through beer from the cupbearer’s hand will
become a mead-mad man; then he will know no measure,
will not give boundary to his mouth with his mind,but he must very wretchedly yield up his life,endure great misfortune bereft of joys,and people will say he killed himself, well decrythe drinking of the mead-mad man with their mouths
[Lucio] had learnt to read at the same time as me, but I had read heaps of books and he had only read a few because he read slowly and got bored; all the same when he was at our house he used to read, because every now and then I would get tired of playing and throw myself down on the lawn with a book. Then Lucio would go and boast to my brothers that he had read a whole book, because they always teased him about reading so little. “Today I read two lira.” “Today I read five lira,” he would say proudly, showing them the price written on the flyleaf.
Again from Melville’s Journal Up the Straits:
“It’s as bad as too much pain: it gets to be pain at last” Heard this broken latter part of sentence from wearied lady coming from Ufezzi (sic) Palace. – She was talking no doubt about excess of pleasure in these galleries.”
This feels a pedestrian version of Stendhal’s response – now known as Stendhal Syndrome – to first arriving at Santa Croce:
Mon émotion est si profonde qu’elle va presque jusqu’à la piété … J’étais déjà dans une sorte d’extase, par l’idée d’être à Florence, et le voisinage des grands hommes dont je venais de voir les tombeaux. Absorbé dans la contemplation de la beauté sublime, je la voyais de près, je la touchais pour ainsi dire. J’étais arrivé à ce point d’émotion où se rencontrent les sensations célestes données par les beaux-arts et les sentiments passionnés. En sortant de Santa Croce, j’avais un battement de cœur, ce qu’on appelle des nerfs à Berlin ; la vie était épuisée chez moi, je marchais avec la crainte de tomber.
My emotion was so profound that it came near piety … I was in a sort of ecstasy, from the idea of being in Florence, and the proximity of the great men whose tombs I had seen. Absorbed in the contemplation of sublime beauty, I saw it at hand, I touched it so to speak… I reached the point where we encounter the celestial sensations granted by the fine arts and impassioned feelings. On leaving Santa Croce, I felt a fluttering in my heart, what they call ‘nerves’ in Berlin; Life was drained from me, I walked on but with fear of collapsing.
The comparison leads me to a hierarchy of aesthetically inflicted sufferings:
1)Stendhal syndrome – a genuine swooning from contact, nearly religious in nature
2)That of Melville’s sufferer – call it aesthetic exhaustion, a running through of your mind’s resources and resulting exhaustion; mental as much as physical, from over-exposure and over-stimulation
3)The average visitor – who sustains memories of wrist-ache from too many selfie-stick selfies and possibly a back-ache as well from violently leaning over me in the process
The following throwaway remark appears in one of Borges’ lectures on English literature (collected and edited as Professor Borges: A Course on English Literature):
There was a legend, or story, that Johnson had an argument with a bookseller and felled him with a blow, not with a cane but with a book, a folio volume, which makes the anecdote more literary and also testifies to Johnson’s great physical strength, for such manuscripts are difficult to handle, especially in the middle of a fight.
Boswell’s account is a mere sketch since the event took place before he and Johnson came together, but it – if Boswell can be trusted in such matters – confirms the essential reality of what Borges takes more as symbol-laden exaggeration.
1742: AETAT. 33.]—In 1742 he wrote . . . ‘Proposals for Printing Bibliotheca Harleiana, or a Catalogue of the Library of the Earl of Oxford.’ He was employed in this business by Mr. Thomas Osborne the bookseller, who purchased the library for 13,000l., a sum which Mr. Oldys says, in one of his manuscripts, was not more than the binding of the books had cost; yet, as Dr. Johnson assured me, the slowness of the sale was such, that there was not much gained by it. It has been confidently related, with many embellishments, that Johnson one day knocked Osborne down in his shop, with a folio, and put his foot upon his neck. The simple truth I had from Johnson himself. ‘Sir, he was impertinent to me, and I beat him. But it was not in his shop: it was in my own chamber.’
Sadly, it must remain unclear whether Johnson deserves praise for his dexterous handling of a full folio.
Extracts 