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And this was received well?

~ Walter Shandy ~ Leave a comment

I was catching up this afternoon on this year’s In Our Time episodes and finally got to the Sir Thomas Browne hour.  One of the panelists, after praising Browne’s densely latinate syntax and flow, reads the below excerpt from Hydriotaphia as an illustration:

But the iniquity of oblivion blindely scattereth her poppy, and deals with the memory of men without distinction to merit of perpetuity. Who can but pity the founder of the Pyramids? Herostratus lives that burnt the Temple of Diana, he is almost lost that built it; Time hath spared the Epitaph of Adrians horse, confounded that of himself. In vain we compute our felicities by the advantage of our good names, since bad have equall durations; and Thersites is like to live as long as Agamenon, without the favour of the everlasting Register: Who knows whether the best of men be known? or whether there be not more remarkable persons forgot, then any that stand remembred in the known account of time? the first man had been as unknown as the last, and Methuselahs long life had been his only Chronicle.

All the panelists can be heard lighting up with praise and Melvyn Bragg’s response is only “And this was received well?”

All time is gathered up together: all the centuries crowd her breast and torture it

~ Walter Shandy ~ Leave a comment

From Bk 5 lines ~165ff of Lucan’s Civil War – Appius goes to consult the long-inactive Delphic oracle on the outcome of the war between Caesar and Pompey/Rome.  For all the attention rightly given to his Erichtho I find Lucan’s vision of prophetic possession the most chilling of his occasional sidelines into the surreal and supernatural.

Scared at last the maiden took refuge by the tripods [inside the temple]; she drew near to the vast chasm and there stayed; and her bosom for the first time drew in the divine power, which the inspiration of the rock, still active after so many centuries, forced upon her. At last Apollo mastered the breast of the Delphian priestess; as fully as ever in the past, he forced his way into her body, driving out her former thoughts, and bidding her human nature to come forth and leave her heart at his disposal. Frantic she careers about the cave, with her neck under possession; the fillets and garlands of Apollo, dislodged by her bristling hair, she whirls with tossing head through the void spaces of the temple; she scatters the tripods that impede her random course; she boils over with fierce fire, while enduring the wrath of Phoebus. Nor does he ply the whip and goad alone, and dart flame into her vitals: she has to bear the curb as well, and is not permitted to reveal as much as she is suffered to know. All time is gathered up together: all the centuries crowd her breast and torture it; the endless chain of events is revealed; all the future struggles to the light; destiny contends with destiny, seeking to be uttered. The creation of the world and its destruction, the compass of the Ocean and the sum of the sands—all these are before her.

Tandem conterrita virgo
Confugit ad tripodas vastisque adducta cavernis
Haesit et insueto concepit pectore numen,
Quod non exhaustae per tot iam saecula rupis
Spiritus ingessit vati; tandemque potitus
Pectore Cirrhaeo non umquam plenior artus
Phoebados inrupit Paean mentemque priorem
Expulit atque hominem toto sibi cedere iussit
Pectore. Bacchatur demens aliena per antrum
Colla ferens, vittasque dei Phoebeaque serta
Erectis discussa comis per inania templi
Ancipiti cervice rotat spargitque vaganti
Obstantes tripodas magnoque exaestuat igne
Iratum te, Phoebe, ferens. Nec verbere solo
Uteris et stimulos flammasque in viscera mergis:
Accipit et frenos, nec tantum prodere vati
Quantum scire licet. Venit aetas omnis in unam
Congeriem, miserumque premunt tot saecula pectus,
Tanta patet rerum series, atque omne futurum
Nititur in lucem, vocemque petentia fata
Luctantur; non prima dies, non ultima mundi,
Non modus Oceani, numerus non derat harenae.

A perpetual generation of passions

~ Walter Shandy ~ Leave a comment

Reflexion IX of La Rochefoucauld’s. Obvious style differences notwithstanding, Proust is to me the true end heir of La Rochefoucauld’s tradition and I always think it would be a curious experiment for an editor to try adding various maxims throughout the novel as aid to help first time readers stay on track. This one maybe most of all prompts that thought.

There is in the human heart a perpetual generation of passions, such that the wreck of one is almost always the establishment of another.

Il y a dans le cœur humain une génération perpétuelle de passions, en sorte que la ruine de l’une est presque toujours l’établissement d’une autre.

et voilà qu’il faut tout à l’heure payer mon terme

~ Walter Shandy ~ Leave a comment

From Chamfort’s Caracteres et Anecdotes – my wit-butchering translation

Un homme très-pauvre, qui avait fait un livre contre le gouvernement, disait: «Morbleu! la Bastille n’arrive point; et voilà qu’il faut tout à l’heure payer mon terme.»

A very poor man who had written a book against the government said: “Good god, they haven’t taken me to the Bastille yet – and now my rent is due.

Io voglio un poco stare teco

~ Walter Shandy ~ Leave a comment

A sonnet of Dante’s

Un di si venne a me Malinconia
Un di si venne a me Malinconia
e disse: ‘‘Io voglio un poco stare teco’’;
e parve a me ch’ella menasse seco
Dolore e Ira per sua compagnia.
E io le dissi: ‘‘Partiti, va via’’;
ed ella mi rispose come un greco:
e ragionando a grande agio meco,
guardai e vidi Amore, che venia
vestito di novo d’un drappo nero,
e nel suo capo portava un cappello;
E certo lacrimava pur di vero.
Ed io le dissi: ‘‘Che hai, cativello?’’.
Ed el rispose: Io ho guai e pensero,
che´ nostra donna mor, dolce fratello.’’

One day Melancholy came to me
One day Melancholy came to me
and said: ‘‘I want to stay with you for a while’’;
and it seemed to me that she was bringing along
Pain and Sorrow as her companions.
And I said to her: ‘‘Move along, hence’’;
and she answered to me proudly:
and while she was reasoning with me at great leisure,
I looked and saw Love, who came
strangely dressed in a black cloth,
and he was wearing a hat on his head;
and for sure he truly wept.
And I said to him: ‘‘What ails you, unfortunate?’’
And he answered: ‘‘I am in trouble and pain,
because our lady is dying, sweet brother.’’

Nam pauperes habent mores corvinos

~ Walter Shandy ~ Leave a comment

Found in Iris Origo’s Tribune of Rome: A Biography of Cola di Rienzo (pg 59-60) but lifted From Ch 10 of Ludovico Antonio Muratorio’s Historiae Romanae Fragmenta.  I don’t back the sentiment but it felt apt when both my and the opposing metro trains were held today for ten minutes as a single officer wrangled down eight or so teenagers for assault and robbery – most of whom had stamped through my car a moment before discussing the crime and their chances of being caught (plus the knives they were all carrying).  But then it is an insult to crows to call them corvine.

So wretched and insatiable were the poor that when the Queen of Hungary … came on a pilgrimage to Rome, her generosity was soon exhausted.  The first man to beg of her … persuaded her to supply the funds required for rebuilding the Milvian bridge.  But, as soon as this became known, “so great was the importunity of the beggars that they turned the Queen out, and she was obliged to leave.  For the poor,” adds the chronicler sententiously, “have the mannners of crows.”

But I must be fed, if I make one

~ Walter Shandy ~ Leave a comment

From Dickens’ A Christmas Carol again, Scrooge shown his end by the ghost of Christmas future.  My mother – who, with my father, has an inordinate love for comparing and critiquing film adaptations of this story – always used this line of work meetings and conferences:

“It’s likely to be a very cheap funeral,” said the same speaker; “for upon my life I don’t know of anybody to go to it. Suppose we make up a party and volunteer?”

“I don’t mind going if a lunch is provided,” observed the gentleman with the excrescence on his nose. “But I must be fed, if I make one.”

Like a bad lobster in a dark cellar

~ Walter Shandy ~ 1 Comment

I’ve never learned to care for Dickens but last night I decided to read A Christmas Carol for the first time in – and its odd I know this so precisely – twenty-one years.  And I find there this maddeningly bewildering line describing the Marley-possessed knocker.

And then let any man explain to me, if he can, how it happened that Scrooge, having his key in the lock of the door, saw in the knocker, without its undergoing any intermediate process of change—not a knocker, but Marley’s face.

Marley’s face. It was not in impenetrable shadow as the other objects in the yard were, but had a dismal light about it, like a bad lobster in a dark cellar. It was not angry or ferocious, but looked at Scrooge as Marley used to look: with ghostly spectacles turned up on its ghostly forehead. The hair was curiously stirred, as if by breath or hot air; and, though the eyes were wide open, they were perfectly motionless. That, and its livid colour, made it horrible; but its horror seemed to be in spite of the face and beyond its control, rather than a part of its own expression.

I would’ve taken it as nonsense but it felt too specific an image.  So I dug a bit and have one definite answer and one related image.  First, the easy answer – rotting marine line tend to shine due to a luminescent marine bacteria that reproduce to the point of visibility as the host decays.  It seems to happen on occasion with fish in aquariums and often baffles the owners.

For the related image – it is an apparently famous quip by American politician John Randolph about an an opponent (generally identified as Henry Clay, sometimes as Edward Livingston) – “He is a man of splendid abilities but utterly corrupt. He shines and stinks, like a rotten mackerel by moonlight.”  The phrase ‘mackerel by moonlight’ seems also to have survived to some degree in American politics to describe a corrupt politician.

the Resurrected Christ, a sturdy stevedore

~ Walter Shandy ~ Leave a comment

From Bernard Berenson’s Piero Della Francesca or: The Ineloquent in Art (pages 3-5):

Piero della Francesca seems to have been opposed to the manifestation of feeling, and ready to go to any length to avoid it.  He hesitated to represent the reaction which even an inanimate object would have when subjected to force, the rebound of a log, for instance, when struck by an axe.
….
In the Borgo San Sepolcro fresco the Resurrected Christ, a sturdy stevedore like the Baptist in the early polyptych of the same little town, or the Christ in the London Baptism, looks straight ahead of him, dazed and as if waking from a refreshing sleep.  It would take great imaginative power to discover in the two other figures just mentioned the faintest correspondence between looks and function.  No Holy Spirit could penetrate the head of the grim athlete standing in mid-stream of Jordan.  Three Angels, the comeliest figures Piero ever painted, stand by, but it is not certain that any of them is participating.
…
One is almost compelled to conclude that Piero was not interested in human beings as living animals, sentient and acting.  For him they were existences in three dimensions whom perchance he would have gladly exchanged for pillars and arches, capitals, entablatures, and facets of walls.

 

Il erre à la merci de sa propre inconstance

~ Walter Shandy ~ Leave a comment

A choral section from Racine’s Esther Act 2, Scene 7

UNE ISRAÈLITE, seule.

Pour contenter ses frivoles désirs,
L’homme insensé vainement se consume.
Il trouve l’amertume
Au milieu des plaisirs.

UNE AUTRE, seule.

Le bonheur de l’impie est toujours agité.
Il erre à la merci de sa propre inconstance.
Ne cherchons la félicité,
Que dans la paix de l’innocence.