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…and did not satisfy my appetite for poetry

~ Walter Shandy ~ Leave a comment

There is a very brief story of Virginia Woolf’s – An Unwritten Novel – that I routinely think of when sitting on trains – or anywhere, really – and coming up with stories about the people around me.  Just now I found a Maupassant story – L’infirme – with much the same setup and a similar trajectory of the narrator’s engagement – an initial enthusiasm in story construction, a later disappointment at the seeming blandness of revealed reality, and a final somewhat ambivalent rebirth of curiosity following recognition potential richness behind that reality.  That last point could alternately be rendered as – the need to tell stories about others is so inborn in certain personalities that no amount of disappointment or lack of closure can keep it from endlessly reawakening.  Still, the below quote from the Maupassant story is how these affairs mostly go:

The outcome conformed to the rule, to the average, to the truth, to the likely … and did not satisfy my appetite for poetry.

Le dénouement conforme à la règle, à la moyenne, à la vérité, à la vraisemblance, ne satisfaisait pas mon appétit poétique

Dostoevsky called Gogol the demon of the guffaw

~ Walter Shandy ~ Leave a comment

From Antal Szerb’s essay on Nikolai Gogol, translated in Reflections in the Library: Selected Literary Essays 1926-1944.

In Gogol, every character carries his own ghost within him.  They are the portraits of two devils, said Pushkin of Khlestakov and Chichikov…. It is the cast of Gogol’s imagination that makes ghosts of them.  He does not invent new lineaments, but hones the existing ones to the point of ghostliness. “In me everything has moved away from its place,” he writes in one of his letters.  “If, for example, I see someone trip up, my imagination at once appropriates this image and develops it into some dreadful vision, which torments me so much that I am unable to sleep and feel sapped of all my strength.”  Here the point is that the most ordinary workaday reality turns ghost-like if we stare at it long and hard enough: one of Gogol’s secrets is that he releases the dread that lurks in the workaday.  Dostoevsky called Gogol the demon of the guffaw.

… he might have written a masterpiece

~ Walter Shandy ~ Leave a comment

From A.J. Liebling’s Between Meals: An Appetite for Paris

The Proust madeleine phenomenon is now as firmly established in folklore as Newton’s apple or Watt’s steam kettle.  The man ate a tea biscuit, the taste evoked memories, he wrote a book.  This is capable of expression by the formula TMB, for Taste>Memory>Book.  Some time ago, when I began to read a book called The Food of France, by Waverley Root, I had an inverse experience: BMT, for Book>Memory>Taste.  Happily, the tastes that The Food of France re-created for me- small birds, stewed rabbit, stuffed tripe, Cote Rotie, and Tavel- were more robust than that of the madeleine, which Larousse defines as “a light cake made with sugar, flour, lemon juice, brandy and eggs”.  (The quantity of brandy in a madeleine would not furnish a gnat with an alcohol rub.)  In the light of what Proust wrote with so mild a stimulus, it is the world’s loss that he did not have a heartier appetite.  On a dozen Gardiners Island oysters, a bowl of clam chowder, a peck of steamers, some bay scallops, three sauteed soft-shelled crabs, a few ears of fresh-picked corn, a thin swordfish steak of generous area, a pair of lobsters, and a Long Island duck, he might have written a masterpiece.

This is humanism not as a feeling but as an attitude to life

~ Walter Shandy ~ Leave a comment

From Antal Szerb’s essay on Thomas Mann, included in Reflections in the Library: Selected Literary Essays 1926-1944.  

This is humanism not as a feeling but as an attitude to life; in practice it is primarily a negative stance: abhorrence of the use of force, of tyranny, of the crippling of individuality.  This is the humanism of the eighteenth century, of Voltaire and Goethe.  It derives from an awareness of human dignity, and from the intellectual’s serenity, tenderness, and horror of fighting, for it rises far, far above the passions that provoke human beings to commit bloody barbarities.  It is an ethos that is not rooted in any feeling or religion, but solely and uniquely in the intellect.  This intellect-based morality has been from Goethe onwards the greatest pride and achievement of the German spirit, and from this the new German world, with its new uncertainty in ethics and intuition, has diverged the furthest.

La plupart des hommes vieillissent dans un petit cercle d’idées

~ Walter Shandy ~ Leave a comment

From Vauvenargues’ Reflexions et Maximes (no.238):

La plupart des hommes vieillissent dans un petit cercle d’idées, qu’ils n’ont pas tirées de leur fond ; il y a peut-être moins d’esprits faux que de stériles

I refuse to translate this.  English can’t hit the semantic range of fond in this context and no English speaker should ever touch esprit, especially when coming from the 17th or 18th century.

All this sounds sadly like gluttony

~ Walter Shandy ~ Leave a comment

Some Patrick Leigh Fermor found in Felipe Fernandez -Armesto’s Near a Thousand Tables: A History of Food (originally from “Gluttony,” Sunday Times, December 31, 1961)

Cannibalism is a problem. In many cases the practice is rooted in ritual and superstition rather than gastronomy, but not always. A French Dominican in the seventeenth century observed that the Caribs had most decided notions of the relative merits of their enemies. As one would expect, the French were delicious, by far the best. This is no surprise, even allowing for nationalism. The English came next, I’m glad to say. The Dutch were dull and stodgy and the Spaniards so stringy, they were hardly a meal at all, even boiled. All this sounds sadly like gluttony.

Et clauso ventorum carcere regnet

~ Walter Shandy ~ Leave a comment

Aeneid 1.137-41, Neptune chastising the winds for the storm they launched – at Juno’s order – against the Trojan fleet:

Hasten your flight and say these words to your king:
Not to him were the power over the sea and the fierce trident
given by lot – but to me.  He has those huge rocks,
your home, Eurus; Let him vaunt himself in that hall
– Aeolus – and let him reign in his closed up prison of winds.

Maturate fugam, regique haec dicite vestro:
non illi imperium pelagi saevumque tridentem,
sed mihi sorte datum. Tenet ille immania saxa,
vestras, Eure, domos; illa se iactet in aula
Aeolus, et clauso ventorum carcere regnet.

Virgil can be so damning so succintly.  And with such perfect word order and verbal juxtapositions: Aeolus + clausus (enclosed) + ventus (winds) + carcer (prison) + regnere (reign).  The prison and its adjective enclose the winds.  Aeolus and his verb enclose/rule the prison.  And then the line ends leading up to regnere so perfectly draw out Neptune’s flow of irony – from his dismissive saxa (plain rocks) to mocking aula (grand hall, court, palace) to the very much cut down sense of the final verb regnere.

A hidden way into the city through the sewers  

~ Walter Shandy ~ Leave a comment

From the second edition of N.G. Wilson’s From Byzantium to Italy: Greek Studies in the Italian Renaissance (pg.36):

Yet a long time was to pass before Byzantium came to be recognised as a civilisation worthy of the same kind of study as classical Greece.  More typical of the immediate response to Procopius’ narrative was Bruni’s own delight and surprise when in 1442 king Alfonso of Aragon succeeded in capturing Naples by the same stratagem that Procopius reports of Belisarius, who found a hidden way into the city through the sewers.

I laughed aloud reading this and said to myself – ‘they learned from the mistake and have since made the entire city an open sewer.’  My wife later suggested that maybe Belisarius and Alfonso simply mistook the native Neapolitan charm for a sewer in the first place.

 

They see not so much your nature as your artifices

~ Walter Shandy ~ Leave a comment

From Montaigne’s De Repentir (Book 3, essay 2)

J’ay mes loix et ma court pour juger de moy, et m’y adresse plus qu’ailleurs. Je restrainsbien selon autruy mes actions, mais je ne les estends que selon moy. Il n’y a que vous qui sçache si vous estes lache et cruel, ou loyal et devotieux ; les autres nevous voyent poinct, ils vous devinent par conjectures incertaines ; ils voyent nontant vostre nature que vostre art. Par ainsi ne vous tenez pas à leur sentence ; tenez vous à la vostre. Tuo tibi judicio est utendum. Virtutis et vitiorum graveipsius conscientiae pondus est : qua sublata, jacent omnia.

Someone’s translation borrowed pulled from online because I don’t feel like typing out a paragraph:

I have my own laws and my own court to judge me, and I refer to these rather than elsewhere. I certainly restrain my actions out of deference to others, but I understand them only by my own light, None but you know whether you are cruel and cowardly, or loyal and dutiful. Others have no vision of you, but judge of you by uncertain conjectures; they see not so much your nature as your artifices. Do not rely on their opinions, therefore; rely on your own.

Goethe is always pithy

~ Walter Shandy ~ Leave a comment

From Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Sign of the Four (and, in what I’m calling a minor Mandela Effect, there is apparently a definite article in front of ‘Four’ that I never before noticed):

“And I,” said Holmes, “shall see what I can learn from Mrs. Bernstone, and from the Indian servant, who, Mr. Thaddeus tell me, sleeps in the next garret. Then I shall study the great Jones’s methods and listen to his not too delicate sarcasms. ‘Wir sind gewohnt dass die Menschen verhoehnen was sie nicht verstehen.‘ Goethe is always pithy.”

The quote is from Faust part 1, scene 3 (around line 1200).  In (poorly rendered) fuller form it goes:

Wir sind gewohnt, daß die Menschen verhöhnen,
Was sie nicht verstehn,
Daß sie vor dem Guten und Schönen,
Das ihnen oft beschwerlich ist, murren;

We are used to seeing that men scorn
what they do not understand,
that before the good and the beautiful
that to them often seems wearisome, they grumble;