Patrick: Lagniappe

It is not true that calamitous events are bound, or even likely, to excite great tragic images.  Nearly sixty years after the bomb bay doors of the Enola Gay opened to release Little Boy, and a new level of human conflict, over Hiroshima, there is still no major work of visual art marking the birth of the nuclear age.  No esthetically significant painting or sculpture commemorates Auschwitz.  It is most unlikely that a lesser though still socially traumatic event, such as the felling of the World Trade Center in 2001, will stimulate any memorable work of art.  What we do remember are the photos, which cannot be exceeded.

--Goya by Robert Hughes

Patrick: Lagniappe

'Look at the guests in the hotel, they are rich.  Those women with lifted faces and dyed hair and awful little dogs.'  She said again with one of her flashes of disquieting wisdom, 'You seem to get afraid of being old when you're rich.'

--Loser Takes All by Graham Greene

Patrick: Lagniappe

[H]er cruelty was a kind of pride which kept her going; it was her best quality, she would have been merely pitiable without it.

--The Fallen Idol by Graham Greene

Patrick: Lagniappe

'How much do you earn a year with your Westerns, old man?'

'A thousand.'

'Taxed.  I earn thirty thousand free.  It's the fashion.  In these days, old man, nobody thinks in terms of human beings.  Governments don't, so why should we?  They talk of the people and the proletariat, and I talk of the mugs.  It's the same thing.  They have their five-year plans and so have I.'

--The Third Man by Graham Greene

Patrick: Lagniappe

For the first time Rollo Martines looked back through the years without admiration, as he thought: He's never grown up.  Marlowe's devils wore squibs attached to their tails: evil was like Peter Pan - it carried with it the horrifying and horrible gift of eternal youth.

Martins said, 'Have you ever visited the children's hospital?  Have you seen any of your victims?'

Harry took a look at the toy landscape below and came away from the door.  'I never feel quite safe in these things,' he said.  He felt the back of the door with his hand, as though he were afraid that it might fly open and launch him into that iron-ribbed space.  'Victims?' he asked.  'Don't be melodramatic, Rollo.  Look down there,' he went on, pointing through the window at the people moving like black flies at the base of the Wheel.  'Would you really feel any pity if one of those dots stopped moving - for eve?  If I said you can have twenty thousand pounds for every dot that stops, would you really, old man, tell me to keep my money - without hesitation?  Or would you calculate how many dots you could afford to spare?  Free of income tax, old man.  Free of income tax.'  He gave his boyish conspiratorial smile.  'It's the only way to save nowadays.'

--The Third Man by Graham Greene

Patrick: Lagniappe

Then the racket began to get organised: the big men saw big money in it, and while the original thief got less for his spoils, he received instead a certain security.  If anything happened to im he would be looked after.  Human nature too has curious twisted reasons that the heart certainly knows nothing of.  It eased the conscience of many small men to feel that they were working for an employer: they were almost as respectable soon in their own eyes as wage-earners; they were one of a group, and if there was guilt, the leaders bore the guilt.  A racket works very like a totalitarian party. 

--The Third Man by Graham Greene

[N.B.:  Or, in the case of China, a totalitarian party works very like a racket.]

Patrick: Lagniappe

A buffet laden with coffee cups; an urn steaming; a woman's face shiny with exertion; two young men with the happy intelligent faces of sixth-formers; and, huddled in the background, like faces in a family album, a multitude of the old-fashioned, the dingy, the earnest and cheery features of constant readers. 

--The Third Man by Graham Greene

Patrick: Lagniappe

The Bible says that if a man does something bad to you, you ought to give him the chance to do more bad to you, like giving him your other cheek to slap.  That's in the Sermon on the Mount.  But I always thought that ought to be changed a little.  If you do pure good to a man that's harmed you that shames him too much.  No man is so bad that you ought to shame him that way.  Do you see?  You ought to do just a little bit of bad in return, so he can keep his self-respect.  Do you see what I mean?

--Heaven's My Destination by Thornton Wilder

Patrick: Lagniappe

Saw Barrière who told us this striking anecdote.  On the Place de Grève he had seen a condemned man whose hair had visibly stood on end when he had been turned to face the scaffold.  Yet this was the man who, when Dr. Pariset had asked him what he wanted before he died, had answered: 'A leg of mutton and a woman.'

--Pages from the Goncourt Journal (ed. and tr. by Robert Baldick), 29 January 1860

Patrick: Lagniappe

'Oh!' said Lafontaine.  'The Empress was charming.  When my manager told her that I was very hoarse, she said: "We shall come back another time."'

'That's just like the Bonapartes!' said Scholl.  'They always imagine they're going to come back!'

--Pages from the Goncourt Journal (ed. and tr. by Robert Baldick), 25 January 1860

Patrick: Lagniappe

We talk about his Carthaginian novel, which he is in the midst of writing.  He tells us of his research, his studies, the reading he has done, the piles of notes he has made, and the incomprehensibility of the words involved, which is forcing him to paraphrase all his terms.  'Do you know the full extent of my ambition?' he asks.  'I just want an intelligent man to shut himself up for four hours with my book, so that I can give him a feast of historical hashish.  That's all I ask. . . . After all, work is still the best means of whiling away one's life.'

--Pages from the Goncourt Journal (ed. and tr. by Robert Baldick), 12 January 1860

Patrick: Lagniappe

Then we remark how few people there are who can appreciate something well done and beautiful in itself, like the rhythm of a sentence.  'Can you imagine anything more stupid', Flaubert asked, 'than struggling to eliminate the assonances from a sentence or the repetitions from a page?  For whom?  And then, even when the book succeeds, the success you obtain is never the kind you wanted.  It was the farcical bits in Madame Bovary that made it a success.  Success is always off the mark.  As for style, how many readers enjoy and appreciate it?  And remember that style is what makes us suspect in the eyes of the law, for the courts are all for the classics. . . . But in reality nobody has read the classics!  There aren't eight men of letters who have read Voltaire, and I mean really read him.  And there aren't five who could tell you the titles of Thomas Corneille's plays.  Art for art's sake?  It received its greatest consecration in the address delivered to the Academy by a classical writer, Buffon, when he said: "The manner in which truth is enunciated is more useful to humanity than the truth itself."  If that isn't art for art's sake, what is?  And how about La Bruyère, who says: "The art of writing is the art of defining and depicting."'

--Pages from the Goncourt Journal (ed. and tr. by Robert Baldick), 12 January 1860

Patrick: Lagniappe

Noticeable, too, is the re-emergence of sentiment as the prince of the critical utensils.  Commentators respond, not to the novel, but to its personnel, whom they want to "care about," in whom they want to "believe."  Such remarks as "I didn't like the characters" are now thought capable of settling the hash of a work of fiction.  This critical approach will eventually elicit what it fully deserves--a literature of ingratiation.  And we will then have reached the destiny that Alexis de Tocqueville predicted for American democracy: a flabby stupor of mutual reassurance.

--The Second Plane by Martin Amis

Patrick: Lagniappe

The old enemy was a superpower; the new enemy isn't even a state.  In the end, the U.S.S.R. was broken by its own contradictions and abnormalities, forced to realize, in Martin Malia's words, that "there is no such thing as socialism, and the Soviet Union built it."  Then, too, socialism was a modernist, indeed a futurist, experiment, whereas militant fundamentalism is convulsed in a late-medieval phase of its evolution.  We would have to sit through a Renaissance and a Reformation, and then await an Enlightenment.  And we're not going to do that.

--The Second Plane by Martin Amis

Patrick: Lagniappe

I was once asked: "Are you an Islamophobe?"  And the answer is no.  What I am is an Islamismophobe, or better say an anti-Islamist, because a phobia is an irrational fear, and it is not irrational to fear something that says it wants to kill you.  The more general enemy, of course, is extremism.  What has extremism done for anyone?  Where are its gifts to humanity?  Where are its works?

--The Second Plane by Martin Amis

Patrick: Lagniappe

There is an obvious end to the amount of purely physical experiment in music, just as there is an obvious end to geographical exploration.  Wyndham Lewis has pointed out that when speed and familiarity have reduced travelling in space to the level of the humdrum those in search of the exotic will have to travel in time, and this is what has already happened in music.  The Impressionist composers vastly speeded up the facilities for space travel in music, exploring the remotest jungles and treating uncharted sea as though they were the Serpentine.  Stravinsky, at one time the globe trotter par excellence can no longer thrill us with his traveller's tales of the primitive steppe and has, quite logically, taken to time travelling instead.  He reminds one of the character in a play be Evreinoff who lives half in the eighteenth century, half in the present.

--Music Ho! by Constant Lambert

Patrick: Lagniappe

But today every composer's overcoat has its corresponding hook in the cloakroom of the past.  Stravinsky's concertos (we have it on the composer's own authority) are 'like' Bach and Mozart; Sauguet's music is admired becase 'c'est dans le vrai tradition de Gounod'; another composer's score is praised because in it 'se retrouvent les graces étincelleantes de Scarlatti'.  The composer can no longer pride himself on being true to himself--he can only receive the pale reflected glory of being true to whichever past composer is credited at the moment with having possessed the Elixir of Life.

It would be a mistake, I think, to put this attitude down to a spiritual humility comparable to the quite natural inferiority complex a modern sculptor might feel in the presence of some early Chinese carving.  It is more in the nature of a last refuge, comparable to the maudlin religiosity of a satiated rake.  After the debauches of the Impressionist period nothing is left to the modern composer in the way of a new frisson save a fashionable repentance.

--Music Ho! by Constant Lambert

Patrick: Lagniappe

This extraordinary speeding up in technical experiment gives a pleasantly vertiginous quality to the Impressionist period, which distinguishes it from all other experimental periods in music; and in spite of the fact that much of their experiment leads us to a blind alley there is an exhilaration of the barricades about the Impressionist composers that imposes a certain gratitude.  'Pioneers, O Pioneers!' we feel as we listen to Iberia, Pierrot Lunaire, and Le Sacre du Printemps.  To be a pioneer is not necessarily the proudest of boasts for a composer--but it is at least something to boast about.  We cannot turn to the present generation and sing: 'Pasticheurs, O Pasticheurs!' with the same grateful enthusiasm.

--Music Ho! by Constant Lambert

Patrick: Lagniappe

Pierrot Lunaire, moreover, cannot be considered an isolated example of the fin-de-siècle quality in Schönberg's music.  Die Glückliche Hand, with its great black cat crouching like an incubus or succubus on the hero, and its green-faced chorus peering through dark violet hangings is in the purest Edgar Allan Poe tradition, while Erwartung, with its vague hints of necrophily, brings in the Kraft-Ebbing touch (Jung at the prow and Freud at the helm) which is the twentieth century's only gift to the 'nineties.  I am not suggesting for a moment that Schönberg rises no higher than the weak decadence of Giraud.  There is in his music a fierce despair, an almost flamelike disgust which recalls the mood of Baudelaire's La Charogne and places it far above the watercolour morbidities of the chosen text.  But at the moment I am not trying to determine the purely musical value of Schönberg's various works--I merely wish to indicate the undoubted neurasthenic strain that is symptomatic of his period, and which can be found in works like Stauss' Salome and Elektra which, musically speaking, are widely differentiated from Schönberg's in technique.

--Music Ho! by Constant Lambert

Patrick: Lagniappe

The 'humanities' : perhaps this was the key word for the 1780s.  It was astonishing how much the upper classes knew.  Fox was an authority on Cassandra of Lycophron, known to scholars as 'the Obscure' : Walpole could read a blazon or print a fine edition or write about the history of Richard III: the classics had been flogged into everybody, so that the Latin poets were quoted as familiarly as educated people now quote Shakespeare: Greek was spouted in the House of Commons, though with no great success: it was in the royal library that Dr Johnson met the bibliophile king: the main legacy of the coarse Sir Robert Walpole was a fabulous collection of pictures: all society went nightly to hear Handel or the Opera: the business of the country had actually been transacted between George I and his First Minister in dog Latin: an Irish earl had possessed the temerity to argue with Bentley: Selwyn, who was an ignoramus, wrote his unimpressive letters instinctively in a mixture of English, French and Italian: in Paris, at Madame de Deffand's and at other salons, the visiting English talked almost as easily in the foreign tongue: and the scandalous Wilkes, who had belonged to the Hell-fire Club and who had set all Britain by the ears in Parliament, retired gracefully to edit Theophrastus.

--The Age of Scandal by T.H. White

Patrick: Lagniappe

The Prince de Kaunitz, who wore satin stays, passed a portion of every morning in walking up and down a room in which four valets puffed a cloud of scented powder, but each of a different colour, in order that it might fall and amalgamate into the exact nuance that best suited their master's taste (CAPTAIN JESSE)

--The Age of Scandal by T.H. White

Patrick: Lagniappe

It is useless to whine.  It has happened.  It is the logical result of our half-baked Victorian humanitarianism.  All men are not equal.  That ridiculous idea of English democracy was invented in the reign of Queen Victoria, and it has now become bureaucracy.

--The Age of Scandal by T.H. White

Patrick: Lagniappe

Well, we have lived to see the end of civilisation in England.  I was once a gentleman myself.  When I was an undergraduate at Cambridge, the Master of a college was a fabulous being, who lived in a Lodge of breath-taking beauty and incalculable antiquity, tended by housemaids, footmen and a butler.  There he consumed vintage port, wrote abstruse treatises if the spirit moved him, and lived the life of an impressive, cultivated gentleman.  Such posts were among the few and noble rewards rightly offered to scholarship by the civilisation which then existed.

When I last stayed in Cambridge, I lunched with two Masters of colleges.  Both of them had to help with the washing-up after luncheon.

--The Age of Scandal by T.H. White

[N.B.:  These are the opening lines to T.H. White's idiosyncratic work about the culture of late-eighteenth century England (that is, right before the Regency).  It is consciously written in the spirit of Lytton Strachey and is as well constructed as a work of well-wrought fiction (no surprise, since T.H. White wrote, among other marvelous things, The Sword in the Stone).  I highly recommend it.]

Patrick: Lagniappe

The cemetery is divided in two halves: French crosses on one side, English headstones on the other.  A place where time and silence have stood their ground.  In the distance, wheat fields and low hedges, trees.  I walk along rows of crosses on each of which is written the single word: INCONNU.  Row after row.  On the English side there are the pale headstones:

A SOLDIER

OF THE GREAT WAR

KNOWN UNTO GOD

In front of each grave there are flowers: flame-bursts of yellow, pink, red, orange.  Apart from roses I recognize none of the flowers; the rest remain unknown, unnamed.

The only sound is of humming bees, of light passing through trees, striking the grass.  Gradually, I become aware that the air is alive with butterflies.  The flowers are thick with the white blur of wings, the rust and black camouflage of Red Admirals, silent as ghosts.  I remember the names of only a few butterflies but I know that the Greek word psyche means both 'soul' and 'butterfly'.  And as I sit and watch, I know also that what I am seeing are the soul of the nameless dead who lie here, fluttering through the perfect air.

--The Missing of the Somme by Geoff Dyer

Patrick: Lagniappe

Theodor Adorno said famously that there could be no poetry after Auschwitz.  Instead, he failed to add, there would be photography.

--The Missing of the Somme by Geoff Dyer

Patrick: Lagniappe

In some ways, then, we talk of the horror of war instinctively and enthusiastically as Rupert Brooke and his contemporaries jumped at the chance of war 'like swimmers into cleanness leaping'.

This is not just a linguistic quibble.  Off-the-peg formulae free you from thinking for yourself about what is being said.  Whenever words are bandied about automatically and easily, their meaning is in the process of leaking away and evaporating.  The ease with which Rupert Brooke coined his 'think only this of me' heroics by embracing a ready-made formula of feeling should alert us to - and make us skeptical of - the ease with which these sentiments have been overruled by another.

--The Missing of the Somme by Geoff Dyer

Patrick: Lagniappe

In 1919, at eleven a.m., not only in Britain but throughout the Empire, all activity ceased.  Traffic came to a standstill.  In workshops and factories and at the Stock Exchange no one moved.  In London not a single telephone call was made.  Trains scheduled to leave at eleven delayed their departures by two minutes; those already in motion stopped.  In Nottingham Assize Court a demobbed soldier was being tried for murder.  At eleven o'clock the whole court, including the prisoner, stood silently for two minutes.  Later in the day the soldier was sentenced to death.

--The Missing of the Somme by Geoff Dyer

[N.B.:  This is a description of the first Armistice Day on November 11th, 1919, the anniversary of the end of the Great War (now known as World War One).]

Patrick: Lagniappe

The Great War ruptured the historical continuum, destroying the legacy of the past.  Wyndham Lewis sounds the characteristic note when he calls it 'the turning-point in the history of the earth', but there is a sense in which, for the British at least, the war helped to preserve the past even as it destroyed it.  Life in the decade and a half preceding 1914 has come to be viewed inevitably and unavoidably through the optic of the war that followed it.  The past as past was preserved by the war that shattered it.  By ushering in a future characterized by instability and uncertainty, it embalmed for ever a past characterized by stability and certainty.

--The Missing of the Somme by Geoff Dyer

Patrick: Lagniappe

On the insensible stone Don Lelio lay, almost inconscious, his form wound in a ligature, marmoreal in white stillness.  His terete members but an hour ago so apt and flexuous, were distorted by incessant twitchings and cold as snow.  Already his lips were livid; they disclosed the purity of teeth clenched and continually strident.  In the pallid throat, palpitated a vein with diminishing rhythm.  Coerulean stains appeared below the flickering lashes of the half-closed eyes.  Like rose-petals in a breeze, even the nostrils quivered.  Bloomed the abhominable unmistakeable pallor on the bow, where the soft caesarial hair was humid with the dew of the breath of Death.

--The Quest for Corvo by A.J.A. Symons

Patrick: Lagniappe

Why continue to think me horrible?  For Goodness' Sake do try to get to the Height of the Comic Cosmic Viewpoint.  You MUST traverse the Valley of the Shadow.  The Realm of White Light is only reached through the Ravine of Ultra-Violet despair.  Get up on the Comic Cone; and peep at yourself in passing.  View your meaningless gyrations and senseless circumlocutions in perspective.  Stop your sulking; and come out on the blue blue blue (turquoise, sapphire, and sometimes) indigo blue (aquamarine) lagoon.  Squatting in your stews, you taint the light-dowered air.  And your livers get into your eyes, and your hearts into your boots.  People who can't change their minds are in danger of losing them.  It is Mirth alone which keeps men sane.  Oh yes--and, Life is Mind out for a Lark.  Well, now?

--The Quest for Corvo by A.J.A. Symons

Patrick: Lagniappe

Dr. and Mrs. van Someren found his company a continual source of pleasure.  Time had added new strings to his conversational bow.  'Have you ever seen serpents sliding out of the eye-holes of skulls?' was one of his openings, derived from his explorations among the islands, one of which he had found to be littered with the whitening bones of Austrians heaped there at the end of the war of liberation.  He talked of the violet evenings and rapid dawns which he had observed from his boat, and had many stories of the quaint behaviour of his young gondoliers, one of whom he frequently described as 'a tiger with a simper'.  There was a story, too, of a dark night when his miserable meditations had been interrupted by arrest as a spy. 

--The Quest for Corvo by A.J.A. Symons

Patrick: Lagniappe

I cannot tell you how profoundly moved I was by your gift, the silver ankh.  I instantly perceived how you, and Harry, must have thought hard till you thought my thoughts.  The evidence was of many kinds, the ankh itself, the size, the metal, AND above all the adornment of it, as never an ankh has been adorned before, with my sign of the crab, and my moon, and my cross-potent-elongate, all of which make it my very, very own.  Such interest in ME, shown by such an exactly intimate knowledge of my secret and not more than half-formed desire and taste, has never been shewn before.  The effect is almost to strike me dumb.  Thank you, I do: but thanks express but feebly what I feel.

--The Quest for Corvo by A.J.A. Symons

[N.B.:  And that, folks, in the good Baron's slightly prolix prose, is why gift cards and the gift of cash, although such presents may reflect generosity (along with the sunshine and the rain that fall on both the just and the damned, indiscriminately), fail to express thoughtfulness as to the individuality of the recipient.  True gifts--as opposed to mere means of support--validate the unique worthiness of the receiver:  I know you and know what would bring you special delight.  Oh, who am I kidding, here's a fiver and quit bugging me.]

Patrick: Lagniappe

The hands of the guilty don't necessarily tremble; only in stories does a dropped glass betray agitation.  Tension is more often shown in the studied action.

--The Third Man by Graham Greene

Patrick: Lagniappe

'What I disliked about him at first sight,' Martins told me, 'was his toupée.  It was one of those obvious toupées - flat and yellow, with the hair cut straight at the back and not fitting close.  There must be something phoney about a man who won't accept baldness gracefully.

--The Third Man by Graham Greene

Patrick: Lagniappe

As we drove away I noticed Martins never looked behind - it's nearly always the fake mourners and the fake lovers who take that last look, who wait waving on platforms, instead of clearing quickly out, not looking back.  It is perhaps that they love themselves so much and want to keep themselves in the sight of others, even of the dead?

--The Third Man by Graham Greene

Patrick: Lagniappe

To me it is almost impossible to write a film play without first writing a story.  Even a film depends on more than plot, on a certain measure of characterisation, on mood and atmosphere; and these seem to me almost impossible to capture for the first time in the dull shorthand of a script.  One can reproduce an effect caught in another medium, but one cannot make the first act of creation in script form.  One must have the sense of more material than one needs to draw on.  The Third Man, therefore, thought never intended for publication, had to start as a story before those apparently interminable transformations from one treatment to another.

--Preface to The Third Man by Graham Greene

Patrick: Lagniappe

Of this money the Khan has such a quantity made that with it he could buy all the treasure in the world.  With this currency he orders all payments to be made throughout every province and kingdom and region of his empire.  And no one dares refuse it on pain of losing his life.  And I assure you that all the peoples and populations who are subject to this rule are perfectly willing to accept these papers in payment, since wherever they go they pay in the same currency, whether for goods or for pearls or precious stones or gold or silver.  With these pieces of paper they can buy anything and pay for anything.  And I can tell you that the papers that reckon as ten bezants do not weigh one.

--The Travels of Marco Polo (tr. Ronald Latham)

[N.B.:  This is just whacky.  Only some despot like the Great Khan could force others to take his paper--which is backed by nothing of value other than the Great Khan himself--in trade for valuable goods and services.  What would stop the Great Khan from flooding the market with his paper?  It's a good thing we live in the modern world where the good ol' yankee dollar is backed by . . . well, by . . . oh, I'm sure it's back by something.  But, at least we're not flooding the market with lots of newly-minted paper money (well, other than that two trillion over the last twelve months).  Where's the Great Khan when you need him in order to impose some fiscal discipline?]

Patrick: Lagniappe

On the northern side of the palace, at the distance of a bow-shot but still within the walls, the Great Khan has had made an earthwork, that is to say a mound fully 100 paces in height and over a mile in circumference.  This mound is covered with a dense growth of trees, all evergreens that never shed their leaves.  And I assure you that whenever the Great Khan hears tell of a particularly fine tree he has it pulled up, roots and all and with a quantity of earth, and transported to this mound by elephants.  No matter how big the tree may be, he is not deterred from transplanting it.  In this way he has assembled here the finest trees in the world.  In addition, he has had the mound covered with lapis lazuli, which is intensely green, so that trees and rock alike are as green as green can be and there is no other colour to be seen.  For this reason it is called the Green Mound.  On top of this mound, in the middle of the summit, he has a large and handsome palace, and this too is entirely green.  And I give you my word that mound and trees and palace form a vision of such beauty that it gladdens the hearts of all beholders.  It was for the sake of this entrancing view that the Great Khan had them constructed, as well as for the refreshment and recreation they might afford.

--The Travels of Marco Polo (tr. Ronald Latham)

Patrick: Lagniappe

When the Great Khan learnt that Nayan was a prisoner, he commanded that he should be put to death.  And this was how it was done.  He was wrapped up tightly in a carpet and then dragged about so violently, this was and that, that he died.  Their object in choosing this mode of death was so that the blood of the imperial lineage might not be spilt upon the earth, and that sun and air might not witness it.

--The Travels of Marco Polo (tr. Ronald Latham)

Patrick: Lagniappe

Here is another strange custom which I had forgotten to describe.  You may take it for a fact that, when there are two men of whom one has had a male child who has died at the age of four, or what you will, and the other has had a female child who has also died, they arrange a marriage between them.  They give the dead girl to the dead boy as a wife and draw up a deed of matrimony.  Then they burn this deed, and declare that the smoke that rises into the air goes to their children in the other world and that they get wind of it and regard themselves as husband and wife.  They hold a great wedding feast and scatter some of the food here and there and declare that that too goes to their children in the other world.  And here is something else that they do.  They draw pictures on paper of men in the guise of slaves, and of horses, clothes, coins, and furniture and then burn them; and they declare that all these become possessions of their children in the next world.  When they have done this, they consider themselves to be kinsfolk and uphold their kinship just as firmly as if the children were alive.

--The Travels of Marco Polo (tr. Ronald Latham)

Patrick: Lagniappe

[T]he doves, spiralling down in the funnel made by trees which were coming out all over in a yellow green through chestnut sheaths the colour of a horse's coat, settled one after another each outside the door to his quarters and after strutting once or twice went on quarrelling, murdering, and making love again.

--Loving by Henry Green

Patrick: Lagniappe

Of Oxford itself (which by this time he must have come to know better than any other city) he wrote to another correspondent:

This Examination [the Honour School of Literae Humaniores] is an experience.  We are doing Ancient History, Logick, Roman History, Translation.  The papers are perfectly appalling.  The vilest, vulgarest scripts, the silliest spelling, infinitives split to the midriff.  I asked Hardy what was to be done with these crimes against fair English and he answered sedately, 'Pass them over with silent contempt.'

I find that silent system admirable altogether.

This is why.

Whatever is of good, a man must get not from a teacher, but from his own toil.

The man who wants to write Good English will, ultimately, write good English, and his work will have the supreme merit of being rare.

So this mighty Alma Mater of Oxford does well not to teach the preservation of unsplit infinitives.  She teaches you how to teach yourself, and that is all, and all is everything, and there is nothing more.

--The Quest for Corvo by A.J.A. Symons

[N.B.:  You see, Baron Corvo was just ahead of his time.  Nowadays he would make an admirable school board trustee as he lectured perplexed parents on the value of teaching their children not vulgar knowledge but how to gather the rosebuds of knowledge while they may--to teach a man to fish and other such pish posh.  In my view, not teaching someone how to write but to allow that person instead to muddle along in the muck of his own errors is akin to allowing a golfer with a splice to go on practicing until he has perfected it (the slice, that is, off to the right, over there, lodged in the solarium, after knocking out that octogenarian).]

Patrick: Lagniappe

Fr. Rolfe returned to Oxford, not yet dispirited.  And, since man must rest his hopes on something, he began to have hopes of Hubert's Arthur.

[It] is an awful piece of work [he wrote].  But it will be unlike any book ever written.  And it will pay.  I go on very slowly and keep on rewriting.  I'm just beginning to know the people in it: but I alter so radically as the thing grows that I shan't let it be seen till it's done.  And I am not going to do any one single thing beside till it is done.  Mark me well.

Some of his postcards are very funny:

Have you any objection to Lady Maud de Braose being shut up in a dungeon, and fed wit the tails of haddocks, two a day, till she, saltish, perishes of pure displeasure?  They can sing her requiem on the eleventh day.

--The Quest for Corvo by A.J.A. Symons

Patrick: Lagniappe

"And that charge is now corroborated by the story of the prisoner.  My lord Bishop," said the friar with finality, turning to the great gilt throne, "this matter requires further investigation."

"Why?" asked the Bishop mildly.  "Is it not an accepted principle in witchcraft proceedings that were doubt exists, one should convict.  The Church's point of view is happily summed up in the well-known phrase: 'Burn all; God will distinguish His own.'"

--The Unfortunate Fursey by Mervyn Wall

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"If the accused should be found not guilty after the evidence has been considered," conceded the friar, "we will start again at the beginning and accept his plea of guilty.  First witness."

--The Unfortunate Fursey by Mervyn Wall

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Lalun is a member of the most ancient profession in the world.  Lilith was her very-great-grandmamma, and that was before the days of Eve, as everyone knows.  In the West, people say rude things about Lalun's profession, and write lectures about it, and distribute the lectures to young persons in order that Morality may be preserved.  In the East, where the profession is hereditary, descending from mother to daughter, nobody writes lectures or takes any notice; and that is a distinct proof of the inability of the East to manage its own affairs.

--On the City Wall from Soldiers Three and Other Stories by Rudyard Kipling

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'Fog av fightin'.  You know, Sorr, that, like makin' love, ut takes each man diff'rint.  Not I can't help bein' powerful sick whin I'm in action.  Orth'ris, here, niver stops swearin' from ind to ind, an' the only time that Learoyd opins his mouth to sing is whin he is messin' wid other people's heads; for he's a dhirty fighter is Jock.  Recruities sometime cry, an' sometime they don't know fwhat they do, an' sometime they are all for cuttin' throats an' such-like dirtiness; but some men get heavy-dead-dhrunk on the fightin'.

--With the Main Guard from Soldiers Three and Other Stories by Rudyard Kipling

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The farmhouse itself no longer looked like a beast about to spring.  (Not that it ever had, to her, for she was not in the habit of thinking that things looked exactly like other things which were as different from them in appearance as it was possible to be.)  But it had looked dirty and miserable and depressing, and when Mr Mybug had once remarked that it looked like a beast about to spring, Flora had simply not had the heart to contradict him.

--Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons

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Mr Mybug was very pleased with himself.  This was his idea of romance, Flora could see.  She knew from experience that intellectuals thought the proper - nay, the only - way to fall in love with somebody was to do it the very instant you saw them.  You met somebody, and thought they were 'A charming person.  So gay and simple.'  Then you walked home from a party with them (preferably across Hampstead Heath, about three in the morning) discussing whether you should sleep together or not.  Sometimes you asked them to go to Italy with you.  Sometimes they asked you go to Italy (preferably Portofino) with them.  You held hands, and laughed, and kissed them and called them your 'true love'.  You loved them for eight months, and then you met somebody else and began being gay and simple all over again, with small-hours' walk across Hampstead, Portofino invitation, and all.

It was very simple, gay and natural, somehow. 

--Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons

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In the evening, she proposed that the three of them should visit the Pit Theatre, in Stench Street, Seven Dials, to see a new play by Barndt Slurb called Manallalive-O! a Neo-Expressionist attempt to give dramatic form to the mental reactions of a man employed as a waiter in a restaurant who dreams that he is the double of another man who is employed as a steward on a liner, and who, on awakening and realizing that he is still a waiter employed in a restaurant and not a steward employed on a liner, goes mad and shoots his reflection in a mirror and dies.  It had seventeen scenes and only one character.  A pest house, a laundry, a lavatory, a court of law, a room in a leper's settlement and the middle of Piccadilly Circus were included in the scenes.   

--Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons

[N.B.:  Okay, okay, it's not funny now since reality has trumped satire--but keep in mind it was written in 1932.]

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For it is a peculiarity of persons who lead rich, emotional lives, and who (as the saying is_ live intensely and with a wild poetry, that they read all kinds of meanings into comparatively simple actions, especially the actions of other people, who do not live intensely and with a wild poetry.  Thus you may find them weeping passionately on their bed, and be told that you - you alone - are the cause because you said that awful thing to them at lunch.  Or they wonder why you like going to concerts; there must be more in it than meets the eye.

--Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons

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One of the disadvantages of universal education was the fact that all kinds of persons acquired familiarity with one's favourite writers.  It gave one a curious feeling; it was like seeing a drunken stranger wrapped in one's dressing gown.

--Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons

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I had, moreover, a sort of grudge against my book for not being a different book which no one could write.  Ideally, Screwtape's advice to Wormwood should have been balanced by archangelical advice to the patient's guardian angel.  Without this the picture of human life is lop-sided.  But who could supply the deficiency?  Even if a man - and he would have to be a far better man than I - could scale the spiritual heights required, what 'answerable style' could he use?  For the style would really be part of the content.  Mere advice would be no good; every sentence would have to smell of Heaven.  And nowadays even if you could write a prose like Traherne's, you wouldn't be allowed to, for the canon of 'functionalism' has disabled literature for half its functions.  (At bottom, every ideal of style dictates not only how we should say things but what sort of things we may say.)

--Foreword to The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis

Patrick: Lagniappe

I live in the Managerial Age, in a world of 'Admin'.  The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid 'dens of crime' that Dickens loved to paint.  It is not done even in concentration camps and labour camps.  In those we see its final result.  But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voice.  Hence, naturally enough, my symbol for Hell is something like the bureaucracy of a police state or the offices of a thoroughly nasty business concern.

--Foreword to The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis

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The literary symbols are more dangerous because they are not so easily recognised as symbolical.  Those of Dante are the best.  Before his angels we sink in awe.  His devils, as Ruskin rightly remarked, in their rage, spite and obscenity, are far more like what the reality must be than anything in Milton.  Milton's devils, by their grandeur and high poetry, have done great harm, and his angels owe too much to Homer and Raphael.  But the really pernicious image is Goethe's Mephistopheles.  It is Faust, not he, who really exhibits the ruthless, sleepless, unsmiling concentration upon self which is the mark of Hell.  The humorous, civilised, sensible, adaptable Mehistopheles has helped to strengthen the illusion that evil is liberating.

--Foreword to The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis

[N.B.:  C.S. Lewis is a great writer, but he really needs to stop using "really."  It rarely adds anything to a text other than emphasis.  Really.]

Patrick: Lagniappe

The Greeks did not believe that the gods were really like the beautiful human shapes their sculptors gave them.  In their poetry a god who wishes to 'appear' to a mortal temporarily assumes the likeness of a man.  Christian theology has nearly always explained the 'appearance' of an angel in the same way.  It is only the ignorant, says Dionysius in the fifth century, who dream that spirits are really winged men.

In the plastic arts these symbols have steadily degenerated.  Fra Angelico's angels carry in their face and gesture the peace and authority of Heaven.  Later come the chubby infantile nudes of Raphael; finally the soft, slim, girlish and consolatory angels of nineteenth-century art, shapes so feminine that they avoid being voluptuous only by their total insipidity - the frigid houris of a tea-table paradise.  They are a pernicious symbol.  In Scripture the visitation of an angel is always alarming; it has to begin by saying 'Fear not'.  The Victorian angel looks as if it were going to say 'There, there'.

--Foreword to The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis

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The door opened, and when he let the curtain fall he realized how dark it had become.  Anna walked stiffly towards him and said, 'There you are.  You've got what you wanted.'  Her face looked ugly in the attempt to avoid tears; it was an ugliness which bound him to her more than any beauty could have done; it isn't being happy together, he thought as though it were a fresh discovery, that makes one love - it's being unhappy together.

--The Ministry of Fear by Graham Greene

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People talk about love at first sight, about the way that men and women fall for each other immediately, but there is also such a thing as friendship at first sight.  Although Luke and Alex had said little to each other there was an immediate ease and sympathy between them.

--Paris Trance by Geoff Dyer

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We shook hands.  He had the handshake of a thin person who has learned how to make a good impression by shaking hands firmly even though that strength always feels as if it is made up of bones and nerves.  He knew there was a way of getting an intensity of feeling into shaking hands but he had not learned how to do it.  He was one of those people who have to learn everything.  I say 'one of those people' and I am not sure why.  Perhaps because, as I got to know him better, he came to seem so emphatically himself, so individual.  Perhaps it is from people like this that we come to an understanding of types.

--Paris Trance by Geoff Dyer

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It is hard to say, difficult to preserve those first impressions because they are being changed by second - and third and fourth - impressions even as they are registering as impressions.  Even when we recall with photographic exactness the way in which someone first presented themselves to us, that likeness is touched by every trace of emotion we have felt up to - and including - the moment when we are recalling the scene.

--Paris Trance by Geoff Dyer

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There are various reasons for this change.  When society had a hierarchy of orders, the nobleman, deeply conscious and proud of his rank, did not feel jealous of the man of letters; he conversed with him on familiar terms, because talent did not encroach on his rank or offend his vanity.  Then too, in that century of spleen, that century in the image of Louis XV, a century in which the aristocracy found life ready-made for them and exhausted it all too quickly, the emptiness and nothingness of mind were incalculable, and the distraction offered by an intelligent man, the pleasure provided by conversation, were highly prized.  A man of letters was a rare bird, whose intelligence and verve tickled delicate, sophisticated minds.  Easy-going hospitality, a friendly welcome, flattering attentions did not strike eighteenth-century society as too high a price to pay for the pleasure of a writer's company.

But the bourgeoisie stopped all that.  The grand passion of the bourgeoisie is equality.  The man of letters offends it because a man of letters is better known than a bourgeois.  He arouses a hidden rancour, a secret jealousy.  Moreover, the bourgeoisie, an enormous family of active people, doing business and making children, has no need of intellectual intercourse: it is satisfied with the newspaper. 

--Pages from the Goncourt Journal (ed. and tr. by Robert Baldick), 11 May 1859

Patrick: Lagniappe

Matia told us all this, and this too.  There exist--this is a fact, she has seen one herself, taken along by another midwife--there exist imitation women, complete in every detail, with all the charms and uses of real women: manikins with flesh which you can push in and which comes out again, a tongue which darts in and out for five minutes, eyes which roll, hair which you would swear was the real thing, and moistness and warmth where you would expect to find them, on sale at the manufacturer's for 15,000 francs, for the use of religious communities or rich sailors.  This one was for a ship whose name Maria has forgotten; but there are others to suit all pockets, down to male and female parts in gilded boxes which cost only 300 francs.  Maria told us that the one she saw was a wonderful sight.  It was nearly finished; there were only the toes-nails which still had to be stuck on.

--Pages from the Goncourt Journal (ed. and tr. by Robert Baldick), 6 May 1858

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Overheard at the next table at Broggi's:

'I've met his mistress.'

'But that's his wife!'

'He introduced her to me as his mistress, to rehabilitate her. . . .'

--Pages from the Goncourt Journal (ed. and tr. by Robert Baldick), 5 March 1858

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Prayer of my cousin Villedeuil:

'O Lord, let my urine be less cloudy, let the little flies stop stinging me in the backside, let me live long enough to make another hundred thousand francs, let the Emperor stay in power so that my dividends may increase, and let the rise in Anzin Coal shares be maintained.'

His housekeeper sued to read this out to him every night, and he would repeat it with his hands clasped.

--Pages from the Goncourt Journal (ed. and tr. by Robert Baldick), Undated 1854

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She also told me that one day, leaving the house of a lover who had thrown her out and whom she adored, she said to the cab-driver who had brought her: 'Take me to a brothel.'  And he retorted coldly: 'Which one?'

--Pages from the Goncourt Journal (ed. and tr. by Robert Baldick), Undated 1853

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De Lurde and Siméon, another important government official, were talking together very seriously.  Somebody who had interrupted them said: 'You are busy, I'll leave you.'  'Yes', he was told.  'We were discussing whether one should wear one's decorations on a visit to a brothel or not.  I say one shouldn't; Siméon says one should.  He says that if you do, they give you women who haven't got the pox.

--Pages from the Goncourt Journal (ed. and tr. by Robert Baldick), August 1852

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Constitutional dilatoriness, an inability to carry anything though from beginning to end without the intervention of a thousand experiments and afterthoughts, had always been part of Leonardo's character, and we must recognise it as a disease of the will similar to that which ruined the magnificent intellect of Coleridge.  'Di mi se mai fu fatta alcuna cosa' - tell me if anything was ever done - this was the first sentence which flowed from Leonardo's pen in any vacant moment.  'Di mi se mai', 'di mi se mai', again and again, dozens of times, we find it on sheets of drawings, among scribbles or mathematical jottings, or beside the most painstaking calculations, till it becomes a sort of refrain, and a clear symptom of his trouble.  With Leonardo, of course, the shrinking of the will was only intermittent and was largely cancelled by the super-human energy of his mind.

--Leonardo da Vinci by Kenneth Clark

Patrick: Lagniappe

To him landscape seems to have represented the wildness of nature, the vast, untamed background of human life; so the resemblance of his mountains to the craggy precipices of Chinese painting is no accident, for the Chinese artists also wished to symbolise the contrast between wild nature and busy organised society.  Yet between Leonardo and the Chinese there is also a profound difference.  To the Chinese a mountain landscape was chiefly a symbol, an ideograph of solitude and communion with nature, expressed in the most correct and elegant forms which the artist could command.  To Leonardo a landscape, like a human being, was part of a vast machine, to be understood part by part and, if possible, in the whole.  Rocks were not simply decorative silhouettes.  They were part of the earth's bones, with an anatomy of their own, caused by some remote seismic upheaval.  Clouds were not random curls of the brush, drawn by some celestial artist, but were the congregation of tiny drops formed from the evaporation of the sea, and soon would pour back their rain into the rivers.  Thus, Leonardo's landscapes, however wildly romantic his choice of subject matter, never take on the slightly artificial appearance of the Chinese.  To realise the deep knowledge of natural appearance behind them, we have only to compare the background of the 'Mona Lisa', in some ways the most romantic of all, with the caricature of Leaonardo's landscape in such a schoolpiece as the 'Resurrection', in Berlin, where the mountains are arranged like the scenery in a toy theatre.

--Leonardo da Vinci by Kenneth Clark

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I think that Leonardo's theories of light and shade led him to push his chiaroscuro a little further than his sensibility alone would have warranted.  We shall see an example of this when we come to examine the second version of the 'Virgin of the Rocks'.  The Paris picture shows Leonardo's natural feeling for darkness in the general setting, but the figures themselves are lit by more or less diffused rays: in the London picture the light comes from a single source and is concentrated on the heads so that a large part of each is in shadow.  The result is a loss of colour and transparency which reminds us disagreeably of Leonardo's followers; for whatever the effect of chiaroscuro and contrapposto on Leonardo himself, on his imitators it was disastrous.  He had provided them with a style, the true meaning of which they could not understand, and one which was peculiarly dangerous to mediocrities.  A bad picture in the quattrocento style still has the merit of bright decorative colour; even its crudities may be a source of charm.  A bad picture in the style of Leonardo is a horror of black shadows and squirming shapes.

--Leonardo da Vinci by Kenneth Clark

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We have now reached what is commonly held to be the climax of Leonardo's career as a painter, the 'Last Supper'.  It is a point at which the student of Leonardo must hesitate, appalled at the quantity of writing which this masterpiece has already evoked, and at the unquestionable authority of the masterpiece itself.  And almost more numbing than this authority is its familiarity.  How can we criticise a work which we have all known from childhood?  We have come to regard Leonardo's 'Last Supper' more as a work of nature than a work of man, and we no more think of questioning its shape than we should question the shape of the British Isles on the map.  Before such a picture the difficulty is not so much to analyse our feelings as to have any feelings at all.  But there are alternatives to the direct aesthetic approach.  We may profitably imagine the day when the 'Last Supper' did not exist, and Leonardo was faced with a blank wall and an exacting patron.

--Leonardo da Vinci by Kenneth Clark

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'Tis so with couples: they do make up differences in all manner of queer ways,' said the bark-ripper.  'I knowed a woman; and the husband o' her went away for four-and-twenty year.  And one night he came home when she was sitting by the fire, and there-upon he sat down himself on the other side of the chimney-corner.  "Well," says she, "have ye got any news?"  "Don't know as I have," says he; "have you?"  "No," says she, "except that my daughter by the husband that succeeded 'ee was married last month, which was a year after I was made a widow by him."  "Oh! Anything else?" he says.  "No," says she.  And there they sat, one on each side of the chimney-corner, and were found by the neighbours sound asleep in their chairs, not having known what to talk about at all.'

--The Woodlanders by Thomas Hardy

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And yet to every bad there is a worse.

--The Woodlanders by Thomas Hardy

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[S]he was determined to be loyal if he proved true; and the determination to love one's best will carry a heart a long way towards making that best an evergrowing thing.

--The Woodlanders by Thomas Hardy

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You should know that all the great lords who are of the lineage of Chinghiz Khan are conveyed for burial to a great mountain called Altai.  When one of them dies, even if it be at a distance of a hundred days' journey from this mountain, he must be brought here for burial.  And here is a remarkable fact: when the body of a Great Khan is being carried to this mountain--be it forty days' journey or more or less--all those who are encountered along the route by which the body is being conveyed are put to the sword by the attendants who are escorting it.  'Go!' they cry, 'and serve your lord in the next world.'  For they truly believe that all those whom they put to death must go and serve the Khan in the next world.  And they do the same thing with horses: when the Khan dies, they kill all his best horses, so that he may have them in the next world.  It is a fact that, when Mongu Khan died, more than 20,000 men were put to death, having encountered his body on the way to burial.

--The Travels of Marco Polo (tr. Ronald Latham)

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Another province, also subject to the Great Khan, is Uighuristan.  It is a large province containing many cities and towns.  The chief city, which is called Kara Khoja, has many other cities and towns dependent on it.  The people are idolaters, but they include many Christians of the Nestorian sect and some Saracens.  The Christians often intermarry with the idolaters.  They declare that the king who originally ruled over them was not born of human stock, but arose from a sort of tuber generated by the sap of trees, which we call esca; and from him all the others descended.  The idolaters are very well versed in their own laws and traditions and are keen students of the liberal arts.  The land produces grain and excellent wine.  But in winter the cold here is more intense than is known in any other part of the world.

--The Travels of Marco Polo (tr. Ronald Latham)

Patrick: Lagniappe

In this country originate the precious stones called balass rubies, of great beauty and value.  They are dug out of rocks among the mountains by tunnelling to great depths, as is done by miners working a vein of silver.  They are found in one particular mountain called Sighinan.  And I would have you know that they are mined only for the king and by his orders; no one else could go to the mountain and dig for these gems without incurring instant death, and it is forbidden under pain of death and forfeiture to export them out of the kingdom.  The king sends them by his own men to other kings and princes and great lords, to some as tribute, to others as a token of amity; and some he barters for gold and silver.  This he does so that these balass rubies may retain their present rarity and value.  If he let other men mine them and export them throughout the world, there would be so many of them on the market that the price would fall and they would cease to be so precious.  That is why he has imposed such a heavy penalty on anyone exporting them without authority.

--The Travels of Marco Polo (tr. Ronald Latham)

[N.B.:  Although written at the beginning of the fourteenth century, this book might have been written today as it aptly describes the modern diamond trade.]

Patrick: Lagniappe

It is as Kevin said long ago: crime begins in egotism: inordinate vanity.  A normal girl, even an emotional adolescent, might be heart-broken that her adopted brother no longer considered her the most important thing in his life; but she would work it out in sobs, or sulks, or being difficult, or deciding that she was going to renounce the world and go into a convent, or half a dozen other methods that the adolescent uses in the process of adjustment.  But with an egotism like Betty Kane's there is no adjustment.  She expects the world to adjust to her.  The criminal always does, by the way.  There was never a criminal who didn't consider himself ill-done-by.'

--The Franchise Affair by Josephine Tey

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'But', someone had objected, 'there have been monsters of vanity and selfishness who were not criminal.'

'Only because they have victimised their wives instead of their bank,' Kevin pointed out.  'Tomes have been written trying to define the criminal, but it is a very simple definition after all.  The criminal is a person who makes the satisfaction of his own immediate personal wants the mainspring of his actions.  You can't cure him of his egotism, but you can make the indulgence of it not worth his while.  Or almost not worth his while.'

--The Franchise Affair by Josephine Tey

Patrick: Lagniappe

For Robert, being old-fashioned, believed in retribution.  He might not go all the way with Moses - an eye was not always compensation for an eye - but he certainly agreed with Gilbert: the punishment should fit the crime.  He certainly did not believe that a few quiet talks with the chaplain and a promise to reform made a criminal into a respect-worthy citizen.  'Your true criminal,' he remembered Kevin saying one night, after a long discussion on penal reform, 'has two unvarying characteristics, and it is these two characteristics which make him a criminal.  Monstrous vanity and colossal selfishness.  And they are both integral, as ineradicable, as the texture of the skin.. You might as well talk of "reforming" the colour of one's eyes.'

--The Franchise Affair by Josephine Tey

Patrick: Lagniappe

'Hooray!  More power to him.  I begin to like the boy.  You put a few wedges into that split, Rob - casual-like - and see that he marries some nice stupid English girl who will give him five children and give the rest of the neighbourhood tennis parties between showers on Saturday afternoons.  It's a much nicer kind of stupidity than standing up on platforms and holding forth on subjects you don't know the first thing about.'

--The Franchise Affair by Josephine Tey

Patrick: Lagniappe

It is very hard to keep count of time in the Gate, and, besides, time doesn't matter to me.  I draw my sixty rupees fresh and fresh every month.  A very, very long while ago, when I used to be getting three hundred and fifty rupees a month, and pickings, on a big timber-contract at Calcutta, I had a wife of sorts.  But she's dead now.  People said that I killed her by taking to the Black Smoke.  Perhaps, I did, but it's so long since that it doesn't matter.  Sometimes when I first came to the Gate, I used to feel sorry for it; but that's all over and done with long ago, and I draw my sixty rupees fresh and fresh every month, and am quite happy.  Not drunk  happy, you know, but always quiet and soothed and contented.

--The Gate of the Hundred Sorrows  from Plain Tales from the Hills by Rudyard Kipling

Patrick: Lagniappe

It is a curious thing that, when a man hates or loves beyond reason, he is ready to go beyond reason to gratify his feelings; which he would not do for money or power merely.

--The Bisara of Pooree  from Plain Tales from the Hills by Rudyard Kipling

Patrick: Lagniappe

Bronckhorst was not nice in any way.  He had no respect for the pretty public and private lies that make life a little less nasty than it is.  His manner towards his wife was coarse.  There are many things--including actual assault with the clenched fist--that a wife will endure; but seldom a wife can bear--as Mrs Bronckhorst bore--with a long course of brutal, hard chaff, making light of her weaknesses, her headaches, her small fits of gaiety, her dresses, her queer little attempts to make herself attractive to her husband when she knows that she is not what she has been, and--worst of all--the love that she spends on her children.  That particular sort of heavy-handed jest was specially dear to Bronckhorst.  I suppose that he had first slipped into it, meaning no harm, in the honeymoon, when folk find heir ordinary stock of endearments run short, and so go to the other extreme to express their feelings.  A similar impulse makes a man say, 'Hutt, you old beast!' when a favourite horse nuzzles his coat-front.  Unluckily, when the reaction of marriage sets in, the form of speech remains, and, the tenderness having died out, hurts the wife more than she cares to say.  But Mrs Bronckhorst was devoted to her 'Teddy' as she called him.  Perhaps that was why he objected to her.  Perhaps--this is only a theory to account for his infamous behaviour later on--he gave way to the queer, savage feeling that sometimes takes by the throat a husband twenty years married, when he sees, across the table, the same, same face of his wedded wife, and knows that, as he has sat facing it, so must he continue to sit until the day of its death or his own.  Most men and all women know the spasm.

--The Bronckhorst Divorce-Case  from Plain Tales from the Hills by Rudyard Kipling

Patrick: Lagniappe

How he kept his oath, and what it cost him in the beginning nobody knows.  He certainly managed to compass the hardest thing that a man who has drunk heavily can do.  He took his peg and wine at dinner; but he never drank alone, and never let what he drank have the least hold on him.

--In Error  from Plain Tales from the Hills by Rudyard Kipling

Patrick: Lagniappe

We are a high-caste and enlightened race, and infant-marriage is very shocking, and the consequences are sometimes peculiar; but, nevertheless, the Hindu notion--which is the Continental notion, which is the aboriginal notion--of arranging marriages irrespective of the personal inclinations of the married, is sound.  Think for a minute, and you will see that it must be so; unless, of course, you believe in 'affinities.'  In which case you had better not read this tale.  How can a man who has never married, who cannot be trusted to pick up at sight a moderately sound horse, whose head is hot and upset with visions of domestic felicity, go about the choosing of a wife?  He cannot see straight or think straight if he tries; and the same disadvantages exist in the case of a girl's fancies.  But when mature, married, and discreet people arrange a match between a boy and a girl, they do it sensibly, with a view to the future, and the young couple live happily ever afterwards.  As everybody knows.

--Kidnapped from Plain Tales from the Hills by Rudyard Kipling

Patrick: Lagniappe

Inventors seem very much alike as a caste.  They talk loudly, especially about 'conspiracies of monopolists;' they beat upon the table with their fists; and they secrete fragments of their inventions about their persons.

--A Germ-Destroyer from Plain Tales from the Hills by Rudyard Kipling