Category Archives: commonplace

on belief

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“ ‘I wonder,’ Howard said. ‘You have to believe, and then it will help you. It’s the same with the Lord. If you belief in the Lord, then there is a Lord for you; if you don’t believe in Him, there is no God for you – nobody who lights up the stars for you and directs the traffic in the heavens. Now, don’t let’s argue about such details; let’s come to the plain story.’ ”

(B. Traven, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, p. 187.)

“ ‘Conscience,’ he began again reflecting on this word and speaking to himself, ‘conscience! What a thing! If you believe that there is such a thing as conscience, it will pester you and blast hell out of you, but, on the other hand, if you don’t believe in the existence of conscience, what can it do to you? And I don’t believe in it any more than I believe in hell. Makes me sick, so much thinking and fussing about nonsense. Let’s hit the hay.’ &rdquo

(B. Traven, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, p. 248.)

the dialogue

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“The principal influence on the origin of dialogue as a genre was of course Socrates: his associates wanted to bear testimony to the personality and teachings of a man who refused to write anything himself and whose philosophic ideals – in theory, at any rate – were of cooperative dialectic. Yet tensions between dialogue and democracy are immediately apparent in Socrates’ activities. In Plato’s Protagoras, the character of Socrates insists on conversing by way of short question and answer; yet in the Gorgias, we are told that such a method (brachylogy) is impossible with a large audience and can only take place with a select few. So Socratic dialectic, which arguably could not have flourished outside a democratic context, is nevertheless a pursuit of the leisured elite.

When we consider Plato himself, the most brilliant practitioner of the dialogue genre, the tensions and ironies multiply. Quite apart from the general irony that all dialogues written by a single author are in a sense monologues, Plato was one of democracy’s most implacable critics, and one of the central reasons for his hostility was that the Athenian democracy had put Socrates to death – at least partly, it could be claimed, because of the way he did dialogue, interrogating self-appointed experts and deflating their pretensions to knowledge. Yet Book One of the Republic can itself be read as an implicit critique of the historical Socrates’ style of dialogue (and of course Plato’s works do not just consist of brief question and answer: there are plenty of longer speeches, including, with tongue doubtless in cheek, one in the Protagoras about the origins of brachylogy). Furthermore, to add an extra layer to the complexity, Plato’s own dialogues, including the Republic, would almost certainly not be permitted into the ‘ideally just’ (and certainly not democratic) state outlined in the Republic: they break many of the censorship rules laid down there. Plato’s dialogues, in other words, simultaneously arise from the culture of democratic Athens and offer a robust critique of that culture, and would be banned by the philosopher-rulers whom Plato (apparently) advocates instead.”

(from Angela Hobbs, “Too much talking in class”, review of The End of Dialogue in Antiquity, ed. Simon Goldhill, p. 17 in the 18 & 25 Dec 2009 TLS.)

the more oil is lost, the higher the price

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“They went up the river on the right shore. The whole road, an ugly dirt road at that, was covered with crude oil. It seemed to break through cracks and holes in the ground. There were even pools and ponds of oil. It came mostly through leaks in the pipes and from overflowing tanks which were lined up on the hills along the shore. Brooks of crude oil ran down like water into the river. Nobody seemed to care about the loss of these thousands and thousands of barrels of oil, which soaked the soil and polluted the river. So rich in oil was this part of the world then that the company managers and directors seemed not to mind when a well which brought in twenty thousand barrels a day caught fire and burned down to its last drop. Who would care about three or four hundred thousand barrels of oil running away ever week and being lost owing to busted pump lines, to filling tanks carelessly, or to not notifying the pumpman that while he has been pumping for days, sections of the pipe lines have been taken out, to be replaced by new ones. The more oil is lost, the higher the price. Three cheers, then, for broken pipes and drunken pumpmen and tank-attendants!”

(B. Traven, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, p. 22.)

the death of seneca

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“But in Tacitus’s version of events, the death is marked, too, by a surprising and self-conscious lacuna: Tacitus tells us that Seneca, his ‘eloquence persisting at each final moment, summon scribes are dictated a considerable amount to them’, but that he,Tacitus, will ‘refrain from adapting’ this material, since it has already been published. (As it happens, Seneca’s final thoughts, whatever they were, have not been preserved.) This most notorious death scene has an absence at its heart: the extraordinarily prolific and voluble philosopher-playwright, whose writings dwell so often on how best to face our final moments, speaks right up to the end, but in words we cannot hear. Tacitus’s suggestive omission silences Seneca, and claims a kind of authority over him. This adds to the nuanced exploration of control in the passage: Seneca’s control of his own departure, Nero’s of Seneca, and Tacitus’s as narrating author, of them both.”

(Victoria Moul, from “A long, enduring end,” review of James Ker’s The Deaths of Seneca, p. 13 in the 23 April 2010 Times Literary Supplement.)

public labor

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“[The artist] undertakes his artistic labour not as a personal effort on his own private behalf, but as a public labour on behalf of the community to which he belongs . . . It is a labour to which he invites the community to participate; for their function is not passively to accept his work, but to do it over again for themselves . . .

Individualism conceives a man as if he were God . . . but a man, in his art as in everything else, is a finite being. Everything that he does is done in relation to others like himself.”

(R. G. Collingwood, The Principles of Art, pp. 315–6, quoted in Klaus Ottmann’s Yves Klein by Himself, p. 155.)

aristocrats

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“What Gabriel had to realize was that aristocrats, unlike intellectuals, had no desire to improve or prove themselves. In the world of the salons there was no future, only the present. One looked at a painting, one consumed a lime ice, one played a round of cards, one talked, walked, shopped, rode a horse, cooked up a practical joke. The absence of time was paradisal, if paradise is conceded to be splendid but dull. No one struggled to memorize the names of foreign painters, to question the meaning of money or society, to talk amusingly, to stand at a viewing distance from the moment.”

(Edmund White, Caracole, p. 259.)

some one is listening while they are talking

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“Nothing makes any difference as long as some one is listening while they are talking. If the same person does the talking and the listening why so much the better there is just by so much the greater concentration. One may really indeed say that that is the essence of genius, of being most intensely alive, that is being one who is at the same time talking and listening. It is really that that makes one a genius. And it is necessary to be at once talking and listening, doing both things, not as if there were one thing, not as if they were two things, but doing them, well if you like, like the motor going inside and the car moving, they are part of the same thing.”

(Gertrude Stein, Lectures in America, “Portraits and Repetition,” p. 170. )

king kong in literature

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“The Auxiliary on guard with him had been in the Navy. Some time ago this man had seen ‘King Kong,’ the film of an outsize in apes that was twenty foot tall. Roe’s explanation was that the experience had had a lasting effect on his adjectives. One in particular, ‘conga,’ he used to cover almost everything.

‘A conga night,’ he said. He called each Rescue man ‘cock.’ He remarked that their whisky was dodgy. He went by the name of ‘Shiner,’ because his surname was Wright.”

(Henry Green, Caught (1943), p. 41.)

butler’s odyssey

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“Then Minerva said, ‘Father, son of Saturn, King of kinds, it served Ægisthus right, and so it would any one else who does as he did; but Ægisthus is neither here nor there; it is for Ulysses that my heart bleeds, when I think of his sufferings in that lonely sea-girt island, far away, poor man, from all his friends. It is an island covered with forest, in the very middle of the sea, and a goddess lives there, daughter of the magician Atlas, who looks after the bottom of the ocean, and carries the great columns that keep heaven and earth asunder. This daughter of Atlas had got hold of poor unhappy Ulysses, and keeps trying by every kind of blandishment to make him forget his home, so that he is tired of life, and thinks of nothing but how he may once more see the smoke of his own chimneys.’ ”

(Homer, The Odyssey, trans. Samuel Butler, book I, lines 44–60.)

people cringe

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“For many years I have worked in film production and seen more than once how the directors, during the screenings before public release, said that these were just sketches, something that would have to be reworked in the future.

People cringe when showing something that’s most precious to them.”

(Viktor Shklovsky, Energy of Delusion: A Book on Plot, trans. Shushan Avagyan, p. 7.)