Category Archives: commonplace

formless

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“As for myself, O Lord, if I am to tell you all that you have given me to understand about this formless matter, and if I am to set it down in this book, I must confess that when I first heard it mentioned, I did not understand what it meant, nor did those who told me of it. I used to picture it to myself in countless different forms, which means that I did not really picture it at all, because my mind simply conjured up hideous and horrible shapes. They were perversions of the natural order, but shapes nevertheless. I took ‘formless’ to mean, not something entirely without form, but some shape so monstrous and grotesque that if I were to see it, my senses would recoil and my human frailty quail before it. But what I imagined was not truly formless, that is, it was not something bereft of form of any sort. It was formless only by comparison with other more graceful forms. Yet reason told me that if I wished to conceive of something that was formless in the true sense of the world, I should have to picture something deprived of any trace of form whatsoever, and this I was unable to do. For I could sooner believe that what had no form at all simply did not exist than imagine matter in an intermediate stage between form and non-existence, some formless thing that was next to being nothing at all.”

(St. Augustine, Confessions, trans. R. S. Pine-Coffin, book XII, chapter 6, p. 283.)

the language of the house itself

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“It was the language of the house itself that spoke to him, writing out for him with surpassing breadth and freedom the associations and conceptions, the ideals and possibilities of the mistress. Never, he felt sure, had he seen so many things so unanimously ugly – operatively, ominously so cruel. He was glad to have found this last name for the whole character; ‘cruel’ somehow played into the subject for an article – an article that his impression put straight into his mind. He would write about the heavy horrors that could still flourish, that lifted their undiminished heads, in an age so proud of its short way with false gods; and it would be funny if what he should have got from Mrs. Lowder were to prove after all but a small amount of copy. Yet the great thing, really the dark thing, was that, even while he thought of the quick column he might add up, he felt it less easy to laugh at the heavy horrors than to quail before them. He couldn’t describe and dismiss them collectively, call them either Mid-Victorian or Early – not being certain they were rangeable under one rubric. It was only manifest they were splendid and were furthermore conclusively British. They constituted an order and abounded in rare material – precious woods, metals, stuffs, stones. He had never dreamed of anything so fringed and scalloped, so buttoned and corded, drawn everywhere so tight and curled everywhere so thick. He had never dreamed of so much gilt and glass, so much satin and plush, so much rosewood and marble and malachite. But it was above all the solid forms, the wasted finish, the misguided cost, the general attestation of morality and money, a good conscience and a big balance. These things finally represented for him a portentous negation of his own world of thought – of which, for that matter, in presence of them, he became as for the first time hopelessly aware. They revealed it to him by their merciless difference.”

(Henry James, The Wings of the Dove, book 2, chapter 2)

reductive arguments

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“Coming away from a violent discussion at Magny’s, my heart pounding in my breast, my throat and tongue parched, I feel convinced that every political argument boils down to this: ‘I am better than you are’, every literary argument to this: ‘I have more taste than you’, every argument about art to this: ‘I have better eyes than you’, every argument about music to this: ‘I have a finer eat than you’. It is alarming to see how, in every discussion, we are always alone and never make converts. Perhaps that is why God made us two.”

(Edmond & Jules de Goncourt, journal entry for 8 June 1863, trans. Robert Baldick.)

a picture of savage life

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“70. Beneventum was built by Diomede, the nephew of Meleager (Cluver, tom. ii. p. 1195, 1196). The Calydonian hunt is a picture of savage life (Ovid. Metamorph. l. viii.). Thirty or forty heroes were leagues against a hog: the brutes (not the hog) quarreled with a lady for the head.”

(Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, vol. IV, chapter XLI; p. 646 in volume 2 of the Penguin edition.)

not as good as st. martin

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“73. I know not how to select or specify the miracles contained in the Vitæ Patrum of Rosweyde, as the number very much exceeds the thousand pages of that voluminous work. An elegant specimen may be found in the Dialogues of Sulpicius Severus, and his life of St. Martin. He reveres the monks of Egypt; yet he insults them with the remark, that they never raised the dead; whereas the bishop of Tours had restored three dead men to life.”

(Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, vol. III, chapter XXXVII; p. 428 in volume 2 of the Penguin edition.)

cavell on stein

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“This recent conjunction of ideas of the diurnal, of weddedness as a mode of intimacy, and of the projection of a metaphysics of repetition, sets me musing on an old suggestion I took away from reading in Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans. She speaks, I seem to recall, to the effect that the knowledge of others depends upon an appreciation of their repeatings (which is what we are, which is what we have to offer). This knowing of others as knowing what they are always saying and believing and doing would, naturally, be Stein’s description of, or direction for, how her reader is to know her own most famous manner of writing, the hallmark of which is its repeatings. The application of this thought here is the suggestion that marriage is an emblem of the knowledge of others not solely because of its implication of reciprocity but because it implies a devotion in repetition, to dailiness. ‘The little life of the everyday’ is the wife’s description of marriage in The Children of Paradise, as she wonders how marriage can be a match for the romantic glamour of distance and drama. A relationship ‘grown sick with obligations’ is the way Amanda Bonner describes a marriage that cannot maintain reciprocity – what she calls mutuality in everything. (This is a promissory remark to myself to go back to Stein’s work. But the gratitude I feel to it now should be expressed now, before looking it up, because it comes from a memory of the work as providing one of those nightsounds or daydrifts of mood whose orientation has more than once prevented a good intuition from getting lost. This is not unlike a characteristic indebtedness one acquires to films. It is just such a precious help that is easiest to take from a writer without saying thanks – and not, perhaps, because one grudges the thanks but because one awaits an occasion for giving it which never quite seems to name itself.)”

(Stanley Cavell, “The Same and Different: The Awful Truth,” p. 177 in The Cavell Reader.)

the adventures of the princess honoria

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“When Attila declared his resolution of supporting the cause of his allies, the Vandals and the Franks, at the same time, and almost in the spirit of romantic chivalry, the savage monarch professed himself the lover and the champion of the princess Honoria. The sister of Valetinian was educated in the palace of Ravenna; and as her marriage might be productive of some danger to the state, she was raised, by the title of Augusta, above the hopes of the most presumptuous subject. But the fair Honoria had no sooner attained the sixteenth year of her age, than she detested the importunate greatness, which must for ever exclude her from the comforts of honourable love: in the midst of vain and unsatisfactory pomp, Honoria sighed, yielded to the impulse of nature, and threw herself into the arms of chamberlain Eugenius. Her guilt and shame (such is the absurd language of imperious man) were soon betrayed by the appearances of pregnancy: but the disgrace of the royal family was published to the world by the imprudence of the empress Placidia; who dismissed her daughter, after a strict and shameful confinement, to a remote exile at Constantinople.”

(Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, vol. III, chapter XXXV; p. 332 in volume 2 of the Penguin edition.)

the loss of rome

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“149. I have disdained to mention a very foolish, and probably a false report (Procop. de Bell. Vandal. l. i. c. 2.), that Honorius was alarmed by the loss of Rome, till he understood that it was not a favourite chicken of that name, but only the capital of the world, which had been lost. Yet even this story is some evidence of the public opinion.”

(Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, vol. III, chapter XXXI; p. 218 in volume 2 of the Penguin edition.)

list of names for the biblical nameless

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“Note: We are expressly told in Exodus 2:21 that Moses was given for his wife, Zipporah, the daughter of Reuel (aka. Jethro) the Midianite, the priest of Midian. We are not expressly told that he married anyone else. It is possible for Zipporah to be of Cushite/Ethiopian ancestry if Reuel’s wife was an Ethiopian, or even the mind-staggering possibility that Abraham’s 3rd wife Keturah was an Ethiopian. (His 2nd wife Hagar was an Egyptian.)”

(from “The Cushitic wife of Moses” in Wikipedia’s List of names for the biblical nameless.)