Category Archives: commonplace

conduct of the goths at athens

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“We are told, that in the sack of Athens the Goths had collected all the libraries, and were on the verge of setting fire to this funeral pile of Grecian learning, had not one of their chiefs, of more refine policy than his brethren, dissuaded them from the design; by the profound observation, that as long as the Greeks were addicted to the study of books, they would never apply themselves to the exercise of arms.”

(Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, vol. I, chapter X; p. 282 in volume 1 of the Penguin edition.)

spain

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“Spain, by a very singular fatality, was the Peru and Mexico of the old world. The discovery of the rich western continent by the Phœnicians, and the oppression of the simple natives, who were compelled to labour in their own mines for the benefit of strangers, form an exact type of the more recent history of Spanish America.”

(Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, vol. I, chapter VI; p. 180 in volume 1 of the Penguin edition.)

the originality of florine stettheimer

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“Part of Florine’s originality was that, for her, art was anecdote in an era when all the modern schools had decided that anecdote was what art was not. Duchamp suggested, considering Florine, ‘Why not revive the anecdote in painting?’ Well, why not? An anecdotalism such as Florine’s draws upon a highly cultivated symbolism so that her work echoes the humanist revival in being a miniature Renaissance of one artist.”

(Parker Tyler, Florine Stettheimer: A Life in Art, p. 142.)

il n’y a pas de solution parce qu’il n’y a pas de problème

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“But today, when the police no longer exist, things aren’t the same. When there’s a mystery, it goes unexplained. Bizarre cases are no longer solved. And perhaps that’s not a bad thing. In the past, the police had an answer for every question, but now, people realize that they don’t really need answers to every question, and they don’t really need the police either. Consequently, we haven’t even opened an investigation into where the police disappeared to. For two or three russet moons, people organized a collection so that the city might buy back a policeman, bur in the end they used the money for something else, I don’t remember what. New curtains for the school, perhaps.”

(Manuela Draeger, “North of the Wolverines,” p. 48 in In the Time of the Blue Ball, trans. Brian Evenson.)

selected adventures of st. columba

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CHAPTER XXVII.

How a Wild Boar was destroyed through his prayers.

On one occasion when the blessed man was staying some days in the Scian island (Sky), he left the brethren and went alone a Little farther than usual to pray; and having entered a dense forest he met a huge wild boar that happened to be pursued by hounds. As soon as the saint saw him at some distance, he stood looking intently at him. Then raising his holy hand and invoking the name of God in fervent prayer, he said to it, “Thou shalt proceed no further in this direction: perish in the spot which thou hast now reached.” At the sound of these words of the saint in the woods, the terrible brute was not only unable to proceed farther, but by the efficacy of his word immediately fell dead before his face.

CHAPTER XXVIII.

How an Aquatic Monster was driven off by virtue of the blessed man’s prayer.

On another occasion also, when the blessed man was living for some days in the province of the Picts, he was obliged to cross the river Nesa (the Ness); and when he reached the bank of the river, he saw some of the inhabitants burying an unfortunate man, who, according to the account of those who were burying him, was a short time before seized, as he was swimming, and bitten most severely by a monster that lived in the water; his wretched body was, though too late, taken out with a hook, by those who came to his assistance in a boat. The blessed man, on hearing this, was so far from being dismayed, that he directed one of his companions to swim over and row across the coble that was moored at the farther bank. And Lugne Mocumin hearing the command of the excellent man, obeyed without the least delay, taking off all his clothes, except his tunic, and leaping into the water. But the monster, which, so far from being satiated, was only roused for more prey, was lying at the bottom of the stream, and when it felt the water disturbed above by the man swimming, suddenly rushed out, and, giving an awful roar, darted after him, with its mouth wide open, as the man swam in the middle of the stream. Then the blessed man observing this, raised his holy hand, while all the rest, brethren as well as strangers, were stupefied with terror, and, invoking the name of God, formed the saving sign of the cross in the air, and commanded the ferocious monster, saying, “Thou shalt go no further, nor touch the man; go back with all speed.” Then at the voice of the saint, the monster was terrified, and fled more quickly than if it had been pulled back with ropes, though it had just got so near to Lugne, as he swam, that there was not more than the length of a spear-staff between the man and the beast. Then the brethren seeing that the monster had gone back, and that their comrade Lugne returned to them in the boat safe and sound, were struck with admiration, and gave glory to God in the blessed man. And even the barbarous heathens, who were present, were forced by the greatness of this miracle, which they themselves had seen, to magnify the God of the Christians.

(Adomnán, Vita Columbæ, pp. 55–56 in the William Reeves edition of 1874.)

201.

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“201. For someone who has no knowledge of such things a diagram representing the inside of a radio receiver will be a jumble of meaningless lines. But if he is acquainted with the apparatus and it’s function, that drawing will be a significant picture for him.

Given some solid figure (say in a picture) that means nothing to me at present – can I at will imagine it as meaningful? That’s as if I were asked: Can I imagine an object of any old shape as an appliance? But to be applied to what?

One class of corporeal shapes might readily be imagined as dwellings for beasts or men. Another class as weapons. Another as models of landscapes. Etc. etc. So here I know how I can ascribe meaning to a meaningless shape.”

(Wittgenstein, Zettel, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe)

poetry & prose

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“A friend tells me: ‘Any plan to alternate poems with prose is suicide, because poems demand an attitude, a concentration, even an alienation completely different from the mental attunement required for prose, so your readers will have to be switching voltage every other page and that’s how you burn out lightbulbs.’

Could be, but I carry on stubbornly convinced that poetry and prose reciprocally empower each other and that alternating readings won’t do any harm. In my friend’s point of view I detect once again that seriousness that tries to place poetry on a privileged pedestal, which is why most contemporary readers can’t get far enough away from poetry in verse, without on the other hand rejecting what reaches them in novels and stories and songs and movies and plays, a fact which suggest a) that poetry has lost none of its deep power but that b) the formal aristocracy of poetry in verse (and above all the way poets and publishers package and present it) provokes resistance and even rejection on the part of many readers otherwise as sensitive as anyone else to poetry. . . .”

(Julio Cortázar, from Save Twilight: Selected Poems, trans. Stephen Kessler, p. 25.)

borges on illustration & henry james

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“BURGIN: I don’t know if I believe in pictures with a book. Do you?

BORGES: Henry James didn’t. Henry James didn’t because he said that pictures were taken in at a glance and so, of course, as the visual element is stronger, well, a picture makes an impact on you, that is, if you see, for example, a picture of a man, you see him all at once, while if you read an account of him or a description of him, then the description is successive. The illustration is entire, it is, in a certain sense, in eternity, or rather in the present. Then he said what was the use of his describing a person in forty or fifty lines when that description was blotted by the illustration. I think some editor or other proposed to Henry James an illustrated edition and first he wouldn’t accept the idea, and then he accepted it on condition that there would be no pictures of scenes, or of characters. For the pictures should be, let’s say, around the text, no?—they should never overlap the text. So he felt much the same way as you do, no?

BURGIN: Would you dislike an edition of your works with illustrations?

BORGES: No, I wouldn’t, because in my books I don’t think the visual element is very important. I would like it because I don’t think it would do the text any harm, and it might enrich the text. But perhaps Henry James had a definite idea of what his characters were like, though one doesn’t get that idea. When one reads his books, one doesn’t feel that he, that he could have known the people if he met them in the street. Perhaps I think of Henry James as being a finer storyteller than he was a novelist. I think his novels are very burdensome to read, no? Don’t you think so? I think Henry James was a great master of situations, in a sense, of his plot, but his characters hardly exist outside the story. I think of his characters as being unreal. I think that the characters are made – well, perhaps, in a detective story, for example, the characters are made for the plot, for the sake of the plot, and that all his long analysis is perhaps a kind of fake, or maybe he was deceiving himself.”

(Richard Burgin, Conservations with Jorge Luis Borges (1968), pp. 69–71.)

images

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“ ‘And now,’ he continued, getting more heated, ‘it’s time you knew the facts. You should know that chess pieces are much, much older than people. Humans were created many centuries after chess pieces, and they are gross imitations of pawns and bishops, kings and queens. Even their horses are imitations of ours. Then they built towers to imitate what we had. After that, they did a lot of other things, but those are superfluous. And everything that occurs among human beings, especially the most important things, which one studies in history, are nothing more than confused imitations and a hodgepodge of variants of the great games of chess we have played. We are the exemplars and governors of humanity. Those things I told you before concerned the other images, and I feel sorry for them, but we are truly eternal. And we, effectively, are in charge of the world. We are the only ones who have a raison d’être and an ideal.’ ”

(Massimo Bontempelli, The Chess Set in the Mirror, trans. Estelle Gilson, pp. 49–50.)