“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.)
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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.)
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(Letter from Pablo Picasso to Gertrude Stein, from Room 26 Cabinet of Curiosities.)
The child is feather to the man;
mice don’t brood. The swiftest race
to the pie. In the sky an encomium
rewards all who notice it.
This isn’t the way I meant to live
but I must or will have to move.
In broader streets the video preference
startles a dozing anomaly—“Come again?”
I just did. I want it to be all clean
and tasting of only distance and water.
There is a stairway in my pocket
and pheasants on the railway
and all I ever had was to be yours,
your instructor. Again I fell for it,
his pencil sharpener. Over time that
made him quite difficult and complicated.
Now is only sun, sunstrife and sea.
(John Ashbery)
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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.)