Idleness

Bertrand Russell, ‘In Praise of Idleness’ In In Praise of Idleness: and Other Essays (London: George Allen and Unwin Ltd, 1935),  pp. 9-29 (p. 14):

Much that we take for granted about the desirability of work is derived from this system and, being pre-industrial, is not adapted to the modern world. Modern technic has made it possible for leisure, within limits, to be not the prerogative of small privileged classes, but a right evenly distributed throughout the community. The morality of work is the morality of slaves, and the modern world has no need of slavery.

A Diet of Coffee and Cigarettes

Claire Harman, Sylvia Townsend Warner: A Biography (London: Penguin Books, 2015; 1989), p. 55.

It also seemed to Bea that Sylvia lived off cups of black coffee and cigarettes, as indeed she did, bar a few winkles and the odd scrambled egg.

What Ruskin Said

How true it was what Ruskin said, that evil communications corrupt good manners. But did Ruskin say it? On second thoughts she was not sure, but it was just the sort of thing he would have said if he had said it, and in any case it was true.

Elizabeth Arnim, The Enchanted April (London: Penguin Books, 2012; 1922), p. 162.

An Egg-Shaped Poem

Pierio Valeriano (1477-1558)

      Danieli Barbaro.P.V. Ouum Dactylicum.
                           θεοκρατικῶς

                                  Sacrā
                                 Barbari
                              Thespiades
                           Cingite frontem
                          Floribus  omnibus
                        OEbaliis,      Paphiis,
                       Laurigerisque  coronis.
                   Nam ferit hic bene Barbyton
                  Suauisonis      modulaminibus:
                Egregius adeò  ,      vt data vobis
               Huic  rear  aurea plectra  sororibus:
                Aoniumve  dedit   puero   melos
                Et citharā bonus addit Apollo,
                  Indole   captus  ,  & ingenio,
                   Hunc hederis igitur sacris
                      Cingite protinus almæ
                           Pierides nouum
                                  Poëtam.

Pierio Valeriano, Hieroglyphica; [opuscula uaria] (Cologne: apud Ioannem Wilhemum Friessem, 1685), p. 123. My translation:

'To Daniel Barbaro, VenetianPatriarch: A Dactylic Egg (In a divine manner)'.

Thespiades, surround the barbarian’s sacred brow with all the flowers of Oebalia, Paphos and laurel-bearing crowns. For he strikes the barbiton well with sweet-sounding melodies. So eloquent, that I think golden picks were given to you by the sister Muses: Or good Apollo imparts Aeonian melodies and a lyre. Captive to genius and wit, surround this new poet, o nourishing Pierdes, with sacred ivy.

Unpunctuality

Leszek Kolakowski, 'In Praise of Unpunctuality' in Is God Happy?: Selected Essays (New York: Basic Books, 2013), pp. 219-223 (p .219):

Unpunctuality is the ingrained habit of regularly failing to fulfil people’s expectations regarding the specific time at which certain of our actions will take place, these expectations being the result of assurances on our part, tacit or explicit, regarding that specific time.

Biography

Biography is the White Man's Graveyard for a working writer. The work expands to fill as much time and energy as one will give it.

Michael Swanwick, Hope-in-the-mist: the Extraordinary Career and Mysterious Life of Hope Mirrlees (Upper Montclair, NJ: Temporary Culture, 2009), p. 52.

Grammatical Training

Ohne sichere grammatische Schulung und weitausgreifende Lektüre ist nichts zu erreichen . Germanistik , Romanistik , Anglistik entbehren alter Tradition . Sie fallen darum den Moden und Irrungen des « Zeitgeistes » leicht zum Opfer.

Without solid grammatical training and extensive reading, nothing can be achieved. German studies, Romance studies, English studies lack ancient tradition. They therefore easily fall victim to the fashions and aberrations of the ’spirit of the times'.

E.R. Curtius, Europäische Literatur Und Lateinisches Mittelalter (Bern: A. Francke AG, 1948), p. 386. My translation.

The Norman Conquest

Kyril Bonfiglioli, The Mortdecai Trilogy (London: Black Spring Press, 1979), p. 79:

‘England isn’t like the Continent, you see, nor even like Scotland in this respect. The seize quartiers “noble in all his branches” thing is something we don’t like to talk about and there aren’t half a dozen families with straight descent from a knight of the Conquest, I should think – and they aren’t titled. Anyway,’ I rambled on, ‘no one in his senses would want to be descended from one of that lot: the Conquest was something between a joint-stock company and a Yukon gold-rush; William the Conk himself was a sort of primitive Cecil Roberts and his followers were bums, chancers, queers and comic singers.’

Churchill's Wiriting Process

Roy Jenkins, Churchill: A Biography (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001), p. 429:

The charge in its most literal sense is irrefutable. From at least this stage onwards Churchill never wrote out a book de novo. He depended on having his factual material not merely checked after he had written it, but as carefully prepared for him in advance as was the laying out of the instruments for a famous surgeon. When he transformed the basic material, by adding insights, comparisons, metaphors and flights of oratorical fancy, he mostly did so by dictation, normally the enemy of succinctness, and not by pen. Sometimes, as with many articles and with My Early Life, he would dictate the whole draft out of his head, and then very carefully correct it. He also acquired the odd habit of being unable to envisage the shape of a book without having it set up in printed proof at an early stage, and then hacking it about in a way that a modern publisher would regard as intolerably inflating his printing budget. Thus when, in February 1930, he was proposing to add about 40,000 new words to the 50,000 or more of My Early Life which he had already written (the number of literary balls he had in the air at that stage is staggering), he insisted that, at his own expense if necessary, the already written text must be set up in print – ‘until I see the existing material in type I cannot make progress’.13 Associated with this was his increasing desire to work standing up, for which purpose he acquired a sloping desk of appropriate height at the side of his Chartwell study. He needed the feel and look of printed proofs for his literary teeth, but he rarely worked at them seated at a writing table. It was nearly all done either upright or in bed.

Mountain Retreat

ἐντὶ δάφναι τηνεί, ἐντὶ ῥαδιναὶ κυπάρισσοι,
ἔστι μέλας κισσός, ἔστ᾽ ἄμπελος ἁ γλυκύκαρπος,
ἔστι ψυχρὸν ὕδωρ, τό μοι ἁ πολυδένδρεος Αἴτνα
λευκᾶς ἐκ χιόνος ποτὸν ἀμβρόσιον προΐητι.
τίς κα τῶνδε θάλασσαν ἔχειν καὶ κύμαθ᾽ ἕλοιτο;

There are laurel trees, and slender cypresses,
there is dark ivy, and the sweet-fruited vine,
there is cool water, which tree-abounding Aetna
sends forth as an ambrosial draught from her snowy heights.
Who would choose the sea and its waves over these?

Theocritus, Idyl. XI.45-49. My translation.

Reading, Rambling and Education

    In intellectual matters things were no better with me. I have before me a small paper book containing a ‘Diary’ for parts of the years 1830, 1831, 1832. Its childishness is astonishing. I had read much more than most boys of my age, but I did not seem to understand anything. This was the want of companionship; I had no one except the sons of the village cottagers to play with. We had a man-servant indoors, and a farming- man out of doors; I was much with them, and learnt much from them; but there was nothing to replace the collision of wit with wit, which takes place between boys. One of these men was a dalesman, native of Hawes, and from him I had stories of the old wild life of the dales, mixed largely with the supernatural, which germinated afterwards into a strong turn for county history, and walks of exploration. I read enormously. Constable’s Miscellany, Murray’s Family Library, the publications of the Useful Knowledge Society, were coming out at that time; we took them all, and I read them. I read ten times as much as I remembered; what is more odd, I read far more than I ever took in the sense of as I read it. I think the mechanical act of perusal must have given me a sort of pleasure. Books, as books, irrespective of their contents, were my delight. The arrival of a new book in the house was the event of the week. I took in the Magazine of Natural History; the anticipation of the first of the month, and the reception of the parcel from the Richmond bookseller, were an excitement that I can remember to this day. I walked up and down in the lane waiting for the butcher's cart, which acted as carrier for the village, to come, snatched up Bell’s parcel, and rushed in with it. I was already marked out for the life of a student, yet little that was in the books I read seemed to find its way into my mind. There was no mind there! My outdoor life, long solitary days’ fishing, and long rides across country – in 1831 I had a pony and went hunting – rambles over the moor, were doing more for my education than my incessant reading.

Mark Pattison, Memoirs of an Oxford Don (London: Cassell, 1988; 1885), pp. 32-33.

All of Greece

Patrick Leigh Fermor, Mani: Travels in the Southern Peloponnese (New York: The New York Review of Books, 2006; 1958), p. 10:

All of Greece is absorbing and rewarding. There is hardly a rock or a stream without a battle or a myth, a miracle or a peasant anecdote or a superstition; and talk and incident, nearly all of it odd or memorable, thicken round the traveller’s path at every step.

Science Fiction Writers

  Not for the first time in my writing career, however, I found myself losing interest in something just as I gained access to its inner circle. Fortunately, the London science-fiction community had no shortage of burned-out cases and perennially promising talents, and since I was as keen a collector of science-fiction first editions as ever, the writers and fans accepted me amiably enough, though my tendency, noted by Kingsley Amis, to linger all night over half of a lager meant I was always looked on a little askance.
   This cut both ways, since science-fiction and fantasy writers don’t make the best company. Those who aren’t scholarly and dull are usually in some way psychologically maimed. ‘All the great fantasies, I suppose, have been written by emotionally crippled men,’ wrote Damon Knight, the doyen of science-fiction critics. ‘[Robert E.] Howard [author of the stories about Conan the Cimmerian] was a recluse and a man so morbidly attached to his mother that when she died he committed suicide. [H.P.] Lovecraft had enough phobias and eccentricities for nine: [A.B.] Merritt was chinless, bald and shaped like a shmoo. The trouble with Conan is that the human race never produced and never could produce such a man, and sane writers know it; therefore the sick writers have a monopoly of him.’
   None of the writers I met qualified for the description ‘sick’, but, for many, a career on the margins of literature had taken its toll. In his long career, Harry Harrison, for instance, had dabbled in just about every form of fiction from comic-book dialogue balloons to a ‘Saint’ novel ghosted for Leslie Charteris. The result was evident in his books. His novel The Stainless Steel Rat and its sequels squirmed with his cynicism, as did his Deathworld trilogy. ‘Slippery’ Jim diGriz of The Stainless Steel Rat is a cosmic con man whose larcenous skills are co-oped to help govern the galaxy, while, in the Deathworld books, colonists land on a planet where every plant and animal is bent on their destruction. Only in the third book do they discover that both flora and fauna can sense the emotions of the invaders; registering Man’s innate hostility, they return it with interest. The message of both series is clear: everyone in authority is a crook, and everything is out to get you.

John Baxter, A Pound of Paper: Confessions of a Book Addict (New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2005), pp. 210-211.

Society Inebriated by Technology

   For decades now in America we have been witnessing a steady and sickening denigration of humanistic understanding and humanistic method. We live in a society inebriated by technology, and happily, even giddily governed by the values of utility, speed, efficiency, and convenience. The technological mentality that has become the American worldview instructs us to prefer practical questions to questions of meaning – to ask of things not if they are true or false, or good or evil, but how they work. Our reason has become an instrumental reason, and is no longer the reason of the philosophers, with its ancient magnitude of intellectual ambition, its belief that the proper subjects of human thought are the largest subjects, and that the mind, in one way or another, can penetrate to the very principles of natural life and human life. Philosophy itself has shrunk under the influence of our weakness for instrumentality – modern American philosophy was in fact one of the causes of that weakness – and generally it, too, prefers to tinker and to tweak.
   
   The machines to which we have become enslaved, all of them quite astonishing, represent the greatest assault on human attention ever devised: they are engines of mental and spiritual dispersal, which make us wider only by making us less deep. There are thinkers, reputable ones if you can believe it, who proclaim that the exponential growth in computational ability will soon take us beyond the finitude of our bodies and our minds so that, as one of them puts it, there will no longer be any difference between human and machine. La Mettrie lives in Silicon Valley. This, of course, is not an apotheosis of the human but an abolition of the human; but Google is very excited by it.

Leon Wieseltier, ‘ “Perhaps Culture is Now the Counterculture” A Defense of the Humanities’, The Commencement Ceremony of Brandeis University, 19 May 2013