Mull it over

"Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes". Song of Myself, By Walt Whitman, 1819-1892

In the quote above Whitman is discussing one of his favorite themes, and that is the concept of celebrating who he is as a human being, even if it is flawed, contradictory, or imperfect. Whitman was an individualist, a man who emphasized loving oneself and seeing oneself as the source of great strength and guidance. Along with my odl good freinds Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, Whitman felt that the person who could judge best and understand best was our own selves. They took a firm pride in one's opinions and beliefs and decisions, even if they were to change those opinions or beliefs the next day.

Now I asks ya, how cool is that?

"By 1848, the new electric telegraph was already being hailed as a modern marvel that would revolutionize commerce, journalism, and warfare. In that year, a prominent New York attorney and editor named Conrad Swackhamer wrote an article predicting that it would transform the language as well. After all, he noted, the telegraph required above all else that its users be brief and direct. As people got used to sending and receiving telegrams and reading the telegraphed dispatches in the newspapers, they would inevitably cast off the verbosity and complexity of the prevalent English style. The 'telegraphic style,' as Swackhamer called it, would be 'terse, condensed, expressive, sparing of expletives, and utterly ignorant of synonyms' and would propel the English language toward a new standard of perfection.

"That was the first time anybody used the word telegraphic to describe a style of writing, with the implication that a new communications technology would naturally leave its mark on the language itself. It's an idea that has resurfaced with the appearance of every writing tool from the typewriter to the word processor. And now there's a resurgence of Swackhamerism as the keypad is passed to a new generation, and commentators ponder the deeper linguistic significance of the codes and shortcuts that have evolved around instant messaging and cell-phone texting. The topic got a lot of media play last month with the release of a study on teens and writing technology sponsored by the College Board and the Pew Research Center. According to the report, more than half of teens say they've sometimes used texting shortcuts in their school writing. The story was a natural for journalists. It combined three themes that have been a staple of feature writing for 150 years: 'the language is going to hell in a handbasket'; 'you'll never get me onto one of those newfangled things'; and 'kids today, I'm here to tell you ...'

"It wasn't hard to find critics who warned of apocalyptic consequences for the language. James Billington, the Librarian of Congress, said that IM and texting were bringing about 'the slow destruction of the basic unit of human thought, the sentence.' ...

"I've got a little prediction to make myself a generation from now all this stuff is going to sound awfully silly. Did people really imagine that rules of written English sentence structure that go back to the Renaissance would suddenly crumble because teenagers took to texting each other over their cell phones instead of passing notes under their desks in class?

"In fact, apart from contributing some slang and jargon, new writing technologies rarely have much of an effect on the language. They can give rise to specialized codes, but those tend to flow alongside the broad channel of standard English without ever mixing with it. As Conrad Swackhamer predicted, the Victorians developed a breathlessly compressed style for sending telegrams, like the message Henry James had one of his characters cable in Portrait of a Lady: 'Tired America, hot weather awful, return England with niece, first steamer decent cabin.' But that telegraphic style didn't leave any traces on Victorian prose - when you think of James's own writing, terse and condensed are not the words that come to mind. The linguistic features of the new media are sure to follow the same pattern. ..."What happens in email stays in email. Kids catch on to this quickly. They may sometimes let texting shortcuts slip into their schoolwork, but they know there are different rules for formal writing, and that you ignore them at your peril."

"The discord that we now call the Reformation had immediate consequences for English, in the form of new translations of the Bible [from Latin and Greek] into the vernacular. By 1611, when the King James Bible appeared, over fifty different Protestant or Catholic translations had been made. There were heated arguments over the linguistic choices made by the translators. Charges of heresy could be leveled at a translation depending on whether it used congregation or church, repentance or penance, charity or love.

"One of the issues which exercised the minds of the early Bible translators was: would the English language be able to cope? For a start, were there enough words available to express everything that was said in the Latin and Greek originals? In the early decades of the sixteenth century, the general opinion was that there weren't. ... If the problem was obvious, so was the solution, ... all writers had to do was borrow ... [and] the sixteenth century saw an extraordinary influx of new words from Latin and Greek, especially the former: anonymous, appropriate, commemorate, emancipate, relevant, susceptible. ...

"The translator George Pettie affirmed their importance by stating 'if they should be all counted inkpot terms, I know not how we should speake any thing without blacking our mouthes with inke.' Inkpot terms. Inkhorn terms. These two words, both meaning a receptacle for ink, ... came to refer to words which are so lengthy (because of their foreign origins) that to write them down would use up a lot of ink. Accordingly, 'inkhorn terms' became an abusive label to describe the writing of anyone who welcomed Latinate neologisms....

"It was not surprising to see the pendulum swing to the opposite extreme, in which such coinages were avoided like the plague. Even a scholar of Greek, Sir John Cheke, was hotly opposed to them. In a 1557 letter he writes: 'I am of the opinion that our tung should be written clean and pure, unmixt and unmangled with borrowing of other tunges.' ... The row went on for half a century--and indeed it has been rumbling ever since. Four hundred years later, George Orwell would be haranguing people for their reliance on classical words: 'Bad writers ... are nearly always haunted by the notion that Latin or Greek words are grander than Saxon ones.' "

"If only Ebenezer Scrooge had not, in the excitement of his transformation from miser to humanitarian, diverged from the traditional Christmas goose to surprise Bob Cratchit with a turkey 'twice the size of Tiny Tim.' But alas - he did, and as A Christmas Carol approaches its 165th birthday, a Google search answers the plaint 'leftover turkey' with more than 300,000 promises of recipes to dispatch it. As for England's goose-raising industry, it tanked. ...

"The public's extraordinary and lasting embrace of Dickens's short novel is but one evidence of the 19th century's changing attitude toward Christmas. In 1819, Washington Irving's immensely popular 'Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent' had 'glorified' the 'social rites' of the season. Clement Moore's 1823 poem 'The Night Before Christmas' introduced a fat and jolly St. Nick whose obvious attractions eclipsed what had been a 'foreboding figure of judgment' as likely to distribute canings as gifts. Queen Victoria and her Bavarian husband, Albert, 'great boosters of the season,' had installed a Christmas tree in Windsor Castle each year since 1840, encouraging a fad that spread overseas to America by 1848. ...

"What is true is that Christmas, more than any other holiday, offered a means for the adult Dickens to redeem the despair and terrors of his childhood. In 1824, after a series of financial embarrassments drove his family to exchange what he remembered as a pleasant country existence for a 'mean, small tenement' in London, the 12-year-old Dickens, his schooling interrupted - ended, for all he knew - was sent to work 10-hour days at a shoe blacking factory in a quixotic attempt to remedy his family's insolvency. Not even a week later, his father was incarcerated in the infamous Marshalsea prison for a failure to pay a small debt to a baker. At this, Dickens's 'grief and humiliation' overwhelmed him so thoroughly that it retained the power to overshadow his adult accomplishments, calling him to 'wander desolately back' to the scene of his mortification. And because Dickens's tribulations were not particular to him but emblematic of the Industrial Revolution - armies of neglected, unschooled children forced into labor - the concerns that inform his fiction were shared by millions of potential readers. ...

"Replacing the slippery Holy Ghost with anthropomorphized spirits, the infant Christ with a crippled child whose salvation waits on man's - not God's - generosity, Dickens laid claim to a religious festival, handing it over to the gathering forces of secular humanism. If a single night's crash course in man's power to redress his mistakes and redeem his future without appealing to an invisible and silent deity could rehabilitate even so apparently lost a cause as Ebenezer Scrooge, imagine what it might do for the rest of us!"

Kathryn Harrison, "Father Christmas," The New York Times Review of Books, December 7, 2008, p. 14.

"Unlike Dorothy Parker, who seems to have been credited with every witticism uttered by every woman in the United States between 1920 and 1970 but actually said only a few of them, George S. Kaufman was the genuine author of virtually all the funny, sardonic, and wise comments and bon mots attributed to him. ...

"It was Kaufman, for example, who deflated Raymond Massey when the actor had scored a huge success playing Abraham Lincoln and began to grow more and more Lincolnesque in his manner, speech, and clothing off the stage. 'Massey,' Kaufman said, 'won't be satisfied until somebody assassinates him.' It was Kaufman who deflated Charles Laughton when Laughton, commenting on his own performance as Captain Bligh in Mutiny on the Bounty, said pompously that he was probably so effective in the role because he came from a long line of seafaring men. 'I presume,' Kaufman said, remembering Laughton's equally excellent performance as Quasimodo, 'that you also come from a long line of hunchbacks.' And it was also Kaufman who took care of an actor with the unfortunate name of Guido Nadzo by commenting, 'Guido Nadzo is nadzo guido.'

"Kaufman's comments were aimed with deadly accuracy, but he wanted them to make their point and nothing more, and he became upset and contrite if damage resulted and seemed to be growing permanent. When, for example, his line about Nadzo achieved such widespread currency that the actor began to find it difficult to get work, Kaufman went from friend to friend until he found a job for him, and he continued to get him jobs until Nadzo himself decided that Kaufman had been right in the first place and left the stage.

"Actors were a favorite target of Kaufman's, partially because they caused him constant agonies by forgetting, rewording, playing badly, or otherwise failing to do justice to the brilliant lines he wrote for them. The Marx Brothers, for whom he wrote two plays, Animal Crackers and The Cocoanuts, and a movie, A Night at the Opera, were particularly painful to him because of their practice of changing lines at every performance and even trying to throw each other off balance by suddenly speaking lines which weren't in the play at all, stealing these from other plays or making them up on the spot. Once, in despair, Kaufman walked up onto the stage in the middle of a rehearsal of Animal Crackers. 'Excuse me for interrupting,' he said, 'but I thought for a minute I actually heard a line I wrote.' ...

"He used humor all the time to bring his associates and others back into line when he felt they were straying too far, employing every device from notices on backstage bulletin boards - '11 a.m. rehearsal tomorrow morning,' he once noted on a call board, 'to remove all improvements inserted in the play since the last rehearsal' - to telegrams. Once he dropped in to view his Pulitzer Prize-winning play, Of Thee I Sing - it was the first musical in history ever to win the prize - after it had been running for many months, and was depressed to observe that William Gaxton, who played the principal role of John P. Wintergreen, had grown bored and was speaking his lines routinely and mechanically. Kaufman left the theatre, went to a nearby Western Union Office, and sent Gaxton a wire: WATCHING YOUR PERFORMANCE FROM THE LAST ROW. WISH YOU WERE HERE. ... But he needed no telegram to cool down an actor who kept blowing his lines and blaming the script. 'It doesn't flow,' the actor said. 'It flows, all right,' Kaufman said. 'You don't.' "

"In 1942 an American journalist called Frederick Oechsner published a book about Hitler entitled This Is the Enemy. It included an account of Hitler's personal library, based on interviews Oechsner had conducted with the Führer's associates while working as the United Press International correspondent in Berlin. And the first thing he made clear was that the library was a very substantial one. Hitler's books were divided between his official residence in Berlin and the Berghof, his mountain retreat near Berchtesgaden, and there were over 16,000 of them--an estimate that subsequent scholarship has confirmed.

"Much of what Oechsner went on to report can hardly have come as a surprise--the fact that a large part of the collection was devoted to military history, for instance. But he also found room for a good deal of curious detail. When books about horse-breeding showed pictures of stallions alongside pictures of mares, Hitler frequently struck through the pictures of the mares with a red pencil, apparently to signal their inferiority. There were whole drawers in the library filled with photographs of famous actors, singers, and dancers. The four hundred-odd books in the section on the Catholic Church included numerous works of pornography, some of them said to have been annotated by Hitler with 'gross and uncouth' marginal notes.

"Oechsner also offered a glimpse of the nine hundred or so works of 'simple, popular fiction' that the library contained. Foremost among them were the German cowboy-and-Indian tales of Karl May, boyhood favorites of Hitler that he repeatedly reread as an adult and recommended to his generals as manuals of strategy. There were also a large number of detective stories, with the British thriller-writer Edgar Wallace a particularly conspicuous presence. (This is not as unlikely as it may sound. Wallace was enormously popular in Germany: another great admirer was Konrad Adenauer.) And love stories were well represented in the library by the novelettes of Hedwig Courts-Mahler, characterized by Oechsner as 'the leading romantic sob sister of Germany,' and scores of similar works. These last volumes were apparently kept in plain covers so as not to reveal their titles.

"In a new study by Timothy W. Ryback, Hitler's Private Library, Oechsner's sketch is reprinted as an appendix. As Ryback says, the sketch is 'journalistic by nature and propagandistic in intent;' some of its claims, he adds, are 'sensational and salacious.' But he also concedes that it is 'the best portrait we have of Hitler's book collection.' Much of it rings true (and about those sensational claims, we simply can't be sure). But what makes it especially valuable is that it is the only account of the library written before it was dispersed or destroyed.

"In 1945 the ten thousand books that Hitler had kept in Berlin were shipped off to Russia by the Soviet authorities. They have not been seen since. Meanwhile, American soldiers were picking through the books that survived at the Berghof (which was by now a smoldering ruin), and others that had been kept in Munich. An unknown number of these minor spoils of war found their way to the States as souvenirs.

"Amid all the chaos, one significant section of the library remained intact--a cache of three thousand books that had been placed for safekeeping in a salt mine near Berchtesgaden. It was sent to Washington, and after duplicates or works judged to be of no great interest had been weeded out, 1,200 volumes were set aside by the Library of Congress as a separate collection."

John Gross, "A Constant Reader," The New York Review of Books, May 14, 2009, p. 8.

"Many scientific men of the day [were] entranced by the potentialities of the voltaic battery, and its possible connections with 'animal magnetism' and human animation. Electricity in a sense became a metaphor for life itself. ... The most singular literary response to [these ideas], called Vitalism ... was Mary Shelley's cult novel Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus (1818). In this story ... a sort of human life is physically created, or rather reconstructed. But the soul or spirit is irretrievably damaged. ...

"As her novel developed, Mary Shelley began to ask in what sense Frankenstein's new 'Creature' would be human. Would it have language, would it have a moral conscience, would it have human feelings and sympathies, would it have a soul? (It should not be forgotten that Mary was pregnant with her own baby in 1817.) ...

"[Dr.] Frankenstein's Creature has been constructed as a fully developed man, from adult body parts, but his mind is that of a totally undeveloped infant. He has no memory, no language, no conscience. He starts life as virtually a wild animal, an orangutan or an ape. ...

"Almost his first conscious act of recognition, when he has escaped the laboratory into the wood at night, is his sighting of the moon, an object that fills him with wonder, although he has no name for it. [The Creature himself then narrates:] 'I started up and beheld a radiant form rise from among the trees. I gazed with a kind of wonder. It moved slowly, but it enlightened my path ... It was still cold ... No distinct ideas occupied my mind; all was confused. I felt light, and hunger, and thirst, and darkness; innumerable sounds rung in my ears and on all sides various scents saluted me. ... My mind received, every day, additional ideas.'

"From this moment the Creature evolves rapidly through all the primitive stages of man. Mary's account is almost anthropological, reminiscent of [Sir Joseph] Banks's account of the Tahitians. First he learns to use fire, to cook, to read. Then he studies European history and civilization, through the works of Plutarch, Milton and Goethe. Secretly listening to the cottagers in the woods, he learns conceptual ideas such as warfare, slavery, tyranny. His conscience is aroused, and his sense of justice. But above all, he discovers the need for companionship, sympathy and affection. And this is the one thing he cannot find, because he is so monstrously ugly: 'The cold stars shone in their mockery, and the bare trees waved their branches above me, the sweet voice of a bird burst forth amidst the universal stillness. All, save I, were at rest ... I, like the arch-fiend, bore a hell within me, and finding myself unsympathized with, wished to tear up the trees, spread havoc and destruction around me, and then to have sat down and enjoyed the ruin.'

"On the bleak Mer de Glace glacier in the French Alps, the Creature appeals to his creator [Dr.] Frankenstein for sympathy, and for love. 'I am malicious because I am miserable. Am I not shunned and hated by all mankind? You, my creator would not call it murder, if you could precipitate me into one of those ice-rifts ... Oh! My creator, make me happy! Let me feel gratitude towards you for one benefit! Let me see that I excite the sympathy of one existing thing. Do not deny me my request!'

"His terrible corrosive and destructive solitude becomes the central theme of the second part of Mary Shelley's novel. Goaded by his misery, the Creature kills and destroys. Yet he also tries to take stock of his own violent actions and contradictory emotions. He concludes that his one hope of happiness lies in sexual companionship. The scene on the Mer de Glace in which he begs Frankenstein to create a wife for him is central to his search for human identity and happiness. The clear implication is that a fully human 'soul' can only be created through friendship and love."

"Dame Edith Sitwell used to lie in an open coffin for a while before she began her day's writing. When I mentioned this macabre bit of gossip to a poet friend, he said acidly, 'If only someone had thought to shut it.' ...

"Sitwell's coffin trick may sound like a prank, unless you look at how other writers have gone about courting their muses. ... For example, the poet Schiller used to keep rotten apples under the lid of his desk and inhale their pungent bouquet when he needed to find the right word. Then he would close the drawer, but the fragrance remained in his head. ...

"Amy Lowell, like George Sand, liked to smoke cigars while writing, and went so far in 1915 as to buy 10,000 of her favorite Manila stogies to make sure she could keep her creative fires kindled. ... Balzac drank more than 50 cups of coffee a day, and actually died from caffeine poisoning, although colossal amounts of caffeine don't seem to have bothered W. H. Auden or Dr. Johnson, who was reported to have drunk 25 cups of tea at one sitting. Victor Hugo, Benjamin Franklin and many others felt that they did their best work if they wrote while they were nude. ...

"Colette used to begin her day's writing by first picking fleas from her cat, and it's not hard to imagine how the methodical stroking and probing into fur might have focused such a voluptuary's mind. After all, this was a woman who could never travel light, but insisted on taking a hamper of such essentials as chocolate, cheese, meats, flowers and a baguette whenever she made even brief sorties. ...

"Alfred de Musset, George Sand's lover, confided that it piqued him when she went directly from lovemaking to her writing desk, as she often did. But surely that was not so direct as Voltaire's actually using his lover's naked back as a writing desk. Robert Louis Stevenson, Mark Twain and Truman Capote all used to lie down when they wrote, with Capote going so far as to declare himself 'a completely horizontal writer.' ...

"Benjamin Franklin, Edmond Rostand and others wrote while soaking in a bathtub. In fact, Franklin brought the first bathtub to the United States in the 1780's, and he loved a good, long, thoughtful submersion. In water and ideas, I mean. ...

"The Romantics, of course, were fond of opium, and Coleridge freely admitted to indulging in two grains of it before working. The list of writers triggered to inspirational highs by alcohol would occupy a small, damp book. T. S. Eliot's tonic was viral - he preferred writing when he had a head cold. The rustling of his head, as if full of petticoats, shattered the usual logical links between things and allowed his mind to roam."

Diane Ackerman, "O Muse! You Do Make Things Difficult!" The New York Times, Sunday, November 12, 1989, Section 7, Page 1.

"The notebooks of Tennessee Williams span the years 1936 to 1981, the period from a few weeks before Williams' twenty-fifth birthday to almost two years before his death at age seventy-one in February 1983. The thirty known journals are a collection of unremarkable-looking notebooks, in which Williams recorded his daily thoughts and emotions. Much of his writing is casual, spontaneous, and at times confessional. ... Unlike his letters, where he modulated his tone and style to suit the recipient, the journals reveal Williams' authentic voice - genuine and unadorned.

"Williams: Keeping a journal is a lonely man's habit, it betrays the vices of introspection and social withdrawal, even a kind of Narcissism, ... It has certain things to recommend it, it keeps a recorded continuity between his past and present selves, it gives him the comforting reassurance that shocks, defeats, disappointments are all snowed under by the pages and pages of new experience that still keep flaking down over him as be continues through time, and promises that this comforting snowfall of obliteration will go right on as long as be himself keeps going. ...

Wednesday, 3 December 1941

"Wednesday Night. Very blue. Very down hearted. Thoughts of despair in my feverish head. Very sick last night. Raging fever and pounding heart. The grippe I suppose. Tormented till daybreak. Then felt asleep and woke much improved, fever gone, but weak. Spent the day walking idly about Tampa - wound up at a movie, the usual anesthesia. Visited a bar with plump child-like B-girls & soldiers - called 'The Broken Mirror'. Home & read a detective story account of the bestial treatment of prisoners in Alcatraz - which made me feel even worse. I feel helpless, unprotected. This little moratorium seems to have stretched its limit and I have written no long play nor do I have a reliable idea for one - and my eye looks worse and I am unbearably shy and had no luck at sex for several weeks. I feel wretched & frightened. more than usual. Tomorrow I will pack off to St. Pete and the beach - God be merciful. Truly - En Avant. ...

Spring 1979

"Did I die by my own hand or was I destroyed slowly and brutally by a conspiratorial group? There is probably no clear cut answer. When was there ever such an answer to any question related to the individual human fate? Perhaps I was never meant to exist at all, but if I hadn't, a number of my created beings would have been denied their passionate existence. This season I purchased a home on a lovely residential street in Key West and removed my sister Rose from Stony Lodge and placed her there: perhaps mistakenly, it remains to be seen. But will I remain to see it? Today I must leave for New Orleans for medical examination and possibly for surgery: the chronic disease of my gastro-intestinal system has, for several weeks now, flared up alarmingly and there is no true relief. I suffer no pain. But I am observing my life and the approaching conclusion of my life and I see a long, long stretch of desolation about me, now at the end. Or will I yet survive? In what condition, under what circumstance? ... The best I can say for myself is that I worked like hell."

"Theaters as dedicated spaces of entertainment were a new phenomenon in England in Shakespeare's lifetime. Previously players had performed in innyards or the halls of great homes or other spaces normally used for other purposes. London's first true playhouse appears to have been the Red Lion, built in 1567 in Whitechapel. ...

"William Shakespeare could not have chosen a more propitious moment to come of age. By the time he arrived in London in (presumably) the late 1580s, theaters dotted the outskirts and would continue to rise throughout his career. All were compelled to reside in 'liberties,' areas mostly outside London's walls where City laws and regulations did not apply. It was a banishment they shared with brothels, prisons, gunpowder stores, unconsecrated graveyards, lunatic asylums (the notorious Bedlam stood close by the Theatre), and noisome enterprises like soapmaking, dyeing, and tanning - and these could be noisome indeed. Glue makers and soapmakers rendered copious volumes of bones and animal fat, filling the air with a cloying smell that could be all but worn, while tanners steeped their products in vats of dog feces to make them supple. No one reached a playhouse without encountering a good deal of odor.

"The new theaters did not prosper equally. Within three years of its opening, the Curtain was being used for fencing bouts, and all other London playhouses, with the single eventual exception of the Globe, relied on other entertainments, particularly animal baiting, to fortify their earnings. The pastime was not unique to England, but it was regarded as an English specialty. Queen Elizabeth often had visitors from abroad entertained with bearbaiting at Whitehall. In its classic form, a bear was put in a ring, sometimes tethered to a stake, and set upon by mastiffs, but bears were expensive investments, so other animals (such as bulls and horses) were commonly substituted. One variation was to put a chimpanzee on the back of a horse and let the dogs go for both together. The sight of a screeching ape clinging for dear life to a bucking horse while dogs leaped at it from below was considered about as rich an amusement as public life could offer. That an audience that could be moved to tears one day by a performance of Doctor Faustus could return the next day to the same space and be just as entertained by the frantic deaths of helpless animals may say as much about the age as any single statement could."

"But here's another Thoreau. Here's a Thoreau who lives in town, in the center city of Concord, which, while not quite the size of a city, even though it wants to be, is a large town. Here is the Thoreau who is born in town and except for a few trips to the Maine and Massachusetts coast, except for a little less than a year in New York City, lives his entire life in his town. ... He comes back [from college at Harvard] to his hometown to discover that there are no jobs, a recession. He goes on the road, to Maine, and he can't find any jobs there either. Thoreau also returns to discover that Ralph Waldo Emerson - the most exciting intellectual and the most renowned intellectual reformer in America - is a neighbor. ... Thoreau moves to Emerson's house, takes care of Emerson's children, his carpentry, his yard work, his gardening, all the while doing other chores for other people around the village, the Transcendental handyman. Thoreau tries poetry, then essay writing, then edits the Transcendentalists' magazine, the Dial. In none of these endeavors does he manage to make much in the way of money. ... He moves to New York, tries to establish himself as a successful freelance writer, but gets homesick and returns early to Concord.

"When he comes home, he decides to build himself a little house on the pond on the edge of town, about forty New York City blocks from the village center on a woodlot owned by Emerson - a woodlot that is not so much woods, in the sense that we think of woods today, as it is a place where Emerson cuts the trees that each day heat his house as he writes away. Thoreau's friends visit - his neighbors and family come to the pond for picnics or to stop by for the watermelon party that Thoreau throws every year. ... Above all, he cherishes his manly self-sufficiency, even though he carried his dirty laundry to Concord for his mother to wash. ...

"Thoreau takes seven years to write and rewrite and rewrite his next book, Walden, his best-known work in America and, along with his essay on civil disobedience, one of the most famous works of American literature in the world. ... To call Thoreau a nature writer is more than limiting, given the way that we tend to think about nature writing; Thoreau writes about the whole world, and he writes of Walden Pond so as to change the world. ... Walden is a work that intended to revive America, a communal work that is forever pigeonholed as a reclusive one. And what is perhaps most surprising is that it's a comedy; it's an economic satire draped in the language of nature and farming and the self-help books of the day that shows the mass of economic men to be a bunch of unwitting saps. With some disdain, Nathaniel Hawthorne referred to his Concord friend as 'a humorist.'

"Walden didn't sell. It didn't do as badly as Thoreau's first book, but it was no huge hit. Thus, after Walden, Thoreau takes on writing as a kind of full-time avocation, working in his family's pencil factory, doing odd jobs while selling the occasional travel piece. He is a singer and a dancer. He plays the flute and likes to take his friends on moonlit walks and, despite his reputation, rarely seems to have gone on a camping trip alone. He is also a surveyor, helping house builders build, farmers settle their disputes. When people think of Thoreau, do they imagine all the time he spent in court, testifying to land boundaries?

"He dies at forty-four. ... He dies at home. His aunt asks him if he has made peace with God. He tells her he did not know that they had quarreled."

"Henry (The 8th) was clearly good-looking. The Venetian ambassador Sebastian Giustinian described him as 'the handsomest potentate I ever set eyes on.' ... Henry was gifted in other ways too. He demonstrated great intelligence and mental acuity. ... As a skillful linguist, Henry spoke French, Spanish and Latin. He was a talented musician and composer. ...

"Ambassadors noted how beautifully he danced, while an observer of the 1513 campaign against France recalled the king practising archery with the archers of his guard, and how 'he cleft the mark in the middle, and surpassed them all, as he surpasses them in stature and personal graces.' He was fond of tennis, and was also 'a capital horseman, and a fine jouster'. Henry delighted in hunting, tiring eight or ten horses a day before exhausting himself. ... Perhaps most surprisingly of all, commentators almost universally described his nature as warm and benevolent. ...

"What a contrast this is to reports of Henry VIII in later life. The most obvious change was in the king's appearance. Between the ages of 23 and 45 his waist and chest measurements increased gradually from 35 to 45 inches. After his 45th birthday in 1536, he quickly became gross - by 1541, his waist measured 54 inches, his chest 57. But this was the least of the changes. Instead of being known for the ease of his companionship and gentle graciousness, the older Henry was reputed to be irritable, capricious and capable of great cruelty. ...

"His volatile moods [became] a source of anxiety for his counsellors. He was violent with some - he would 'beknave' his erstwhile closest confidant and chief minister Thomas Cromwell twice a week, hitting 'him well about the pate'. Others he berated - after Cromwell's execution in 1540, Henry blamed his advisers for having 'upon light pretexts, by false accusations ... made him put to death the most faithful servant he ever had'. ... Henry had become a misanthropic, suspicious and cruel king, and his subjects began (discreetly, for such words were illegal) to call him a tyrant. ...

"The year 1536 contained all the ingredients necessary to catalyse, foster and entrench this change. It was Henry VIII's annus horribilis. In the course of one year, the 45-year-old king suffered threats, betrayals, rebellion, disappointments, injury, grief and anxieties on a terrific scale. A near-fatal fall from his horse in January 1536 left this great athlete of the tiltyard injured and unable to joust again, when for Henry the pursuit of physical masculine activity was strongly linked to his sense of self. This injury was also the key to his later obesity. Henry's wife, Anne Boleyn, suffered a miscarriage of a male child on the same day as his first wife's funeral. ... Anne was 'discovered' to be an adulteress [which] provoked her rapid arrest, trial and execution on May 19th.

"In July, soon after Henry had forced his daughter Mary to swear to her own illegitimacy, Henry's only son, the illegitimate Henry Fitzroy, Duke of Richmond and Somerset, died aged 17, leaving the king entirely heirless."

Suzannah Lipscomb, "Who Was Henry VIII?" History Today, April 2009, Volume 59, Issue 4, pp. 14-20.

"Take the idea that it is wrong to say If a student comes before I get there, they can slip their test under my office door, because student is singular and they 'is plural.' Linguists traditionally observe that esteemed writers have been using they as a gender-neutral pronoun for almost a thousand years. As far back as the 1400s, in the Sir Amadace story, one finds the likes of Iche mon in thayre degree ("Each man in their degree").

"Maybe when the sentence is as far back as Middle English, there is a sense that it is a different language on some level than what we speak--the archaic spelling alone cannot help but look vaguely maladroit. But Shakespeare is not assumed to have been in his cups when he wrote in The Comedy of Errors, 'There's not a man I meet but doth salute me / As I were their well-acquainted friend' (Act IV, Scene 111). Later, Thackeray in Vanity Fair tosses off 'A person can't help their birth.' ...

"Or there's the objection to nouns being used as verbs. These days, impact comes in for especial condemnation: The new rules are impacting the efficiency of the procedure. People lustily express that they do not 'like' this, endlessly writing in to language usage columnists about it. Or one does not 'like' the use of structure as in I structured the test to be as brief as possible.

"Well, okay--but that means you also don't 'like' the use of view, silence, worship, copy, outlaw, and countless other words that started as nouns and are now also verbs. Nor do many people shudder at the use of fax as a verb. ...

"Over the years, I have gotten the feeling that there isn't much linguists can do to cut through this. ... There are always books out that try to put linguists' point across. Back 1950, Robert Hall's Leave Your Language Alone! was all over the place, including a late edition kicking around in the house I grew up in. Steven Pinker's The Language Instinct, which includes a dazzling chapter on the grammar myths, has been one of the most popular books on language ever written. As I write, the flabbergastingly fecund David Crystal has just published another book in the tradition, The Fight for English: How Language Pundits Ate, Shot, and Left. But the air of frustration in Crystal's title points up how persistent the myths are. ...

"English is shot through with things that don't really follow. I'm the only one, amn't I? Shouldn't it be amn't after all? Aren't, note, is 'wrong' since are is used with you, we, and they, not I. There's no 'I are.' Aren't I? is thoroughly illogical-and yet if you decided to start saying amn't all the time, you would lose most of your friends and never get promotions. Except, actually, in parts of Scotland and Ireland where people actually do say amn't--in which case the rest of us think of them as 'quaint' rather than correct!"

"In his brief work, The Prince, are contained the results of his studies of ancient history and everything he learned during his years as secretary of the Florentine Republic. ... Above all, he wished that his short work might be read and understood by the Medici ... [and] if they read it, they would realize that he knew better than anyone else what a prince should do to consolidate power. ...

"When The Prince began to circulate ... it found a host of enemies who saw it as an evil work, inspired directly by the devil, in which a malevolent author teaches a prince how to win and keep power through avarice, cruelty, and falseness. ... What had Machiavelli written to stir up such indignation? He had explained that the ideas set forth by thinkers who had written advice books for princes before him were simply wrong. ... These writers maintained that a prince who wishes to keep power and win glory must always follow the path of virtue. ... Machiavelli [who had just seen Florence fall under such a 'virtuous' leader] stated in contrast that a prince who followed such advice in all circumstances would surely lose it and be scorned and soon forgotten. ...

" 'It is necessary' [he wrote], for a prince, if he wants to maintain his realm, 'to learn to be able not to be good' and to use or not use this 'according to necessity.' ... A good prince, it has been said for centuries, ... should not try to instill fear in but to win the love of his subjects. ... Machiavelli argues instead that a prince should 'know well how to use the beast and the man.' ... With similar daring, he discarded the doctrine that a good prince must be generous, lavishing gifts and favors on his friends, [writing that he] will succeed only in flattering a few hangers-on and bankrupting his estate. ... Machiavelli writes that a prince should certainly hope to be considered merciful and kind, but that cruelty [could be] 'well-used.' ... It is difficult to be loved and feared at the same time, but 'it is much safer to be feared than loved, if one has to lack one of the two.' ... [Further], princes who have readily broken their word have 'done great things' and have triumphed over princes who have kept their word. ... In short, he wants a prince who knows how to win.

"When Francesco Vettori, who had become Lorenzo [de'Medici, Duke of Urbino's] most authoritative adviser, presented Lorenzo with Niccolo's masterpiece, Lorenzo barely glanced at it, showing much more interest in two stud dogs that someone had sent him."

"Communication expert Linda McCallister ... has identified six different communication styles. People can be Reflectives, Nobles, Socratics, Magistrates, Candidates, or Senators. Although no one fits completely into any one category, all of us have a tendency to use one particular style more than the others. Recognizing that [can] help you understand them better.

"At one end of the spectrum are Nobles. These people believe communication serves one purpose and one purpose only: to exchange information. That's what they do when they come into your office, and that's what they hope you do when you come into theirs. Nobles seek to discuss relevant data with as few words as possible. ... Even if you have been working together for years, all a Noble will ask you on Monday morning is the time and location of the next meeting.

"On the other end of the spectrum are Reflectives-the 'touchy-feely' people. To them, communication is all about building relationships. Despite how busy these people may be, the first thing they want to know when they walk into your office on Monday morning is how your son did in his hockey tournament or how your daughter's dance recital went. And they can't wait to tell you what they did over the weekend. ... A Noble, as you might imagine, makes a beeline to her office to get right to work, while a Reflective makes the rounds--greeting and socializing with everyone else before finally settling in at his desk. Problems arise, as you can imagine, when a Noble works with a Reflective. The Noble may read the Reflective as inefficient, spacey, and distracted, while the Reflective may think the Noble is rude.

"For a Socratic, the purpose of communication is to talk. Many of the lawyers I work with are Socratics. They love discussion and debate. These people may seem like they are running at the mouth or being unresponsive, when in reality, they just like to talk things out and exchange ideas.

"Magistrates display some of the characteristics of Socratics, and some of Nobles, and as such, these people are often opinionated, argumentative, and difficult to deal with. Their goal is to explain to you why they are right and you are wrong. You will likely read these people very negatively, even if you don't realize it, because you can sense that they are not listening to you; they are merely selling themselves. At first they may seem to enjoy the exchange of ideas, but as the conversation progresses you will notice that they don't seem to care what you have to say.

"Candidates don't want to upset anyone, so they seek to communicate along a path of least resistance. They are people-pleasers whose goal is to avoid conflict. They may sometimes seem evasive, but if you recognize this communication style you will understand they are not being to be dishonest; they just don't want to displease anyone.

"A Senator chooses whatever communication style works in the situation. Senators go out of their way to respond warmly to Reflectives, respect the austerity of Nobles. They apply whatever communication style works under the circumstances. If a Reflective walks into a Senator's office, he will ask about the Reflective's weekend, and tell the Reflective about his. If a Noble comes in and asks, 'What time is the meeting, and where?' his response win be, 'Two o'clock, conference room.'

"Knowledge of these different communication styles is critical to accurately reading people. Just because someone answers a question with a short and terse response, it doesn't necessarily mean she dislikes you or is being evasive or dishonest."

Jo-Ellan Dimitrius, Ph.D., and Wendy Patrick Mazzarella, Reading People, Ballantine, Copyright to the revised edition 2008 by Jo-Ellan Dimitrius and Wendy Patrick Mazzarella, pp. 152-153.

"During the postwar years, average Americans in ever greater numbers deserted small towns and big cities to embrace the emergent concept of suburbia. Rod and [his wife] Carol Serling made that move, following commercial success, to a notably upscale aspect of the new American paradigm. But like so many other young adults of the 1950s, Serling experienced an uneasy sense of dislocation.

"Something essential, however hard to define, had been lost en route; some aspect of innocence, perhaps, that at least to a romantic imagination, once existed in our towns. Each such place had been unique, organically created over decades, taking on a shape and style all its own. Suburbia, in comparison, was defined by Pulitzer-prize winning author David Halberstam as 'the new social contract according to Bill Levitt.' Reacting to rampant blandness, residents began to yearn for the good old days, if less the reality of a bygone lifestyle than what Richard Schickel called 'an imagined past.' Our growing hunger for this mythic America shortly informed 'much of the new popular culture.' What would eventually come to be called The Nostalgia Craze would prove essential to The Twilight Zone from its earliest episodes. ...

"On [this dislocation, the myth of normalcy, the dehumanizing effects of commercialism, the angst of the nuclear age, and] other subjects, Rod spoke truthfully and fearlessly. One early observer of TV hailed him as the medium's 'angry young man.' The only other contender: Edward R. Murrow, whose interview show followed Zone on Friday nights (1959-1960). What Murrow achieved in CBS's newsroom--integrity!--Serling pulled off at that network' entertainment arm.

"Earlier in the decade, Serling and other top talents openly addressed important issues during TV's brief 'golden age.' Colleagues included Reginald Rose (Twelve Angry Men), Paddy Chayefsky (Marty), and J. P. Miller (The Days of Wine and Roses). All turned out smart scripts for 'live' anthologies that dominated TV drama from 1948 to 1955. Then the price of sets lowered and TV became big business for mass entertainment. Serious drama was out; predictable potboilers were in. From that point on, Serling necessarily presented politics and philosophy in a foxier manner. ...

"Casting a seductive smile, Serling alone continued to convey on TV what every other serious writer wanted to say but wasn't allowed to. High-profile sponsors now acted as self-appointed censors, making certain that their products were presented in a context that offended no one. So Serling 'said something' by doing so indirectly, dropping confrontational realism for parable. During The Twilight Zone's five-year run (1959-1964), he employed imaginative/allegorical fiction to comment on (and sharply criticize) postwar America. 'On Zone,' Peter Kaplan claimed, 'the nightmare side of American life was opened up,' ... all the more frightening because stories took place close to home rather than in distant Transylvania. ... What initially seemed to be out-of-this-world dreams of darkness reflected a shadow-world existing on the edge of our brightly lit suburbs."

"So which Nights are they, the Arabian, or the Thousand and One? ... The dual title neatly illustrates the hybrid nature of the work: it is part of Arabic and European literature, it contains stories and motifs that may be traced to Sanskrit, Persian and Greek literature, it hovers between the oral and the written, the popular and the highbrow, the pious and the scabrous, realism and fantasy. 'Arabian,' an epithet it acquired in Europe, is a misnomer, for it was neither conceived nor written in Arabia and the great majority of the stories are set in Iraq, Egypt or Persia rather than the Arabian Peninsula. The original Arabic title, Alf layla wa-layla, translates as 'A Thousand and One Nights' - but one should be cautious using the term 'original,' for the earliest mention in Arabic refers to a Persian book called Hazar afsana, 'A Thousand Tales.' An Arabic version, including the frame story about the resourceful and eloquent Shahrazad and the murderous misogynist King Shahriyar (a story that may be of Indian origin, whereas the names are Persian), was around in the tenth century, but the text is not preserved, presumably because it was deemed to be 'silly stuff,' in the words of a tenth-century scholar. It was anonymous, its language was not sufficiently polished, and it was too obviously fictional and fantastic in parts, all of which precluded its acceptance in highbrow circles. At the same time it was never as truly popular, in the sense of widespread among and beloved by the illiterate, as the monstrously lengthy and equally anonymous epic tales such as Sirat Antar or Sirat Bani Hilal.

"Then, in Europe three centuries ago, the Nights rose to the pinnacle of critical esteem when Antoine Galland produced his French translation, which spawned numerous other European versions. The Nights came to belong to World Literature, loved by children, novelists, poets and the general reading public, in the process contributing much to the formation and malformation of the Middle East in Western eyes. Galland did more than merely translate: he shaped the text into what became a more or less canonical form; as a result the Nights are as much a part of Western literature as of Arabic. To Western readers, the stories of Aladdin, Ali Baba and Sindbad belong to the core of the Nights and are among the best-known tales; but they did not belong to the Arabic text until Galland added them. There is, in fact, no known Arabic text of the Aladdin and Ali Baba stories that predates Galland, and elements in the story of Aladdin suggest that it may have been a European fairy tale rather than an Arabic one. ... It was only in the course of the twentieth century that the Arabs themselves, in the wake of the Westerners, came to consider the Nights as something to be proud of and to study seriously instead of enjoying it in secret as a guilty pleasure. Many reactionary Muslims still consider it an unedifying text that ought to be banned or at least expurgated; but on the alwaraq.com website, where a wealth of Arabic texts may be consulted and searched, the Nights have the highest number of hits (I should add that the Koran is not listed there). "

Geert Jan Van Gelder, "Naming of parts-or not," The Times Literary Supplement, January 23, 2009, p. 7.

"Working as a government copyist to pay the rent, and 'hacking on the press' [for extra funds] whenever he could, Walt Whitman nursed and gave other assistance for four or five hours per day, five or six days a week [in makeshift Union hospitals]. By his own reckoning he cared for more than 80,000 soldiers in the course of the war. He assisted at amputations, carried bedpans, fed those too weak to feed themselves, held the hands or mopped the brows of men dying of typhoid, dysentery, pyemia (an epidemic blood infection), and systemic gangrene. He wrote hundreds of letters of condolence, and those few letters not lost to history exhibit an affecting restraint. Walt's instinctive sympathy for the parents and other relatives of the young men sacrificed in the war led him neither to patriotic effusions ('Rest assured that your son died in a noble cause, there being no greater honor than to shed one's blood for one's country,' etc.) nor to religious or religio-mystical hyperventilations. He was not of the school that asserts that the dead are better off, that they have gone to a better place. Rather, his letters of condolence tended to describe the young man so painfully lost in terms that a father or mother or brother or sister could readily understand and would long remember: how the boy behaved at the end; what he said, if anything; whether he had lost weight, had a haircut, or suffered some other notable alteration in appearance. 'Though I knew him but briefly,' a number of the letters say, in essence, 'I came to love him, beautiful and appealing young man that he was.'

"Walt came to believe that the details of the battles--the 'mere military minutiae,' as he called the information about tactics, victories, and acts of combat heroism--would soon be lost to history, and deservedly so. What would be remembered, instead, would be the acts of compassionate intercession: the nursing, comforting, and condoling to which he and other volunteers and medical personnel had dedicated themselves. A poet's narcissism may explain his praise for what he himself was undertaking to do--Whitman is, after all, the Poet of Himself, ever given to idealizing and mythologizing his own character and life. But other concerns were also at play. Though loyal to Lincoln and to the Union cause, Walt was disgusted by the war--his letters to his mother recount again and again the horrors he was seeing, the gross waste of young life, the hideous, pointless agonies. He was finally overcome by what he saw. In the spring of 1864, just as George was embarking on the final campaign of the war, Walt began to fail emotionally. He exhibited an assortment of odd symptoms and had to take temporary leave from the hospitals and go home to Brooklyn to be nursed by his mother. It is a testament to his devotion that, six months later, he returned to Washington and to the same grim, saddening work in the hospitals. His love for the young men and his pity for their suffering made his return unavoidable.

"Considering his uncanny insight into the hearts of men, the way Walt got things exactly wrong about the Civil War is notable. He abhorred violence and thought that the 620,000 dead of the war--a figure equivalent to six million Americans today percentagewise--would consign war to the ashbin of history. But the world was actually on the threshold of an enduring boom in war, with the Civil War marking but its initial stage."

Robert Roper, "Collateral Damage," The American Scholar, Winter 2009, pp. 78-79.

"At noon on March 4, [outgoing president] James Buchanan and Abraham Lincoln entered an open barouche (horse-drawn carriage) at Willard's Hotel to begin the drive down Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capitol. Determined to prevent any attempt on Lincoln's life, General [Winfield] Scott had stationed sharpshooters on the roofs of buildings along the avenue, and companies of soldiers blocked off the cross streets. He stationed himself with one battery of light artillery on Capitol Hill; General John E. Wool, commander of the army's Department of the East, was with another. The presidential procession was short and businesslike, more like a military operation than a political parade.

"Entering the Capitol from the north through a passageway boarded so as to prevent any possible assassination attempt, Buchanan and Lincoln attended the swearing in of Vice President Hannibal Hamlin and then emerged to a smattering of applause on the platform erected at the east portico. Introduced by his old friend, the silver-tongued E. D. Baker, Lincoln rose but was obviously troubled by what to do with his tall stovepipe hat. Noting his perplexity, [Illinois Senator Stephen] Douglas said, 'Permit me, sir,' took the hat, and held it during the ceremony. Lincoln read his inaugural, an eyewitness recalled, in a voice 'though not very strong or full-toned' that 'rang out over the acres of people before him with surprising distinctness, and was heard in the remotest parts of his audience.' When he finished, the cadaverous Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, now nearly eighty-four years old, tottered forth to administer the oath of office to the sixteenth President of the United States. The audience could not be quite sure what the new President's policy toward secession would be because his inaugural address, like his cabinet, was an imperfectly blended mixture of opposites.

"The draft that he completed before leaving Springfield was a no-nonsense document; it declared that the Union was indestructible, that secession was illegal, and that he intended to enforce the laws. 'All the power at my disposal will be used to reclaim the public property and places which have fallen,' he pledged. ... Lincoln urged secessionists to pause for reflection: 'In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow citizens, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war. ... With you, and not with me, is the solemn question of 'Shall it be peace, or a sword?' '

"Lincoln showed this warlike draft to several of his associates. ... [However, the highly-regarded William] Seward thought the speech much too provocative. If Lincoln delivered it without alterations, he warned, Virginia and Maryland would secede within sixty days. ... Entreating Lincoln to include 'some words of affection,' some 'of calm and cheerful confidence,' he proposed a less martial concluding paragraph, [a suggestion which became the now famous 'mystic chords of memory' passage.]"

"In logic class, I opened my textbook--the last place I was expecting to find comic inspiration--and was startled to find that Lewis Carroll, the supremely witty author of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, was also a logician. He wrote logic textbooks and included argument forms based on the syllogism, normally presented in logic books this way:

"All men are mortal.

Socrates is a man.

Therefore, Socrates is mortal.

"But Carroll's were more convoluted, and they struck me as funny in a new way:

"1) Babies are illogical.

2) Nobody is despised who can manage a crocodile.

3) Illogical persons are despised.

Therefore, babies cannot manage crocodiles

"And:

1) No interesting poems are unpopular among people of real taste

2) No modern poetry is free from affectation.

3) All your poems are on the subject of soap bubbles.

4) No affected poetry is popular among people of taste.

5) Only a modern poem would be on the subject of soap bubbles.

Therefore, all your poems are uninteresting

"These word games bothered and intrigued me. Appearing to be silly nonsense, on examination they were absolutely logical--yet they were still funny. The comedy doors opened wide, and Lewis Carroll's clever fancies from the nineteenth century expanded my notion of what comedy could be. I began closing my show by announcing, 'I'm not going home tonight; I'm going to Bananaland, a place where only two things are true, only two things: One, all chairs are green; and two, no chairs are green.' Not at Lewis Carroll's level, but the line worked for my contemporaries, and I loved implying that the one thing I believed in was contradiction."

" 'Woody was the shyest little bunny that ever was,' Rollins told me. 'Something about the guy made us crack up. He'd do [his jokes] in a monotone like a writer, not trying to presume to perform, and to us it came across hilarious. He undersold everything'.

"It wasn't just that Allen wrote funny jokes, his jokes were of a different kind from anyone else's, full of surreal concepts and funny images--like ... his joke about being raised in a home so strict that he had to be home by nine-thirty on prom night--'So I made a reservation at the Copacabana for five o'clock and I took my date and we watched them set up.'

" 'We put him in these little clubs that paid nothing, and because of his lack of cachet as a performer, he would come out, and not only was the material offbeat and strange to people, but he would present it like a kid doing a show-and-tell for school. Not a laugh. ... Allen said '[It] took more courage than I knew I had. I worked at my own expense, financially and emotionally, going down to some godforsaken, mostly empty club at eleven P.M. and then nobody would laugh. I wanted to die.' ...

"He found that 'what audiences want is intimacy with the person. They want to like the person and find the person funny as a human being. ... It's not the jokes that do it, it's the individual himself. The comedian has nothing to do with the jokes. It's just a great, great fallacy that turns out so many mediocre comedians and causes so much trouble. The best material in the world in the hands of a hack or someone who doesn't know how to deliver jokes is not going to mean anything. You can take the worst material in the world and give it to W.C. Fields or Groucho Marx and something funny will come out.' "

Gerald Nachman, Seriously Funny, Backstage, 2004, pp. 544-547.

"As pastor, teacher, activist, theologian, and prolific author, Niebuhr was a towering presence in American intellectual life from the 1930s through the 1960s. Even today, he deserves recognition as the most clear-eyed of American prophets. Niebuhr speaks to us from the past, offering truths of enormous relevance to the present. As prophet, he warned that what he called 'our dreams of managing history' ... posed a potentially mortal threat to the United States.' ...

"Niebuhr wrote after World War II [that] ... a position of apparent preeminence placed the United States 'under the most grievous temptations to self-adulation.' ...

"Niebuhr once wrote disapprovingly of Americans, their 'culture soft and vulgar, equating joy with happiness and happiness with comfort.' ... In Niebuhr's words, they will cling to 'a culture which makes 'living standards' the final norm of the good life and which regards the perfection of techniques as the guarantor of every cultural as well as every social-moral value.' ...

"Niebuhr [also] wrote, "One of the most pathetic aspects of human history is that every civilization expresses itself most pretentiously, compounds its partial and universal values most convincingly, and claims immortality for its finite existence at the very moment when the decay which leads to death has already begun.' ...

" 'The trustful acceptance of false solutions for our perplexing problems,' he wrote a half century ago, 'adds a touch of pathos to the tragedy of our age.' ... For all nations, Niebuhr once observed, 'The desire to gain an immediate selfish advantage always imperils their ultimate interests. If they recognize this fact, they usually realize it too late.' "

" 'My, how foolish I am!' she cries, suddenly alert, like a woman remembering too late she has biscuits in the oven. 'You know what I've always thought?' she asks in a tone of discovery, and not smiling at me but a point beyond. 'I've always thought a body would have to be sick and dying before they saw the Lord. And I imagined that when He came it would be like looking at the Baptist window: pretty as colored glass with the sun shining through, such a shine you don't know it's getting dark. And it's been a comfort: to think of that shine takes away all the spooky feeling. But I'll wager it never happens. I'll wager at the very end a body realizes the Lord has already shown Himself. That things as they are,'--her hand circles in a gesture that gathers clouds and kites and grass and Queenie, our dog, pawing earth over her bone-- 'just what they've always seen, was seeing Him. As for me, I could leave the world with today in my eyes.' " Truman Capote, A Christmas Memory, Modern Library, 1996, originally published in 1956, pp. 26-7.

Wednesday, 3 December 1941

Spring 1979

"Thanks to the combined scandals of his 'un-American' politics and his underage bedfellows, Chaplin had been exiled [by the FBI in 1952] from the country whose most popular art form he helped to define. Decamping to a villa in Switzerland, he lived out the next twenty years with his devoted fourth wife, Oona, at his side, returning to the US in 1972 for 'the great American recantation,' when Hollywood offered him an honorary Oscar, and the opportunity for some preening. He died five years later, at the age of eighty-eight, widely considered cinema's greatest genius.

"Although the international adoration the Tramp inspired was gratifying at first, Chaplin came to resent the 'mask' he had assumed: 'There are days when I am filled with disgust at the character that circumstances forced me to create,' he said late in life: 'That dreadful suit of clothes.' This seems less a rejection of the suit itself, than of a career defined by - or as - a suit of clothes, the lingering horror of a costume that became both straitjacket and carapace. But as James Agee pointed out, Chaplin's genius was precisely for finding 'inflections,' for ranging across human nature while remaining within this one, apparently fixed, identity.

"Nonetheless, becoming a living legend is, by all accounts, not much fun. Like Marilyn Monroe after him, Chaplin felt imprisoned by his own creation, as his audiences refused to let him play anyone else. Unlike Monroe, however, Chaplin had the wealth and the creative control to make the attempt. After dozens of shorts and a handful of classic features starring the Tramp, including The Gold Rush and City Lights, Chaplin set about killing him off, first turning him into Hitler, in The Great Dictator, and then into Monsieur Verdoux, the sociopathic serial killer who justifies murdering a string of wives by means of the atomic bomb. Monsieur Verdoux was greeted with a mixture of incomprehension and hostility; although it was nominated for best screenplay of 1947, it lost to that beloved masterpiece, The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer starring Cary Grant and Shirley Temple. Chaplin made only one more film in Hollywood, the mawkish and self-pitying Limelight, before the House Un-American Activities Committee drove him into exile."

Sarah Churchwell, "The Tramp and the sort-of-lady," The Times Literary Supplement, June 12, 2009, p. 7.

"Though not yet famous, as he eventually would become, mainly because of his colorful and often exaggerated descriptions of sports events and his popular short stories about Broadway gamblers and their variegated associates, Damon Runyon was a man in perennial search of a buck. Or at least he was before he became famous after some of his make-believe Broadway characters became immortalized in the hit musical Guys and Dolls. Barney Nagler, one of the most highly respected boxing writers over a period that extended from the 1930s to the 1980s, was known to become almost apoplectic when he would hear a young sports reporter wax reverentially about Runyon's work. 'He was the crookedest writer around, with his hand in every promoter's pocket and in a lot of managers' and fighters' pockets, too,' the usually mild-mannered and soft-spoken Nagler once suddenly thundered.

"Indeed, Runyon had been on the take of promoters and fight managers since he was a very young sportswriter on the Pueblo Chieftain in Colorado, where he grew up. ... Early in his journalistic career, Runyon found out that managers and promoters were willing to pay a sportswriter or sports editor to ensure that their fighters got what they considered adequate space on the local sports pages. Taking a cue from some older writers, Runyon also bought, or was given, part ownership of some fighters in Pueblo and Denver, both good fight towns in the early part of the twentieth century. By owning a piece of a fighter, a sportswriter was even more inclined to write often and favorably about a fistic prospect.

"Runyon's ethical misbehavior went even further. In his 1991 biography of Runyon, Jimmy Breslin said that while running an annual Milk Fund boxing benefit [to help the children of the poor] at Madison Square Garden for the wife of William Randolph Hearst, Runyon was inclined to skim off some of the gate receipts--in effect, as Breslin put it, stealing money from the babies of indigent New York families. But by then some of Runyon's best friends were well-known New York gangsters whose scruples also left much to be desired."

"The next morning the Duke and Dutchess sailed into the [Juan Fernandez Island] harbor entrance, their guns ready for action. ... As they approached the beach, they were shocked to see a solitary man, clad in goatskin, waving a white cloth and yelling exuberantly to them in English. Alexander Selkirk, the castaway whose story would inspire Daniel Dafoe to write Robinson Crusoe, was about to be rescued.

"Selkirk had been stranded on Juan Fernandez Island for four years and four months, ... a Scotsman, [he] had been the mate aboard a consort ... whose captain and officers had lost faith in their commodore's leadership and sailed off on their own. Unfortunately, the ship's hull had already been infested by shipworm, so much so that when the galley stopped at Juan Fernandez for water and fresh provisions, young Selkirk decided to stay--to take his chances on the island rather than try to cross the Pacific in a deteriorating vessel. According to the extended account he gave [Captain] Rogers, Selkirk spent the better part of a year in deep despair, scanning the horizon for friendly vessels that never appeared. Slowly he adapted to his solitary world. The island was home to hundreds of goats, descendents of those left behind when the Spanish abandoned a half-hearted colonization attempt. He eventually learned to chase them down and catch them with his bare hands. He built two huts with goatskin walls and grass roofs, one serving as a kitchen, the other as his living quarters, where he read the Bible, sang psalms, and fought off the armies of rats that came to nibble his toes as he slept. He defeated the rodents by feeding and befriending many of the island's feral cats, which lay about his hut by the hundreds. As insurance against starvation in case of accident or illness, Selkirk had managed to domesticate a number of goats, which he raised by hand and, on occasion, would dance with in his lonely hut. ... He was rarely sick, and ate a healthful diet of turnips, goats, crayfish, and wild cabbage.

"[Captain] Rogers said ... 'He had so much forgot his language for want of use that we could scarcely understand him, for he seemed to speak by halves. ... We offer'd him a Dram [alcoholic drink], but he would not touch it, having drank nothing but water since his being there, and 'twas some time before he could relish our victuals.' Selkirk was remarkably healthy and alert at first, but Rogers noted that 'this man, when he came to our ordinary method of diet and life, though he was sober enough, lost much of his strength and agility.' "

Colin Woodard, The Republic of Pirates, Harcourt, 2007, pp. 75-77.

"Here's what happened to him. Going to lunch he passed an office-building that was being put up--just the skeleton. A beam or something fell eight or ten stories down and smacked the sidewalk along side him. It brushed pretty close to him, but didn't touch him, though a piece of sidewalk was chipped off and flew up and hit his cheek. It only took a piece of skin off, but he still had the scar when I saw him. He rubbed it with his fingers--well, affectionately--when he told me about it. He was scared stiff of course, he said, but he was more shocked than really frightened. He felt like somebody had taken the lid off his life and let him look at the works.

"Flitcraft had been a good citizen and a good husband and father, not by any outer compulsion, but simply because he was a man who was most comfortable in step with his surroundings. He had been raised that way. The people he knew were like that. The life he knew was a clean orderly sane responsible affair. Now a falling beam had shown him that life was fundamentally none of these things. He, the good citizen-husband-father, could be wiped out between office and restaurant by the accident of a falling beam. He knew then that men died at haphazard like that, and lived only while blind chance spared them.

"It was not, primarily, the injustice of it that disturbed him: he accepted that after the first shock. What disturbed him was the discovery that in sensibly ordering his affairs he had got out of step, not into step, with life. He said he knew before he had got twenty feet from the fallen beam that he would never know peace again until he had adjusted himself to this new glimpse of life. By the time he had eaten his luncheon he had found his means of adjustment. Life could be ended for him at random by a falling beam: he would change his life at random by simply going away. He loved his family, he said, as much as he supposed was usual, but he knew he was leaving them adequately provided for, and his love for them was not of the sort that would make absence painful.

"He went to Seattle that afternoon ... and from there by boat to San Francisco. For a couple of years he wandered around and then drifted back to the Northwest, and settled in Spokane and got married. His second wife didn't look like the first, but they were more alike than they were different. You know, the kind of women that play fair games of golf and bridge and like new salad-recipes. He wasn't sorry for what he had done. It seemed reasonable enough to him. I don't think he even knew he had settled back into the same groove he had jumped out of in Tacoma. But that's the part of it I always liked. He adjusted himself to beams falling, and then no more of them fell, and he adjusted himself to them not falling."

Dashiell Hammett, The Maltese Falcon, Vintage, 1992, originally published 1929, pp. 63-4.

"Fundamentally the War, despite its being won, consisted for Britain of a ceaseless nightly Blitz of humiliations, compromises and setbacks, and these did not stop with 1945 but kept up in a relentless battering until well into the 1970s ... [with Britain as] the European Economic Community's poorest member country ...

"[The establishment of the British Empire], whereby over centuries great chunks of the world were repopulated and reconfigured by British settlers--whose almost insectoid blankness and rapacity will surely to some later global generation make them appear far, far worse than the Mongols--fell to pieces. ... If people understood in 1945 that Britain had won the War only because the United States and the USSR had won it with them, then they certainly did not understand that the consequence would be the demolition of the British Empire, a cornerstone of national identity, hopes, fears and opportunities, in the space of about fifteen years. ...

"The effect of this change within Britain was massive and profound trauma--it enraged millions of British who neither understood it nor saw how they could create for themselves a new identity without the Empire. ... As Britain's greatness went off a cliff with the chaotic mass decolonization of 1960, the James Bond books' sales went higher and higher. ... As a large part of the planet slipped from Britain's grasp, one man silently maintained the country's reputation. When a secret organization with stolen atomic weapons planned to destroy Miami Beach, it was not the Americans who would save the world, but a solitary Englishman, mucking around for wholly implausible reasons in the Bahamas. The beautiful Domino, key to the mystery, approaches him with the immortal exchange, 'And who might you be?' 'My name's Bond, James Bond.' "

Simon Winder, The Man Who Saved Britain, Farrar, Straus, 2006, pp. 4, 51-3, 96-7.

"Alexander the Great founded Alexandria in 332 BCE but hung around just long enough to lay out the basic street plan and get construction underway. When he died a few years later, one of his generals, Ptolemy Soter, took control of Egypt and made Alexandria his capital, building great palaces and temples, including a temple to the Muses (or Museum). His son, Ptolemy II Philadelphus, started the library, which was based in or next to the Museum, using Aristotle's personal library as its core. Ptolemy III Euergetes continued the work, determined to gather in the library all the knowledge of the world, and he instituted an aggressive policy of collection that involved acquiring scrolls, copying them and then returning the (inferior) copies while retaining the originals. He supposedly had every ship that passed through Alexandria searched for new scrolls and borrowed the entire scroll collection of Athens, willingly forfeiting his massive deposit in order to keep the originals. Eventually the collection [was reputed to have] numbered over 500,000 scrolls--700,000 by some accounts--making it, by a considerable margin, the greatest collection the ancient world had ever known. ...

"Along with the collection of parchment (and later vellum) scrolls, the Ptolemies paid for a permanent faculty of 30-50 scholars to live and work at the library, and over the centuries their number included most of the great names of antiquity, including Euclid (father of geometry), Eratosthenes (who calculated the circumference of the Earth), Archimedes (legendary discoverer of the lever, the screw, and pi) and Galen (the most influential medical writer of the next 1,400 years). ...

"The Library was probably not a big as legend contends. Historian James Hannam has calculated that storing 500,000 scrolls would require 25 miles of shelving, which in turn would mean that the Library must have been a truly monumental building. None of the sources mention such a gargantuan edifice, and since the remains of the library have never fully been excavated its full extent remains a mystery.

"Most telling, however, is the evidence from other ancient libraries that have left remains, which show that even those renowned for their wealth and breadth had collections numbering in the thousands rather than the hundreds of thousands. The finest library in the history of ancient Rome was the Library of Trajan, which probably contained around 20,000 scrolls, while the Library of Pergamon, arch-rival to the Alexandrian library, probably had around 30,000."

"In spelling, the [English] language was assimilating the consequences of having a civil service of French scribes, who paid little attention to the traditions of English spelling that had developed in Anglo-Saxon times. Not only did French qu arrive, replacing Old English cw (as in queen), but ch replaced c (in words such as church--Old English cirice), sh and sch replaced sc (as in ship--Old English scip), and much more. Vowels were written in a great number of ways. Much of the irregularity of modern English spelling derives from the forcing together of Old English and French systems of spelling in the Middle Ages. People struggled to find the best way of writing English throughout the period. ... Even Caxton didn't help, at times. Some of his typesetters were Dutch, and they introduced some of their own spelling conventions into their work. That is where the gh in such words as ghost comes from.

"Any desire to standardize would also have been hindered by the ... Great English Vowel Shift, [which] took place in the early 1400s. Before the shift, a word like loud would have been pronounced 'lood'; name as 'nahm'; leaf as 'layf'; mice as 'mees'. ...

"The renewed interest in classical languages and cultures, which formed part of the ethos of the Renaissance, had introduced a new perspective into spelling: etymology. Etymology is the study of the history of words, and there was a widespread view that words should show their history in the way they were spelled. These weren't classicists showing off. There was a genuine belief that it would help people if they could 'see' the original Latin in a Latin-derived English word. So someone added a b to the word typically spelled det, dett, or dette in Middle English, because the source in Latin was debitum, and it became debt, and caught on. Similarly, an o was added to peple, because it came from populum: we find both poeple and people, before the latter became the norm. An s was added to ile and iland, because of Latin insula, so we now have island. There are many more such cases. Some people nowadays find it hard to understand why there are so many 'silent letters' of this kind in English. It is because other people thought they were helping."

David Crystal, The Fight for English: How language pundits ate, shot, and left, Oxford, 2006, pp. 26-9.

"John Ashberry's praise for Bishop as a 'writer's writer's writer', whose work 'inspires in writers of every sort' an 'extraordinarily intense loyalty' seems apt. ...

"[A]t the time of her death, she had assembled fewer than ninety poems. ... She could mull over a draft for more than a decade in wait for the right line or word. ... Bishop's reticence seems less a matter of timidity and more of perfectionism, a trait now synonymous with her name. ... Part of Bishop's appeal involves the contrast between the work published in her lifetime ... and the pain and disorder of her often very messy life..."

Excerpts from her work:

The art of losing isn't hard to master.

So many things seem filled with the intent

To be lost that their loss is no disaster

from One Art

The intimidating sound

of these voices

we must separately find

can and shall be vanquished:

Days and Distance disarrayed again

and gone

both for good and from the gentle battleground.

from Argument

Elizabeth Bishop, The Complete Poems, 1927-1979

Commentary from Gillian White, "Awful but Cheerful," London Review of Books, 25 May 2006, pp. 8-9.

"Broadly speaking, there are two groups of people who think, talk, and write a lot about language, and parts of speech give them both agita. The 'prescriptivists' ... peer at something like Pimp My Ride and see the decline of Western civilization. The process by which nouns like impact and access, or a noun phrase like fast track are verbed is called 'functional shifting.'...

"[Functional] shifting has been going on for a long, long time. In the words of Garland Cannon ... the process became 'productive in Middle English, when the nouns duke and lord acquired verb functions, and the verbs cut and rule shifted to a noun.' Shakespeare was the past master of this kind of thing; he had characters say 'season your admiration,' 'dog them at the heels,' 'backing a horse,' plus elbow, drug, gossip, lapse, and silence--none of them ever used before as verbs.

"Nouns still get verbed every day, much to the despair of the prescriptivists. ... The real fun starts when a word shifts more than once. Frame started as a verb, meaning 'to form,' then became a noun meaning 'border,' and emerged as a new verb meaning 'to put a frame around something.' In a similar way, the noun wire engendered a verb ('I wired him the news') and from that turned into another noun ('He sent me a wire'). Despite being less than two centuries old, okay is commonly used as five different parts of speech: adjective ('It was an okay movie'), adverb ('The team played okay'), interjection ('Okay!'), noun ('The boss gave her okay'), and verb ('The president okayed the project'). ...

"By contrast, 'descriptivists' ... would go to their deaths defending the use of hopefully to mean 'it is to be hoped that' simply because people use it that way. ... This school underestimates the difference in protocol between speaking and writing, unjustifiably applying the inherent looseness of the one to the necessary (to some extent) formality of the other."

Ben Yagoda, When You Catch an Adjective, Kill It, Broadway, 2007, pp. 3-11.

"One of the best examples of an industry tackling its greatest image weakness and turning it into its most beneficial strength just by changing a single solitary word is the 'gaming' industry--formerly known as the 'gambling' industry. ... Turning gambling into gaming wasn't [industry association president] Frank Fahrenkopf's idea ... [but he] intensified the effort. ...

"What's important to understand is that the underlying products and services changed not a whit. Same slot machines. Same deck of cards. Same dice. Same casino advantage. But the switch from 'gambling' to 'gaming' in describing one's behavior contributed to a fundamental change in how Americans see the gambling industry. ...

"All the old, unsavory associations (e.g., organized crime, pawnshops, addiction, foolishly losing one's fortune) gave way to a lighter, brighter image of good, clean fun. 'Gambling' looks like what an old man with a crumpled racing form does at a track, or sounds like the pleas of a desperate degenerate trying to talk a pawnshop punter into paying a little more for his wedding ring, or feels like the services provided by some seedy back-alley bookie in some smoke-filled room. 'Gaming' is what families do together at the Hollywood-themed MGM Grand, New York, New York, or one of the other 'family-friendly resorts' in Las Vegas. 'Gambling' is a vice. 'Gaming' is a choice. 'Gambling' is taking a chance, engaging in a risky behavior. 'Gaming' is as simple as playing a game with cards or dice or a little ball that goes round and round and round."

Dr. Frank Luntz, Words That Work, Hyperion, 2007, p. pp. 129-130.

"In 1912, by which time Beatrix Potter, the author of The Tale of Peter Rabbit, was a hugely successful forty-six-year-old writer and illustrator, she sent her publisher Harold Warne a new story, her darkest yet, called The Tale of Mr. Tod. The story is about an argument between a fox and a badger, and features the abduction and near death of a sackful of baby rabbits. The story had a particularly good opening sentence: 'I am quite tired of making goody goody books about nice people.' But the candor and acerbity of that were too much for Warne, and he fussed until Potter agreed to change the opening to something inarguably less punchy: 'I have made many books about well-behaved people.' Before she succumbed to this bad editorial advice, Potter relieved herself of her feelings in a letter to Warne:

" 'If it were not impertinent to lecture one's publisher, you are a great deal too much afraid of the public for whom I have never cared one tuppeny-button. I am sure that it is this attitude of mind which has enabled me to keep up the series. Most people, after one success, are so cringingly afraid of doing less well that they rub all the edge off their subsequent work.'

"The world's most popular children's author had a low opinion of both books and children: 'I never have cared tuppence either for popularity or for the modern child; they are pampered & spoilt with too many toys & books.' ...

"Potter's work was always tinged with a bleak realism about death, right from the opening of The Tale of Peter Rabbit, in which we learn that Peter's father has had 'an accident' and ended up in one of Mrs. McGregor's pies. ...

"Even in the lighter stories, such as Two Bad Mice, the main characters experience 'no end of rage and disappointment,' and that is before we encounter the outright evil of the fox in The Tale of Jemima Puddle-Duck, who encourages Jemima to pick the flavorings and seasonings in which she is to be cooked—a gesture of macabre cruelty which would give pause to Hannibal Lecter.

"This darkness and violence is a central reason to why children like Beatrix Potter. Her bright, brisk, no- nonsense sentences, her sharply observed and beautifully tinted images, and her strong feeling of coziness and domesticity are all underpinned and made real by underlying intimations of darkness, cruelty, and sudden death."

John Lanchester, "The Heroine of Hill Top Farm," The New York Review of Books, March 15, 2007, p. 25.

"Scholars sometimes speak of 'nonliterate' civilizations--the Inca in South America or such West African states as the Ashanti of the seventeenth century or the Dahomey of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. But on close inspection, such societies seem always to have some good information technology. They may not be able to record their poems, but they can handle more vital data, such as numbers, just fine.

"The Dahomey, for example, took a census to aid taxation and military mobilization. Their database consisted of a room full of boxes containing pebbles that signified the number of men and women, boys and girls, in each village. Updating was continuous, via the registering of every birth and death (including the cause of death) throughout the land. For similar purposes, the Inca used the quipu, the variously knotted and colored strings that only specialists understood. ...

"That the benefit of ancient writing may have clustered near the top of the social pyramid shouldn't surprise us. ... The fewer the gatekeepers, the more power they had. Ancient Mesopotamia had an estimated literacy rate of less than 1 percent. It's hard to say whether this reflected an attempt by the elites to monopolize the technology, but in any event scribes were a small and esteemed class, complete with an official deity (aptly, the goddess of fertility). Entry to the class--via lengthy instruction at the 'tablet house'--was granted mainly to the privileged. A Sumerian text describes a rich man giving his son's writing teacher food, a robe, and a ring to ensure a passing grade in spite of his son's indiscipline.

"Many scribes were mere transcribers and didn't themselves call the shots. Still, they seem to have reveled in the power emanating from their art. Some Egyptian scribes opined that the lower classes, lacking in brains, had to be driven like cattle. Actually, what the lower classes lacked was their own personal scribe."

Robert Wright, Nonzero, Vintage, 2000, pp. 102-104

"Johannes Gutenberg produced his first Bible in Mainz, Germany, in 1454 or 1455, and word soon spread beyond Germany about the potential of the printing press. Leon Battista Alberti, for example, wrote admiringly of 'the German inventor who has recently made it possible, by making certain imprints of letters, for three men to make more than two hundred copies of a given original text in one hundred days.' By the early 1460s printing presses had begun to spread to many of Europe's important cities, although not everybody understood what they were. In 1465 the secretary of the Vatican Library still felt it necessary to describe the advantages of the new invention to Pope Paul II. 'Every poor scholar can purchase for himself a library for a small sum,' he explained. 'Those volumes that heretofore could scarce be bought for a hundred crowns may now be procured for less than twenty, very well-printed and free from those faults with which manuscripts used to abound, for such is the art of our printers and letter makers that no ancient or modern discovery is comparable to it.'

"Columbus belonged to the first lay generation to benefit from the spread of printing, and he made the most of the opportunity that this offered him. After arriving in Spain he acquired a number of newly printed books, almost all of which concerned geography, and for the rest of his life he kept them at his side as trusted companions. He didn't just read his books; he engaged them in conversation, scribbling notes to himself in the margins, calling out statements he agreed with, testily objecting to others. Several of his books survive, and together they provide invaluable information about how Columbus tried to build his case in Spain - and, later, after he had finally crossed the ocean, how he struggled to make sense of what it was that he had found on the other side.

"One of Columbus's favorite books, published in 1477, was the Historia rerum ubique gestarum, or History of Matters Conducted Everywhere - one of the earliest of all printed guides to geography. Written in the aftermath of the Council of Florence by the Italian humanist Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini, who would go on to reign as Pope Pius II from 1458 to 1464, the work surveyed traditional medieval ideas about the world, and updated them with references to Ptolemy, Strabo, and even Niccolo Conti. Its quintessentially humanist aim, Piccolomini wrote, was matching modern with ancient geography. The book consists of two parts, one devoted to Asia, the other to Europe. Columbus, naturally, read the former with great avidity, making a total of 861 different notes in the margins."

But their real peak came in the 1950s on television. During the zenith year, 1959, the American television viewer could choose among twenty eight western series running on network television--an average of four a night. "It is decidedly odd that these figures of the West, whose lives consisted mostly of herding cows across lonely plains and whose idea of ultimate excitement was a bath and a shave and a night on the town in a place like Abilene, should have exerted such a grip on the popular imagination..."They certainly didn't spend a lot of time shooting each other. In the ten years that Dodge City was the biggest, rowdiest cow town in the world, only thirty-four people were buried in the infamous Boot Hill Cemetery, and almost all of them died of natural causes. Incidents like the shootout at the O.K. Corral or the murder of Wild Bill Hickock became famous by dint of their being so unusual." Bill Bryson, Made in America, Perennial, 1994, p. 129

"I have tried to isolate and inspect the great talent that was in Ed Ricketts, that made him so loved and needed and makes him so missed now that he is dead. Certainly he was an interesting and charming man, but there was some other quality that far exceeded these. I have thought that it might be his ability to receive, to receive anything from anyone, to receive gracefully and thankfully, and to make the gift seem very fine. Because of this everyone felt good in giving to Ed--a present, a thought, anything.

"Perhaps the most overrated virtue in our list of shoddy virtues is that of giving. Giving builds up the ego of the giver, makes him superior and higher and larger than the receiver...It is so easy to give, so exquisitely rewarding. Receiving, on the other hand, if it is well-done, requires a fine balance of self-knowledge and kindness. It requires humility and tact and great understanding of relationships. In receiving, you cannot appear, even to yourself, better or stronger or wiser than the giver, although you must be wiser to do it well. "It requires self-esteem to receive--not self-love but just a pleasant acquaintance and liking for oneself."

John Steinbeck, The Log from the Sea of Cortez, Appendix, "About Ed Ricketts", Penguin Books, 1951, pp. 272-3

"I took a playwriting course from the noted Prof. A.M. Drummond, a huge man on crutches who right off the bat delivered a ukase never to begin a play with the telephone ringing. I immediately wrote a one-act play that began with a telephone ringing. If I hadn't, there wouldn't have been a play. It wasn't just rebelliousness that prompted that play; Drummond was a casually overt anti-Semite. He had no compunction about beginning a sentence with 'You Jews'--there were two others in the class--and I was declaring war. I didn't win, not while I was at Cornell anyway. He advised me to give up playwriting.

"It wasn't until I was writing professionally for radio that I did happen on a good teacher: Ned Warren...Bald and rosy-cheeked, Ned looked as though he got his clothes in London (he wore ascots). He sat me down one day to discuss the scripts I had been writing. He was so wry and sardonic that I was completely unprepared when he told me I had talent. Just that, in those words: I had talent. No one had ever said that before and he was definite. I wanted to run out of the room before he continued because I new there had to be a caveat. As indeed there was. My problem was that I was too facile. Too often, I made transitions in a scene through words, not as they should be made, through emotions. Emotions precede thought, emotions determine thought; plays are emotion. The single best lesson I have ever been given."

Arthur Laurents, Original Story, Knopf, 2000, pp. 16-7

"A Yorkshire gravestone bears this inscription:

Hear underneath dis laihl stean las Robert earl of Huntingtun neer arcir yer az hie sa geud and pipl kauld in Robin Heud sick utlawz as he an iz men il england nivr si agen

Obiit 24 kal Decembis 1247

"Robin Hood lived; this marker confirms it, just as the Easter tables attest to the existence of the great Arthur. But that is all the tombstone does. Everything we know about that period suggests that Robin was merely another wellborn cutthroat who hid in shrubbery by roadsides, waiting to rob helpless wayfarers...

"The more we study those remote centuries, the unlikelier such legends become. Later mythmakers invested the Middle Ages with a bogus aura of romance. The Pied Piper of Hamelin is an example. He was a real man, but there was nothing enchanting about him. Quite the opposite; he was horrible, a psychopath and a pederast who, on June 20, 1484, spirited away 130 children in the Saxon village of Hammel and used them in unspeakable ways. Accounts of the aftermath vary. According to some, his victims were never seen again; others told of dismembered little bodies found scattered in the forest underbrush or festooning the branches of trees.

"The most imaginative cluster of fables appeared in print the year after the Piper's mass murders, when William Caxton published Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur. Later, bowdlerized(sanitized) versions of this great work have obscured the fact that Malory, contemplating medieval morality, seldom wore blinders. He had no illusions about his heroine when he wrote: 'There syr Launcelot toke the Fayrest Ladie by the hand, and she was naked as a nedel.' Some of his characters may actually have existed. For over a thousand years villagers in remote parts of Wales have called an adultress 'a regular Guinevere.' But Launcelot du Lac is entirely fictitious, and given the colossal time sprawl of the Middle Ages, it is highly unlikely that Guinevere, if indeed she lived, even shared the same century with Arthur."

William Manchester, A World Lit Only By Fire, Little, Brown, 1992, pp. 65-6

"Most non-literate societies (but not all) will have teachers assigned to give instructions in religious matters and they may (or may not) lead in cult performances. They will not necessarily be consecrated priests. There may also be prophets who rise up spontaneously, persons inspired to speak out to guide or to protest. Prophets may be aristocrats, or come from lowly families; even woman may be spirit-possessed (sometimes especially women). Whatever has been the case in the period before literacy, once literacy arrives, everything changes. The young will be quicker to learn than the old, as we have seen in our own history of information technology. But in the early stages there may be nothing to stop the older generation of the non-literate upper classes from holding on to power by paying scribes and secretaries. In the following generation , though by then everyone knows the current technology of communication, the old patterns of social advantage may remain intact-or they may be radically transformed." Mary Douglas, "I thirst! Water, I beseech thee", London Review of Books,? 23 June 2005, p. 33

"In a small ceremony in the year 1492 at the university city of Salamanca, in north central Spain, Queen Isabella of Castile was presented with the first copy, just off the press, of the humanist Antonio de Nebrija's Grammar of the Castilian language. She was slightly puzzled, and asked to know for what (purpose) it served. Five years before, she had been presented with a copy of the same author's textbook of Latin grammar, and had found that to be undeniably useful; it had certainly helped her with her own earnest and not always successful efforts to learn Latin. But a grammar of one's everyday spoken tongue, as distinct from the formal study of a language used by professional people and lawyers, was something different. No other European country had yet got round to producing such a thing. Before Nebrija could reply, the queen's confessor, Fray Hernando de Talavera, bishop of Avila, broke in and spoke on his behalf. 'After Your Highness has subjected barbarous peoples and nations of varied tongues,' he explained, 'with conquest will come the need for them to accept the laws that the conqueror imposes on the conquered, and among them will be our language.' It was a reply that the queen could understand..." Henry Kamen, Empire, Perennial, 2004, p. 3

"At 2pm, two long cold hours after starting, (Edward) Everett concluded his speech...and turned the dais over to President Lincoln...

"Though Lincoln was never expected to provide anything other than some concluding remarks, this was breathtakingly brief.? The Gettysburg Address contained just 268 words, two-thirds of them of only one syllable, in ten mostly short, direct, and memorably crystalline sentences.? It took only a fraction over two minutes to deliver...

"...this was an age of ludicrously inflated diction...no nineteenth century journalist would write that a house had burned down, but must instead say that "a great conflagration consumed the edifice."? Nor would he be content with a sentiment as unexpressive as "a crowd came to see" but instead would write "a vast concourse was assembled to witness"...

"American English had at last found a voice to go with its flag and anthem and national symbol..."

Bill Bryson, Made in America, Perennial, 1994, pp. 79-81

"The heroic daring of [the new] century lay in its conviction of absolute, unprecedented novelty. This is what the exhilarating notion of modernity meant: canceling all the accumulated wisdom of our forebears. ... Valiantly eager for the future, the Bauhaus instructor Oskar Schlemmer decreed in 1929 that 'One should act as if the world had just been created.'

"A new-born universe called for fresh tenants. Virginia Woolf accordingly reported, as if she were pinpointing an actual, verifiable event, that 'on or about December 1910 human character changed.' Rites of passage made this enigmatic transformation visible. How do human beings usually announce an altered identity? By changing the way they wear their hair. Men who wanted to be ruthlessly modern shaved their skulls, like the Russian revolutionary poet Vladimir Mayakovsky or Johannes Itten, an instructor at the Bauhaus in Weimar. In the hirsute nineteenth century, sages - aspiring to the shagginess of Old Testament prophets - grew beards. For the glowering, bullet-headed Mayakovsky, the cranium was a projectile, made more aerodynamic by being rid of hair. For Itten, shaving announced his priestly dedication to the new world which the designers at the Bauhaus intended to build. ...

"Women had their own equivalent to those drastic masculine acts of self-mutilation. In 1920 F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote a story, 'Bernice Bobs Her Hair,' about a timid provincial girl for whom bobbing is a transition between two periods of life and two historical epochs. The new style ejects her from Madonna-like girlhood, when she was protectively cocooned in tresses, and announces her sexual maturity. Bernice fearfully acknowledges the revolutionary antecedents of the process. Driving downtown to the mens' barber-shop where the operation will be performed, she suffers 'all the sensations of Marie Antoinette bound for the guillotine in a tumbril;' the barber with his shears is an executioner. The French revolutionaries sliced off the heads of bewigged aristocrats in order to destroy an old world. Bernice, however, has her own hair chopped to fit her for membership of a new society: bobbing conferred erotic allure on girls who were previously dismissed as wallflowers. ...

"James Joyce's Ulysses in 1922 testified to the change in human character announced by Virginia Woolf. Bodies now did things which, at least according to literature, they had never done before. A man ponders his own bowel movement, relishing its sweet smell. Later in the day he surreptitiously masturbates in a public place and takes part in a pissing contest, proud of the arc his urine describes. A woman has a noisily affirmative orgasm, or perhaps more than one. The same people did not think in paragraphs or logical, completed sentences, like characters in nineteenth-century novels. Their mental life proceeded in associative jerks and spasms; they mixed up shopping lists with sexual fantasies, often forgot verbs and (in the woman's case) scandalously abandoned all punctuation. The modern mind was not a quiet, tidy cubicle for cogitation. It thronged with as many random happenings as a city street; it contained scraps and fragments, dots and dashes, like the incoherent blizzard of marks on a modern canvas which could only be called an 'impression' because it represented nothing recognizable."