Laudator Temporis Acti

Richard Carter, review of R. Porter, Bodies Politic: Disease, Death and Doctors in Britain (1650-1900) (London: Reaction Books, 2001), in Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine 95.3 (March 2002) 157-159 (at 157-158):

Another child, Mary Anne Schimmelpenninck was of sterner stuff. Having extracted four front teeth, her kindly dentist offered '... a packet of comfits as my reward. But I drew up and said, "Do you think Regulus, and Epictetus, and Seneca, would take a reward for bearing pain; or the little Spartan boys?"'.

One of Catullus' most engaging poems is number 31, of which Walter Savage Landor wrote, "Never was a return to home expressed so sensitively and beautifully as here."

Its simple, heartfelt emotion is the despair of translators. Let's start out with the bare prose rendition of F.W. Cornish, followed by the Latin original, and then see how various English poets have rendered it.

Sirmio, bright eye of peninsulas and islands, all that in liquid lakes or vast ocean either Neptune bears; how willingly and with what joy I revisit you, scarcely trusting myself that I have left Thynia and the Bithynian plains, and that I see you in safety. Ah, what is more blessed than to put cares away, when the mind lays by its burden, and tired with labour of far travel we have come to our own home and rest on the couch we longed for? This it is which alone is worth all these toils. Welcome, lovely Sirmio, and rejoice in your master, and rejoice ye too, waters of the Lydian lake, and laugh out aloud all the laughter you have in your home.

Paene insularum, Sirmio, insularumque
ocelle, quascumque in liquentibus stagnis
marique vasto fert uterque Neptunus,
quam te libenter quamque laetus inviso,
vix mi ipse credens Thyniam atque Bithynos
liquisse campos et videre te in tuto.
o quid solutis est beatius curis,
cum mens onus reponit, ac peregrino
labore fessi venimus larem ad nostrum
desideratoque acquiescimus lecto?
hoc est, quod unumst pro laboribus tantis.
salve, o venusta Sirmio, atque ero gaude:
gaudete vosque, o Lydiae lacus undae:
ridete, quidquid est domi cachinnorum.

Leigh Hunt:

O best of all the scattr'd spots that lie
In sea or lake, -- apple of landscape's eye, --
How gladly do I drop within thy nest,
With what a sight of full, contented rest,
Scarce able to believe my journey o'er,
And that these eyes behold thee safe once more!
Oh where's the luxury like the smile at heart,
When the mind, breathing, lays its load apart, --
When we come home again, tir'd out, and spread
The loosen'd limbs o'er all the wish'd-for bed!
This, this alone is worth an age of toil.
Hail, lovely Sirmio! Hail, paternal soil!
Joy, my bright waters, joy! your master's come!
Laugh, every dimple on the cheek of home!

Thomas Moore:

Sweet Sirmio! thou, the very eye
  Of all peninsulas and isles,
That in our lakes of silver lie,
  Or sleep enwreathed by Neptune's smiles --

How gladly back to thee I fly!
  Still doubting, asking -- can it be
That I have left Bithynia's sky,
  And gaze in safety upon thee?

Oh! what is happier than to find
  Our hearts at ease, our perils past;
When, anxious long, the lightened mind
  Lays down its load of care at last:

When tired with toil o'er land and deep,
  Again we tread the welcome floor
Of our own home, and sink to sleep
  On the long-wished-for bed once more.

This, this it is that pays alone
  The ills of all life's former track. --
Shine out, my beautiful, my own
  Sweet Sirmio, greet thy master back.

And thou, fair Lake, whose water quaffs
  The light of heaven like Lydia's sea,
Rejoice, rejoice -- let all that laughs
  Abroad, at home, laugh out for me!

Charles Stuart Calverley:

Gem of all isthmuses and isles that lie,
  Fresh or salt water's children, in clear lake
Or ampler ocean: with what joy do I
  Approach thee, Sirmio! Oh! am I awake,
Or dream that once again mine eye beholds
Thee, and has looked its last on Thracian wolds?
  Sweetest of sweets to me that pastime seems,
When the mind drops her burdens: when -- the pain
Of travel past -- our own cot we regain,
  And nestle on the pillow of our dreams!
'Tis this one thought that cheers us as we roam.
  Hail, O fair Sirmio! Joy, thy lord is here!
  Joy too, ye waters of the Golden Mere!
And ring out, all ye laughter-peals of home!

Thomas Hardy:

Sirmio, thou dearest dear of strands
That Neptune strokes in lake and sea,
With what high joy from stranger lands
Doth thy old friend set foot on thee!
Yea, barely seems it true to me
That no Bithynia holds me now,
But calmly and assuringly
Around me stretchest homely Thou.

Is there a scene more sweet than when
Our clinging cares are undercast,
And, worn by alien moils and men,
The long untrodden sill repassed,
We press the pined for couch at last,
And find a full repayment there?
Then hail, sweet Sirmio; thou that wast,
And art, mine own unrivalled Fair!

Stevie Smith:

Dear little Sirmio
Of all capes and islands
Wherever Neptune rides the coastal waters and the open sea
You really are the nicest.

How glad I am to see you again, how fondly I look at you.

No sooner had I left Bithynia -- and what was the name of that other place?
And was safely at sea
I thought only of seeing you.

Really is anything nicer
After working hard and being thoroughly worried
Than to leave it all behind and set out for home
Dear old home and one's own comfortable bed?

Even if one wears oneself out paying for them.

Christopher Langmuir clears up my confusion about verbs in John Clare's poem Emmonsails Heath in Winter:

Regarding John Clare's seemingly wayward verbal morphology, it is perhaps pertinent to point out that one of the most salient features of his dialect, East Anglian, is a zero marking for the 3rd person singular, which I imagine he uses as often as it suits him [see Fisiak, Jacek, and Peter Trudgill, ed. (2001) East Anglian English. D. S. Brewer, xii+264pp, hardback ISBN 0-85991].

I wish I could claim credit for the blog post title, but that too is Christopher's, from the subject line of his email.

I first became acquainted with the poetry of John Clare (1793-1864) from W.H. Auden's anthology of Nineteenth Century British Minor Poets. I recently acquired a copy of Clare's Major Works in the Oxford World Classics series. Minor poets can apparently write major works.

Several of Clare's poems begin with the words I love. The index of titles and first lines in the Major Works lists about a dozen such poems. In only one of these does Clare say that he loves a person. In the rest he loves things, natural objects. Clare was infatuated with a woman named Mary Joyce and wrote many poems about her, but it is the poetry in which he expresses his love of nature that most interests me.

There are no pictures in Clare's Major Works. One could compile a interesting book by juxtaposing Clare's poems with photographs of the natural objects he describes. Furze and ling were just words to me until I found pictures of them. Gorse is another name for furze, and here is picture from Wikipedia of dwarf gorse:


As the picture shows, furze flowers can survive in at least some snow. Pictures like this make Clare's poem Emmonsails Heath in Winter more vivid to me:

I love to see the old heaths withered brake
Mingle its crimpled leaves with furze and ling
While the old Heron from the lonely lake
Starts slow and flaps his melancholly wing
And oddling crow in idle motions swing
On the half rotten ash trees topmost twig
Beside whose trunk the gipsey makes his bed
Up flies the bouncing wood cock from the brig
Where a black quagmire quakes beneath the tread
The field fare chatters in the whistling thorn
And for the awe round fields and closen rove
And coy bumbarrels twenty in a drove
Flit down the hedgerows in the frozen plain
And hang on little twigs and start again

A couple of the verb forms in this poem puzzle me. Clare says crow ... swing (not crow ... swings, which would destroy the rhyme). Perhaps here one could supply the opening words of the poem and understand "I love to see the oddling (solitary) crow swing..." Towards the end of the poem we read the field fare chatters ... and ... rove, where chatters is singular and rove is plural. It would be easy to emend to the field fares chatter ... and ... rove, but probably unfair to Clare, who chafed at the constraints of grammar and spelling and punctuation. He once wrote (Major Works, p. 480):

A man who learns enough of grammer to write sufficiently plain so as to be understood by others as well as to understand his own consceptions himself and trys out the way to make his consceptions correct thinkings rather than the correct placing of particles and stops and other trifling with which every writer on grammar seems to be at loggerheads about with each other -- such an attainment will get the possessor an enlightened and liberal mind and if he attain not with this broad principle an excellence in composition the niceties of intricate Lectures on grammer with its utmost perfection will not attain it for him

There has been more words used and study uselessly expended in the settlement of what is grammar and what should be grammer in the argument of opinions urged and in the explanation of opinions refuted then there has been arguments and refutations hustled up in the matters of politics or even in opinions of religion

Jasper Griffin on Homer, Iliad 9.150:

Homer constantly makes the third element, in a line which lists three, longer than the other two .... That is an ancient device of Indo-European rhetoric, and it helps to explain why nouns and names which come late in the line regularly have 'ornamental' epithets. Cf. Behaghel, 'Das Gesetz der wachsenden Glieder', IF 35 (1909) 111; M.L. West in JHS 108 (1988), 155.

IF stands for Indogermanische Forschungen, JHS for Journal of Hellenic Studies. West's article is 'The Rise of the Greek Epic', JHS 108 (1988) 151-172. I haven't seen these articles.

If we translate Behaghel's title Das Gesetz der wachsenden Glieder literally as "the law of the increasing members," it has a faintly risqué, priapic ring.

G.S. Kirk in his commentary on Homer's Iliad 1-4 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985) uses the term "rising threefolder," but restricts it to a particular type of Homeric verse, "composed of three progressively-lengthening cola, through absence or weakness of a third-foot caesura and the presence of a strong fourth-foot one" (p. xxiii).

"Tricolon crescendo" seems to be the term most in favor with classical scholars. Eduard Fraenkel, Horace (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957), p. 351, n. 1, discussing Horace, Epistles 1.13.3 (si validus, si laetus erit, si denique poscet) has an illuminating note on this rhetorical device:

Many Latin sentences built in accordance with the 'Gesetz der wachsenden Glieder' (Behaghel), i.e. so that B is longer than A, and C longer than B, are examined by E. Lindholm, Stilistiche Studien zur Erweiterung der Satzglieder im Lateinischen, Lund 1931. This device, very much favoured by, for example, Tacitus, Macaulay, and Sir Winston Churchill, is as old as European literature and probably much older. It is sometimes operative even in the arrangement of a triad of proper names, as, for instance, at Homer Α 145 ἢ Αἴας ἢ Ἰδομενεὺς ἢ δῖος Ὀδυσσεὺς, or Υ 232 Ἶλός τ᾽ Ἀσσάρακός τε καὶ ἀντίθεος Γανυμήδης. Si clauses arranged in this way are fairly common, e.g. (tricolon as in the Horatian line under examination) Cic. Fam. 5.2.10 si acerbe, si crudeliter, si sine causa sum a tuis oppugnatus; Caelius ap. Cic. Fam. 8.10.5 si tempus, si senatus coget, si honeste a nobis recusari non poterit; for a kindred, if somewhat different, arrangement see, for example, Ennius, Ann. 431 si luci, si nox, si mox, si iam data sit frux; Cic. Quinct. 82 si te nihil impediret, si voluntas eadem maneret, si valeres [cf. Horace's si validus], denique si [cf. Horace's si denique] viveres. A tricolon (not crescendo) with anaphora of ubi shows once more how stereotyped were the forms of these expressions of politeness, Ter. Eun. 484 f. verum ubi molestum non erit, ubi tu voles, ubi tempus tibi erit, sat habet si tum recipitur.

In English, a good example is Shakespeare's Friends, Romans, countrymen, with one, two, and three syllables in the three increasing members.

Henry David Thoreau, Journals (September 20, 1851):

As I go through the fields, endeavoring to recover my tone and sanity and to perceive things truly and simply again, after having been perambulating the bounds of the town all the week, and dealing with the most commonplace and worldly-minded men, and emphatically trivial things, I feel as if I had committed suicide in a sense. I am again forcibly struck with the truth of the fable of Apollo serving King Admetus, its universal applicability. A fatal coarseness is the result of mixing in the trivial affairs of men. Though I have been associating even with the select men of this and the surrounding towns, I feel inexpressibly begrimed. My Pegasus has lost its wings; he has turned a reptile and gone on his belly. Such things are compatible only with a cheap and superficial life.

Apollodorus 3.10.4 (tr. J.G. Frazer):

But Zeus, fearing that men might acquire the healing art from him [Apollo's son Aesculapius] and so come to the rescue of each other, smote him with a thunderbolt. Angry on that account, Apollo slew the Cyclopes who had fashioned the thunderbolt for Zeus. But Zeus would have hurled him [Apollo] to Tartarus; however, at the intercession of [Apollo's mother] Latona he ordered him to serve as a thrall to a man for a year. So he went to Admetus, son of Pheres, at Pherae, and served him as a herdsman, and caused all the cows to drop twins.

Henry David Thoreau, Journals (August 23, 1851):

Resolve to read no book, to take no walk, to undertake no enterprise, but such as you can endure to give an account of to yourself. Live thus deliberately for the most part.

In Homer's Odyssey (1.206-216, tr. A.T. Murray and George E. Dimock), the goddess Athena disguised as Mentes talks with Odysseus' son Telemachus:

"But come, tell me this and declare it truly, whether indeed, tall as you are, you are the son of Odysseus himself. Wondrously like his are your head and beautiful eyes; for many were the times we consorted with one another before he embarked for the land of Troy, whither others, too, the bravest of the Argives, went in their hollow ships. But since that day neither have I seen Odysseus, nor he me."

Then wise Telemachus answered her: "Therefore, stranger, will I frankly tell you all. My mother says that I am his child; but I do not know this, for never yet did any man know his parentage of his own knowledge."

For most of human history, children did not know for certain the identities of their fathers. This ignorance may be one impulse behind those societies that defined their membership through the maternal line alone. It is only recently that blood and DNA tests have allowed children to know for sure who their fathers are (and vice versa).

In the days before blood and DNA tests for paternity, a child who obviously resembled his father was prized:

• Hesiod, Works and Days 235 (when justice flourishes): Women bear children resembling their fathers.
  
• Theophrastus, Characters 5 (The Complaisant Man, tr. R.C. Jebb): Then, when he is asked to dinner, he will request the host to send for the children; and will say of them, as they come in, that they are as like their father as figs.
  
• Catullus 61.221-225: May he look like his father Manlius and be easily recognized by all who don't know him and prove with his face his mother's virtue.
  
• Horace, Odes 4.5.23: Mothers who have just given birth are praised for children resembling [their fathers].
  
• Dio Cassius 56.3 (supposedly from a speech delivered by the Emperor Augustus, tr. Ian Scott-Kilvert): Is it not a joy to acknowledge a child who possesses the qualities of both parents, to tend and educate a being who is both the physical and spiritual image of yourself, so that, as it grows up, another self is created?
  
• Martial 6.27.3-4: You have a daughter who is marked with paternal resemblance of face, witness of her mother's virtue.
  
• G. Kaibel, Epigrammata Graeca 243b (an inscription from Pergamum, 2nd century A.D.), line 5: You bore me children, all resembling me.
  
• Buecheler and Lommatzsch, Carmina Latina Epigraphica 387, lines 9-10 (restoration conjectural): I have three sons, resembling their father, born from one wife.

On the other hand, children who didn't look at all like their fathers were suspect:

• Aeschines, Against Ctesiphon 111 (quoting an Amphictyonic oath): And may their wives not bear children resembling the fathers, but freaks.
  
• Theocritus 17.43-44 (tr. C.S. Calverley): She that loves not bears sons, but all unlike / Their father: for her heart was otherwhere.
  
• Martial 6.39 describes in great detail the seven "children" of husband Cinna and wife Marulla, none of whom looks like the supposed father.
  
• Lucilius, Greek Anthology 11.215 (tr. W.R. Paton): Eutychus the painter was the father of twenty sons, but never got a likeness even among his children.

In an earlier post on Aeschylus' Libation Bearers 205-210, I speculated that Electra may have recognized footprints belonging to her brother Orestes because they reminded her of the distinctive way in which their father Agamemnon walked.

Andromache in Seneca's Trojan Women (461-468, tr. John G. Fitch) enumerates the ways in which her son Astyanax resembles his dead father Hector, including his gait:

O son, true descendant of a great father, one hope for the Phrygians and only hope for our ruined house, all too famous as issue of ancient blood, and all too like your father! This countenance my Hector had, such he was in walk and bearing, so he carried his brave hands, so he squared his shoulders, so his stern brow conveyed a threat as he spread his flowing hair with a toss of his neck.

O nate, magni certa progenies patris,
spes una Phrygibus, unica afflictae domus,
veterisque suboles sanguinis nimium inclita
nimiumque patri similis! hos vultus meus
habebat Hector, talis incessu fuit
habituque talis, sic tulit fortes manus,
sic celsus humeris, fronte sic torva minax
cervice fusam dissipans iacta comam.

Seneca, Hercules Furens 735-736 (spoken by Theseus recently escaped from the underworld, tr. John G. Fitch):

What each man did, he suffers: the crime recoils on its perpetrator, and the criminal is plagued by the precedent he set.

quod quisque fecit, patitur; auctorem scelus
repetit, suoque premitur exemplo nocens.

The same notion appears here and there in Psalms, e.g. at 7.15-16:

He made a pit, and digged it, and is fallen into the ditch which he made. His mischief shall return upon his own head, and his violent dealing shall come down upon his own pate.

A comforting thought at first, until I remembered the pits dug not by others, but by me.

When I arrived home after work yesterday, I found a package on my front porch. Inside was a copy of G.S. Kirk's commentary on the first four books of the Iliad, sent by a reader of this blog whom I've never met. Thank you very much, Robert. Ancient texts and commentaries are my favorite reading, and Homer tops the list. I will treasure this commentary.

Blogging can be a lonely, time-consuming pursuit. I'm often tempted to abandon it. But occasional encouraging emails from readers keep me going. This is the second time that a kind and generous reader has sent a book as a gift.

In a note accompanying the book, Robert mentioned that he enjoys the posts on asyndetic privative adjectives. I recently read Seneca's Medea and found an example at line 395 (tr. John G. Fitch):

magnum aliquid instat, efferum immane impium.

Something great is looming, savage, monstrous, unnatural.

At first I wasn't sure if the im- of immane was privative, but apparently it is. Lewis and Short s.v. immanis derive it from "in- and old Lat. mānus=bonus; kindr. with Sanscr. ma=metior, to measure; Lat. mānes, good spirits."

From the citations in Lewis and Short I see another example at Plautus, Trinummus 826 (tr. H.T. Riley):

spurcificum immanem intolerandum vesanum

filthy, unsightly, unendurable, and outrageous.

Sophocles, Oedipus at Colonus 607-615 (tr. R.C. Jebb):

Kind son of Aegeus, to the gods alone comes never old age or death, but all else is confounded by all-mastering time. Earth's strength decays, and the strength of the body; faith dies, distrust is born; and the same spirit is never steadfast among friends, or betwixt city and city; for, be it soon or be it late, men find sweet turn to bitter, and then once more to love.

ὦ φίλτατ᾽ Αἰγέως παῖ, μόνοις οὐ γίγνεται
θεοῖσι γῆρας οὐδὲ κατθανεῖν ποτε.
τὰ δ᾽ ἄλλα συγχεῖ πάνθ᾽ ὁ παγκρατὴς χρόνος.
φθίνει μὲν ἰσχὺς γῆς, φθίνει δὲ σώματος,
θνῄσκει δὲ πίστις, βλαστάνει δ᾽ ἀπιστία,
καὶ πνεῦμα ταὐτὸν οὔποτ᾽ οὔτ᾽ ἐν ἀνδράσιν
φίλοις βέβηκεν οὔτε πρὸς πόλιν πόλει.
τοῖς μὲν γὰρ ἤδη, τοῖς δ᾽ ἐν ὑστέρῳ χρόνῳ
τὰ τερπνὰ πικρὰ γίγνεται καὖθις φίλα.

Bernard M.W. Knox, The Heroic Temper: Studies in Sophoclean Tragedy, chap. 2:

Immovable once his decision is taken, deaf to appeals and persuasion, to reproof and threat, unterrified by physical violence, even by the ultimate violence of death itself, more stubborn as his isolation increases until he has no one to speak to but the unfeeling landscape, bitter at the disrespect and mockery the world levels at what it regards as failure, the hero prays for revenge and curses his enemies as he welcomes the death that is the predictable end of his intransigence.

Here are some recent examinations, diagnoses, and prescriptions from the doctor:

• Gillray's Ungloomy Morality
  
• Fear of the Invisible
  
• Do Iraqis Have Free Will?
  
• On Evil (review of Jean Hatzfeld, A Time for Machetes)

From an Associated Press story, dateline North Platte, Nebraska (hat tip to Jim K):

Brian Bruggeman caused a stink at the Lincoln County Jail earlier this month and will now have to answer for it in court. Another inmate, Jesse Dorris, alleges that Bruggeman's flatulence, passed in close proximity to Dorris, sparked a Dec. 14 fight between the two at the jail.

Now Bruggeman, 38, faces a Jan. 11 preliminary hearing on the state's complaint of assault by a confined person. It's a felony punishable by up to five years in prison.

Bruggeman is accused of injuring Dorris, his cellmate, when he pushed him into cell bars. Dorris, 26, was not charged.

The two began scuffling, County Attorney Jeff Meyer said Tuesday, because Dorris was fed up with Bruggeman's flatulence.

Jail fights are common, Meyer said, but the cause of this one was rather uncommon.

"It's usually about someone hogging the newspaper or someone not happy about what's on TV," he said.

Bruggeman, of Hershey, is serving a 90-day sentence for violating a protection order.

"He compounded his problems," Meyer said.

Dorris, of North Platte, is awaiting a January trial on a charge of aiding and abetting robbery.

Brad Dawson, Bruggeman's attorney, did not immediately return a phone message left at his office.

Sheriff Jerome Kramer said the incident was a result of overcrowding. The jail was built in 1933 and has a capacity of 23 inmates, according to 2006 standards, Kramer said. As many as 65 inmates have been lodged at the jail in recent days, he said.

"You just can't get a reprieve from one another," Kramer said. "When you've got a guy causing problems passing gas, there's no way to get away from the smell."

Among the complaints in the class action suit Jones v. Goord, 435 F.Supp.2d 221 (S.D.N.Y. 2006), was that the practice of confining prisoners to double cells rather than single cells violated the Eighth Amendment probihition against cruel and unusual punishment, in part because the practice led to unsanitary conditions (at 236):

The unsanitary conditions of which plaintiffs complain are the lack of floor space (Nathan Rep. 19-20), the distance between the beds and the toilets in the cells (id. 20), the amount of personal property kept in cells (id. 19-20), the smell of "a cellmate's feces and flatulence" (id. 20), and the smell that can result from a cellmate's failure to bathe frequently (Pl. Inj. Mem. 36).

Footnote 10 of the opinion uses the Pythagorean theorem to calculate the distance between the toilet in a typical cell and the upper bunk. This distance is the hypotenuse of a right triangle consisting of lower bunk, upper bunk, and toilet. The distance between lower bunk and toilet is known, as is the distance between upper bunk and lower bunk. The problem is to calculate the distance between upper bunk and toilet, which the judge writing the opinion (Gerard E. Lynch) did in detail, showing all of his work, unlike the student who answered this examination question:

But my favorite paragraph in the judicial opinion is this (at 237):

Similarly, plaintiffs' complaints regarding having to deal with a cellmate's odors do not rise to the level of a constitutional violation. Sharing a cell with an individual with body odor, or an individual who does not bathe frequently, is a far cry from the "wanton and unnecessary infliction of pain" against which the Eighth Amendment protects. Rhodes, 452 U.S. at 347. Furthermore, plaintiffs' claims that double-celling subjects them to "the stench of a cellmate's feces and flatulence" ignore the fact that even in a single cell, an inmate would be subjected to the "stench" of his own "feces and flatulence." (Nathan Rep. 20.) Plaintiffs are not so bold as to expressly claim that, to borrow a phrase, their "feces and flatulence" don't stink. Without question, shared quarters increase this problem, but plaintiffs offer no evidence that such conditions present a health risk, as opposed to a mere increased degree of unpleasantness.

I once collected some literary passages illustrating the Latin proverb Stercus cuique suum bene olet (alt. Suus cuique crepitus bene olet). I would now like to add these memorable words from the Reverend Sun Myung Moon's speech In Search of the Origin of the Universe, delivered at the Family Federation for World Peace, Farewell Banquet (August 1, 1996, Washington, D.C.):

You may think it rude if I share this with you, but I would like to give you an example. You use the bathroom each morning. When you defecate, do you wear a gas mask? This is not a laughing matter but a serious one. If you are near someone else defecating, you will quickly move a good distance away. But when you smell your own feces, you do not even notice it. This is because that fecal matter is one with your body. Therefore, you do not feel that it is dirty.

When you were young, did you ever taste the dried mucus from your nose? Does it taste sweet or salty? It's salty, right? Since you can answer, you must have tasted it! Why did you not feel that it was dirty? It is because it was part of your body. Reverend Moon has figured out something that no one in the world knew.

When you cough up phlegm, you sometimes swallow it, right? What about you who are here today? Have you ever had that experience? Be honest. Why do you not feel it is dirty? Because the phlegm was one with your body. We all eat three meals a day, breakfast, lunch and dinner. If you go about twelve inches down from your mouth, there is a fertilizer factory. By eating three meals a day, we are providing raw materials for fertilizer factories. After knowing that, can you still take food into your mouth with a fork and spoon? We know that there is a fertilizer factory in our stomach, but we live on without feeling its presence. Why do we not feel it? It is because we are one with it.

E.J. Moncada writes:

Hardy was very fond of his cat and very upset at its death, as his poem tells us. Accordingly, the succession of circumstances following Hardy's own death seem rather ironic. Hardy's heart was to be buried in Stinsford, England, his birthplace, while the rest of his body was cremated in Dorchester. It happened, however, that Hardy's sister who had taken pro tem possession of her brother's heart left it on her kitchen table and her cat snatched it and ran off into the woods with it.

I can only imagine the pulverous remains of the great poet being much put out and inditing, perhaps, the following plea to the felonious feline: O Catte, ne cor edito.

See here for another version of the circumstances surrounding Hardy's death.

E.B. White, The Winter of the Great Snows (1971):

If there's one thing people are agreed on, it's this: the snow must get removed. A century ago in New England, the approach to snow was quite different. When snow began to fly, people switched to runners. Roads were not plowed out, they were rolled down. A giant roller pulled by horses packed the surface to a fine, smooth glaze. Then the sleighs came out, with their bells. And sleds, to haul wood out from the woodlots. Wheels were laid away for the season. The old pleasure in runners hasn't died, though. The snowmobile is the new big thing -- life on runners. It pollutes in two ways: with its exhaust fumes and with its noise.

Thomas Hardy, Last Words to a Dumb Friend:

Pet was never mourned as you,
Purrer of the spotless hue,
Plumy tail, and wistful gaze
While you humoured our queer ways,
Or outshrilled your morning call
Up the stairs and through the hall -
Foot suspended in its fall -
While, expectant, you would stand
Arched, to meet the stroking hand;
Till your way you chose to wend
Yonder, to your tragic end.

Never another pet for me!
Let your place all vacant be;
Better blankness day by day
Than companion torn away.
Better bid his memory fade,
Better blot each mark he made,
Selfishly escape distress
By contrived forgetfulness,
Than preserve his prints to make
Every morn and eve an ache.

From the chair whereon he sat
Sweep his fur, nor wince thereat;
Rake his little pathways out
Mid the bushes roundabout;
Smooth away his talons' mark
From the claw-worn pine-tree bark,
Where he climbed as dusk embrowned,
Waiting us who loitered round.

Strange it is this speechless thing,
Subject to our mastering,
Subject for his life and food
To our gift, and time, and mood;
Timid pensioner of us Powers,
His existence ruled by ours,
Should - by crossing at a breath
Into safe and shielded death,
By the merely taking hence
Of his insignificance -
Loom as largened to the sense,
Shape as part, above man's will,
Of the Imperturbable.

As a prisoner, flight debarred,
Exercising in a yard,
Still retain I, troubled, shaken,
Mean estate, by him forsaken;
And this home, which scarcely took
Impress from his little look,
By his faring to the Dim
Grows all eloquent of him.

Housemate, I can think you still
Bounding to the window-sill,
Over which I vaguely see
Your small mound beneath the tree,
Showing in the autumn shade
That you moulder where you played.

If I can figure out how to import chess diagrams, so can you.


I used http://chessup.net/. I will not, however, be posting any of my games. My son trounced me the last time we played chess, and a public record of the debacle would be too embarrassing.

Regards,
Mike

Alexander Pope, The Dunciad 3.185-194:

But who is he, in closet close y-pent,
Of sober face, with learned dust besprent?
Right well mine eyes arede the myster wight,
On parchment scraps y-fed, and Wormius hight.
To future ages may thy dulness last,
As thou preserv'st the dulness of the past!
There, dim in clouds, the poring Scholiasts mark,
Wits, who like owls, see only in the dark,
A Lumberhouse of books in every head,
For ever reading, never to be read!

Alexander Pope, Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot 89-94:

Who shames a Scribler? break one cobweb thro',
He spins the slight, self-pleasing thread anew;
Destroy his Fib, or Sophistry; in vain,
The Creature's at his dirty work again;
Thron'd in the Centre of his thin designs;
Proud of a vast Extent of flimzy lines.