Laudator Temporis Acti

Samuel Johnson, Letter "to a young clergyman in the country" (quoted by Boswell in his Life of Doctor Johnson, 1780, aetat. 71):

[I]n the labour of composition, do not burthen your mind with too much at once; do not exact from yourself at one effort of excogitation, propriety of thought and elegance of expression. Invent first, and then embellish. The production of something, where nothing was before, is an act of greater energy than the expansion or decoration of the thing produced. Set down diligently your thoughts as they rise, in the first words that occur; and, when you have matter, you will easily give it form: nor, perhaps, will this method be always necessary; for by habit, your thoughts and diction will flow together.

Karl Marx, Letter to Friedrich Engels (Nov. 19, 1859 = Werke XXIX, 513), quoted by S.S. Prawer, Karl Marx and World Literature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), p. 199:

This fellow finds it natural to hear cries of 'Hurrah' when he has broken wind.

This fellow = Ferdinand Freiligrath. I no longer have access to Prawer's book, so I don't know if he connected this with a famous passage of Juvenal describing a toady (3.100-108, tr. G.G. Ramsay):

They are a nation of play-actors. If you smile, your Greek will split his sides with laughter; if he sees his friend drop a tear, he weeps, though without grieving; if you call for a bit of fire in winter-time, he puts on his cloak; if you say 'I am hot,' he breaks into a sweat. Thus we are not upon a level, he and I; he has always the best of it, being ready at any moment, by night or by day, to take his expression from another man's face, to throw up his hands and applaud if his friend gives a good belch or piddles straight, or if his golden basin make a gurgle when turned upside down.

natio comoeda est. rides, maiore cachinno
concutitur; flet, si lacrimas conspexit amici,
nec dolet; igniculum brumae si tempore poscas,
accipit endromidem; si dixeris 'aestuo,' sudat.
non sumus ergo pares: melior, qui semper et omni
nocte dieque potest aliena sumere vultum
a facie, iactare manus, laudare paratus,
si bene ructavit, si rectum minxit amicus,
si trulla inverso crepitum dedit aurea fundo.

See especially lines 106-107.

John Burroughs, In the Catskills, ch. VII (Speckled Trout):

I have thus run over some of the features of an ordinary trouting excursion to the woods. People inexperienced in such matters, sitting in their rooms and thinking of these things, of all the poets have sung and romancers written, are apt to get sadly taken in when they attempt to realize their dreams. They expect to enter a sylvan paradise of trout, cool retreats, laughing brooks, picturesque views, and balsamic couches, instead of which they find hunger, rain, smoke, toil, gnats, mosquitoes, dirt, broken rest, vulgar guides, and salt pork; and they are very apt not to see where the fun comes in. But he who goes in a right spirit will not be disappointed, and will find the taste of this kind of life better, though bitterer, than the writers have described.

Dear Michael Gilleland,

The Romans apparently managed to droop even without drawers:

Maltinus tunicis demissis ambulat; est qui
inguen ad obscenum subductis usque. Horace Sat. 1, 2 25-26

Maltinus walks about in baggy pants and another guy
With his tunic tucked up to his raunchy crotch.

(translator: Paul T. Alessi)

Maltinus goes out dressed
In baggy clothes. Another dandy hikes
His tunic halfway up his ass.

(translator: John Svarlien)

'Aurea mediocritas' in the trouser department was spelled out at great length by Lyndon B. Johnson, recorded for the nation ordering various pairs from Texas tailor, Joe Haggar on August 9 th 1964.

Here's a short excerpt from the Oval Office tapes:

LBJ: So leave me at least two and a half, three inches in the back where I can let them out or take them up. And make these a half an inch bigger in the waist. And make the pockets at least an inch longer, my money, my knife, everything falls out - wait just a minute.

Operator: Would you hold on a minute please?

[conversation on hold for two minutes]

LBJ: Now the pockets, when you sit down, everything falls out, your money, your knife, everything, so I need at least another inch in the pockets. And another thing - the crotch, down where your nuts hang - is always a little too tight, so when you make them up, give me an inch that I can let out there, uh because they cut me, it's just like riding a wire fence. These are almost, these are the best I've had anywhere in the United States,

JH: Fine

LBJ: But, uh when I gain a little weight they cut me under there. So, leave me, you never do have much of margin there. See if you can't leave me an inch from where the zipper (burps) ends, round, under my, back to my bunghole, so I can let it out there if I need to.

JH: Right

Whether the tailor managed to defuse the President's personal missile crisis I have no idea.

Best Wishes,
Eric Thomson

In 2004, Louisiana state legislator Derrick Shepherd (D-Jefferson Parish) proposed House Bill 1626:

R.S. 14:106.3 is hereby enacted to read as follows:

§ 106.3. Illegally wearing pants below waist in public; penalty

  A. It shall be unlawful for any person to appear in public wearing his pants below his waist and thereby exposing his skin or intimate clothing.

  B. Whoever violates the provisions of this Section shall be fined not more than five hundred dollars or imprisoned for not more than six months, or both.

Similarly in 2005, Virginia state legislator Algie Howell (D-Norfolk) proposed House Bill 1981:

Be it enacted by the General Assembly of Virginia:

1. That the Code of Virginia is amended by adding a section numbered 18.2-387.1 as follows:

§ 18.2-387.1. Indecent display of underwear.

Any person who, while in a public place, intentionally wears and displays his below-waist undergarments, intended to cover a person's intimate parts, in a lewd or indecent manner, shall be subject to a civil penalty of no more than $50. "Intimate parts" has the same meaning as in § 18.2-67.10.

Who says the Democrats aren't the party of family values? Neither bill became law. The custom of wearing droopy drawers has a long pedigree. The earliest mention I can find is by Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-1375) in his Decameron 8.5 (tr. Frances Winwar):

But what was most astonishing, in Maso's opinion, was the pair of breeches that graced him which, as he sat, and his clothes spread open back and front because of the stinginess of their cut, revealed a baggy seat, that hung at least half-way down his thighs.

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Matthew 12.11:

And he said unto them, What man shall there be among you, that shall have one sheep, and if it fall into a pit on the sabbath day, will he not lay hold on it, and lift it out?

Luke 13.15:

The Lord then answered him, and said, Thou hypocrite, doth not each one of you on the sabbath loose his ox or his ass from the stall, and lead him away to watering?

Luke 14.5:

And answered them, saying, Which of you shall have an ass or an ox fallen into a pit, and will not straightway pull him out on the sabbath day?

Jewish writings of course have much to say about what may or may not be done on the Sabbath. Pagans also had their regulations about activities permitted or forbidden on holy days.

Vergil, Georgics 1.268-272 (tr. H. Rushton Fairclough):

Nay, even on holy days, the laws of God and man permit you to do certain tasks. No scruples ever forbade us to guide down the water-rills, to defend a crop with a hedge, to set snares for birds, to fire brambles, or to plunge bleating flocks into the health-giving stream.

Columella (2.21.1) quotes this passage from Vergil and goes on to say (2.21.2-5, tr. H.B. Ash):

[2] And yet the pontiffs assert that a grain-field should not be fenced on holidays; they also forbid the washing of sheep for the good of the fleece, except as a curative measure. Vergil is instructing us as to the lawfulness of washing the flock in a river on holidays, and for that reason he adds "to dip in wholesome stream" that is, in a healing stream; for there are ailments because of which it is expedient to bathe the cattle. [3] Furthermore, the religious observances of our forefathers permit these tasks also on holidays: the braying of spelt; the cutting of torches; the dipping of candles; the tilling of a leased vineyard; the clearing out and cleaning of fish-ponds, cisterns, and old ditches; the sickling of meadows; the spreading of manure; the storing of hay in the loft; the gathering of the fruits of a leased olive-grove; the spreading of apples, pears and figs to dry; the making of cheese; the carrying of trees for planting, either on our own shoulders or with a pack mule. But it is not permitted to haul them with a yoked animal, nor to plant them after they are transported, nor to open the ground, nor to thin a tree; [4] and not to assist in the sowing either unless you have first sacrificed a puppy, nor to cut hay or bind it or haul it; and it is not permissible either by the ordinances of the priests for the vintage to be gathered on feast days, nor to shear sheep, unless you have sacrificed a puppy. It is also lawful to make boiled must and to boil wine. To gather grapes and olives for preserving is likewise lawful. It is not lawful to clothe sheep with skins. Anything that you may do in your garden for the good of your vegetables is lawful. It is not lawful to bury a dead person on public feast days. [5] Marcus Porcius Cato says that there are no holidays for mules, horses, and asses; the same authority permits the yoking of oxen for the purpose of hauling wood and grain. We ourselves have read in the books of the pontiffs that only on the holidays called Denicale is it unlawful to have mules in harness, but on other holidays it is lawful.

Columella refers to Cato, On Agriculture 1.138 (tr. W.D. Hooper and H.B. Ash):

Oxen may be yoked on feast days for these purposes: to haul firewood, bean stalks, and grain for storing. There is no holiday for mules, horses, or donkeys, except the family festivals.

See also Cato, On Agriculture 2.4 (tr. Hooper and Ash):

Remind him, also, that on feast days old ditches might have been cleaned, road work done, brambles cut, the garden spaded, a meadow cleared, faggots bundled, thorns rooted out, spelt ground, and general cleaning done.

Thomas Babington Macaulay, Letter to Thomas Flower Ellis (Dec. 30, 1835):

During the last thirteen months I have read Aeschylus twice; Sophocles twice; Euripides once; Pindar twice; Callimachus; Apollonius Rhodius; Quintus Calaber; Theocritus twice; Herodotus; Thucydides; almost all Xenophon's works; almost all Plato; Aristotle's Politics, and a good deal of his Organon, besides dipping elsewhere in him; the whole of Plutarch's Lives; about half of Lucian; two or three books of Athenaeus; Plautus twice; Terence twice; Lucretius twice; Catullus; Tibullus; Propertius; Lucan; Statius; Silius Italicus; Livy; Velleius Paterculus; Sallust; Caesar; and, lastly, Cicero. I have, indeed, still a little of Cicero left; but I shall finish him in a few days. I am now deep in Aristophanes and Lucian. Of Aristophanes I think as I always thought; but Lucian has agreeably surprised me. At school I read some of his Dialogues of the Dead when I was thirteen; and, to my shame, I never, to the best of my belief, read a line of him since. I am charmed with him. His style seems to me to be superior to that of any extant writer who lived later than the age of Demosthenes and Theophrastus. He has a most peculiar and delicious vein of humour. It is not the humour of Aristophanes; it is not that of Plato; and yet it is akin to both; not quite equal, I admit, to either, but still exceedingly charming. I hardly know where to find an instance of a writer, in the decline of a literature, who has shown an invention so rich, and a taste so pure.

Macaulay, Letter to Ellis (May 30, 1836):

My mornings, from five to nine, are quite my own. I still give them to ancient literature. I have read Aristophanes twice through since Christmas; and have also read Herodotus, and Thucydides again. I got into a way last year of reading a Greek play every Sunday. I began on Sunday the 18th of October with the Prometheus, and next Sunday I shall finish with the Cyclops of Euripides. Euripides has made a complete conquest of me. It has been unfortunate for him that we have so many of his pieces. It has, on the other hand, I suspect, been fortunate for Sophocles that so few of his have come down to us. Almost every play of Sophocles, which is now extant, was one of his masterpieces. There is hardly one of them which is not mentioned with high praise by some ancient writer. Yet one of them, the Trachiniae, is, to my thinking, very poor and insipid. Now, if we had nineteen plays of Sophocles, of which twelve or thirteen should be no better than the Trachiniae,--and if, on the other hand, only seven pieces of Euripides had come down to us, and if those seven had been the Medea, the Bacchae, the Iphigenia in Aulis, the Orestes, the Phoenissae, the Hippolytus, and the Alcestis, I am not sure that the relative position which the two poets now hold in our estimation would not be greatly altered.

I have not done much in Latin. I have been employed in turning over several third-rate and fourth-rate writers. After finishing Cicero, I read through the works of both the Senecas, father and son. There is a great deal in the Controversiae both of curious information, and of judicious criticism. As to the son, I cannot bear him. His style affects me in something the same way with that of Gibbon. But Lucius Seneca's affectation is even more rank than Gibbon's. His works are made up of mottoes. There is hardly a sentence which might not be quoted; but to read him straightforward is like dining on nothing but anchovy sauce. I have read, as one does read such stuff, Valerius Maximus, Annaeus Florus, Lucius Ampelius, and Aurelius Victor. I have also gone through Phaedrus. I am now better employed. I am deep in the Annals of Tacitus, and I am at the same time reading Suetonius.

I'm reading Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind by Robert D. Richardson Jr. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), which came to my attention through Patrick Kurp at Anecdotal Evidence. It's a fine biography, on a level with Walter Harding's The Days of Henry Thoreau and Henry Seidel Canby's Thoreau, and the following are mere quibbles.

On pp. 104-105, Richardson states:

Thoreau's interest in individual reformation also led him back to the Greek ethical schools, and particularly to Stoicism -- the search for self-rule or autarky -- and the same interest should be seen as a practical consequence of a serious immersion in the new, Kantian, subjectivism.

Autarky doesn't mean self-rule; it means self-sufficiency. The word comes from Greek αὐτάρκεια (autárkeia), itself from αὐτός (autós) = self and ἀρκέω (arkéo) which in its passive form means be satisfied, content. There is no connection with Greek ἀρχή (arché) = rule, sovereignty.

The same mistake occurs on p. 316:

Walden modernizes and extends the idea of freedom by reviving the classical, Stoic emphasis on autarky or self-rule, by domesticating into an American context the Hindu concept of the "final liberation" of the spirit, and by equating freedom with the wildness he understood to be the source and raw material of all civilization and culture.

Euripides is misspelled Euripedes every time it appears in the book (pp. 24, 78, 445). Finally, there are errors on p. 255:

Linnaeus's crisp Latin says "lapidae crescunt, vegetabile crescunt et vivunt, animali crescunt vivunt et sentiunt." The word that Thoreau could not have missed is crescunt, from cresco, to come into existence, spring forth, grow. It is the transitive equivalent of creo, to create.

The quotation from Linnaeus is mangled. It comes from the introduction to his Systema Naturae and should be Lapides crescunt, Vegetabilia crescunt et vivunt, Animalia crescunt, vivunt et sentiunt. Richardson's chapter heading on p. 254 should thus be Lapides Crescunt, not Lapidae Crescunt. Also, cresco is intransitive, not transitive.

Giacomo Leopardi, The Moral Essays. Operette Morali. Translated from the Italian by Patrick Creagh = Works of Giacomo Leopardi, vol. 1 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), p. 184 (from The Dialogue of Timander and Eleander):

Laughing at our woes is the only profit we can gain from them, and the only remedy to be found in them.

As the amount of energy in a physical system is constant, so too (it was once thought by some) the amount of evil in the world does not change. Evil can be moved from one place to another but never totally destroyed. To the passages collected on the Gadarene swine, add Tibullus 2.1.17-18 (on the Ambarvalia, tr. J.P. Postgate):

Gods of our sires, we cleanse the farms, we cleanse the farming folk. Do ye outside our boundaries drive all evil things.

di patrii, purgamus agros, purgamus agrestes:
  vos mala de nostris pellite limitibus.

---

To the passages on children who resemble their fathers, add Theophrastus, Characters 19.1-2 (tr. R.C. Jebb):

Offensiveness is distressing neglect of person. The Offensive man is one who will go about with a scrofulous or leprous affection, or with his nails overgrown, and say that these are hereditary complaints with him; his father had them, and his grandfather, and it is not easy to be smuggled into his family.

Ἔστι δὲ ἡ δυσχέρεια ἀθεραπευσία σώματος λύπης παρασκευαστική, ὁ δὲ δυσχερὴς τοιοῦτός τις, οἷος λέπραν ἔχων καὶ ἀλφὸν καὶ τοὺς ὄνυχας μεγάλους περιπατεῖν καὶ φῆσαι ταῦτα εἶναι αὑτῷ συγγενικὰ ἀρρωστήματα· ἔχειν γὰρ αὐτὸν καὶ τὸν πατέρα καὶ τὸν πάππον, καὶ οὐκ εἶναι ῥᾴδιον αὐτῶν εἰς τὸ γένος ὑποβάλλεσθαι.

Herwerden conjectured μέλανας for μεγάλους (black nails, instead of overgrown ones).

Henry David Thoreau, A Winter Walk:

The snow falls on every wood and field, and no crevice is forgotten; by the river and the pond, on the hill and in the valley. Quadrupeds are confined to their coverts and the birds sit upon their perches this peaceful hour. There is not so much sound as in fair weather, but silently and gradually every slope, and the gray walls and fences, and the polished ice, and the sere leaves, which were not buried before, are concealed, and the tracks of men and beasts are lost. With so little effort does nature reassert her rule and blot out the traces of men.

Dear Mr Gilleland,

Your post on drinking tobacco reminded me that I had heard, years ago, about some of the early Europeans to come into contact with tobacco wondering in what way best to consume it, and having tried infusion. I can't find any of those references; but I did turn up this, which might interest you:

"Probably the oldest way of taking the weed, and the most straightforward, was chewing it. Cured tobacco leaves were mixed with salt or ashes, formed into pellets or rolls, then tucked into the user's cheek, or under a lip. The juices thus released then dissolved in saliva and slid down the masticator's throat. Tobacco chewing could be recreational, or magical. The next method of consumption, in terms of complexity and pedigree, was drinking tobacco, in a sort of tea. Tobacco leaves were boiled or steeped in water and the resulting brew drunk via the nose or mouth. This was a popular method of consumption among shamans, as the strength of the brew could be adjusted to deliver the massive doses they preferred. The provenance of the tobacco used in making tea was a matter of great importance. For instance, Acawaio men would travel to a special stream to collect ‘Mountain Spirit’ tobacco, which was steeped in the water of the stream to enhance its potency. Drinking tobacco also presented the opportunity of mixing other narcotics into the brew. Novice shamans would sometimes add a dash of the fluids they collected from a dead shaman, and a qualified shaman's tea was often loaded with other hallucinogenic plant extracts. Tobacco was drunk in sufficient quantities at shamanic initiation ceremonies to induce vomiting, paralysis and, occasionally, death. Even everyday tobacco drinkers attributed mystic powers to their brew."

Also, someone did a book on Tobacco and Shamanism which lists all the South American tribes that drank rather than smoked tobacco. So I imagine it was a question of which tribe which Westerner first met, for a while at least.

Sincerely,

Roger Kuin

---

The excerpt quoted by Professor Kuin comes from the first chapter of Iain Gately, Tobacco: The Story of How Tobacco Seduced the World (New York: Grove Press, 2001). Gately provides this additional detail about drinking tobacco:

Tobacco tea was also ‘drunk’ via the anus where it was introduced in the form of a clyster, using a hollow length of cane or bone, or with a bulb made out of animal skin and a bone or reed nozzle. An early example of such a device, dating from AD 500, has been discovered in the tomb of a Colombian shaman.

Don't try this at home, kids.

Matthew Arnold, Rugby Chapel, lines 58-72:

What is the course of the life
Of mortal men on the earth? -
Most men eddy about
Here and there - eat and drink,
Chatter and love and hate,
Gather and squander, are raised
Aloft, are hurl'd in the dust,
Striving blindly, achieving
Nothing; and, then they die -
Perish; - and no one asks
Who or what they have been,
More than he asks what waves
In the moonlit solitudes mild
Of the midmost Ocean, have swell'd,
Foam'd for a moment, and gone.

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Dr. Hodges at Gypsy Scholar, in a post On Milton's 'Identity', mentions the odd expression drinking tobacco. By coincidence, just yesterday I happened on the same expression in a poem by Robert Wisdome included in Norman Ault's anthology of Elizabethan Lyrics (1949; rpt. New York: Capricorn Books, 1960), pp. 19-20:

A RELIGIOUS USE OF TAKING TOBACCO

The Indian weed witherëd quite,
Green at morn, cut down at night,
    Shows thy decay;
    All flesh is hay:
Thus think, then drink tobacco.

And when the smoke ascends on high,
Think thou behold’st the vanity
    Of worldly stuff,
    Gone with a puff:
Thus think, then drink tobacco.

But when the pipe grows foul within,
Think of thy soul defiled with sin.
    And that the fire
    Doth it require:
Thus think, then drink tobacco.

The ashes that are left behind,
May serve to put thee still in mind
    That into dust
    Return thou must:
Thus think, then drink tobacco.

The final stanza is especially appropriate for today, Ash Wednesday.

I recently encountered another expression new to me and related to tobacco -- anatomical snuff box, an area of the wrist so called from its use in taking snuff.

Sebastien-Roch Nicolas de Chamfort, Products of the Perfected Civilization. Selected Writings, tr. W.S. Merwin (New York: Macmillan, 1969), p. 231:

M. de Lassay, a very gentle man but with a great knowledge of society, said that one must swallow a toad every morning, when one had to go out into the world, so as not to find anything more disgusting during the day.

M. de Lassay, homme très doux, mais qui avait une grande connaissance de la société, disait qu'il faudrait avaler un crapaud tous les matins, pour ne trouver plus rien de dégoûtant le reste de la journée, quand on devait la passer dans le monde.

Nicolás Gómez Dávila, Notas, 210 (tr. Michael Hendry):

The reading of Homer every morning, with the serenity, the tranquillity, the deep sensation of moral and physical well-being which it instills in us, is the best provision to endure the vulgarities of the day.

La lectura matutina de Homero, con la serenidad, el sosiego, la honda sensación de bienestar moral y físico, de salud perfecta, que nos infunde, es el mejor viático para soportar las vulgaridades del díia.

By the way, I've noticed a few more translations of Nicolás Gómez Dávila (1913-1994) by Michael Hendry recently at Dr. Weevil. I hope he continues this project. Reading the master aphorist is also a good way to start the day.

A few years ago I tried my hand at translating a few aphorisms from Nicolás Gómez Dávila's Escolios a un Texto Implicito (1977). Unfortunately I didn't transcribe the original Spanish. Here are a few of my translations:

The individual shrinks in proportion as the state grows. (I, 21)

Confused ideas and muddy ponds appear deep. (I, 40)

All literature is contemporary to the reader who knows how to read. (I, 57)

Violence is not necessary to destroy a civilization. Each civilization dies from indifference toward the unique values which created it. (I, 70)

Civilization is a poorly fortified encampment in the midst of rebellious tribes. (I, 268)

I distrust every idea that doesn't seem obsolete and grotesque to my contemporaries. (I, 353)

The cultured man has the obligation to be intolerant. (II, 58)

He who speaks of his "generation" admits that he's part of a herd. (II, 81)

For the myth of a past golden age, present day humanity substitutes the myth of a future plastic age. (II, 88)

The imagination is the only place in the universe where it is possible to live. (II, 132)

A cultivated soul is one where the din of the living does not drown out the music of the dead. (II, 195)

The modern world seems invincible. Like the extinct dinosaurs. (II, 226)

To be unaware of the putrefaction of the modern world is a symptom of contagion by it. (II, 451)

There is an illiteracy of the soul that no diploma cures. (II, 469)

The genuine reader is the one who reads for pleasure the books that others only study. (II, 486)

G.K. Chesterton, What's Wrong With the World, ch. 10 (The Case for the Public Schools):

There is something highly maddening in the circumstance that when modern people attack an institution that really does demand reform, they always attack it for the wrong reasons. Thus many opponents of our public schools, imagining themselves to be very democratic, have exhausted themselves in an unmeaning attack upon the study of Greek. I can understand how Greek may be regarded as useless, especially by those thirsting to throw themselves into the cut throat commerce which is the negation of citizenship; but I do not understand how it can be considered undemocratic. I quite understand why Mr. Carnegie has a hatred of Greek. It is obscurely founded on the firm and sound impression that in any self-governing Greek city he would have been killed. But I cannot comprehend why any chance democrat, say Mr. Quelch, or Mr. Will Crooks, or Mr. John M. Robertson, should be opposed to people learning the Greek alphabet, which was the alphabet of liberty. Why should Radicals dislike Greek? In that language is written all the earliest and, Heaven knows, the most heroic history of the Radical party. Why should Greek disgust a democrat, when the very word democrat is Greek?

Michael Schmidt, Lives of the Poets (1998; rpt. New York: Vintage Books, 2000), p. 672, quotes a few lines from Hugh MacDiarmid (1892-1978):

For ilka thing a man can be or think or dae
Aye leaves a million mair unbeen, unthocht, undune,
Till his puir warped performance is,
To a' that micht ha' been, a thistle to the mune.

"Unbeen, unthocht, undune" is a good example of a series of asyndetic, privative adjectives.

I can't find the rest of MacDiarmid's poem on the World Wide Web, and I don't even know the title of it.

Update: See the following email.

---

Dear Michael Gilleland,

'Thistle to the moon' comes from my fellow countryman's masterpiece 'A Drunk Man looks at the Thistle' lines 269 -272, which - mirabile dictu - is more or less at the beginning of the poem, as there are another 2,413 lines to go. The stanza seems to be a variation on the 'mute inglorious Milton' theme of unrealized possibilities. Another Miltonic theme ['Milton, Thou shouldst be living this hour'] occurs a little earlier in the poem in a marvellous outburst of Juvenalian disgust. As Burns' Day has only just passed, it perhaps deserves an airing:

"You canna gang to a Burns supper even
Wiout some wizened scrunt o a knock-knee
Chinee turns round to say "Him Haggis - velly goot"
And ten to wan the piper is a Cokney.

No wan in fifty kens a wurd Burns wrote
But misapplied is aabody's property,
And gin there was his like alive the day
They'd be the last a kennan hand to gie -

Croose London Scotties with their braw shirt fronts
And aa their fancy freinds rejoicean
That similah gatherings in Timbuctoo,
Bagdad - and Hell, nae doot - are voicean

Burns' sentiments o universal love.
In pidgin English and wild-fowl Scots,
And toastan ane wha's nocht to them but an
Excuse for faitherin Genius wi their thochts.

Aa they've to say was aften said afore
A lad was born in Kyle to blaw about.
What unco fate maks him the dumpan-grund
For aa the sloppy rubbish they jaw out?

Mair nonsense has been uttered in his name
Than in ony barran liberty and Christ.
If this keeps spreiden as the drink declines,
Syne turns to tea, wae's me for the Zeitgeist!

Rabbie, wadst thou wert - the warld hath need,
And Scotland mair sae, o the likes o thee!
The whisky that aince moved your lyre's become
The laxative for aa loquacity." [l. 37- 64]

MacDiarmid never suffered coofs, gowks and gomerels gladly.

Best wishes,

Eric Thomson

PS More on eating acorns. Or should that be moron eating acorns. Isn't it typical of Juvenal to tarnish his Golden Age by peopling it with a pair of acorn-belching neanderthals?

[montana uxor] horridior glandem ructante marito Sat. VI, 10

I'll leave the carminative properties of the tannin-rich acorn to others.

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science § 125 (tr. Walter Kaufmann):

God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.

Don't blame us. A doctor named Marcus killed the king of the gods, according to an epigram by Nicarchus in the Greek Anthology (11.113, tr. W.R. Paton):

The physician Marcus laid his hand yesterday on the stone Zeus, and though he is of stone and Zeus he is to be buried to-day.

Τοῦ λιθίνου Διὸς ἐχθὲς ὁ κλινικὸς ἣψατο Μάρκος·
  καὶ λίθος ὢν καὶ Ζεύς, σήμερον ἐκφέρεται.

This is one of a series of jokes making fun of doctors in book 11 of the Greek Anthology (poems 112-126).

On the custom of touching a statue of a god, cf. Lucretius 1.316-318 (tr. Martin Ferguson Smith):

Again, bronze statues set by gateways display the right hands thinned away by the frequent touch of greeting from those who pass by.

                              tum portas propter aena
signa manus dextras ostendunt adtenuari
saepe salutantum tactu praeterque meantum.

Smith ad loc. cites Cicero, Against Verres 4.43.94 (tr. C.D. Yonge):

There is a temple of Hercules at Agrigentum, not far from the forum, considered very holy and greatly reverenced among the citizens. In it there is a brazen image of Hercules himself, than which I cannot easily tell where I have seen anything finer; (although I am not very much of a judge of those matters, though I have seen plenty of specimens;) so greatly venerated among them, O judges, that his mouth and his chin are a little worn away, because men in addressing their prayers and congratulations to him, are accustomed not only to worship the statue, but even to kiss it.

Herculis templum est apud Agrigentinos non longe a foro, sane sanctum apud illos et religiosum. ibi est ex aere simulacrum ipsius Herculis, quo non facile dixerim quicquam me vidisse pulchrius--tametsi non tam multum in istis rebus intellego quam multa vidi--usque eo, iudices, ut rictum eius ac mentum paulo sit attritius, quod in precibus et gratulationibus non solum id venerari verum etiam osculari solent.

In Minucius Felix, Octavius 2.4, it is not clear if a statue was actually touched or not. Gerald H. Rendall and W.C. Ker translate the passage thus:

Caecilius noticed an image of Serapis, and -- as is the superstitious habit of the vulgar -- put his hand to his mouth and blew it a kiss.

But "blew it a kiss" isn't in the Latin. Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson translate as follows:

Caecilius, observing an image of Serapis, raised his hand to his mouth, as is the custom of the superstitious common people, and pressed a kiss on it with his lips.

"On it" refers to Caecilius' hand, as the Latin makes clear:

Caecilius simulacro Serapidis denotato, ut vulgus superstitiosus solet, manum ori admovens osculum labiis pressit.

Palladas (Greek Anthology 10.78, tr. W.R. Paton):

Cast away complaint and be not troubled, for how brief is the time thou dwellest here compared with all the life that follows this! Ere thou breedest worms and art cast into the tomb torment not thy soul, as if it were damned while thou still livest.

Ῥίπτε γόους, μὴ κάμνε, πόσον χρόνον ἐνθάδε μίμνων,
  ὡς πρὸς ἐκεῖνον ὅλον τὸν μετὰ ταῦτα βίον.
πρὶν τοίνυν σκώληκα βαλεῖν τύμβοις τε ῥιφῆναι,
  μὴ δαμάσῃς ψυχὴν ζῶν ἔτι κρινομένην.

The Worthless Word of the Day earlier this week was cumber-ground. I can't find a permanent link, but the definition was "a person or thing that uselessly cumbers the ground; a useless or unprofitable occupant of a position," and the citations included:

• John Bunyan, The Holy War (1682): "Thou hast been a cumber-ground long already, and wilt thou continue so still?"
  
• John Bunyan, The Pilgrim's Progress (1684): "It hath been a cumber-ground these three years; cut it down."
  
• John Clare, Rural Evening: "Now at the parish cottage wall'd with dirt, / Where all the cumber-grounds of life resort."

Clare might have remembered the word from Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress, which book pleased him "mightily" according to Jonathan Bate's biography of Clare (p. 28). I don't know who coined cumber-ground or when it first appeared, but I'd guess the inspiration was the question in the parable of the barren fig tree at Luke 13.7 (King James Version):

Then said he unto the dresser of his vineyard, Behold, these three years I come seeking fruit on this fig tree, and find none: cut it down; why cumbereth it the ground?

εἶπεν δὲ πρὸς τὸν ἀμπελουργόν, Ἰδοὺ τρία ἔτη ἀφ’ οὗ ἔρχομαι ζητῶν καρπὸν ἐν τῇ συκῇ ταύτῃ καὶ οὐχ εὑρίσκω. ἔκκοψον [οὖν] αὐτήν· ἱνατί καὶ τὴν γῆν καταργεῖ;

A Homeric equivalent of "cumber-ground" might be the phrase ἄχθος ἀρούρης (burden on the earth), which appears once each in the Iliad (18.104, ἐτώσιον ἄχθος ἀρούρης, worthless burden on the earth) and the Odyssey (20.379, αὔτως ἄχθος ἀρούρης, mere burden on the earth).