Laudator Temporis Acti

Samuel Johnson, The Rambler 185 (Tuesday, December 24, 1751):

He that willingly suffers the corrosions of inveterate hatred, and gives up his days and nights to the gloom of malice, and perturbations of stratagem, cannot surely be said to consult his ease. Resentment is an union of sorrow with malignity, a combination of a passion which all endeavour to avoid, with a passion which all concur to detest. The man who retires to meditate mischief, and to exasperate his own rage; whose thoughts are employed only on means of distress and contrivances of ruin; whose mind never pauses from the remembrance of his own sufferings, but to indulge some hope of enjoying the calamities of another, may justly be numbered among the most miserable of human beings, among those who are guilty without reward, who have neither the gladness of prosperity, nor the calm of innocence.

William Cowper, letter to Lady Hesketh (November 27, 1787):

A poor man begg'd food at the Hall lately. The Cook gave him some Vermicelli soup. He ladled it about sometime with the spoon, and then returned it to her saying — I am a Poor man it is true, and I am very hungry, but yet I cannot eat broth with Maggots in it.

Vermicelli, a type of pasta, is also the Italian word for little worms, or maggots. Here is a recipe for vermicelli soup from Francis Collingwood and John Woollams, The Universal Cook, and City and Country Housekeeper (London: R. Noble, 1792), p. 191:

Having put four ounces of butter into a large tossing-pan, cut a knuckle of veal and a scrag of mutton into small pieces about the size of walnuts. Slice in the meat of a shank of ham, with three or four blades of mace, two or three carrots, two parsnips, two large onions, with a clove stuck in at each end. Cut in four or five heads of celery washed clean, a bunch of sweet herbs, eight or ten morels, and an anchovy. Cover the pan close, and set it over a slow fire, without any water, till the gravy is drawn out of the meat. Then pour the gravy into a pot or bason, let the meat brown in the same pan; but take care it does not burn. Then pour in four quarts of water, and let it boil gently till it is wasted to three pints. Then strain it, and put the gravy to it. Set it on the fire, add to it two ounces of vermicelli, cut the nicest part of a head of celery, put in chyan pepper and salt to your taste, and let it boil about four minutes. If it is not of a good colour, put in a little browning, lay a French roll in the soup-dish, pour in the soup upon it, and lay some of the vermicelli over it.

A children's song starts "Nobody likes me, everybody hates me, / Guess I'll go eat worms..."

Nicolás Gómez Dávila (1913-1994), Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección (Bogotá: Villegas Editores, 2001), p. 237 (tr. by Stephen at Don Colacho's Aphorisms):

When one century’s writers can write nothing but boring things, we readers change century.

This reminds me of two more of Gómez Dávila's aphorisms, also from Escolios a un Texto Implícito, 2 vols. (Bogotá: Instituto Colombiano de Cultura, 1977), my translation:

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

Contemporary literature, in each and every epoch, is the worst enemy of culture. A reader's limited time is wasted in reading a thousand books that blunt his critical sense and damage his literary sensibility. (I, 258)

Hat tip: Patrick Kurp, for introducing me to the excellent blog Don Colacho's Aphorisms.

Cicero, On Old Age 7.24-25:

They expend effort on things which they know won't benefit them at all: "He plants trees to benefit another age," as our Caecilius Statius says in his Young Comrades. If you ask a farmer, no matter how old he is, for whom he's planting, he doesn't hesitate to say, "For the immortal gods, who not only were willing for me to receive these things from my ancestors, but also for me to hand them on to my descendants."

in eis elaborant, quae sciunt nihil ad se omnino pertinere: "serit arbores, quae altero saeclo prosint," ut ait Statius noster in Synephebis. nec vero dubitat agricola, quamvis sit senex, quaerenti cui serat respondere: "dis immortalibus, qui me non accipere modo haec a maioribus voluerunt, sed etiam posteris prodere."

Clare Leighton, from Four Hedges: A Gardener's Chronicle
Anton Lock, The Sapling

"Anecdotes of Dr. Jabez Earle, a Dissenting Minister, Who Died in 1768," The Kentish Register (December 1794) 464:

His chief excellence, as a scholar, was in classical learning. When he was above ninety years old, he would repeat with the greatest readiness and fluency, a hundred verses or more from Homer, Virgil, Horace, Juvenal, or others of the ancient poets, upon their being at any time occasionally mentioned.

William Cowper mentions him in a letter to Martin Madan (June 8, 1789, anent Madan's translation of Juvenal and Persius):

Dr. Earl, I remember, was a Master of both these authors, and could perhaps have repeated the greatest part of Juvenal, but of all the Scholars I have ever known He was the only one so well acquainted with him. Juvenal, of all the Roman Writers, was his Favorite.

John Muir, The Story of My Boyhood and Youth (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1916), pp. 356-357:

Why should man value himself as more than a small part of the one great unit of creation? And what creature of all that the Lord has taken the pains to make is not essential to the completeness of that unit — the cosmos? The universe would be incomplete without man; but it would also be incomplete without the smallest transmicroscopic creature that dwells beyond our conceitful eyes and knowledge.

From the dust of the earth, from the common elementary fund, the Creator has made Homo sapiens. From the same material he has made every other creature, however noxious and insignificant to us. They are earthborn companions and our fellow mortals. The fearfully good, the orthodox, of this laborious patchwork of modern civilization cry "Heresy" on every one whose sympathies reach a single hair's breadth beyond the boundary epidermis of our own species. Not content with taking all of earth, they also claim the celestial country as the only ones who possess the kind of souls for which that imponderable empire was planned.

Henry David Thoreau, Journals (April 2, 1852):

It appears to me that, to one standing on the heights of philosophy, mankind and the works of man will have sunk out of sight altogether; that man is altogether too much insisted on. The poet says the proper study of mankind is man. I say, study to forget all that; take wider views of the universe. That is the egotism of the race.

Thanks very much to the anonymous benefactor who sent me a copy of Bernard Knox, The Oldest Dead White European Males and Other Reflections on the Classics (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1994). I read it from cover to cover with immense enjoyment.

Knox died last month. See Wolfgang Saxon, "Bernard Knox, 95, Classics Scholar, Dies," New York Times (August 16, 2010), especially the final paragraph:

"There is a sort of general feeling among radicals that the whole of the Western tradition — and the Greeks are the heart of that tradition — is something that has to be repudiated," he told The Washington Post in 1992. "I feel appalled. God knows what the world would be like if we were all brought up on the stuff they'd like us to read."

Hat tip for the New York Times article: Dave Lull.

Samuel Johnson, The Rambler 160 (Saturday, September 28, 1751):

We are, by our occupations, education, and habits of life, divided almost into different species, which regard one another, for the most part, with scorn and malignity. Each of these classes of the human race has desires, fears, and conversation, vexations and merriment, peculiar to itself; cares which another cannot feel; pleasures which he cannot partake; and modes of expressing every sensation which he cannot understand.

The fact that we humans are "divided almost into different species" always strikes me with special force when I see crowds of people. I can't imagine myself, under any circumstances, travelling hundreds of miles, at the beck and call of some television personality, to join thousands of people on the National Mall in Washington, waving signs, hollering, cheering, whooping, chanting, and gesticulating.

It's dehumanizing to submerge one's individuality in the crowd like that. Søren Kierkegaard, The Last Years: Journals 1853-1855, tr. R.G. Smith (New York: Harper & Row, 1968), p. 141 (XI¹ A 384):

These millions, the law of whose existence is 'first be like the rest', this mass of aping—materially they look as if they were something, something great, something immensely powerful. And materially they are indeed something; but ideally this mass, these millions are zero, they are less than zero, they are wasted and forfeited existences.

William Cowper, letter to Walter Bagot (December 6, 1787):

In the course of our conversation he produced from his pocket-book a translation of the first 10 or 12 lines of the Iliad, and in order to leave my judgment free, informed me kindly at the same time that they were not his own. I read them, and according to the best of my recollection of the Original, found them well executed. The Bishop indeed acknowledged that they were not faultless, neither did I find them so. Had they been such, I should have felt their perfection as a discouragement hardly to be surmounted; for at that passage I have laboured more abundantly than at any other, and hitherto with the least success. I am convinced that Homer placed it at the threshold of his work as a Scarecrow to all Translators.

William Cowper, translation of Homer, Iliad 1.1-12:

Achilles sing, O Goddess! Peleus' son;
His wrath pernicious, who ten thousand woes
Caused to Achaia's host, sent many a soul
Illustrious into Hades premature,
And Heroes gave (so stood the will of Jove)
To dogs and to all ravening fowls a prey,
When fierce dispute had separated once
The noble Chief Achilles from the son
Of Atreus, Agamemnon, King of men.

Who them to strife impell'd? What power divine?
Latona's son and Jove's. For he, incensed
Against the King, a foul contagion raised
In all the host, and multitudes destroy'd,
For that the son of Atreus had his priest
Dishonored, Chryses.

The Greek:

Μῆνιν ἄειδε θεὰ Πηληϊάδεω Ἀχιλῆος
οὐλομένην, ἣ μυρί᾿ Ἀχαιοῖς ἄλγε᾿ ἔθηκε,
πολλὰς δ᾿ ἰφθίμους ψυχὰς Ἄϊδι προΐαψεν
ἡρώων, αὐτοὺς δὲ ἑλώρια τεῦχε κύνεσσιν
οἰωνοῖσί τε πᾶσι· Διὸς δ᾿ ἐτελείετο βουλή,
ἐξ οὗ δὴ τὰ πρῶτα διαστήτην ἐρίσαντε
Ἀτρεΐδης τε ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν καὶ δῖος Ἀχιλλεύς.

Tίς τ᾿ ἄρ σφωε θεῶν ἔριδι ξυνέηκε μάχεσθαι;
Λητοῦς καὶ Διὸς υἱός· ὃ γὰρ βασιλῆϊ χολωθεὶς
νοῦσον ἀνὰ στρατὸν ὄρσε κακήν, ὀλέκοντο δὲ λαοί,
οὕνεκα τὸν Χρύσην ἠτίμασεν ἀρητῆρα
Ἀτρεΐδης...

One reason why Cowper decided to translate Homer was his dissatisfaction with Alexander Pope's version (letter to Clotworthy Rowley, February 21, 1788):

Not much less than thirty years since, Alston and I read Homer through together. We compared Pope with his original all the way. The result was a discovery, that there is hardly the thing in the world of which Pope was so entirely destitute, as a taste for Homer. After the publication of my last volume, I found myself without employment. Employment is essential to me; I have neither health nor spirits without it. After some time, the recollection of what had passed between Alston and myself in the course of this business struck me forcibly; I remembered how we had been disgusted; how often we had sought the simplicity and majesty of Homer in his English representative, and had found instead of them, puerile conceits, extravagant metaphors, and the tinsel of modern embellishment in every possible position.

Rhyme, thought Cowper, led Pope astray (letter to Edward Thurlow, August 22, 1791):

I verily believed that rhime had betrayed Pope into his deviations.

Here is the beginning of Pope's translation of the Iliad:

The Wrath of Peleus' Son, the direful Spring
Of woes unnumber'd, heav'nly Goddess, sing!
That Wrath which hurl'd to Pluto's gloomy Reign
The Souls of mighty Chiefs untimely slain;
Whose Limbs unbury'd on the naked Shore
Devouring Dogs and hungry Vultures tore.
Since Great Achilles and Atrides strove,
Such was the Sov'reign Doom, and such the Will of Jove.

Declare, O Muse! in what ill-fated Hour
Sprung the fierce Strife, from what offended Pow'r?
Latona's Son a dire Contagion spread,
And heap'd the Camp with Mountains of the Dead;
The King of Men his Rev'rend Priest defy'd,
And, for the King's Offence, the People dy'd.

See the detailed criticisms on the opening lines by Philip Gentner in his edition of Pope, The Iliad of Homer: Books I., VI., XXII., and XXIV. (Boston: Benj. H. Sanborn & Co., 1899), p. xviii-xix:

In his first verse, Pope ornaments and elaborates a simple thought implied by Homer; he calls Achilles' wrath the "spring" of disasters, and, worse than that, seems to play upon the various meanings of the word. In the second verse, he adds the needless adjective "heavenly," and calls the "Muse" "goddess." The third verse adds the epithet "gloomy," and impairs the visual image suggested by "Hades," by adding the abstract word "reign" (realm). The fourth verse expands the Homeric phrase, "strong souls of heroes" into "mighty chiefs untimely slain." The fifth verse changes and elaborates a graphic picture into trivialness; "limbs" takes the place of body, and the words "unburied" and "naked "are gratuitous and woefully artificial. For the sixth verse, Pope has been praised for an accuracy and concreteness surpassing Homer's. "Vultures," it is said, is more definite than "all winged birds;" and, moreover, every bird is not one of prey. But it is hard to believe that Homer meant more than that the bodies were there, a ready spoil for all birds that cared to prey upon them; and, in any case, since other birds besides vultures do feed upon the dead, Homer's expression is as true as Pope's, and far more wide-reaching in import. Again (to say nothing of Pope's feeble reduplication of idea in the words "devouring" and "hungry,"), Homer, by the epithet "winged," adds an idea of flight absent in Pope.

Gentner overreaches a bit—Homer has "goddess," not "Muse," and I see no epithet "winged" in the Greek.

A.E. Housman, More Poems, VIII:

Give me a land of boughs in leaf,
    A land of trees that stand;
Where trees are fallen, there is grief;
    I love no leafless land.

Alas, the country whence I fare,
    It is where I would stay;
And where I would not, it is there
    That I shall be for aye.

And one remembers, and one forgets,
    But 'tis not found again,
Not though they hale in crimsoned nets
    The sunset from the main.

Could Housman have had Ovid in the back of his mind when he wrote this poem? The speaker is going into exile unwillingly (second stanza), and one of the things Ovid hated about his exile in Tomis was the lack of trees: "aspiceres nudos sine fronde, sine arbore, campos" (Tristia 3.10.75); "non salices ripa, robora monte virent" (Ex Ponto 1.3.52); and "non hic pampineis amicitur vitibus ulmus" (Ex Ponto 3.8.13).

George Orwell, Rudyard Kipling:

It is no use pretending that in an age like our own, 'good' poetry can have any genuine popularity. It is, and must be, the cult of a very few people, the least tolerated of the arts....But in general ours is a civilization in which the very word 'poetry' evokes a hostile snigger or, at best, the sort of frozen disgust that most people feel when they hear the word 'God'. If you are good at playing the concertina you could probably go into the nearest public bar and get yourself an appreciative audience within five minutes. But what would be the attitude of that same audience if you suggested reading them Shakespeare's sonnets, for instance?

Roy Clark Playing the Part of Poet Claude Strawberry

---

Update: Thanks to Patrick Kurp for drawing my attention to poet laureate Percy Dovetonsils, a role played by comedian Ernie Kovacs. Watch recitations of Dovetonsil's Autumn and Ode from a Germ's Eye Viewpoint, and read several of Dovetonsil's Odes here.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Written in an Album, in The Complete Poems, ed. William Keach (1997; rpt. London: Penguin Books, 2004), p. 397:

PARRY seeks the polar ridge;
Rhymes seeks S.T. Coleridge,
Author of works, whereof — tho' not in Dutch —
The public little knows — the publisher too much.

No bumf there, but see Keach's note on p. 599, where he quotes the following alternate version from a letter of Coleridge to J.H. Green (May 30, 1827):

Parry seeks the Pólar Ridge:
But rhymes seeks S.T. Cólĕridge
Fit for Mrs Smudger's Olbum
Or to wipe her Baby's small bum.

Related posts:

• A Place for Reading
  
• Cacata Carta
  
• Bumf

Labels: noctes scatologicae

Samuel Johnson, The Rambler, edd. W.J. Bate and Albrecht B. Strauss, Vol. III (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1969), p. 315, n. 1:

Greek Anthology, VII.128. Thewho quotes it in "Heraclitus," Lives,
authorship is uncertain, SJ attributesIX.1.16.
the epigram to Diogenes Laertius,

This is the editors' note on the motto for essay 208 (Saturday, March 14, 1752). Perhaps it was corrected in later printings, but so it stands in the copy I borrowed from the library. It should read:

Greek Anthology, VII.128. The authorship is uncertain. SJ attributes the epigram to Diogenes Laertius, who quotes it in "Heraclitus," Lives IX.1.16.

Here is Johnson's translation of the epigram, followed by the Greek:

Begone, ye blockheads, Heraclitus cries,
And leave my labours to the learn'd and wise;
By wit, by knowledge, studious to be read,
I scorn the multitude, alive and dead.

Ἡράκλειτος ἐγώ· τί μ' ἄνω κάτω ἕλκετ' ἄμουσοι;
  οὐχ ὑμῖν ἐπόνουν, τοῖς δ' ἔμ' ἐπισταμένοις.
εἷς ἐμοὶ ἄνθρωπος τρισμύριοι, οἱ δ' ἀνάριθμοι
  οὐδείς. ταῦτ' αὐδῶ καὶ παρὰ Φερσεφόνῃ.

Related posts:

• Few, One, or None
  
• Few, One, or None Revisited
  
• Write the Book You Want To Read
  
• An Audience of One
  
• Tolkien on Writing for Oneself
  
• To Write for Oneself
  
• Soliloquies
  
• Mihi et Musis
  
• Says I to Myself

Labels: typographical and other errors

Henry David Thoreau, Cape Cod, V (The Wellfleet Oysterman):

He was curious to know to what religious sect we belonged. He said that he had been to hear thirteen kinds of preaching in one month, when he was young, but he did not join any of them, — he stuck to his Bible. There was nothing like any of them in his Bible.

Horace, Epistles 1.1.14 (tr. Niall Rudd):

I don't feel bound to swear obedience to any master.

Nullius addictus iurare in verba magistri.

Samuel Johnson, The Rambler 178 (Saturday, November 30, 1751):

Many complaints are made of the misery of life; and indeed it must be confessed that we are subject to calamities by which the good and bad, the diligent and slothful, the vigilant and heedless, are equally afflicted. But surely, though some indulgence may be allowed to groans extorted by inevitable misery, no man has a right to repine at evils which, against warning, against experience, he deliberately and leisurely brings upon his own head; or to consider himself as debarred from happiness by such obstacles as resolution may break, or dexterity may put aside.

Great numbers who quarrel with their condition have wanted not the power but the will to obtain a better state. They have never contemplated the difference between good and evil sufficiently to quicken aversion, or invigorate desire; they have indulged a drowsy thoughtlessness or giddy levity; have committed the balance of choice to the management of caprice; and when they have long accustomed themselves to receive all that chance offered them, without examination, lament at last that they find themselves deceived.

Samuel Johnson, The Rambler 181 (Tuesday, December 10, 1751):

Rouse from this lazy dream of fortuitous riches, which, if obtained, you could scarcely have enjoyed, because they could confer no consciousness of desert; return to rational and manly industry, and consider the mere gift of luck as below the care of a wise man.

William Cowper, letter to Walter Bagot (January 3, 1787):

Is it possible for a man to be calm who for 3 weeks past has been perpetually occupied in slaughter. Letting out one man's bowels, smiting another through the gullet, transfixing the liver of another, and lodging an arrow in the buttock of a fourth? Read the 13th. book of the Iliad, and you will find such amusing incidents as these the subject of it, the sole subject. In order to interest myself in it and to catch the spirit of it, I had need discard all humanity. It is woeful work, and were the best poet in the world to give us at this day such a List of Killed and wounded, he would not escape universal censure, to the praise of a more enlighten'd age be it spoken. I have waded through much blood, and through much more I must wade before I shall have finish'd. I determine in the mean time to account it all very sublime, and for two reasons. First, because all the Learned think so, and 2dly, because I am to translate it. But were I an indifferent by-stander perhaps I should venture to wish that Homer had applied his wonderful powers to a less disgusting subject. He has in the Odyssey, and I long to get at it.

Po Chü-i, On Being Sixty, tr. by Arthur Waley in A Hundred and Seventy Chinese Poems (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1919), p. 233:

Addressed to Liu Mēng-tē, who had asked for a poem. He was the same age as Po Chü-i.

Between thirty and forty, one is distracted by the Five Lusts;
Between seventy and eighty, one is prey to a hundred diseases.
But from fifty to sixty one is free from all ills;
Calm and still — the heart enjoys rest.
I have put behind me Love and Greed; I have done with Profit and Fame;
I am still short of illness and decay and far from decrepit age.
Strength of limb I still possess to seek the rivers and hills;
Still my heart has spirit enough to listen to flutes and strings.
At leisure I open new wine and taste several cups;
Drunken I recall old poems and sing a whole volume.
Mēng-tē has asked for a poem and herewith I exhort him
Not to complain of three-score, "the time of obedient ears."<sup>1

1</sup>Confucius said that it was not till sixty that "his ears obeyed him." This age was therefore called "the time of obedient ears."

Excerpts from Guy Davenport, "What Are Revolutions?" in The Hunter Gracchus and Other Papers on Literature and Art (Washington: Counterpoint, 1996), pp. 235-248:

Our revolution was fought because of a penny tax on paper and a two-penny one on butter. We are now taxed for every movement we make, every exchange of a nickel from citizen to citizen. That tyrant against whom we rebelled would not have dared to tax his subjects' incomes and was innocent of the diabolical idea that one can collect taxes on income not yet earned, which all of us now pay.

....

The strangest revolution of our century is this perverse and invisible evolution of the human body into the automobile.

....

When we wake up from our myths we will discover that we Americans do not live in Jefferson's republic but in a technological tyranny the likes of which has yet to be described by political scientists, who have slept through it all.

....

My grandmother, like Alexander Graham Bell, would not have a telephone in her house—she said it was a vulgar invention. (Bell, its inventor, did not have one because it was a damned nuisance.) I like better the objection of Edgar Degas, who did not have a phone because there was a great likelihood that the party calling might be someone to whom you had not been introduced.

....

Anybody can see that the automobile owns us, not we it. We are its slaves. It takes sharper eyes to see the more insidious process: the car is swallowing up our soul in its metal-and-glass body. But it has happened and it is so.

....

What scares me is that for the past fifty years we have been moving backward while we have dreamed, or fooled ourselves, that we were moving forward. Every one of our cities became more dangerous to live in; we all became little more than consumers and taxpayers so far as our government was concerned. Rascality in government has become the norm rather than the exception. Wars have gotten longer, more demoralizing, more devastating and irrational.

....

Because I have no rational revolution to offer you, I suggest, for the fun of it, that you try the Erewhonian. Take back your body from its possession by the automobile; take back your imagination from the TV set; take back your wealth from Congress's bottomless pit and maniac spending; take back your skills as homemakers from the manufacturers; take back your minds from the arguments from necessity and the merchants of fear and prejudice. Take back peace from perpetual war. Take back your lives; they are yours.

William Gropper, Divided House
This post is dedicated to a friend who wrote in a letter:

More cheeringly, some crucial organ in our television blew up very loudly this afternoon causing me ill-concealed glee and a renewed faith in the efficacy of petitionary prayer. The LS (lumen stultorum) is a perennial source of friction, and its life has been spared up till now only because my 'nay' has always been outnumbered 5 to 1. Now in a brave act of self-snuffing it has done the ethical thing. Beyond repair, I hope, and may no replacement cross the threshold.

Labels: Luddism

Guy Davenport, "Travel Reconsidered," in The Hunter Gracchus and Other Papers on Literature and Art (Washington: Counterpoint, 1996), pp. 314-317 (at 315):

As best as I can ascertain from casual research, the typical American trip to, say, Paris, has been standardized into four events as mandatory as the stages of a religious progress from shrine to shrine. These are an evening at the Moo Land Rouge (which ceased to exist years ago, but the crafty French have built a place so called), the Lido, and Mont Mart Tree, where you can see Impressionist painters at their canvases hard by Sacker Curr, and a tour by bus of "the old parts of the city."

A trip abroad isn't necessary for the innocent who wishes to experience Paris. When I lived in Florida, an acquaintance told me, in all seriousness, that it made no sense for him ever to visit France, when all he needed to do was take a day trip to the France Pavilion at Disney's Epcot Theme Park.