Laudator Temporis Acti

There is one other thing that I recall about Yiddish. Many languages have some sort of suffix, added at the end of a word, for a variety of purposes—smallness, affection, intimacy, etc. In English we use only two: -let and -kin (e.g., booklet, lambkin) and both sparingly. German makes much more extensive use of -lein and -chen (e.g., fraülein, mädchen). Italian has a wide range, notably -ino, -etto, -ello and, to magnify rather than reduce, -one. A similar effect is achieved in Arabic not by adding a suffix, but by a change of vowels—from Hassan to Husayn, from ‘Abd to ‘Ubayd, as in the names ‘Abdallah and ‘Ubaydallah. Yiddish has a wide range of such suffixes, but one in particular, -inyu, caught my attention. It is attached to three words and to no others. The three words are father (tatinyu), mother (maminyu) and God (Gottinyu). Clearly, these are not diminutives—the message is not diminution but intimacy. I thought this remarkable. The same theological attitude of intimacy is expressed in a familiar Jewish joke about the hard-up businessman who prays, “Oh God, you help complete strangers! Why can’t you help me?”

Then was I sore afraid, and fell into such a pickle that I savoured ill in the nostrils of those who stood by.

Tunc fui ita perterritus quod perminxi et permerdavi me, quod omnes nasum praetenebant.

Then I was so very afraid that I thoroughly pissed and shat myself, so that all were holding their noses.

• The Smell of Fear
• An Effect of Fear
• Thin Soup
• An Effect of Fear in Cellini's Autobiography

Labels: noctes scatologicae

The people's lack of judgment has often put the worst man in office.

πολλάκις γὰρ ἀκρισία δήµου τὸν χείριστον εἰς ἀρχὴν προεστήσατο.

This is wine—if the merest driblet falls in the Nile,
its scent makes the sober crocodile drunk without end.
If the deer on the plain drinks but a single drop,
he becomes a roaring lion, fearing no tiger.

• Some Effects of Wine
• Praise of Dionysus
• Wine
• The Power of Wine
• Effects of Wine
• Effects of Drinking Wine

You save yourself, and I'll save myself.

σῶζε σαυτόν, ἐγὼ δ' ἐμέ.

As vultures are attracted to foul-smelling things, flying over many meadows and many fair and sweet-smelling places, and as flies, passing over what is healthy, are drawn to a sore, so too malicious characters do not even glance at splendid achievements or great accomplishments in life but dedicate themselves to the rot and the decay.

Ὥσπερ δὲ οἱ γῦπες πρὸς τὰ δυσώδη φέρονται, πολλοὺς µὲν λειµῶνας, πολλοὺς δὲ ἡδεῖς καὶ εὐώδεις τόπους ὑπεριπτάµενoι, καὶ αἱ µυῖαι τὸ µὲν ὑγιαῖνον παρατρέχουσιν, πρὸς δὲ τὸ ἕλκος ἐπείγονται, οὕτως οἱ βάσκανοι τὰς µὲν τοῦ βίου λαµπρότητας καὶ τὰ µεγέθη τῶν κατορθουµένων οὐδὲ προσβλέπουσι, τοῖς δὲ σαθροῖς ἐπιτίθενται.

Get lost! You can do nothing—you can only talk.

φθείρου· τὸ γὰρ δρᾶν οὐκ ἔχων λόγους ἔχεις.

Tastier than old wine,
sweeter than the passing of winecups
is the play of swords and lances,
the clash of armies at my command.
To face death in battle is my life,
for life is what fulfils the soul.

Despite the warnings of those around her, Dorothea married him, thus embarking on a short-lived, unhappy wedded life in a gloomy parsonage filled with books and silence.

Before he left the next day it had been decided that the marriage should take place within six weeks. Why not? Mr. Casaubon's house was ready. It was not a parsonage, but a considerable mansion, with much land attached to it. The parsonage was inhabited by the curate, who did all the duty except preaching the morning sermon.

Mr. Casaubon's home was the manor-house. Close by, visible from some parts of the garden, was the little church, with the old parsonage opposite.

Labels: typographical and other errors

Your life is a sum of counted breaths.
With each breath that passes
a part of life is lost.
That which gives life brings death every moment nearer,
and your caravan is led by one
who will not jest with you.

Labels: typographical and other errors

For every one should cleave to his own business, and none should put his sickle into another man's corn. Because a cobbler is a cobbler, and a tailor is a tailor, and a smith is a smith; and it would go ill with a tailor who tried to make shoes and slippers.

Quia unusquisque debet manere in facultate sua, et non debet mittere falcem in messem alterius. Quia sutor est sutor et sartor est sartor, et faber est faber. Et non staret bene si unus sartor vellet facere calceos vel stamulta.

• Outside My Area of Expertise
• Let the Cobbler Stick to His Last
• Sutor Ne Ultra Crepidam

Though our modern dictators entertain us by their bombast and vulgarity, and maintain the high traditions of their class in other less engaging vices, they fall short, alas!, of the exorbitant pleasures, the outrageous, shameless orgies of debauchery, which are so endearing a feature of the more ancient and authentic tyrants. Hitler and Mussolini neither smoke nor drink, and although Musso sometimes allows himself a mild infusion of lime-flowers, for his stomach’s sake, tea and coffee (those poisonous drugs!) he rigorously eschews. As for Hitler, cream-éclairs are said to be the limit of his indulgence; but of these, it is whispered, he has sometimes, when in convivial mood, been known to take one over the eight. When these two miserable creatures met in Venice, that city of ancient and exotic debauchery, did they feast with Lucullus and romp with Cleopatra? No: two plates of scrambled eggs, and early and alone to bed. O tempora, o mores! Shades of Sardanapalus and Semiramis! Where’s Caligula, where’s Nero, where’s Elagabalus? Has the long catalogue of luxurious Popes and Caesars tapered down to this, and the Seven glorious Deadly Sins shrunk to an inhibition?

More problematic is the Aeneid, which reverses the proportions: the Dido episode, and the journey into the underworld that succeeds it, add up to an oasis in a carefully landscaped desert, and it takes a lot of thirstily summoned dedication to convince yourself that those parched miles of dunes, elegantly arranged though they might be, are worth crossing just for the prospect of getting to Troy and watching it burn. The Orpheus and Eurydice episode in Georgics IV shows the intensity of dramatic talent that lay within Virgil's reach, but that only makes things worse when we find out how little drama the Aeneid has, compared with the long swathes of beautiful language with nothing in particular to be beautiful about. As it has come down to us, epic poetry in Latin is a misfire. The great classical historian Ronald Syme spoke the truth in passing, when he said that Tacitus wrote the Roman epics that the poets didn't.

Poor old Rowse says somewhere in his autobiography that he regards the old ideal of Mens sana in corpore sano as arrant nonsense and a contradiction in terms, or words to that effect; for when he rides his hobby-horses he does ride them with whips and spur. He prefers to believe that bodily health and intellectual force are incompatible things, and that art springs from the limitation of experience. Well, I suppose it's a tenable view for such as want to hold it, and for sure, since Flaubert and Leopardi were invalids, there's something to give a smack of taste to the weak, insipid soup of Wackenroder and Proust. But I'm on the side of the Elizabethans, and Goethe, and St Aristophanes, my patron saint, and all whose philosophy is founded on experience, or, at least, on a bottom of common sense which presupposes experience. I'm for Gibbon and Surtees, not these etiolated continentals. Why even style depends on experience and observation, since style needs imagery, and imagery must be drawn from life, from wild beasts in the forest, and storms at sea, and low life in taprooms and circuses and at earthstoppers' dinners, and a relish and recollection of these things, and a sympathy with them. But who can draw a good image from private wards and clinking bedpans and cut flowers and demure white sheets and undertones, an unillumined world, without seasons, without laughter, where even a fart is an austere medical symptom only?

Lord, of your grace all that I hope is this—
keep the realm of my pleasure prosperous
avert from me the calamity of chastity
and keep far from me the doom of repentance.

                                        I am so tired,
And sick, and sicker even than that; for ah,
The worst of sicknesses is life itself;
And only death can cure it. This is sure
The medicine that is bitterest, but the last,
And everywhere available, and cheap.

                                        Ich bin recht müd'
Und krank, und kranker noch als krank, denn ach!
Die allerschlimmste Krankheit ist das Leben;
Und heilen kann sie nur der Tod. Das ist
Die bitterste Arznei, doch auch die letzte,
Und ist zu haben überall, und wohlfeil.

Though it can be overdone, there is nothing like a trading of quotations for bringing cultivated people together, or for making you feel uncultivated if you have nothing to trade. Nowadays very few people can quote from the Greek or would think to impress anyone if they could, and even quoting from the Latin — still a universal recognition system in the learned world when I was young — is now discouraged.

                     Where men burn books,
They will burn people also in the end.

                                                     [W]o man Bücher
Verbrennt, verbrennt man auch am Ende Menschen.

You may read it, an you will, because I am sending it to you herewith. It seemeth to me that the author and the book ought to be burned together, for it is a monstrous scandal that anybody should compile such a volume.

Vos potestis eum legere si vultis, quia mitto hic eum vobis. Mihi videtur quod autor ille cum suo libro debet comburi, quia est maxime scandalosum quod aliquis debet talem librum compilare.

• A Pungent Smell of Smoke
• Burning Books Written by Epicurus
• An Official Book Burning
• Burn Me!
• A Curse

Reading is a mere makeshift for original thinking. When we read, we allow another to guide our thoughts in leading strings. Moreover, many books merely serve to show how many false paths there are and how seriously we could go astray if we allowed ourselves to be guided by them. But whoever is guided by genius, in other words thinks for himself; thinks freely and of his own accord and thinks correctly; he has the compass for finding the right way. We should, therefore, read only when the source of our own ideas dries up, which will be the case often enough even with the best minds. On the other hand, to scare away our own original and powerful ideas in order to take up a book, is a sin against the Holy Ghost. We then resemble the man who runs away from free nature in order to look at a herbarium, or to contemplate a beautiful landscape in a copper engraving.

Lesen ist ein bloßes Surrogat des eigenen Denkens. Man läßt dabei seine Gedanken von einem Andern am Gängelbande führen. Zudem taugen viele Bücher bloß, zu zeigen, wie viel Irrwege es giebt und wie arg man sich verlaufen könnte, wenn man von ihnen sich leiten ließe. Den aber der Genius leitet, d. h. der selbst denkt, freiwillig denkt, richtig denkt, der hat die Boussole, den rechten Weg zu finden. Lesen soll man also nur dann, wann die Quelle der eigenen Gedanken stockt; was auch beim besten Kopfe oft genug der Fall seyn wird. Hingegen die eigenen, urkräftigen Gedanken verscheuchen, um ein Buch zur Hand zu nehmen, ist Sünde wider den heiligen Geist. Man gleicht alsdann Dem, der aus der freien Natur flieht, um ein Herbarium zu besehn, oder um schöne Gegenden im Kupferstiche zu betrachten.

The truth that has been merely learnt sticks to us like an artificial limb, a false tooth, a nose of wax, or at best like a rhinoplastic nose formed from someone else's flesh. On the other hand, the truth acquired through our own thinking is like the natural limb; it alone really belongs to us. On this rests the distinction between the thinker and the mere scholar. The intellectual gain of the man who thinks for himself is, therefore, like a beautiful painting that vividly stands out with correct light and shade, sustained tone, and perfect harmony of colours. The intellectual acquisition of the mere scholar, on the other hand, is like a large palette full of bright colours, systematically arranged perhaps, but without harmony, sequence, and significance.

Die bloß erlernte Wahrheit klebt uns nur an, wie ein angesetztes Glied, ein falscher Zahn, eine wächserne Nase, oder höchstens wie eine rhinoplastische aus fremdem Fleische; die durch eigenes Denken erworbene aber gleicht dem natürlichen Gliede: sie allein gehört uns wirklich an. Darauf beruht der Unterschied zwischen dem Denker und dem bloßen Gelehrten. Daher sieht der geistige Erwerb des Selbstdenkers aus, wie ein schönes Gemälde, das lebendig hervortritt, mit richtigem Lichte und Schatten, gehaltenem Ton, vollkommener Harmonie der Farben. Hingegen gleicht der geistige Erwerb des bloßen Gelehrten einer großen Palette, voll bunter Farben, allenfalls systematisch geordnet, aber ohne Harmonie, Zusammenhang und Bedeutung.