Laudator Temporis Acti

Galway Kinnell (1927-2014), The Poems of François Villon. New Edition. Translated with an Introduction and Notes (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1977), pp. 36-37 (Le Testament, lines 159-160) with note on p 227:

Valere pour vray le baudit
Qui fut nommé le Grant a Romme.

This is vouched for by Valerian
Who was called "The Great" in Rome.

Valerian: Valerian Maximus. However, the story isn't from his writing but from Jean de Salisbury's Policraticus. It also appears in Augustine's City of God and the Jouvencel of J. de Bueil.

For Valerian read Valerius. An unfortunate blemish in a fine translation.

Labels: typographical and other errors

C.S. Lewis, letter to his father (March 31, 1928):

In the mean time I spend all my mornings in the Bodleian: and the evenings in trying, for the hundredth time, to get a real working knowledge of the German language, since in my present occupation I find my ignorance of it up against me at every turn. For example, the only history of mediaeval Latin literature is in German. The authoritative edition of an old French poem I shall have to read is in German. And so on. But I am making progress.

The "history of mediaeval Latin literature" is probably Max Manitius, Geschichte der lateinischen Literatur des Mittelalters (München: Beck, 1911).

William Hazlitt (1778-1830), "On the Pleasure of Hating":

[T]here is a secret affinity, a hankering after, evil in the human mind, and that it takes a perverse, but a fortunate delight in mischief, since it is a never-failing source of satisfaction. Pure good soon grows insipid, wants variety and spirit. Pain is a bittersweet, which never surfeits. Love turns, with a little indulgence, to indifference or disgust: hatred alone is immortal. Do we not see this principle at work everywhere? Animals torment and worry one another without mercy: children kill flies for sport: every one reads the accidents and offences in a newspaper as the cream of the jest: a whole town runs to be present at a fire, and the spectator by no means exults to see it extinguished. It is better to have it so, but it diminishes the interest; and our feelings take part with our passions rather than with our understandings. Men assemble in crowds, with eager enthusiasm, to witness a tragedy: but if there were an execution going forward in the next street, as Mr. Burke observes, the theatre would be left empty. A strange cur in a village, an idiot, a crazy woman, are set upon and baited by the whole community. Public nuisances are in the nature of public benefits. How long did the Pope, the Bourbons, and the Inquisition keep the people of England in breath, and supply them with nicknames to vent their spleen upon! Had they done us any harm of late? No: but we have always a quantity of superfluous bile upon the stomach, and we wanted an object to let it out upon. How loth were we to give up our pious belief in ghosts and witches, because we liked to persecute the one, and frighten ourselves to death with the other! It is not the quality so much as the quantity of excitement that we are anxious about: we cannot bear a state of indifference and ennui: the mind seems to abhor a vacuum as much as ever nature was supposed to do. Even when the spirit of the age (that is, the progress of intellectual refinement, warring with our natural infirmities) no longer allows us to carry our vindictive and headstrong humours into effect, we try to revive them in description, and keep up the old bugbears, the phantoms of our terror and our hate, in imagination. We burn Guy Fawkes in effigy, and the hooting and buffeting and maltreating that poor tattered figure of rags and straw makes a festival in every village in England once a year. Protestants and Papists do not now burn one another at the stake: but we subscribe to new editions of Fox's Book of Martyrs; and the secret of the success of the Scotch Novels is much the same — they carry us back to the feuds, the heart-burnings, the havoc, the dismay, the wrongs, and the revenge of a barbarous age and people — to the rooted prejudices and deadly animosities of sects and parties in politics and religion, and of contending chiefs and clans in war and intrigue. We feel the full force of the spirit of hatred with all of them in turn. As we read, we throw aside the trammels of civilization, the flimsy veil of humanity. "Off, you lendings!" The wild beast resumes its sway within us, we feel like hunting animals, and as the hound starts in his sleep and rushes on the chase in fancy, the heart rouses itself in its native lair, and utters a wild cry of joy, at being restored once more to freedom and lawless, unrestrained impulses.

Augustine, Letters 137.1.3 (Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum, vol. 44, pp. 99-100; to Volusianus; tr. Peter Brown):

For such is the depth of the Christian Scriptures that, even if I were attempting to study them and nothing else, from boyhood to decrepit old age, with the utmost leisure, the most unwearied zeal, and with talents greater than I possess, I would still be making progress in discovering their treasures.

tanta est enim christianarum profunditas litterarum, ut in eis quotidie proficerem, si eas solas ab ineunte pueritia usque ad decrepitam senectutem maximo otio, summo studio, meliore ingenio conarer addiscere.

I don't see "in discovering their treasures" in the Latin. Brown's translation appears in his Augustine of Hippo: A Biography (1967; rpt. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975), p. 263.

C.S. Lewis, letter to his father (November 22, 1923):

I have got quite recently ONE pupil, tho’ not through Poynton. He is a youth of eighteen who is trying to get a Classical scholarship. I am to coach him in essay writing and English for the essay paper and general papers which these exams always include. I fear we shall win no laurels by him. I questioned him about his classical reading: our dialogue was something like this:—

SELF: ‘Well Sandeman, what Greek authors have you been reading?’
SAND (cheerfully): ‘I never can remember. Try a few names and I’ll see if I can get on to any.’
SELF (a little damped:) ‘Have you read any Euripides?’
SAND: ‘No.’
SELF: ‘Any Sophocles?’
SAND: ‘Oh yes.’
SELF: ‘What plays of his have you read?’
SAND (after a pause): ‘Well—the Alcestis.
’ SELF (apologetically): ‘But isn’t that by Euripides?’
SAND (with the genial surprise of a man who finds £1 where he thought there was a 10/-note): ‘Really. Is it now? By Jove, then I HAVE read some Euripides.’

Frederic Van der Meer (1904-1994), Augustine the Bishop (London: Sheed and Ward, 1961), p. xv:

Yet even the genius is somewhat forbidding, for Augustine the genius is hidden away in eleven great folios of strangely scintillating Latin, a fitting subject for the scholar and especially for those industrious human bees, the philologists.

Aesop, Fables 380 Perry (tr. Laura Gibbs, with her note):

Xanthus, Aesop's master, said to him, 'Can you tell me why we sometimes look at our own shit after we go to the bathroom?' Aesop replied, 'A long time ago the son of a king indulged in all kinds of luxurious foods. As a result, he spent a lot of time in the bathroom. And once he spent such a long time sitting there that he forgot what he was doing and crapped his own guts out. Ever since, anyone taking a crap bends over to make sure he hasn't done the same thing. But you don't have to worry about that, since you don't have any guts to begin with!'

Note: This fable depends on a distinctly Greek understanding of human anatomy: the 'guts' are actually the seat of intelligence (English 'brains') rather than a sign of courage. By saying that his master has no 'guts', Aesop means that his master is an idiot, not that he is a coward.

Ὁ Ξάνθος αὐτῷ· "δύνασαί μοι εἰπεῖν διὰ ποίαν αἰτίαν, ἐπὰν χέζωμεν, πυκνὰ εἰς τὸ ἀφόδευμα ἑαυτῶν βλέπομεν;" Αἴσωπος· "ὅτι κατὰ τοὺς πάλαι χρόνους βασιλέως υἱὸς ἐγένετο ὅστις διὰ τὴν σπατάλην καὶ τρυφὴν ἐπὶ πολὺν χρόνον ἐκαθέζετο χέζων, ἐπὶ τοσοῦτον δὲ χρόνον, ἄχρις οὗ ἐπιλαθόμενος τὰς ἰδίας φρένας ἔχεσεν. ἀπ’ ἐκείνου δὲ τοῦ χρόνου οἱ ἄνθρωποι χέζοντες ὑποκύπτουσιν φοβούμενοι μὴ καὶ αὐτοὶ τὰς ἰδίας φρένας χέσωσιν· σὺ δὲ μηδὲν ἀγωνία περὶ τούτου· οὐ μὴ γὰρ χέσης σου τὰς φρένας, οὐκ ἔχεις γὰρ."

Labels: noctes scatologicae

C.S. Lewis, letter to his father (October 28, 1922):

I am drumming ahead like anything with my Anglo-Saxon, and it is great fun. One begins it in a Reader constructed on the admirable system of having nearly all the text in one dialect and nearly all the glossary in another. You can imagine what happy hours this gives the young student—for example, you will read a word like 'WADO' in the text: in the glossary this may appear as WEDO, WAEDO, WEODO, WAEDU, or WIEDU. Clever bloke, ain't he? The language in general, gives the impression of parodied English badly spelled. Thus the word 'CWIC' may baffle you till you remember the 'quick and the dead' and suddenly realize that it means 'Alive'. Or again TINGUL for a star, until you think of 'Twinkle, twinkle little star'.

Warning: This post, about my (now deceased) uncle's return home after World War II, will probably interest only my family members.

My brother showed me an old telegram that our uncle (a paratrooper in WWII) sent to our mother. I sent the following email to my uncle about his Odyssey (including the Circe episode):

Here is the text of a telegram which you sent to my mother on March 18, 1946:

ARRIVED 11:15 SATURDAY NIGHT ALSO MET AIRBORNE SLICK CHICK NECKED FROM ALBUQUERQUE TO KANSAS CITY

Sounds like quite a trip...

My uncle responded with the following reminiscences:

I landed in Seattle late Feb., 1946, after a ride on a troopship from Japan. After a train ride to Ft. MacArthur, California, I was discharged from the army on March 9, 1946, 3 months before my 21st birthday. Your Dad was on recruiting duty in L.A. after serving in the Pacific. In Japan I told the army that I lived at your parents' address in L.A. so I could visit them. After I got to Ft. MacArthur, I told them that I lived in Maine.

I visited for a few days and then went to a local air base and tried to get a ride East on an Air Corps plane. (Free). Because I was discharged, it was not possible. I had to buy a ticket on a regular airline. The Army gave me 5 cents a mile travel allowance. I received around $154.00. Believe it or not, the price of an airline ticket to Portland, Maine, was just about the same amount that I received.

Your folks gave me a ride to the Burbank Airport in Los Angeles. My flight left at 11:00 P.M. It went to Albuquerque, NM. (Your 61-year-old telegram copy covers this segment only.) The "chick" referred to was grateful to those of us who had saved the world from oblivion. However, she got off in Kansas City. (No pun intended.)

From Kansas City, my flight went on to Chicago. From Chicago we flew to New York City, then to Boston, then to Portland, Maine.

It was cold and dark. I hitchhiked and walked to the road to Brunswick, then with my limited luggage, I put on my pity-full look and hitched a ride to Brunswick. By this time I was very cold and uncomfortable. I still had on my uniform and did not have to wait too long for a ride. I did not have an overcoat as we didn't need an overcoat in California.

The guy let me off at the corner of Pleasant St. (Rte. 1) and Spring St. in Brunswick. Consequently, I walked the last half mile to 29 Spring St. (I was asked why I hadn't called my father from Portland to ask for a ride. I said that I didn't know how much he'd charge me.)

I walked into my home at 11:15 P.M. The trip took 21 hours using planes, autos, and foot power. I had been gone since Sept., 1944, 18 months. (Eighteen months of still untold unique experiences.)

"I didn't know how much he'd charge me." This is revealing. My grandfather was a penny-pincher — when my mother graduated from high school at age 16 and got a job at a bank, her father started charging her for room and board.

Related post: Memorial Day.

Augustine, Confessions 10.8.15 (tr. R.S. Pine-Coffin):

Yet men go out and gaze in astonishment at high mountains, the huge waves of the sea, the broad reaches of rivers, the ocean that encircles the world, or the stars in their courses. But they pay no attention to themselves.

et eunt homines mirari alta montium et ingentes fluctus maris et latissimos lapsus fluminum et oceani ambitum et gyros siderum, et relinquunt se ipsos.

James J. O'Donnell ad loc. (vol. 3, p. 180):

Bruce Catton, Never Call Retreat (Garden City: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1965), p. 306 (note omitted):

Mostly, the critics centered their fire on Jefferson Davis, taking the traditional American view that if anything goes wrong the President must be at fault. As a member of the intimate circle surrounding that wan perfectionist, Vice-President Alexander Stephens, who criticized Mr. Davis with a sad but tireless persistence, [Howell] Cobb knew all about that kind of talk; but as the new year began he felt that at least part of the trouble lay with Congress. After a visit to the capital he wrote candidly to Stephens: "What is wanting in Richmond is brains. I did not find the temper and disposition of Congress as bad as I expected, but there is a lamentable want of brains and good sound common sense."

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.