My world is wholly formed of words -- so much of a philologist I have become! Each one dreams the dream of life in his own way. I have dreamed it in my library; and when the hour shall come in which I must leave this world, may it please God to take me from my ladder -- from before my shelves of books!
Il n'y a pour moi dans le monde que des mots, tant je suis philologue! Chacun fait à sa manière le rêve de sa vie. J'ai fait ce rêve dans ma bibliothèque, et, quand mon heure sera venue de quitter ce monde, Dieu veuille me prendre sur mon échelle, devant mes tablettes chargées de livres!
"A peculiar anthologic maze, an amusing literary chaos, a farrago of quotations, a mere olla podrida of quaintness, a pot pourri of pleasant delites, a florilegium of elegant extracts, a tangled fardel of old-world flowers of thought, a faggot of odd fancies, quips, facetiae, loosely tied" (Holbrook Jackson, Anatomy of Bibliomania) by a "laudator temporis acti," a "praiser of time past" (Horace, Ars Poetica 173).
Pages
▼
Monday, December 27, 2004
Death Wish
Anatole France, Le Crime de Sylvestre Bonnard (1881, tr. Lafcadio Hearn):