One day, after he had returned to Westbrook from New Mexico for a visit to his mother, they were walking together down one of the well-tended paths of the arboretum and passed one of the workmen who had been employed on the place for some forty years. My grandmother said a pleasant word to him, but Bronson pointedly looked the other way.
"Don't you remember Louis, Bronson? Why didn't you speak to him?"
"I was ashamed to."
"Ashamed of what?"
"Ashamed to think that a man's whole life should have been spent in tidying paths for us to walk on."
"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).
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Thursday, July 04, 2013
Ashamed
Iris Origo (1902-1988), Images and Shadows (London: John Murray, 1970), p. 34 (on her uncle, Senator Bronson M. Cutting):