A youngster in front of his school, with his Virgil and his Corneille under his arm, is reading a newspaper, a parade of horrors in big type.
"What are you up to?"
"Oh, good morning, sir ... I'm doing my inhumanities."
Un adolescent devant son lycée, avec son Virgile et son Corneille sous le bras. Il lit un journal, tableau d'horreurs en grosses lettres.
— Qu'est-ce que tu fais là?
— Bonjour, Monsieur. Je fais mes inhumanités.
"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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Monday, September 24, 2018
Studying the Inhumanities
Paul Valéry (1871-1945), Collected Works, Vol. 14: Analects, tr. Stuart Gilbert (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), p. 587: