Tragical to think of: Every new generation is born to us direct out of Heaven; white as purest writing paper, white as snow;—everything we please can be written on it;—and our pleasure and our negligence is, To begin blotching it, scrawling, smutching and smearing it, from the first day it sees the sun: towards such a consummation of ugliness, dirt, and blackness of darkness, as is too often visible. Woe on us; there is no woe like this,—if we were not sunk in stupefaction, and had still eyes to discern or souls to feel it!
"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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Saturday, August 24, 2024
Tragical
Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881), "Shooting Niagra: And After?" Essays on Politics and Society (Oakland: University of California Press, 2022), pp. 265-299 (at 293):