Laudator Temporis Acti

Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986), "The Library of Babel," Collected Fictions, tr. Andrew Hurley (New York: Penguin Books, 1998), pp. 112-118 (at 117):

There is no combination of characters one can make—dhcmrlchtdj, for example—that the divine Library has not foreseen and that in one or more of its secret tongues does not hide a terrible significance. There is no syllable one can speak that is not filled with tenderness and terror, that is not, in one of those languages, the mighty name of a god.

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• Dealing with Telemarketers
• Thrippsy Pillivinx
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• Radaratoo, Radarate
• Gibberish

Czeslaw Milosz (1911-2004), "Conversation with Jeanne," New and Collected Poems 1931-2001 (New York: Ecco, 2003), pp. 543-544:

Let us not talk philosophy, drop it, Jeanne.
So many words, so much paper, who can stand it.
I told you the truth about my distancing myself.
I've stopped worrying about my misshapen life.
It was no better and no worse than the usual human tragedies.

For over thirty years we have been waging our dispute
As we do now, on the island under the skies of the tropics.
We flee a downpour, in an instant the bright sun again,
And I grow dumb, dazzled by the emerald essence of the leaves.

We submerge in foam at the line of the surf,
We swim far, to where the horizon is a tangle of banana bush,
With little windmills of palms.
And I am under accusation: That I am not up to my oeuvre,
That I do not demand enough from myself,
As I could have learned from Karl Jaspers,
That my scorn for the opinions of this age grows slack.

I roll on a wave and look at white clouds.

You are right, Jeanne, I don't know how to care about the salvation of my soul.
Some are called, others manage as well as they can.
I accept it, what has befallen me is just.
I don't pretend to the dignity of a wise old age.
Untranslatable into words, I chose my home in what is now,
In things of this world, which exist and, for that reason, delight us:
Nakedness of women on the beach, coppery cones of their breasts,
Hibiscus, alamanda, a red lily, devouring
With my eyes, lips, tongue, the guava juice, the juice of la prune de Cythère,
Rum with ice and syrup, lianas-orchids
In a rain forest, where trees stand on the stilts of their roots.

Death, you say, mine and yours, closer and closer,
We suffered and this poor earth was not enough.
The purple-black earth of vegetable gardens
Will be here, either looked at or not.
The sea, as today, will breathe from its depths.
Growing small, I disappear in the immense, more and more free.

Arrian, Discourses of Epictetus 1.25.29 (tr. W.A. Oldfather):

Why, what is this matter of being reviled? Take your stand by a stone and revile it; and what effect will you produce? If, then, a man listens like a stone, what profit is there to the reviler? But if the reviler has the weakness of the reviled as a point of vantage, then he does accomplish something.

ἐπεὶ τί ἐστιν αὐτὸ τὸ λοιδορεῖσθαι; παραστὰς λίθον λοιδόρει: καὶ τί ποιήσεις; ἂν οὖν τις ὡς λίθος ἀκούῃ, τί ὄφελος τῷ λοιδοροῦντι; ἂν δ᾽ ἔχῃ τὴν ἀσθένειαν τοῦ λοιδορουμένου ὁ λοιδορῶν ἐπιβάθραν, τότε ἀνύει τι.

I wonder if, in the last sentence, we're meant to imagine a city under siege, since ἐπιβάθρα can also mean a ladder. Robin Hard translates it as handhold.

Steve Sailer, "Why Did It Take Farmers and Philosophers So Long to Understand Heredity?" Unz Review (November 7, 2019):

Our word "race," meaning a lineage or breed, is etymologically linked to our word "race" meaning a test of speed, in part because breeding faster racehorses took up a lot of space in the English mind.

Screen image:


I don't think there's any etymological link between these two homonyms.

---

From Dr Dunstan Lowe:

After consulting the Oxford English Dictionary, I just wanted to confirm your suspicion, in today's blog post, that there is no etymological link between 'race' (competition) and 'race' (ethnicity). The former first appeared in connection with horsebreeding as Italian razzo (then razza), whose origin is disputed but is probably either from ratio or generatio. The latter is a borrowing from early Scandinavian ras, meaning onrush (originally of water, and hence also a word for a water-channel). In fact the word 'rush' comes from the same origin.

Of course, there can be perceived folk-etymological links between words that have no basis in fact. That is the position to which your author would presumably resort.

Labels: etymology, typographical and other errors

Geoffrey Chaucer (1343-1400), "The Pardoner's Prologue," Canterbury Tales VI.391-402 (tr. Nevill Coghill):

Then, priestlike in my pulpit, with a frown,
I stand, and when the yokels have sat down,
I preach, as you have heard me say before,
And tell a hundred lying mockeries more.
I take great pains, and stretching out my neck
To east and west I crane about and peck
Just like a pigeon sitting on a barn.
My hands and tongue together spin the yarn
And all my antics are a joy to see.
The curse of avarice and cupidity
Is all my sermon, for it frees the pelf.
Out come the pence, and specially for myself...

I stonde lyk a clerk in my pulpet,
And whan the lewed peple is doun yset,
I preche so, as ye han herd bifoore,
And telle an hundred false japes moore.
Thanne peyne I me to strecche forth the nekke,        395
And est and west upon the peple I bekke,
As dooth a dowve sittynge on a berne.
Myne handes and my tonge goon so yerne
That it is joye to se my bisynesse.
Of avarice and of swich cursednesse        400
Is al my prechyng, for to make hem free
To yeven hir pens, and namely, unto me...

The Laughable Stories Collected by Mâr Gregory John Bar Hebræus. The Syriac Text Edited with an English Translation by E.A. Wallis Budge (London, Luzac and Co., 1897), p. 161 (number DCXLII):

Another lunatic was boasting that he was a king in the time of Hercules, and when a certain nobleman said to him, "Thou art the king of podical sternutations", he replied, "If I were what thy words say I am, my kingdom would be greater and much more vast than that of Hercules, because podical sternutations are much more numerous than Greeks."

The phrase "podical sternutations" should be easily intelligible by anyone who knows Latin, but for the benefit of the Latinless, here are some hints:

• podex, podicis: anus
• sternuto: sneeze (verb)

A podical sternutation is therefore an anal sneeze, or passage of gas from below. I know someone whose recent misbehavior on an airplane flight qualifies him to be called the King of Podical Sternutations.

Labels: noctes scatologicae

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), Nature: Addresses and Lectures (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1903), pp. 9-10:

In the woods, too, a man casts off his years, as the snake his slough, and at what period soever of life is always a child. In the woods is perpetual youth. Within these plantations of God, a decorum and sanctity reign, a perennial festival is dressed, and the guest sees not how he should tire of them in a thousand years. In the woods, we return to reason and faith. There I feel that nothing can befall me in life, — no disgrace, no calamity (leaving me my eyes), which nature cannot repair.

Eliot Porter, Path in Woods

Jonathan Bate, How the Classics Made Shakespeare (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019), pp. 200-201:

This notion of a progression from lighter to more serious matter was based on the so-called cursus Virgilius, the model of the Virgilian poetic career that began with pastoral (the Eclogues or Bucolics), proceeded to labor (the Georgics, poems about the work of farming), and climaxed in epic (the Aeneid, poetry of a nation).

Read Virgilianus for Virgilius. The mistake is repeated in the index (p. 351).

Labels: typographical and other errors

John Milton (1608-1674), "On the Fifth of November," lines 170-193, in his Latin Poems, tr. Walter MacKellar (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1930), pp. 129, 131:

There is a place, men say, that looks toward the waters of Mareotis, equally distant from Asia and the fertile land of Europe; here stands the lofty tower of Fame, the Titanian goddess, brazen, wide, resounding, nearer to the golden stars than Athos, or Pelion piled upon Ossa. A thousand doors and a thousand windows stand open, and the spacious courts within shine through the thin walls. Here a swarming crowd raises a confused murmur, like the buzzing of flies about milk-pails or wattled sheepfolds, when in the heat of summer the Dog Star seeks the summit of the heavens. Fame herself, who avenges her mother, sits upon the topmost height, and lifts her head that is girt with numberless ears, with which she gathers the slightest whisper, and catches the airiest murmur from the ends of the wide-spread earth. Not even you, Argus, false guard of the heifer Io, rolled so many eyes in your savage face, eyes that never grow drowsy in silent sleep, eyes gazing far and wide over the lands beneath, eyes with which she often searches places devoid of light, places inaccessible even to the rays of the sun. What she has heard and seen, with a thousand babbling tongues she heedlessly pours out to any one; now with lies she lessens the truth, now with invented speeches she augments it.

The Latin (id., pp. 128, 130):

Esse ferunt spatium, qua distat ab Aside terra        170
Fertilis Europe, et spectat Mareotidas undas;
Hic turris posita est Titanidos ardua Famae,
Aerea, lata, sonans, rutilis vicinior astris
Quam superimpositum vel Athos vel Pelion Ossae.
Mille fores aditusque patent, totidemque fenestrae,        175
Amplaque per tenues translucent atria muros.
Excitat hic varios plebs agglomerata susurros;
Qualiter instrepitant circum mulctralia bombis
Agmina muscarum, aut texto per ovilia iunco,
Dum Canis aestivum caeli petit ardua culmen.        180
Ipsa quidem summa sedet ultrix matris in arce,
Auribus innumeris cinctum caput eminet olli,
Queis sonitum exiguum trahit, atque levissima captat
Murmura, ab extremis patuli confinibus orbis.
Nec tot, Aristoride, servator inique iuvencae        185
Isidos, immite volvebas lumina vultu,
Lumina non unquam tacito nutantia somno,
Lumina subiectas late spectantia terras.
Istis illa solet loca luce carentia saepe
Perlustrare, etiam radianti impervia soli.        190
Millenisque loquax auditaque visaque linguis
Cuilibet effundit temeraria; veraque mendax
Nunc minuit, modo confictis sermonibus auget.

Milton was writing about Guy Fawkes Day in 17th century England, but his words also seem suited to Election Day 2019 in the United States of America.

Mark Twain (1835-1910), A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur's Court, chapter 8:

Well, it was a curious country, and full of interest. And the people! They were the quaintest and simplest and trustingest race; why, they were nothing but rabbits. It was pitiful for a person born in a wholesome free atmosphere to listen to their humble and hearty outpourings of loyalty toward their king and Church and nobility; as if they had any more occasion to love and honor king and Church and noble than a slave has to love and honor the lash, or a dog has to love and honor the stranger that kicks him! Why, dear me, any kind of royalty, howsoever modified, any kind of aristocracy, howsoever pruned, is rightly an insult; but if you are born and brought up under that sort of arrangement you probably never find it out for yourself, and don't believe it when somebody else tells you. It is enough to make a body ashamed of his race to think of the sort of froth that has always occupied its thrones without shadow of right or reason, and the seventh-rate people that have always figured as its aristocracies—a company of monarchs and nobles who, as a rule, would have achieved only poverty and obscurity if left, like their betters, to their own exertions.

Father Alexey Yakovlev, quoted by Rod Dreher, "Father Alexey's Carpentry Shop" (November 3, 2019):

These men, when they come in here for class, they look like plankton. But then they take off their business suits, put on their work clothes, pick up a saw or a hatchet, and transform themselves into men. It's an amazing thing to see. There's something about working with your hands that is necessary to developing your masculinity.

The Oxyrynchus Papyri, Part IV, edd. Bernard P. Grenfell and Arthur S. Hunt (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co., 1904), pp. 24-25 (number 655 = "Fragment of a Lost Gospel," lines 17-23):

His disciples say unto him, When wilt thou be manifest to us, and when shall we see thee? He saith, When ye shall be stripped and not be ashamed.

λέγουσιν αὐτῷ οἱ μαθηταὶ αὐτοῦ· πότε ἡμεῖν ἐμφανὴς ἔσει, καὶ πότε σε ὀψόμεθα; λέγει· ὅταν ἐκδύσησθε καὶ μὴ αἰσχυνθῆτε.

The Greek is misquoted (ἐκδύσητε for ἐκδύσησθε) in Sergey A. Ivanov, Holy Fools in Byzantium and Beyond, tr. Simon Franklin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 26.

The fragment is from the Gospel of Thomas, Logion 37. See Simon Gathercole, The Gospel of Thomas: Introduction and Commentary (Leiden: Brill, 2014), pp. 362-366.

Labels: typographical and other errors

Paul Edward Dutton, Charlemagne's Mustache and Other Cultural Clusters of a Dark Age (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), pp. xii-xiv:

How, for instance, could we ever recreate the particular smell of the past?

Patrick Süskind, Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, tr. John E. Woods (New York: Vintage International, 2001), pp. 3-4:

In the period of which we speak, there reigned in the cities a stench barely conceivable to us modern men and women. The streets stank of manure, the courtyards of urine, the stairwells stank of moldering wood and rat droppings, the kitchens of spoiled cabbage and mutton fat; the unaired parlors stank of stale dust, the bedrooms of greasy sheets, damp featherbeds, and the pungently sweet aroma of chamber pots. The stench of sulfur rose from the chimneys, the stench of caustic lyes from the tanneries, and from the slaughterhouses came the stench of congealed blood. People stank of sweat and unwashed clothes; from their mouths came the stench of rotting teeth, from their bellies that of onions, and from their bodies, if they were no longer very young, came the stench of rancid cheese and sour milk and tumorous disease. The rivers stank, the marketplaces stank, the churches stank, it stank beneath the bridges and in the palaces. The peasant stank as did the priest, the apprentice as did his master's wife, the whole of the aristocracy stank, even the king himself stank, stank like a rank lion, and the queen like an old goat, summer and winter. For in the eighteenth century there was nothing to hinder bacteria busy at decomposition, and so there was no human activity, either constructive or destructive, no manifestation of germinating or decaying life that was not accompanied by stench.

Babylonian Talmud, Sanhedrin 64a:10 (tr. Rabbi Adin Even-Israel Steinsaltz):

Rav Yehuda says that Rav says: An incident occurred involving a certain gentile woman who was very ill. She said: If that woman, referring to herself, recovers from her illness, she will go and worship every object of idol worship in the world. She recovered from her illness and subsequently worshipped every object of idol worship in the world. When she arrived at Peor she asked the priests: How does one worship this idol? They said to her: One eats spinach, which causes diarrhea, and drinks beer, which also causes diarrhea, and defecates before it. The woman said: Better for that woman, referring to herself, to return to her illness, and not worship an idol in such a manner.

Id. 64a:13:

The Gemara relates another incident with regard to Ba'al-Peor. The Sages taught: There was an incident involving a Jew named Sabbeta ben Alas, who rented out his donkey and his services to a certain gentile woman. He was driving his donkey behind her, and when she arrived at Peor, she said to him: Wait here until I go in and come out. After she came out, he said to her: You too wait for me until I go in and come out. She said to him: Aren't you Jewish? Why, then, are you worshipping idols? He said to her: And what do you care? He entered and defecated before the idol, and wiped himself with its nostril, as he wanted to demean the idol as much as possible. But he was unsuccessful, as the priests of Peor were praising him and saying: No person has ever worshipped it before with this excellent form of worship. Although he intended to demean Ba'al-Peor, he actually worshipped it.

Image of Belphegor (i.e. Ba'al-Peor) defecating, from J. Collin de Plancy (1793-1887), Dictionnaire Infernal, 6th ed. (Paris: Henri Plon, 1863), p. 89:

Labels: noctes scatologicae

Robinson Jeffers (1887-1962), "De Rerum Virtute," § IV:

                                              Indeed it is hard to see beauty
In any of the acts of man: but that means the acts of a sick microbe
On a satellite of a dust-grain twirled in a whirlwind
In the world of stars ....
Something perhaps may come of him; in any event
He can't last long.

Id. § V:

One light is left us: the beauty of things, not men;
The immense beauty of the world, not the human world.

Herman Melville (1819-1891), "Etymology," Moby-Dick:

The pale Usher—threadbare in coat, heart, body, and brain; I see him now. He was ever dusting his old lexicons and grammars, with a queer handkerchief, mockingly embellished with all the gay flags of all the known nations of the world. He loved to dust his old grammars; it somehow mildly reminded him of his mortality.

Most people think Moby-Dick starts with the words "Call me Ishmael," but in fact it starts with the passage quoted above.

Christopher De Hamel, Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts: Twelve Journeys into the Medieval World (New York: Penguin Press, 2017), pp. 330, 333:

I took the Latin option at school, not because I had any particular aptitude for it (I hadn't), but because I was generally worse at nearly everything else. It was a local state school for boys, King's High School, in Dunedin, New Zealand, where, with hindsight, the curriculum was even then very old-fashioned. We struggled through the usual grammar and translation exercises. One day in the sixth form, our Latin teacher — he was called Mr Dunwoodie — imaginatively brought in a portable gramophone from home and a recording of the medieval Carmina Burana set to music by Carl Orff (1895–1982). It was unforgettable. We were all captivated by the haunting music and the sensuous rhythmical Latin lyrics about girls and drinking and the manifest unfairness of fortune. To a classroom of hormone-humming teenage boys, here was Latin which touched the soul as Caesar's Gallic Wars had never done. We urged Mr Dunwoodie to play it over and over again, assuring him that it was educational. To his credit, he did. We soon knew many of the Latin verses by heart, and some I still do: o! o! o! totus floreo, iam amore virginali, totus ardeo! — 'Oh! Oh! Oh! I am all in bloom, now I am all burning with first love', and so on. We were just the right age. This music was to us a seductive evocation of anarchic and amorous medieval students vagabonding their way in verse and song across twelfth-century Europe, with a free-spirited ethos very like that of the mid-1960s. It is quite likely that Latin masters in schools elsewhere in the world sometimes also played the same record to their own classes at that time and our generation all shared familiarity with these songs of lust and rebellion in Latin, which for that purpose was still — just — serving as an international language.

Carmina Burana 6, lines 1-20 (tr. David Parlett):

Once learning flourished. Now it's come
to be condemned as tedium:
the days of thirsting after truth
are now the idle days of youth.

For students hardly in their prime
find themselves wise before their time:
they know it all — impertinence
replaces plain intelligence.

In days gone by we were required
to stick with study: none retired,
or wished himself to be released,
till ninety years of age at least.

Now lads of barely a decade
can graduate — get themselves made
professors too! And who's to mind
how blind the blind who lead the blind?

So fledgelings soar upon the wing,
so donkeys play the lute and sing:
bulls dance about at court like sprites
and ploughboys sally forth as knights.

---

Florebat olim studium,
nunc vertitur in tedium;
iam scire diu viguit,
sed ludere prevaluit.

iam pueris astutia
contingit ante tempora,
qui per malivolentiam
excludunt sapientiam.

sed retro actis seculis
vix licuit discipulis
tandem nonagenarium
quiescere post studium.

at nunc decennes pueri
decusso iugo liberi
se nunc magistros iactitant,
ceci cecos precipitant,

implumes aves volitant,
brunelli chordas incitant,
boves in aula salitant,
stive precones militant.

Bayerische Staatsbibliothek (Munich), Clm 4660, fol. 44v:

Anatole France, quoted in Jean Jacques Brousson, Anatole France Himself: A Boswellian Record, tr. John Pollock (1925; rpt. London: Thornton Butterworth, Ltd., 1934), p. 97:

My friend, I cannot go to sleep of an evening without an old book, be it good or bad. It is a sort of rite. And then, there are no bad books, any more than there are ugly women. I admit indeed that contemporary books do not interest me. By pondering over this, I have discovered the reason for it: they are not real books. There was a time when, I confess, my taste was ostentatious. My vanity got the better of my appetite. How many books have I not bought for the binding, the frontispiece, or a flower! To-day I make provision against insomnia. Should nightmare come, I take refuge in the past.

Mon ami, je ne puis plus m'endormir le soir, sans un vieux livre, bon ou mauvais. C'est une sorte de cérémonie. Et puis, il n'y a pas de mauvais livres, pas plus qu'il n'y a de femmes laides. Je conviens, toutefois, que les livres contemporains ne m'intéressent pas. A force d'y rêver, j'en ai trouvé la raison: ce ne sont plus des livres. Dans le temps, j'avais un goût un peu ostentatoire. Ma vanité l'emportait sur mon appétit. Que de bouquins ai-je pas achetés pour la reliure, le frontispice, un fleuron! Aujourd'hui, je me pourvois contre les insomnies; je m'approvisionne d'ouvrages du bon temps. Viennent les cauchemars, et je me réfugie dans le passé.

The translator seems to have skipped over "je m'approvisionne d'ouvrages du bon temps." Also, I might have kept "fleuron," which has become naturalized in English.

Council of Carthage (September 13, 401), in C. Munier, ed., Concilia Africae A. 345 - A. 525 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1974 = Corpus Christianorum, Series Latina, 149), p. 205 (from Registri Ecclesiae Carthaginensis Excerpta):

DE IDOLORVM RELIQVIIS EXTIRPANDIS.
84. Item placuit ab imperatoribus gloriosissimis peti, ut reliquiae idolatriae non solum in simulacris sed in quibuscumque locis uel lucis uel arboribus omnimodo deleantur.

Translated by Henry R. Percival, in The Seven Ecumenical Councils (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1900 = A Select Library of Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, 2nd series, vol. XIV), p. 482:

Of extirpating the remains of the idols.
Item, it seemed good to petition the most glorious Emperors that the remains of idolatry not only in images, but in any places whatever or groves or trees, should altogether be taken away.

Labels: arboricide