Laudator Temporis Acti

1. John McCrae, In Flanders Field
2. R.W. Lilliard, America's Answer
3. Abraham Lincoln, Gettysburg Address

Surely this qualifies as one of the strangest sentences ever to appear in a scholarly work:

Heroes do not, in general, turn into anteaters, or make themselves buttocks out of mashed potatoes...

Jasper Griffin, Homer on Life and Death (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), p. 177.

R.J. Hollingdale, Nietzsche: The Man and His Philosophy (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1965), p. 59:

He suggested the students might like to read the description of the Shield of Achilles in the Iliad during the summer vacation: at the beginning of the following semester he asked one of them if he had in fact read it. The student (his name has not been recorded) said he had, although this wasn't true. 'Good, then describe the shield of Achilles for us,' said Nietzsche. An embarrassed silence followed, which he allowed to continue for ten minutes -- the time he thought a description of Achilles' shield should have taken -- pacing up and down and appearing to be listening attentively. Then he said: 'Very well, X has described Achilles' shield for us, let us get on.'

Chamfort:

Society is made up of two great classes: those who have more dinners than appetite, and those who have more appetite than dinners.

Leopardi:

The human race, from the individual on up, and even in its smallest units, is split into two camps: the bullies and the bullied.

Seen on a t-shirt:

There are 10 types of people in the world: those who understand binary and those who don't.

Clayton Cramer says:

If I were to write a novel Puritan Guerrilla in which an angry father, grieving over the loss of his daughter to the hip-hop culture, decides to take revenge on the entertainment industry by assassinating record company executives, would that be criminal conduct? (I only have one chapter written so far.)

Keep writing. You have one reader waiting for it to be finished.

Thomas Love Peacock, Gryll Grange (1860), chapter XX:

ALGERNON. May I ask if you read Latin?
MORGANA. I do; sufficiently to derive great pleasure from it. Perhaps, after this confession, you will not wonder that I am a spinster.

Bill Vallicella tells the true story of an unfortunate philosopher who published a paper entitled Creation Ex Deus, which should of course be Creation Ex Deo. This cautionary tale is a good illustration of the saying "vox missa nescit reverti" (Horace, Ars Poetica 390), "a word, having been sent forth, does not know how to return." Creation Ex Deus, now committed to print, is destined to live on forever, in the writer's own curriculum vitae, in bibliographies, in footnotes and citations. I've heard of authors who bought up and destroyed all copies of their juvenilia, but that seems impossible in this case. If it had taken form only in the shadowy bytes of cyberspace, rather than in indelible printer's ink, the solecism might easily have been corrected. But even in cyberspace, the Google cache awaits to trap and embalm the unwary, like a tar pit.

Rushing into print can have its advantages, for example if you're a journalist and want the credit for a scoop. But it also has its obvious disadvantages -- a hasty utterance is likely to be an inaccurate or an impolitic or an unwise one. Horace recommends that, if you've written anything, you keep it locked up in your desk for nine years (Ars Poetica 388-389: "nonumque prematur in annum / membranis intus positis"). If it still pleases you after that time, then submit it for publication. Advice fatal for bloggers, as well as for junior professors who must publish or perish, but advice worth considering nonetheless.

Vallicella also answers the query of a correspondent who asks how to say "Seize the world" in Latin, with the reasonable reply "Carpe mundum," after Horace's "Carpe diem." I understand well enough what Horace meant, when I read his words in context (Ode 1.11), but I don't understand what is meant by the expression "Seize the world," because I don't know its context. Is it advice for an up-and-coming conqueror like Alexander the Great? Or does it mean something quite different, like "Embrace the beauty of God's creation"? Is "world" the earth as opposed to heaven, with a meaning like "Forget about the hereafter, live to the fullest in the midst of the world around us here and now"? We have no way of telling.

Horace's use of the word "seize" (or "pluck," as one might pick a flower) is a bold poetic locution, since one cannot literally grasp with the hand something as insubstantial as time. The only one who's got the whole world in his hand is God, as the spiritual says. In addition to "mundus," there are other possible ways to translate "world" into Latin, depending on the shade of meaning desired. Meissner's Latin Phrase Book gives, e.g., rerum universitas or mundi universitas (the universe), rerum natura or just natura (creation, nature), haec omnia quae videmus (the visible world), etc.

Translation is a tricky business, but so is speaking and writing in one's own tongue. In the introduction to his Studies in Words, C.S. Lewis writes:

Prolonged thought about the words which we ordinarily use to think with can produce a momentary aphasia. I think it is to be welcomed. It is well that we should become aware of what we are doing when we speak, of the ancient, fragile, and (well used) immensely potent instruments that words are.

Everyone has his own idea of hell. To Sartre it's "other people," whereas to poet Charles Bukowski it's the opposite ("hell is a lonely place"). General William Tecumseh Sherman famously said, "War is hell," and St. Theresa called hell "the place that stinks and where no one loves."

The Baltimore Catechism, from which I was taught in my boyhood and to which I still go for guidance, answers the question "What is Hell?" as follows (Part 3, Lesson 7, Question 1379):

Hell is a state to which the wicked are condemned, and in which they are deprived of the sight of God for all eternity, and are in dreadful torments.

Dante devoted a third of his Divine Comedy to a description of the place.

Some have tried to narrow hell down to a particular spot. A film by R. Zane Rutledge is entitled Hell is Texas, and the October 13, 2003, cover of The National Review had a picture of a bucolic Vermont landscape with the word "Hell" scrawled over it, to illustrate the lead story by Jonah Goldberg. The Moon is Hell according to an article with that title by Stephen Baxter published in Astronomy Now (September, 1998), but I think it's a little closer to us than that.

Matt Groening wrote two books on the topic, one called Work Is Hell, the other called School Is Hell. If I had my druthers, I'd choose school over work any day. Pop singer Ryan Adams put out a couple of albums called Love Is Hell, but his music will forever remain unknown to me, to whom listening to any kind of rock 'n roll is hell on earth.

Milton (Paradise Lost, 1.254-255) sums it up best:

The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.

Charles Dickens, Pickwick Papers, chapter 35:

Lounging near the doors, and in remote corners, were various knots of silly young men, displaying various varieties of puppyism and stupidity; amusing all sensible people near them with their folly and conceit; and happily thinking themselves the object of general admiration. A wise and merciful dispensation which no good man will quarrel with.

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, XV (tr. Francis Golfing):

Practically every era of Western civilization has at one time or another tried to liberate itself from the Greeks, in deep dissatisfaction because whatever they themselves achieved, seemingly quite original and sincerely admired, lost color and life when held against the Greek model and shrank to a botched copy, a caricature. Time and again a hearty anger has been felt against that presumptuous little nation which had the nerve to brand, for all time, whatever was not created on its own soil as "barbaric." Who are these people, whose historical splendor was ephemeral, their institutions ridiculously narrow, their mores dubious and sometimes objectionable, who yet pretend to the special place among the nations which genius claims among the crowd? None of the later detractors was fortunate enough to find the cup of hemlock with which such a being could be disposed of once and for all: all the poisons of envy, slander, and rage have proved insufficient to destroy that complacent magnificence.

To the poisons listed by Nietzsche add those of our time, indifference and ignorance.

Samuel Butler, The Way of All Flesh, chapter 31:

Latin and Greek are great humbug; the more people know of them the more odious they generally are.

Schiller said:

If only a man has lived to read the 23rd book of the Iliad, he cannot complain of his lot. (Wenn man auch nur gelebt hätte, um den 23. Gesang der Ilias zu lesen, so könnte man sich über sein Dasein nicht beschweren.)

Watching Brad Pitt play Achilles in the movie Troy doesn't count.

Herodotus 1.155.4 (speech of Croesus to Cyrus, tr. Aubrey de Selincourt):

As for the Lydians, forgive them -- but all the same, if you want to keep them loyal and to prevent any danger from them in future, I suggest that you put a veto upon their possession of arms. Make them wear tunics under their cloaks, and high boots, and tell them to teach their sons to play the zither and harp, and to start shopkeeping. If you do that, my lord, you will soon see them turn into women instead of men, and there will not be any more danger of them rebelling against you.

Bruno Snell, The Discovery of the Mind, chapter 2 (The Olympian Gods):

Those closest to the gods in Homer are not the poor and the meek, but the strong and the powerful; the godless one, i.e. the one who is shunned by the gods, upon whom they do not bestow any gifts, is Thersites.

Colin Thubron, Journey into Cyprus (New York: The Atlantic Monthly Press, 1976), p. 242 (quoting a Turkish soldier):

"I was four years in England," he said, "in a canning factory at Newton Abbot, twisting a knob day after day -- twist, twist, twist. In the end I got fed up and came back home. What sort of life is that for a man -- twist, twist, twist?"

What sort of life is it for a man, sitting in front of a computer, tapping away at the keys day after day -- tap, tap, tap?

St. Augustine, Contra Academicos 1.2.6:

Very great matters, when they are investigated by little men, tend to make those men great.

Maximae res, cum a parvis quaeruntur, magnos eos solent efficere.

Friedrich Nietzsche, Die fröhliche Wissenschaft, 5.358 (tr. Walter Kaufmann):

He [Luther] gave back to the priest sexual intercourse with women; but three quarters of the reverence of which the common people, especially the women among the common people, are capable, rests on the faith that a person who is an exception at this point will be an exception in other respects as well.

Samuel Butler, The Way of All Flesh, chapter 26:

I have often thought that the Church of Rome does wisely in not allowing her priests to marry. Certainly it is a matter of common observation in England that the sons of clergymen are frequently unsatisfactory.

I was looking on amazon.com for details about Milena Minkova's Introduction to Latin Prose Composition. The page I was on helpfully suggested that "Customers interested in this title might also be interested in" a sponsored link with the name "Date Sexy Latin Singles"!

Alexander Leitch, A Princeton Companion (Princeton: Princeton University Press,1978), on classical scholar Basil Lanneau Gildersleeve (1831-1924):

A regular churchgoer, he kept himself awake during sermons by mentally translating them into Greek, sentence by sentence as uttered, a practice he recommended as "a peculiarly rewarding means of grace."

Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (New York: Harper & Row, 1958), II, 495-6 (tr. S.G.C. Middlemore):

In 1487, when Piacenza was visited with a violent and prolonged rainfall, it was said that there would be no dry weather until a certain usurer, who had been lately buried at S. Francesco, had ceased to rest in consecrated earth. As the bishop was not obliging enough to have the corpse dug up, the young fellows of the town took it by force, dragged it around the streets amid frightful confusion, offered it to be insulted and maltreated by former creditors, and at last threw it into the Po. Even Politian accepted this point of view in speaking of Giacomo Pazzi, one of the leaders of the conspiracy of 1478 in Florence which is called after his name. When he was put to death he devoted his soul to Satan with fearful words. Here, too, rain followed and threatened to ruin the harvest; here, too, a party of men, mostly peasants, dug up the body in the church, and immediately the clouds departed and the sun shone -- "so gracious was fortune to the opinion of the people," adds the great scholar. The corpse was first cast into unhallowed ground, the next day again dug up, and after a horrible procession through the city thrown into the Arno.

Burckhardt comments:

These facts and the like bear a popular character, and might have occurred in the tenth just as well as in the sixteenth century.

They might have occurred in the twenty-first century as well. According to a recent news story from Marotinu De Sus in southern Romania, vampire slayer Gheorghe Marinescu was arrested for exhuming the body of his brother-in-law, Toma Petre:

Marinescu's story goes like this: After Petre died, Marinescu's son, daughter-in-law and granddaughter fell ill. Marinescu knew the cause was his dead brother-in-law. So he went to the cemetery...