Laudator Temporis Acti

Timothy Ware, The Orthodox Church, chapter 13:

There is a story in the Russian Primary Chronicle of how Vladimir, Prince of Kiev, while still a pagan, desired to know which was the true religion, and therefore sent his followers to visit the various countries of the world in turn.

They went first to the Muslim Bulgars of the Volga, but observing that these when they prayed gazed around them like men possessed, the Russians continued on their way dissatisfied. 'There is no joy among them,' they reported to Vladimir, 'but mournfulness and a great smell; and there is nothing good about their system.'

Travelling next to Germany and Rome, they found the worship more satisfactory, but complained that here too it was without beauty.

Finally they journeyed to Constantinople, and here at last, as they attended the Divine Liturgy in the great Church of the Holy Wisdom, they discovered what they desired. 'We knew not whether we were in heaven or on earth, for surely there is no such splendour or beauty anywhere upon earth. We cannot describe it to you: only this we know, that God dwells there among humans, and that their service surpasses the worship of all other places. For we cannot forget that beauty.'

What would travellers on a similar quest find today?

From a column on journalistic objectivity by Fred Reed:

When people say that they want the press to be objective, they usually mean that they want reporters to cheerlead for their point of view. They do not want objectivity, however imagined, but concurring propaganda. Anything else, they believe, is bias.

Most of them seem to lack the sophistication to know that their particular prejudices are in fact prejudices. Since whatever they believe seems to them obviously true, they regard anything that does not support their cause as evidence of depraved indifference to truth or as outright lying.

Horace, Epistles 1.18.105-112 (tr. H. Rushton Fairclough):

What, think you, my friend, are my prayers? May I have my present store, or even less; may I live to myself for what remains of life, if the gods will that aught remains. May I have a goodly supply of books and of food to last the year; nor may I waver to and fro with the hopes of each uncertain hour. But 'tis enough to pray Jove, who gives and takes away, that he grant me life, and grant me means; a mind well-balanced I will myself provide.

Here is another translation, this one in verse, by John Conington:

What prayers are mine? "O may I yet possess
The goods I have, or, if Heaven pleases, less!
Let the few years that Fate may grant me still
Be all my own, not held at others' will!
Let me have books, and stores for one year hence,
Nor make my life one flutter of suspense!"

But I forbear: sufficient 'tis to pray
To Jove for what he gives and takes away:
Grant life, grant fortune, for myself I'll find
That best of blessings, a contented mind.

And finally here is the Latin original:

                         quid credis, amice, precari?
'sit mihi quod nunc est, etiam minus, et mihi vivam
quod superest aevi, si quid superesse volunt di;
sit bona librorum et provisae frugis in annum
copia, neu fluitem dubiae spe pendulus horae.'
sed satis est orare Iovem, qui ponit et aufert,
det vitam, det opes; aequum mi animum ipse parabo.

C.S. Lewis, in a letter to Arthur Greeves (January 9, 1930), describes the pleasure of reading a commentary on Chaucer:

What a glory-hole is the commentary of an old author. One minute you are puzzling out a quotation from a French medieval romance: the next, you are being carried back to Plato: then a scrap of medieval law: then something about geomancy: and manuscripts, and the signs of the Zodiac, and a modern proverb 'reported to Mr Snooks to be common in Derbyshire', and the precession of the equinoxes, and an Arabian optician (born at Balk in 1030), five smoking room stories, the origins of the doctrine of immaculate conception, and why St Cecilia is the patroness of organists. So one is swept from East to West, and from century to century, equally immersed in each oddity as it comes up.

A glory-hole is "an opening in the wall of a glass furnace, exposing the brilliant white light of the interior" (Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, 1913), used by a glassmaker to reheat glass.

Dennis Mangan's eloquent jeremiad on popular culture and the contemporary political scene is well worth reading.

There is a still life by Jacques de Gheyn the Elder (1565–1629) that shows two philosophers (top left and right), one laughing at a skull, the other weeping. The laughing philosopher is Democritus, the weeping philosopher Heraclitus. Confronted with the folly of mankind, one can either laugh or weep.

As for me, I hope I die laughing.

A few days ago I mentioned the ancient practice of using urine to whiten teeth. Now I read that United States Senator Norm Coleman (R-Minn.) is not satisfied with blow-dried hair -- he had his teeth straightened and whitened as well. An article in the Washington Post reports that St. Paul dentist Frank J. Milnar, a self-described "smile artist," did the work. Milnar got in trouble for posting before and after photos of Coleman's teeth on his web site.

Nausea originally meant seasickness. From an etymological standpoint it's shipsickness, from Greek naus = ship.

There are pitfalls associated with the word nausea and its derivatives. Adjectival forms in English are nauseated, nauseating, and nauseous. Concerning nauseous versus nauseated, the 4th edition of Strunk and White's Elements of Style (2000) says:

The first means "sickening to contemplate"; the second means "sick at the stomach." Do not, therefore, say, "I feel nauseous," unless you are sure you have that effect on others.

In other words, Strunk and White would restrict nauseous to mean nauseating (causing nausea), not nauseated (feeling nausea). The distinction is disappearing. Merriam-Webster's Concise Dictionary of English Usage (2000) cites numerous examples of nauseous meaning nauseated, to which may be added this sentence by John Grisham, from his novel The Street Lawyer (1998), chapter 4:

But the smell of fresh paint made me nauseous.

Purists would say that the smell of fresh paint was nauseous, and that the smell made the narrator nauseated. If you're in doubt, the simplest solution is to banish nauseous and use either nauseated or nauseating, as the context demands.

In Latin, the verb nauseo likewise can mean both be seasick and cause disgust, although the former meaning is the more common.

A second pitfall is the Latin phrase ad nauseam, frequently misspelled ad nauseum. The preposition ad takes the accusative case, and the accusative singular of nausea is nauseam, not nauseum. Google statistics are unreliable -- I see 162,000 occurrences of ad nauseam, 182,000 of ad nauseum, which would lead me to conclude that the erroneous form is winning out over the correct form. But when I click on some of the ad nauseum links, I find only ad nauseam. Apparently Google software is conflating the two. I find this nauseating.

My uncle is no slouch when it comes to gadgets or technology. He was awarded patents for his improvements to helicopter engines, and even in his 80s he's an avid and expert computer user. But he cannot cope with Microsoft's insecure operating system, and he writes in an email:

The computer problems of the past two months appear to have been resolved with the acquisition of an iMac 5 computer.

Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), Journal (December 11, 1855):

It is only necessary to behold thus the least fact or phenomenon, however familiar, from a point a hair's breadth aside from our habitual path or routine, to be overcome, enchanted by its beauty and significance. Only what we have touched and worn is trivial, -- our scurf, repetition, tradition, conformity. To perceive freshly, with fresh senses, is to be inspired.

Learned Hand (1872-1961), The Spirit of Liberty, 3rd edition (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1974), pp. 164-165:

What is the spirit of moderation? It is the temper which does not press a partisan advantage to its bitter end, which can understand and will respect the other side, which feels a unity between all citizens -- real and not the factitious product of propaganda -- which recognizes their common fate and their common aspirations -- in a word, which has faith in the sacredness of the individual. If you ask me how such a temper and such a faith are bred and fostered, I cannot answer. They are the last flowers of civilization, delicate and easily overrun by the weeds of our sinful human nature; we may even now be witnessing their uprooting and disappearance until in the progress of the ages their seeds can once more find some friendly soil.

"The naturalist Sutherland," quoted by Joseph Wood Krutch, The Voice of the Desert (New York: William Sloane Associates, 1954), p. 71:

If the test of nobility is antiquity of family, then the cockroach that hides behind the kitchen sink is the true aristocrat. He does not date back merely to the three brothers that came over in 1640 or to William the Conquerer. Wherever there have been great epoch-making movements of people he has been with them heart and soul .... Since ever a ship turned a foamy furrow in the sea he has been a passenger, not a paying one certainly, but still a passenger. But man himself is but a creature of the last twenty minutes or so compared with the cockroach, for, from its crevice by the kitchen sink, it can point its antennae to the coal in the hod and say: 'When that was being made my family was already well-established.'

St. Augustine, City of God 19.24 (tr. Marcus Dodds):

But if we discard this definition of a people, and, assuming another, say that a people is an assemblage of reasonable beings bound together by a common agreement as to the objects of their love, then, in order to discover the character of any people, we have only to observe what they love. Yet whatever it loves, if only it is an assemblage of reasonable beings and not of beasts, and is bound together by an agreement as to the objects of love, it is reasonably called a people; and it will be a superior people in proportion as it is bound together by higher interests, inferior in proportion as it is bound together by lower.

Si autem populus non isto, sed alio definiatur modo, velut si dicatur: "Populus est coetus multitudinis rationalis rerum quas diligit concordi communione sociatus", profecto, ut videatur qualis quisque populus sit, illa sunt intuenda, quae diligit. Quaecumque tamen diligat, si coetus est multitudinis non pecorum, sed rationalium creaturarum et eorum quae diligit concordi communione sociatus est, non absurde populus nuncupatur; tanto utique melior, quanto in melioribus, tantoque deterior, quanto est in deterioribus concors.

Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), letter to William Short (November 7, 1819):

As you say of yourself, I too am an Epicurean. I consider the genuine (not the imputed) doctrines of Epicurus as containing everything rational in moral philosophy which Greece and Rome have left us. Epictetus indeed, has given us what was good of the Stoics; all beyond, of their dogmas, being hypocrisy and grimace.

Their great crime was in their calumnies of Epicurus and misrepresentations of his doctrines; in which we lament to see the candid character of Cicero engaging as an accomplice. Diffuse, vapid, rhetorical, but enchanting. His prototype Plato, eloquent as himself, dealing out mysticisms incomprehensible to the human mind, has been deified by certain sects usurping the name of Christians; because, in his foggy conceptions, they found a basis of impenetrable darkness whereon to rear fabrications as delirious, of their own invention. These they fathered blasphemously on him whom they claimed as their founder, but who would disclaim them with the indignation which their caricatures of his religion so justly excite.

Of Socrates we have nothing genuine but in the Memorabilia of Xenophon; for Plato makes him one of his Collocutors merely to cover his own whimsies under the mantle of his name; a liberty of which we are told Socrates himself complained.

Seneca is indeed a fine moralist, disfiguring his work at times with some Stoicisms, and affecting too much of antithesis and point, yet giving us on the whole a great deal of sound and practical morality.

But the greatest of all the reformers of the depraved religion of his own country, was Jesus of Nazareth. Abstracting what is really his from the rubbish in which it is buried, easily distinguished by its lustre from the dross of his biographers, and as separable from that as the diamond from the dunghill, we have the outlines of a system of the most sublime morality which has ever fallen from the lips of man; outlines which it is lamentable he did not live to fill up. Epictetus and Epicurus give laws for governing ourselves, Jesus a supplement of the duties and charities we owe to others.

The establishment of the innocent and genuine character of this benevolent moralist, and the rescuing it from the imputation of imposture, which has resulted from artificial systems, invented by ultra-Christian sects, unauthorized by a single word ever uttered by him, is a most desirable object, and one to which Priestley has successfully devoted his labors and learning. It would in time, it is to be hoped, effect a quiet euthanasia of the heresies of bigotry and fanaticism which have so long triumphed over human reason, and so generally and deeply afflicted mankind; but this work is to be begun by winnowing the grain from the chaff of the historians of his life.

I have sometimes thought of translating Epictetus (for he has never been tolerable translated into English) by adding the genuine doctrines of Epicurus from the Syntagma of Gassendi, and an abstract from the Evangelists of whatever has the stamp of the eloquence and fine imagination of Jesus. The last I attempted too hastily some twelve or fifteen years ago. It was the work of two or three nights only, at Washington, after getting through the evening task of reading the letters and papers of the day.

But with one foot in the grave, these are now idle projects for me. My business is to beguile the wearisomeness of declining life, as I endeavor to do, by the delights of classical reading and of mathematical truths, and by the consolations of a sound philosophy, equally indifferent to hope and fear.

Outer Life has some interesting things to say about the perils and pitfalls of teaching.

Acts of the Apostles 1:8:

But ye shall receive power, after that the Holy Ghost is come upon you: and ye shall be witnesses unto me both in Jerusalem, and in all Judaea, and in Samaria, and unto the uttermost part of the earth.

In his commentary on this verse, F.F. Bruce writes:

It has often been pointed out that the geographical terms of v. 8 provide a sort of "Index of Contents" for Acts. "Ye shall be my witnesses" might be regarded as the theme of the book; "in Jerusalem" covers the first seven chapters; "in all Judaea and Samaria" Chs. 8:1 to 11:18; and the remainder of the book deals with the progress of the gospel outside the frontiers of the Holy Land until at last it reaches Rome.

In other words, Luke first lists things briefly in the order ABC, and then he treats them at length in the same order. Cicero, De Inventione 1.23.33 (tr. H.M. Hubbell), makes this principle of organization explicit, using a passage from the first act of Terence's Andria (49-171) as an example:

Now that the rules for partition have been stated, it is necessary to remind the orator that throughout the speech he should bear in mind to complete the sections in order one after another as they have been planned in the partition, and that after all have been dispatched he should bring the speech to a close so that nothing be introduced after the conclusion. The old man in the Andria of Terence makes a brief and neat partition of what he wishes his freedman to know: "In this may you will learn my son's manner of life, my plan, and what I wish you to do in the matter." [49-50] And his narrative follows the plan laid down in the partition: first his son's manner of life,

"For after he had left the school of youth..." [51]

then his plan:

"And now I am anxious..." [157]

then what he wishes Sosia to do, which was the last point in the partition, is stated last:

"Now your task is..." [168]

Just as he turned his attention first to each point as it arose, and after dispatching them all stopped speaking, so I favour turning our attention to each topic and when all have been dispatched, winding up the speech.

Some ancient authors, however, reversed the order for artistic effect. Eduard Fraenkel, Horace (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957), p. 292, in an analysis of Horace, Ode 1.12, says:

With ancient writers it was a fairly common practice to announce the sections of their subject in terms such as 'I propose to deal with A and B' and then, in the execution, to let B come first. The arrangement of the ode Quem virum is a case in point. The announcement in the proem runs Quem virum aut heroa...quem deum?: in the execution the gods come first (triad II), then the heroes (triad III), and finally the men (triad IV).

In footnote 2 on the same page, Fraenkel cites another example from Vergil's Aeneid:

A large-scale instance of ABC being taken up by CBA occurs in Aen. VII, where the Fury first incites matres (392), then Turnus (445-74), and finally the herdsmen (483-510), but the description of the ensuing warlike action begins with the herdsmen (574), passes on to Turnus (577), and ends with the sons of those matres (580 ff.).

Michael C. LaBarbera is the author of a fascinating article on The Biology of B-Movie Monsters, which contains the following useful advice:

Here's the trick to defeating the giant ants. You don't want a rifle, you want a pile of bricks and a good pitching arm. One well-hurled brick hitting a leg and--plink!--the leg goes into local buckling and collapses, increasing the load on the remaining legs. Two more bricks and you've taken out all the legs on one side; all the bug can do is scrabble in circles. Three more bricks and the giant insect is completely immobilized.

Yesterday I saw financial guru Suze Orman for about 90 seconds on PBS. It was 90 seconds too long. Her teeth are preternaturally white, and I feared that prolonged viewing would burn my retinas. Orman's fangs remind me of James Carker's (Dickens, Dombey and Son, chapter XIII):

Mr Carker was a gentleman thirty-eight or forty years old, of a florid complexion, and with two unbroken rows of glistening teeth, whose regularity and whiteness were quite distressing. It was impossible to escape the observation of them, for he showed them whenever he spoke; and bore so wide a smile upon his countenance (a smile, however, very rarely, indeed, extending beyond his mouth), that there was something in it like the snarl of a cat.

Catullus wrote a naughty but clever poem on the subject of white teeth (39, tr. Roy Arthur Swanson):

Because Egnatius has white teeth, he smiles
without a stop. And should it come to trials
where lawyers move the court to tears, he smiles.
Suppose a mother mourns her only son,
he smiles. Whatever it is, whatever he's done,
wherever it is, he smiles. It's a disease,
not elegance, I think, nor does it please.
  So, good Egnatius, I must give you warning,
were you a Roman, Sabine, Tiburtine,
or frugal Umbrian, or fat Etruscan,
or dark Lanuvian with big buck teeth,
or Transpadane — to bring my people in —
or one of any group which cleans its teeth
with water, constant smiles would still displease:
nothing's as far from tact as tactless grins.
  But you're from Spain, and Spain's the spot
where teeth are scrubbed and red gums rubbed with what
is pissed the night before into a pot,
so that your tooth tells by its higher shine
how much you've drunk the dregs of bedroom wine.

Egnatius, quod candidos habet dentes,
renidet usque quaque. si ad rei ventum est
subsellium, cum orator excitat fletum,
renidet ille; si ad pii rogum fili
lugetur, orba cum flet unicum mater,
renidet ille. quidquid est, ubicumque est,
quodcumque agit, renidet: hunc habet morbum,
neque elegantem, ut arbitror, neque urbanum.
quare monendum est te mihi, bone Egnati.
si urbanus esses aut Sabinus aut Tiburs
aut pinguis Vmber aut obesus Etruscus
aut Lanuvinus ater atque dentatus
aut Transpadanus, ut meos quoque attingam,
aut quilubet, qui puriter lavit dentes,
tamen renidere usque quaque te nollem:
nam risu inepto res ineptior nulla est.
nunc Celtiber es: Celtiberia in terra,
quod quisque minxit, hoc sibi solet mane
dentem atque russam defricare gingivam,
ut quo iste vester expolitior dens est,
hoc te amplius bibisse praedicet loti.

This is not just a figment of Catullus' filthy imagination. Strabo 3.4.16 (tr. Horace Leonard Jones) confirms the use of this dentifrice by the Iberians:

They have regard, not for rational living, but rather for satisfying their physical needs and bestial instincts — unless some one thinks those men have regard for rational living who bathe with urine which they have aged in cisterns, and wash their teeth with it, both they and their wives, as the Cantabrians and the neighbouring peoples are said to do. But both this custom and that of sleeping on the ground the Iberians share with the Celts.

You can buy teeth whiteners at the pharmacy. The whitening agent in them is peroxide. I don't know what it is in urine.

In his book On Writing: A Memoir (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2000), p. 93, novelist Stephen King gives the following advice:

• "You should avoid the passive tense."
  
• "I won't say there's no place for the passive tense."
  

This betrays a fundamental misunderstanding. The adjective "passive" cannot modify the noun "tense." There is no such thing in grammar as the "passive tense."

Verbs have various attributes. Among them are tense and voice. The tense of a verb specifies the time when the action occurred. Examples of tenses are past, present, and future. The tense in "I came" is past; in "I come" it's present; and in "I will come" it's future. The voice of a verb indicates the relation between the subject and the action expressed by the verb. Possible voices are active, passive, and (in some languages) middle. In "I hit the ball," the verb is in the active voice; in "The ball was hit by me," it's in the passive voice.

It is correct to say "passive voice" or "passive verb." It is nonsense to say "passive tense," just as it would be to say "future voice." King's error is not uncommon. I recently heard the instructor in a legal writing class use the very same phrase, "passive tense," more than once. It hurt my ears, but I kept my mouth shut.

To be fair, I should point out that on the same page King also writes:

• "The passive voice is safe."
  
• "I think unsure writers also feel the passive voice somehow lends their work authority, perhaps even a quality of majesty."
  

He evidently regards "tense" and "voice" as synonyms.

Stephen King and I attended the same college, at the same time. He spent his college years honing his skills as a writer. I spent mine studying dead languages. Stephen King is a famous multi-millionaire today. I'm an impecunious nobody.

Heinrich Schliemann, Ilios: The City and Country of the Trojans (New York: Harper, 1880), p. 7:

Dissatisfied with his lot, the young man gave himself up to drink, which, however, had not made him forget his Homer; for on the evening that he entered the shop he recited to us about a hundred lines of the poet, observing the rhythmic cadence of the verses. Although I did not understand a syllable, the melodious sound of the words made a deep impression upon me, and I wept bitter tears over my unhappy fate. Three times over did I get him to repeat to me those divine verses, rewarding his trouble with three glasses of whiskey, which I bought with the few pence that made up my whole fortune. From that moment I never ceased to pray God that by His grace I might yet have the happiness of learning Greek.

Edmund Gosse, Father and Son: A Study of Two Temperaments (1907), chapter VII:

My Father grudged the time, but he felt it a duty to do something to fill up these deficiencies, and we now started Latin, in a little eighteenth-century reading-book, out of which my Grandfather had been taught. It consisted of strings of words, and of grim arrangements of conjunction and declension, presented in a manner appallingly unattractive. I used to be set down in the study, under my Father's eye, to learn a solid page of this compilation, while he wrote or painted. The window would be open in summer, and my seat was close to it. Outside, a bee was shaking the clematis-blossom, or a red-admiral butterfly was opening and shutting his wings on the hot concrete of the verandah, or a blackbird was racing across the lawn. It was almost more than human nature could bear to have to sit holding up to my face the dreary little Latin book, with its sheepskin cover that smelt of mildewed paste.

But out of this strength there came an unexpected sudden sweetness. The exercise of hearing me repeat my strings of nouns and verbs had revived in my Father his memories of the classics. In the old solitary years, a long time ago, by the shores of Canadian rapids, on the edge of West Indian swamps, his Virgil had been an inestimable solace to him. To extremely devout persons, there is something objectionable in most of the great writers of antiquity. Horace, Lucretius, Terence, Catullus, Juvenal, -- in each there is one quality or another definitely repulsive to a reader who is determined to know nothing but Christ and him crucified. From time immemorial, however, it has been recognized in the Christian church that this objection does not apply to Virgil. He is the most evangelical of the classics; he is the one who can be enjoyed with least to explain away and least to excuse. One evening my Father took down his Virgil from an upper shelf, and his thoughts wandered away from surrounding things; he travelled in the past again. The book was a Delphin edition of 1798, which had followed him in all his wanderings; there was a great scratch on the sheep-skin cover that a thorn had made in a forest of Alabama. And then, in the twilight, as he shut the volume at last, oblivious of my presence, he began to murmur and to chant the adorable verses by memory.

Tityre, tu patulae recubans sub tegmine fagi,

he warbled; and I stopped my play, and listened as if to a nightingale, until he reached

                        tu, Tityre, lentus in umbra
Formosam resonare doces Amaryllida silvas.

'Oh Papa, what is that?' I could not prevent myself from asking. He translated the verses, he explained their meaning, but his exposition gave me little interest. What to me was beautiful Amaryllis? She and her love-sick Tityrus awakened no image whatever in my mind. But a miracle had been revealed to me, the incalculable, the amazing beauty which could exist in the sound of verses. My prosodical instinct was awakened quite suddenly that dim evening, as my Father and I sat alone in the breakfast-room after tea, serenely accepting the hour, for once, with no idea of exhortation or profit. Verse, 'a breeze mid blossoms playing', as Coleridge says, descended from the roses as a moth might have done, and the magic of it took hold of my heart forever. I persuaded my Father, who was a little astonished at my insistence, to repeat the lines over and over again. At last my brain caught them, and as I walked in Benny's garden, or as I hung over the tidal pools at the edge of the sea, all my inner being used to ring out with the sound of

Formosam resonare doces Amaryllida silvas.

The verses come from the beginning of Vergil's first Eclogue.