Laudator Temporis Acti

Is it correct, then, that you will now recognize no god but those we recognize,
the Void around us, the Clouds, and the Tongue, these three?

ἄλλο τι δῆτ᾽ οὖν νομιεῖς ἤδη θεὸν οὐδένα πλὴν ἅπερ ἡμεῖς,
τὸ Χάος τουτὶ καὶ τὰς Νεφέλας καὶ τὴν Γλῶτταν, τρία ταυτί;

If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.

"The best cow pies look like pancake batter, are almost symmetrical and even have a divot in the middle," [Dan] Glenn instructed. "That's the perfect patty. What you don't want is a tall pie that looks like horse manure. It has too much fiber in it."

Years ago my cows produced perfect patties. I guess I fed them right.

A healthy human bowel movement, so I was later to be told in the Royal Army Medical Corps, went 'twice round the pan and was curly at both ends'.

Labels: noctes scatologicae

Rain-bearing maidens,
Let us go to Pallas' lustrous country, to see where stalwart men
Abound in Kekrops' lovely land.
Where awe of secret rites abides,
Where the home in which the mysteries are housed
Is opened up in sacred ritual acts.
The heavenly gods receive gifts there as well,
High-roofed temples and glorious statues,
Sacred processions for the blessed ones,
Garlanded sacrifices and feasts for the gods
At every season of the year,
Including springtime's Dionysiac joy
When mellifluous choruses compete
And the pipes' deep-resonant notes resound.

παρθένοι ὀμβροφόροι,
ἔλθωμεν λιπαρὰν χθόνα Παλλάδος, εὔανδρον γᾶν        300
Κέκροπος ὀψόμεναι πολυήρατον:
οὗ σέβας ἀρρήτων ἱερῶν, ἵνα μυστοδόκος δόμος
ἐν τελεταῖς ἁγίαις ἀναδείκνυται,
οὐρανίοις τε θεοῖς δωρήματα,        305
ναοί θ᾽ ὑψερεφεῖς καὶ ἀγάλματα,
καὶ πρόσοδοι μακάρων ἱερώταται,
εὐστέφανοί τε θεῶν θυσίαι θαλίαι τε,
παντοδαπαῖς ἐν ὥραις,        310
ἦρί τ᾽ ἐπερχομένῳ Βρομία χάρις,
εὐκελάδων τε χορῶν ἐρεθίσματα,
καὶ μοῦσα βαρύβρομος αὐλῶν.

Politicians and shrill reformers, people telling other people what to do: Hawthorne cared for none of them—cared, he said, for no party anymore, hated them all, "free soilers, pro-slavery men, and whatever else—all alike."

225 "free soilers, pro-slavery men": To William D. Ticknor, 10/10/56; quoted in Hall, Critic, 152.

It is a delicious sort of mutual aid, when the united power of two sympathetic, yet dissimilar, intelligences is brought to bear upon a poem by reading it aloud, or upon a picture or statue by viewing it in each other's company. Even if not a word of criticism be uttered, the insight of either party is wonderfully deepened, and the comprehension broadened; so that the inner mystery of a work of genius, hidden from one, will often reveal itself to two.

Libraries, like museums, are a refuge from old age, sickness and death.

Comme les musées, les bibliothèques sont un refuge contre le vieillissement, la maladie, la mort.

The first sacred place in Antiquity is the 'home', that is to say, the hearth of the house; not the fire of the kitchen, but the sacred altar where the fire consecrated to the gods smoulders continuously. This is where the goddess Hestia is present, 'seated at the centre of the house', as the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite says. The hearth is thus in some way rootedness in the Earth, which is itself Hestia, the immobile centre of the Universe. But the hearth is also the point of contact with the higher gods, the point from whence the smoke of the incense or the sacrifices rises. Hestia is, nevertheless, not solely the figure of the Earth, but the figure of the woman who remains by the hearth, whereas the man will work outside.¹ Our civilization has perhaps been profoundly marked by the poem, The Odyssey, which describes the pilgrimage of the exiled man who strives to come back to the hearth where the woman whom he loves awaits him: return to the native land, which is at base a return to oneself.

1 Cf. Jean-Pierre Vernant, Mythe et pensée chez les Grecs, tome 1 (Paris: F. Maspero, 1971), 124-170.

You have enough in the outdoor tasks; my job is to keep things in the house in order. A worker coming in from outside likes to find things properly set up within.

                                                 ἅλις δ' ἔχεις
τἄξωθεν ἔργα· τἀν δόμοις δ' ἡμᾶς χρεὼν
ἐξευτρεπίζειν. εἰσιόντι δ' ἐργάτῃ 
θύραθεν ἡδὺ τἄνδον εὑρίσκειν καλῶς.

If any of you knows where I can buy an unperforated nose, please tell me!

ὑμῶν δέ γ᾽ εἴ τις οἶδ᾽ ἐμοὶ κατειπάτω,
πόθεν ἂν πριαίμην ῥῖνα μὴ τετρημένην.

That thing is filthy and smelly...

μιαρὸν τὸ χρῆμα καὶ κάκοσμον...

• What to Say When Someone Farts
• What to Say in Awkward Situations
• What to Say After Passing Gas
• What to Say When Someone Passes Gas

Labels: noctes scatologicae

We study Greek literature and philosophy, and in this study we set ourselves very high standards of accuracy. But in order to understand Nu. we must make an imaginative effort to adopt an entirely different position, the position of someone to whom all philosophical and scientific speculation, all disinterested intellectual curiosity, is boring and silly. To such a person distinctions which are of fundamental importance to the intellectual appear insignificant, incomprehensible, and often imperceptible. Nothing is more striking, in all departments of human life, than the extreme subjectivity of differences. For everyone who understands and cares about the difference between Bach and Rachmaninov, the Labour Party and the Communist Party, Oxford and Cambridge, or England and Scotland, there is another to whom the difference is of no interest or consequence. This is nowhere more conspicuous than in popular attitudes to the intellectual. Until very recently—nowadays, the illustrator has to choose between library and laboratory as background—a 'professor' in popular literature was a man from whom one could expect a learned opinion on any subject from the history of Assyria to the anatomy of the newt. Ar., as a successful writer of comedies for a mass audience, did not have to make a great effort to look at the world from a popular standpoint; he must in essentials have adopted that standpoint by nature, for otherwise he would not have been a comic poet. To judge from the extant citations, the comic poets of the fifth century were unanimous in their adoption of what seems to their modern readers a reactionary and philistine persona, and in this respect they resemble modern music-hall comedians rather than modern writers of comedies.

Indeed, the ties of family became less close than those of party...

καὶ μὴν καὶ τὸ ξυγγενὲς τοῦ ἑταιρικοῦ ἀλλοτριώτερον ἐγένετο...

There is a lithograph by Daumier called “The book-lover in heaven” (from Le Charivari, November 5, 1844) which perfectly illustrates the fascination rarity holds for the bibliophile. It shows a man thumbing through a little book and explaining to another book-lover, “I can’t tell you how happy I am … I’ve just found the 1780 Amsterdam edition of Horace for fifty écus — it’s very valuable, because every page is covered with misprints!”

For a man health is the first and best possession,
Second best to be born with shapely beauty,
And the third is wealth honestly won,
Fourth are the days of youth spent in delight with friends.

ὑγιαίνειν μὲν ἄριστον ἀνδρὶ θνητῷ,
δεύτερον δὲ φυὴν ἀγαθὸν γενέσθαι,
τὸ τρίτον δὲ πλουτεῖν ἀδόλως,
καὶ τὸ τέταρτον ἡβᾶν μετὰ τῶν φίλων.

During his presidency he stated that he never read translations, but, since he had a good many of them, it would doubtless be more correct to say that he much preferred to read originals. He was at home in French, Italian, and Spanish, and stressed their importance, but he regarded Greek as the finest of human languages. He said that Homer must ever remain the first of poets until a language "equally ductile and copious shall again be spoken."²⁰

He was much interested in the pronunciation of classical Greek, and had made special efforts to ascertain this in Paris, where he learned the pronunciation of modern Greek from persons who spoke it. Though he accepted this as something of a guide, he fully recognized that, since sound is "more fugitive than the written letter," there must have been very considerable change after so long a time. He did not really hope ever to recapture the voices of Homer and Demosthenes, but he never ceased to regard Greek as a notably euphonious language. He quoted it frequently to John Adams, though in letters to persons of lesser learning  he generally contented himself with Latin.²¹

He accepted the Italian pronunciation of Latin and seems to have harbored little doubt of its authenticity. In the last year of his life he bemoaned the necessity of admitting "shameful Latinists" to the classical school (department) of the University of Virginia, being specially disturbed by the pronunciation they brought with them. Thus he said: "We must rid ourselves of this Connecticut Latin, of this barbarous confusion of long and short syllables, which renders doubtful whether we are listening to a reader of Cherokee, Shawnee, Iroquois, or what."²²

He appears to have said much less about Latin as a language than about Greek, but, while something of a stickler about its pronunciation, he was not one about its grammar. Outside the realm of poetry his favorite among the Roman writers was Tacitus, of whom he said: "It is by boldly neglecting the rigorisms of grammar that Tacitus has made himself the strongest writer in the world. The Hypercritics call him barbarous; but I should be sorry to exchange his barbarisms for their wire-drawn purisms. Some of his sentences are as strong as language can make them. Had he scrupulously filled up the whole of their syntax. they would have been merely common.²³ He was nearing eighty when he said this. A decade earlier he had made a similar observation: "Fill up all the ellipses and syllepses of Tacitus, Sallust, Livy, etc., and the elegance and force of their sententious brevity are extinguished."<sup>24

20</sup> TJ to John Waldo, Aug. 16, 1813 (L. & B., XIII, 341; cited by Sowerby, IV, 412).

²¹ The appearance of a pamphlet on the pronunciation of Greek occasioned him to discuss the subject with Adams, Mar. 11, 1819, with John Brazier, Aug. 14, 1819, and with others.

²² To W.B. Giles, Dec. 16, 1825 (Ford, X, 357).

²³ TJ to Edward Everett, Feb. 24, 1823 (L. & B., XV. 414-415).

²⁵ To John Waldo, Aug. 16, 1813 (L. & B., XIII, 339).

My repugnance to the writing-table becomes daily and hourly more deadly and insurmountable. In place of this has come on a canine appetite for reading. And I indulge it, because I see in it relief against the taedium senectutis; a lamp to lighten my path through the dreary wilderness of time before me, whose bourne I see not. Losing daily all interest in the things around us, something else is necessary to fill the void. With me it is reading, which occupies the mind without the labor of producing ideas from my own stock.

O stately halls, O my once happy home, O Priam who had so much and was so blessed with children, myself here too, the ancient mother of my children, how we have come to nothing! We have been stripped of our former pride. So why do we mortals swell with conceit, one of us over the wealth of his house, another over his reputation for honour among the citizens? Wealth and honour are nothing, nothing but ambitions for the heart and boasting for the tongue. The truly happy man is the one who meets with nothing bad from day to day.

ὦ σχήματ᾽ οἴκων, ὦ ποτ᾽ εὐτυχεῖς δόμοι,
ὦ πλεῖστ᾽ ἔχων κάλλιστά τ᾽, εὐτεκνώτατε        620
Πρίαμε, γεραιά θ᾽ ἥδ᾽ ἐγὼ μήτηρ τέκνων,
ὡς ἐς τὸ μηδὲν ἥκομεν, φρονήματος
τοῦ πρὶν στερέντες. εἶτα δῆτ᾽ ὀγκούμεθα,
ὃ μέν τις ἡμῶν πλουσίοις ἐν δώμασιν,
ὃ δ᾽ ἐν πολίταις τίμιος κεκλημένος.        625
τὰ δ᾽ οὐδὲν, ἄλλως φροντίδων βουλεύματα
γλώσσης τε κόμποι. κεῖνος ὀλβιώτατος
ὅτῳ κατ᾽ ἦμαρ τυγχάνει μηδὲν κακόν.

620 κάλλιστά codd.: μάλιστά Harry

Architects, town planners, and specialists in traffic circulation are much more dangerous than sociologists, who, so often, have merely served to complicate what might have seemed self-evident and simple to the historian. The errors, assumptions, and miscalculations of the former are both durable and visible: solid contributions to human misery, whereas, while sociologists may attempt to bypass history, or to render it unintelligible and unreadable, they do not seek to destroy it altogether.

What virtually all architects and urbanists since Haussmann have had in common is a loathing for the past and an overriding desire to erase its visible presence. Like sociologists, they have little time for individuals and their trying, quirky, and unpredictable ways, tending to think only in terms of human destiny: so many units in the formation of a Grand Design (or a Grand Ensemble, to use a modish French expression), as if people, in rectangular blocks of a thousand, or ten thousand, were to be assimilated to a gigantic set of Lego. There is nothing more remote from humanity and more devoid of the human scale than an architect's model plan for a new urban development. Even the trees are puny and plastic, and of a sickly green (chlorophile); the cars, lined up in their parkings souterrains, are gaily coloured, but the people to be assigned to the new Alphavilles are not even dots.

An ungrateful lot you all are, who want to be political leaders!

ἀχάριστον ὑμῶν σπέρμ᾽, ὅσοι δημηγόρους
ζηλοῦτε τιμάς.