Stephanie's Pillowbook

 

EATING

One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well. [Virginia Woolf]

The whole of nature, as has been said, is a conjugation of the verb to eat, in the active and passive. [W.R. Inge]

Spread the table and contention will cease. [English proverb]

Eating is not merely a material pleasure. Eating well gives a spectacular joy to life and contributes immensely to goodwill and happy companionship. It is of great importance to the morale. [Elsa Schiaparelli]

Food should be shared. Remember those words of Conrad Aiken’s, ‘Bread I broke with you was more than bread.’ It’s at this early stage that you hand on to children an appetite for the good things in life: conversation, friendship, sympathy, celebration, jokes and stories, as well as food. [Jane Grigson]

Unquestionably there lies deeply rooted in the nature of man a desire to eat everything he loves and put every new object he encounters immediately into his mouth in order to break it down, if possible, into its primal constituents. A healthy hunger for knowledge makes him want to apprehend the object completely, to penetrate and bite through to its inmost centre. Touching it, on the other hand, stops at the surface and every touch confers only an indirect and imperfect knowledge. [Friedrich Schlegel]

Eating is touch carried to the bitter end. [Samuel Butler]

A man seldom thinks with more earnestness of anything than he does of his dinner. [Samuel Johnson]

Gastronomical perfection can be reached in these combinations: one person dining alone, usually upon a couch or a hillside; two people, of no matter what sex or age, dining in a good restaurant; six people, of no matter what sex or age, dining in a good home…
The six should be capable of decent social behaviour: that, no two of them should be so much in love as to bore the others, nor at the opposite extreme should they be carrying on any sexual or professional feud which could put poison on the plates all must eat from. A good combination would be one married couple, for warm composure; one less firmly established, to add a note of investigation to the talk; and two strangers of either sex, upon whom the better-acquainted could sharpen their questioning wits. [M.F.K. Fisher]

… those who eat together. [definition of a family]

We invite each other not to eat and drink, but to eat and drink together. [Plutarch]

Men do not have to cook their food; they do so for symbolic reasons to show they are men and not beasts. [Edmund Leach]

Probably most of us are at least vaguely aware of a universal reality in the natural world. All living things are destined to die and be recycled as part of the flow of energy through the life community. Which is to say, a creature must feed, and sooner or later it will be fed upon. [Durward L. Allen]

[Health] “is vaguer, more scientific and less human, and far less attainable as an ideal. Into the breach between this abstract goal and our hesitations about how to achieve it leap the purveyors of foods and technology. [Margaret Visser explaining why food manufacturers prefer 'health' to 'manners'. The latter is merely a matter of self-control asserted before commercial interests]

{Shelley’s] vegetable diet entered for something in his restlessness… it made him weak and nervous, and exaggerated the sensitiveness of his imagination. Then arose those thick-coming fancies which almost invariably preceded his change of place…
On our way up, at Oxford, he was so much out of order that he feared being obliged to return. He had been living chiefly on tea and bread and butter, drinking occasionally a sort of spurious lemonade, made of some powder in a box, which, as was reading at the time the Tale of a Tub, he called ‘the powder of pimperlimpimp’. He consulted a doctor, who may have done him some good, but it was not apparent. I told him, ‘If he would allow me to prescribe for him, I would set him to rights.’ He asked, ‘What would be your prescription?’ I said, ‘Three mutton chops, well peppered.’ He said ‘Do you really think so?’ I said, ‘I am sure of it.’ He took the prescription; the success was obvious and immediate. He lived in my way for the rest of our expedition, rowed vigorously, was cheerful, merry, overflowing with animal spirits, and had certainly one week of thorough enjoyment of life. [Thomas Love Peacock]

To the ancient Greeks eating alone was considered almost inhuman – the term monophagos was an insult.

 

ECCENTRICITY

That so few now dare to be eccentric, marks the chief danger of our time. [John Stuart Mill]

Eccentricity is not, as dull people would have us believe, a form of madness. It is often a kind of innocent pride, and the man of genius and the aristocrat are frequently regarded as eccentrics because genius and aristocrat are entirely unafraid and uninfluenced by the opinions and vagaries of the crowd. [Edith Sitwell]

… a writer in the Monthly Magazine was very much struck by his appearance, ‘with a large patch of coarse brown paper on his nose, the rusty black coat hung with cobwebs’; whilst another friend, who met him in 1807, was dumbfounded ‘by his fiery and volcanic face, and by his nose, on which he had a perpetual efflorescence, and which was covered with black patches; his clothes were shabby, his linen dirty.’
Yet, in earlier life, who more gallant than the Professor, who more assiduous in their attentions to the Fair? It is rumoured, indeed, that he once carried a young lady round the room in his teeth. But that was before dinner, and after dinner, the Professor, though equally manly, was less urbane. Indeed Mr. Timbs tells us that, whilst at Cambridge, ‘his passion for smoking, which was then going out among the younger generation, his large and indiscriminate potations, and his occasional use of the poker with a very refractory controversialist, had caused his company to be shunned by all except the few to whom his wit and scholarship were irresistible.’ Apparently the gifts in question did not always prove irresistible to the Fellows of Trinity, who, when the use of the poker seemed imminent, would slink out of the Common Room, and leave the Professor sitting at the table, emitting no sign of life excepting a perpetual eruption of smoke. In the morning, the servants were accustomed to seeing him sitting where he had been left, with no appearance of having moved, even once, during his night-long vigil.
These vigils became a source of anxiety in the houses which the professor frequented, and it became necessary, at last, for the sake of preserving the health and sanity of the hosts, that the Professor should be told that he must never stay to a later hour than eleven. He showed no resentment at this mandate, but kept the agreement, honourably, and to the letter. But ‘though he never attempted to exceed the hour limited, he would never stir before,’ and woe betide the host who suggested such a breach of faith. But this state of affairs did not extend to every house, or to every host, and there were houses in which the Professor behaved like a lion rampant. The unfortunate Mr. Horne Tooke, for instance, was one of Professor Porson’s unhappier hosts, for he was foolish enough to invite the Professor to dine with him on a night that he knew had been preceded by three nights in which the Professor had refused all entreaties on the part of his hosts that he should go home to bed. Mr. Tooke thought, therefore, that Professor Porson would relent on this occasion. But the night wore on, and Mr. Tooke was worn out, for the Professor became more and more animated, passing from one learned theme to another. The poker was out of sight and out of mind, but insensibility, at any costs, might have been preferred. Dawn broke, the birds sang, the milkmen shouted, the Professor continued his monologue.
At last, in mid morning, the exhausted Mr. Tooke proclaimed that he had an engagement to meet a friend for breakfast in a coffee-house at Leicester Square. The Professor was delighted, and announced that he would come too. But in the end, Providence came to the rescue of Mr. Tooke, and, soon after the Professor and he were seated in the coffee-house, the Professor’s attention was distracted for an instant, and Mr. Tooke, seizing the opportunity, fled as fast as his legs would carry him, nor did he pause for breath until he reached Richmond Buildings. Having reached this haven of refuge, he barricaded himself in, and ordered his servant not to admit the Professor even if he should attempt to batter down the door. For ‘a man’ Mr. Tooke observed, ‘who could sit up four nights successively, could sit up forty.’
Mr. Tooke won a victory over the Professor on another occasion, when the latter had threatened to ‘kick and cuff Mr. Tooke,’ and to bring in the poker as umpire. Mr. Tooke said the duel must be fought not with pokers but with brandy, and quarts of brandy at that. When the second quart was half-finished, the Professor sank into unconsciousness beneath the table, and the triumphant Mr. Tooke, in what appears to me to be a spirit of bravado, drank the health of the vanquished in another glass of brandy and, after instructing the servants to ‘take great care of the Professor,’ joined the ladies, without ostensible difficulty, into the drawing room, where tea was being served.
In spite of this victory, however, and of his successful flight, Mr. Tooke feared Professor Porson in controversial matters, because, after remaining silent for some aeons, he would ‘pounce upon him with his terrible memory.’ Indeed, the position of host to the famous Greek scholar was no sinecure, and his rival Dr. Parr informed Dr. Burney, who had wished to invoke the Professor’s aid on some question of the classics, that ‘Porson shall do it, and he will do it. I know his terms when he bargains with me: two bottles instead of one, six pipes instead of two, Burgundy instead of claret, liberty to sit till five in the morning, instead of sneaking into bed at one – these are his terms’…
But there were moments when his memory failed him; and he would forget to eat dinner, though he never forgot a quotation. Once when Rogers invited him to dine, he answered, in an abstracted tone: ‘Thank you, no, I dined yesterday.’
In early life he was wretchedly poor, and in later years would say: ‘I was then almost destitute with less than £40 a year for my support, and without a profession; for I could never bring myself to subscribe to the Articles of Faith. I used often to lie awake for a whole night, and wish for a large pearl.’ [Edith Sitwell]

… the eight bottles of port a day, changing soon to scarcely less of brandy, the ruined estate, the ruined life, the debtor’s prison, the death amid the horrors of delirium tremens.
Here he comes, that poor driven drunken ghost, blown by a turbulent hurricane weather. His life seemed to be spent in running like an ostrich – he walked as fast and as strongly as that bird – racing, jumping, driving, hunting, chased always by a high mad black wind.
He meant, always to cheat that wind. let it blow through him and eat him to the bone. he would show it how little he cared.
This half-mad hunting hunted creature never wore any but the thinnest of silk stockings, with very thin boots or shoes, so that in winter his feet were nearly always wet. His hunting breeches were unlined, he wore only one small waistcoat, and that was nearly always open. He rarely wore a hat, and in winter went shooting in white linen trousers without either a lining or drawers and, with this, a light jacket. No matter how black the frost, no matter how high and mad was the black turbulent wind in which he lived, he would wade through any water, break down the ice of any pond and trample through it, such was his impatience to have his way. He might often be seen stripped to the shirt and following wild-fowl in the snowiest weather, and once lay down in his shirt to await their arrival at dusk. And once, the keepers at Woodhouse, an estate belonging to his uncle, were surprised, to say the least of it, to see Squire Mytton, stark naked, pursuing some ducks over the ice in a most determined manner…
The Squire was constantly riding at dangerous fences, falling of his horse when drunk, driving his tandem at a frantic speed, and paying no more attention to crossroads and corners than he did to creditors. ‘There goes Squire Mytton,’ the country people would say, when they saw a crazily driven tandem, rushing along like the north wind; and they would raise a cheer; for the Squire was warm-hearted and beloved. Once he galloped at full speed over a rabbit-warren, to find out if his horse would fall. He found out. Rolling over and over, after a time both horse and Squire rose to their feet unhurt…
John Mytton was as dangerous to others as to himself; it was not only that he did not mind accidents, he positively liked them; and when one unhappy gentleman was rash enough to venture into the Squire’s gig, and, when having done so and had some slight experience of the resultant steeplechasing, he begged the Squire to consider their necks, the latter enquired ‘Were you ever much hurt then, by being upset in one.’ The next moment, all was confusion. For the Squire, much shocked by this omission on the part of Providence, ejaculated: ‘What, never upset in a gig? What a damned slow fellow you must have been all your life,’ and running the rear wheel up the bank, he rectified the omission. Fortunately, according to Nimrod, neither gentleman was injured seriously…
Master and horses were so friendly with the country people that they would help themselves to anything that took their fancy on their way home from hunting, and Squire Mytton, if his coat was wet, would think nothing of taking a country woman’s red flannel petticoat from a ledge, slipping it over his head, and leave his coat drying in its place. It was, too, not in the least unusual for Squire Mytton, if he felt cold when out hunting, to go into the house of a cottager, accompanied by his favourite horse Baronet, and ask her to light a good fire to warm baronet and himself, for he did not believe in a heaven from which animals were excluded. Baronet and he would then lounge by the fire, side by side, until they were warm again, and then they would start for home. But alas, there was one moment when disaster came from the master’s habit of sharing all good things with the subject beast, for a horse named Sportsman dropped dead because John Mytton, out of kindness of heart, had given him a bottle of mulled port…
The strangest exploit, perhaps, in which Mytton was concerned, was the episode of the Nightshirt and the Hiccup… ‘ “Damn this hiccup,” said Mytton, as he stood undressed on the floor, apparently in the act of getting into his bed; “but I’ll frighten it away”; so, seizing a lighted candle he applied it to the tab of his shirt and, it being a cotton one, he was instantly enveloped in flames.’
In the subsequent mêlée, during which two intrepid gentlemen knocked down and rolled upon the Squire in their attempt to put out the flames, and the flames did their worst against both nightshirt and hiccup, the two gentlemen won, for they tore his shirt from his body piecemeal. As for the hiccup it was frightened away. The hiccup is gone, by G-,’ said the Squire, as, appallingly burnt, he reeled into bed.
The next morning, he greeted his friends with a loud ‘view-halloo’ to show them how he could bear pain… [Edith Sitwell]

That very day Chambers has made a will for Johnson’s friend, Bennet Langton, in which ‘Lanky’ left his estate to his three sisters (‘three dowdies,’ said Johnson) rather than the nearest male relative. Half laughing at himself for his ‘feudal’ zeal, Johnson – trying to forget his illness – began to talk enthusiastically about the need to keep up male succession in noble families, though ‘for an estate newly acquired by trade, you may give it, if you will, to the dog Towser, and let keep his own name.’ Then the crucial passage follows:
‘I have known him at times exceedingly diverted at what seemed to others a very small sport. He now laughed immoderately, without any reason that we could perceive, at our friend’s making his will; called him the testator, and added, ‘I daresay, he thinks he has done a mighty thing. He won’t stay till he gets home to his seat in the country… he’ll call up the landlord of the first inn on the road; and, after a suitable preface upon mortality and the uncertainty of life, will tell him that he should not delay making his will; and here, Sir, will he say, is my will, which I have just made, with the assistance of one of the ablest lawyers in the kingdom… (laughing all the time). He believes he has made this will; but he did not make it: you, Chambers, made it for him. I trust you had more conscience than to make him say, ‘being of sound understanding’; ha, ha, ha!… I’d have his will turned into verse, like a ballad.’
‘In this playful manner did he run… Mr. Chambers… seemed impatient till he got rid of us. Johnson cold not stop his merriment, but continued it all the way till we got without the Temple-gate. He then burst into such a fit of laughter, that he appeared to be almost in a convulsion; and, in order to support himself, laid hold of one of the posts… and sent forth peals so loud, that in the silence of the night his voice seemed to resound from Temple-bar to Fleet-ditch.’
Boswell was just as puzzled as the prim Chambers, and says that he mentions this incident only so that his readers ‘may be acquainted even with the slightest occasional characteristics of so eminent a man.’ But in the context of Johnson’s whole life we see what is breaking through, in a moment when he has so much else on his mind. Behind it is the accumulated sense, put so powerfully in The Vanity of Human Wishes and the moral essays, of the triviality of all our posturings and strategems for ‘importance’ against the large backdrop of the general ‘doom of man’…

An incident occurred shortly afterwards – again at the Miss Cotterall’s – which both Reynolds and his sister thought amusingly characteristic. While Johnson was following some ladies upstairs on this visit, the housemaid, noticing his shabby dress, seized him by the shoulder and tried to pull him back, exclaiming, ‘Where are you going?’ Startled into shame and anger, Johnson roared out like a bull, ‘What have I done?’ Meanwhile a gentleman behind him quieted the maid, and Johnson ‘growled all the way upstairs, as well he might.’ Already chagrined, he became more offended when two ladies of rank suddenly arrived (the Duchess of Argyle and Lady Fitzroy), and the Miss Cotterall’s, engrossed in their titled visitors, neglected to introduce him or Reynolds. Inferring that this was because they were ashamed of him and Reynolds as ‘low company,’ he sat for a while in silent meditation and, ‘resolving to shock their supposed pride, ‘called out to Reynolds in a loud voice, “I wonder which of us two could get most money by his trade in one week, were we to work hard at it from morning to night.”‘…

Time and again, when he was with others, he could climb out of the prison house of self that he so loathed, and emerged with an exuberance and a childlike love of fun for which, said Mrs. Thrale, she never saw an equal. One little episode during this visit was typical. For whatever reason, Langton never told it to Boswell, though he passed on so much other information to him. Perhaps he simply thought Boswell would not have understood it. But he had always remembered it, and as an elderly man told the story to a friend of his son when they were out walking and came to the top of a very steep hill. Back in 1764 Johnson and the Langtons had also walked to the top of this hill, and Johnson, delighted by its steepness, said he wanted to ‘take a roll down.’ They tried to stop him. But he said he ‘had not had a roll for a long time,’ and taking out of his pockets his keys, a pencil, a purse, and other objects, lay down parallel at the edge of the hill, and rolled down its full length ‘turning himself over and over till he came to the bottom’…

He would accept any correction of manners from Thrale as he would from no other person. If he became dogmatic at the table, Thrale could stop him at once with a firm remark: ‘There, there, we have now had enough for one lecture, Dr. Johnson; we will not be upon education any more till after dinner, if you please.’ Thrale even got him to improve his appearance, persuaded him to change his shirt more frequently, arranged to have his clothes kept clean, and had silver buckles put on his shoes. He also got him a special wig to wear at dinner. Johnson always read in bed at night. Because of his poor eyesight, he would lean his head as near the candle that his wig – which he often forgot to take off – was singed. The same thing would happen to new wigs. Finally Thrale had his personal valet stand outside the dining room with Johnson’s ‘company’ wig, which was presented to him before he entered and taken away from him afterwards…

At the inn where they were staying, some people came in to visit Johnson on the evening of a solemn Scottish Sunday, including the Reverend Alexander Grant. During the conversation, said Grant, Johnson was in ‘high-spirits,’ and mentioned that Joseph Banks… had discovered in Australia an ‘extraordinary animal called the kangaroo.’ In order to render his description more vivid, Johnson rose from his chair and ‘volunteered an imitation of the animal. The company stared… nothing could be more ludicrous than the appearance of a tall, heavy, grave-looking man, like Dr. Johnson, standing up to mimic the shape and motions of a kangaroo. He stood erect, put out his hands like feelers, and, gathering up the tails of his huge brown coat so as to resemble the pouch of the animal, made two or three vigorous bounds across the room.’ [Walter Jackson Bate]

The other half of the eccentrics in British history were motivated by only one very single-minded purpose, be it finding solitude, frugality, or being universally kind, and then taking that goal to bizarre extremes. Inadvertently, along the way their behaviour tended to make people wonder. For instance, all that Thomas Birch wanted to do was to emulate Isaac Walton, to become a complete angler. An eighteenth-century librarian at the British Museum, his ambition led him to disguise himself as a tree in a costume carefully designed to make his arms look like branches and the fishing line a floating blossom. History does not tell us how successful he was at catching fish, but it does record that he frightened the living daylights out of passing walkers whenever he spoke or moved…

In a similar vein, Lady Margaret-Ann Tyrell (1870-1939) ploughed her contrary but enchanting way through both her and her husband’s career. Supremely absent-minded, she was devoted to her grand scheme to research and write a new kind of parallel history, simultaneously tracing events in all parts of the world from 2000 BC to her own day.
With so many threads to chase, annotate, cross-reference and connect, it was little wonder that Lady Tyrell was prone to minor forgetfulness and little social gaffes, such as mistaking the future George VI for her husband’s private secretary. She also charmingly conversed for several hours with Lord Birkenhead under the misapprehension that he was the Turkish Ambassador. During her husband’s diplomatic posting to Paris, she preferred to avoid most official functions. Ensconced in the uppermost branches of a tree in the Embassy gardens she was able to concentrate on her ‘magnum opus.’…

Or take the case of the Honourable Henry Cavendish FRS (1731-1810), whose introversion went beyond a social phobia. He was so reclusive that he forbade his bankers to speak to him about his money or his housekeepers to speak to him at all. He was painfully shy, and could not bear to be interrupted about trivial matters. To ensure his privacy, he developed an elaborate ritualised system of letter-boxes and double doors within his house. After meeting a maid on the staircase by accident, he had a second stairway built to spare himself any further close encounters. His contemporary, Lord Brougham, recalled Cavendish’s nervous quirks at scientific meetings – ‘the shrill cry he uttered as he shuffled from room to room.’ He probably spoke fewer words in his seventy-eight years than any septuagenarian in history, ‘not at all excepting monks of the Trappist order.’ Yet Cavendish was a brilliant scientist, the first to realise that water was not a single element, but composed of hydrogen and oxygen. He also discovered, but neglected to publish, two fundamental principles of electricity – Coulomb’s Law and Ohm’s Law – years before they dawned on Charles Coulomb or George Ohm…

That of Alan Fairweather, forty-three, is the potato – its history, how to clone it, how to grow different types with different qualities, and so on. His diet consists wholly of meals of two pounds of potatoes, topped off with a chocolate bar, the occasional vitamin pill and lots of tea. ‘Potatoes provide all the nourishment I need – I can’t be bothered to cook anything else.’ Alan need little encouragement to expound on the socio-political repercussions of this vital tuber, or alternatively the best way to cook the hundred or so varieties… As an inspector of his beloved vegetable for Scotland’s Department of Agriculture and Fisheries, he is fortunately well-suited in his work. Even his working holidays take him to Peru – to study further the humble spud in its native environment. Alan sleeps on the floor of his study, letting out all four bedrooms of his home for rent: ‘I don’t see the point in having a special room set aside to fall unconscious in’… [David Weeks]

[Henry] James, who was a frequent companion on our English motor-trips, was firmly convinced that, because he lived in England and our chauffeur (an American) did not, it was necessary that the latter should be guided by him throughout the intricacies of the English countryside. Signposts were rare in England in those days, and for many years afterwards…
It chanced however that Charles Cook, our faithful and skilful driver, was a born pathfinder, while James’s sense of direction was non-existent, or rather actively but always erroneously alert; and the consequences of his intervention were always bewildering and sometimes extremely fatiguing. The first time that my husband and I went to Lamb House by motor (coming from France) James, who had travelled to Folkestone by train to meet us, insisted on seating himself next to Cook on the plea that the roads across Romney Marsh formed such a tangle that only an old inhabitant could guide us to Rye. The suggestion resulted in our turning around and around in our tracks till long after dark, though Rye, conspicuous on its conical hill, was just ahead of us and Cook could easily have landed us there in time for tea..
Another year we had been motoring in the West country, and on the way back were to spend a night at Malvern. As we approached (at the close of a dark rainy afternoon) I saw James growing restless, and was not surprised to hear him say: ‘My dear, I once spent a summer at Malvern and know it very well; and as it is rather difficult to find the way to the hotel, it might be well if Edward were to change places with me and let me sit beside Cook. My husband of course acceded (though with doubt in his heart) and, James having taken his place, we awaited the result. Malvern, if I am not mistaken, is encircled by a sort of upper boulevard, of the kind called in Italy a strada di circonvallazione, and for an hour we circled about above the outspread city while James vainly tried to remember which particular street led down most directly to our hotel. At each corner (literally) he stopped the motor, and we heard a muttering, first confident and then anguished. ‘This – this, my dear Cook, yes… this certainly is the right corner. But no; stay! A moment longer, please – in this light it’s so difficult… appearances are so misleading… It may be… yes! I think it is the next turn… a little farther lend thy guiding hand… that is, drive on; but slowly, please, my dear Cook; very slowly!’ And at the next corner the same agitated monologue would be repeated; till at length Cook, the mildest of men, interrupted gently: ‘I guess any turn’ll get us down into the town, Mr. James, and after that I can ask’ – and late, hungry and exhausted we arrived at length at our destination, James still convinced that the next turn would have been the right one if only we had been more patient.
The most absurd of these episodes occurred on another rainy evening when James and I chanced to arrive at Windsor long after dark. We must have been driven by a strange chauffeur – perhaps Cook was on holiday; at any rate, having fallen into the lazy habit of trusting him to know the way, I found myself at a loss to direct his substitute to the King’s Road. While I was hesitating and peering out into the darkness James spied an ancient doddering man who had stopped in the rain to gaze at us. ‘Wait a moment, my dear – I’ll ask him where we are’; and leaning out he signalled to the spectator.
‘My good man, if you’ll be good enough to come here, please; a little nearer – so,’ and as the old man came up: ‘My friend, to put it to you in two words, this lady and I have just arrived here from Slough; that is to say, to be more strictly accurate, we have recently passed through Slough on our way here, having actually motored to Windsor from Rye, which was our point of departure; and the darkness having overtaken us, we should be much obliged if you would tell us where we now are in relation, say, to the High Street, which, as you of course know, leads to the Castle, after leaving on the left hand the turn down to the railway station.’
I was not surprised to have this extraordinary appeal met by silence, and a dazed expression on the old wrinkled face at the window; nor to have James go on: ‘In short’ (his invariable prelude to a fresh series of explanatory ramification), in short, my good man, what I want to put to you in a word is this: supposing we have already (as I have reason to think we have) driven past the turn to the railway station (which in that case, by the way, would probably not have been on our left hand, but on our right) where are we now in relation to…’
‘Oh, please,’ I interrupted, feeling myself utterly unable to sit through another parenthesis, ‘do ask him where the King’s Road is.’
‘Ah -? The King’s Road? Just so! Quite right! Can you, as a matter of fact, my good man, tell us where, in relation to our present position, the King’s Road exactly is?’
‘Ye-re in it,’ said the aged face at the window. [Edith Wharton]

 

ECSTASY

In childhood and boyhood this ecstasy overtook me when I was happy out of doors. Was I five or six? Certainly not seven. It was a morning in early summer. A silver haze shimmered and trembled over the lime trees. The air was laden with their fragrance. The temperature was like a caress. I remember – I need not recall – that I climbed up a tree stump and felt suddenly immersed in Itness. I did not call it by that name, I had no need for words. It and I were one. [Bernard Berenson]

Absolute physical sensations, terrific constriction in throat and stomach, but it’s a mental sensation – it is to me perfectly described in Cassian, when the heart without words leaps like a fountain – a wordless feeling of sudden tremendous expansion, sudden glory, which is the key, so that I am part of the thing that has set it off, and I enclose the universe or it encloses me – it is an end of individuality for a moment, because there’s sudden glory in both me and the universe, both inextricably mingled. [Anon.]

I looked at the hills, at the dewy grass, and then up through the elm branches to the sky. In a moment all that was behind me, the house, the people, the sounds, seemed to disappear, and to leave me alone. Involuntarily I drew a long breath, then I breathed slowly. My thought, or inner consciousness, went up through the illumined sky, and I was lost in a moment of exaltation. This only lasted a very short time, perhaps only part of a second, and while it lasted there was no formulated wish. I was absorbed; I drank the beauty of the morning; I was exalted. When it ceased I did wish for some increase or enlargement of my existence to correspond with the largeness of feeling I had monetarily enjoyed. [Richard Jeffries]

Vauxhall Station on a murky November Saturday evening is not the setting one would choose for a revelation of God!… The third-class compartment was full. I cannot remember any particular thought processed which may have led up to the great moment… For a few seconds only (I suppose) the whole compartment was filled with light… I felt caught up into some tremendous sense of being within a loving, triumphant and shining purpose. I never felt more humble. I never felt more exalted. A most curious, but overwhelming, sense possessed me and filled me with ecstasy. I felt that all was well for mankind… All men were shining and glorious beings who in the end would enter incredible joy. beauty, music, joy, love immeasurable and a glory unspeakable, all this they would inherit…
This happened over fifty years ago, but even now I can see myself in the corner of the dingy third-class compartment, with the feeble lights of inverted gas mantles overhead and the Vauxhall Station platforms outside with milk cans standing there. In a few moments the glory had departed – all but one curious, lingering feeling. I loved everybody in that compartment. It sounds silly now, and indeed I blush to write it, but at that moment I think I would have died for any one of the people in that compartment. I seemed to sense the golden worth in them all. [Anon.]

On January 23rd, 1961, I came home after an evening lecture at the house of some friends. It was a freezing night… I had absolutely no premonitions of anything unusual, but suddenly, I don’t know exactly what happened, but it was a bit like a long electric shock. Of course this was quite different, it wasn’t mechanical, it was a person; I could have no doubt about this at all. There was a feeling of heat and light rushing through my bloodstream, sweeping over me and paralysing me almost, as if some person outside were blowing something in me to white heat, and I was sobbing tears of love and gratitude. I was longing for it to go on and for some time it kept returning more and more strongly, leaving me weak and shivering in between. There were no visions or voices, but the person communicated with words, or rather ideas, or certainties, with a sort of close intimacy, much more closely than into my ear or imagination…
For more than a week I went about as if I were drunk; I could think of nothing else and spent a lot of time waiting and praying and hoping for more of this sensation for the sheer happiness of it. But it was always below the surface, like an electric heater unexpectedly being switched on at the most unlikely moments – such as driving on busy roads, in supermarkets, or walking about, gardening or doing housework. [Anon.]

I had spent the evening in a great city, with two friends, reading and discussing poetry and philosophy. We parted at midnight. I had a long drive in a hansom to my lodging. My mind, deeply under the influence of the ideas, images, and emotions called up by the reading and talk, was calm and peaceful. I was in a state of quiet, almost passive enjoyment, not actually thinking but letting ideas, images, and emotions flow of themselves, as it were, through my mind. All at once, without warning of any kind, I found myself wrapped in a flame-coloured cloud. For an instant I thought of fire, an immense conflagration somewhere close by in that great city; the next, I knew that the fire was within myself. Directly afterwards there came upon me a sense of exultation, of immense joyousness accompanied or immediately followed by an intellectual illumination impossible to describe. Among other things, I did not merely come to believe, but I saw that the universe is not composed of dead matter, but is, on the contrary, a living Presence; I became conscious in myself of eternal life. It was not a conviction that I would have eternal life, but a consciousness that I possessed eternal life then; I saw that all men are immortal; that the cosmic order is such that without any peradventure all things work together for the good of each and all; that the foundation principle of the world, of all the worlds, is what we call love, and that the happiness of each and all is in the long run absolutely certain. The vision lasted a few seconds and was gone, but the memory of it and the sense of the reality of what it taught has remained during the quarter of a century which has since elapsed. I knew that what the vision showed was true. I had attained to a point of view from which I saw that it must be true. That view, that conviction, I may say that consciousness, has never, even during periods of the deepest depression, been lost. [R.M. Buckle]

I was twelve years old at the time and it was September, the end of the summer holidays. I was out for a walk alone, up at the top of my favourite hill from which one could see a panoramic view of the north Staffordshire countryside, right away towards the Peak District. It was getting towards evening and I had climbed over a wall and was standing on a piece of rough ground covered with heather, bracken and brambles, looking for blackberries – when suddenly I stood quite still and began to think deeply, as an indescribable peace, which I have since tried to describe as a ‘diamond moment of reality,’ came flowing into (or, indeed, waking up within) me, and I realized that all around me everything was lit with a kind of inner shining beauty – the rocks, bracken, bramble bushes, view, sky and even blackberries – and also myself… And in that moment, sweeping in on that tide of light, there came also knowledge. The knowledge that though disaster was moving moving slowly and seemingly unavoidably towards me (and this I had known subconsciously for some time) yet in the end ‘All would be well… All manner of things would be well.’ At that time I had never heard of Julian of Norwich, but that timeless, and even now clearly remembered moment I think probably did much to help me over the following bitterly difficult years. [Anon.]

I caught sight, in the aisle at my side, of what resembled bluish smoke issuing from the chinks of the stone floor. Looking more intently, I saw it was not smoke, but something finer, more tenuous – a soft, impalpable, self-luminous haze of violet colour, unlike any physical vapour. Thinking I experienced some momentary optical defect or delusion, I turned my gaze farther along the aisle, but there too the same delicate haze was present. I perceived the wonderful fact that it extended farther than the walls and roof of the building and was not confined by them. Through these I now could look and could see the landscape beyond… I saw from all parts of my being simultaneously, not from my eyes only. Yet for all this intensified perceptive power there was as yet no loss of touch with my physical surroundings, no suspension of my faculties of sense…
I felt happiness and peace – beyond words. Upon the instant the luminous blue haze engulfing me and all around me became transformed into golden glory, into light untellable… The golden light of which violet light seemed now to have been as the veil or outer fringe, welled forth from a central immense globe of brilliancy… But the most wonderful thing was that these shafts and waves of light, that vast expanse of photosphere, and even the great central globe itself, were crowded to solidarity with the forms of living creatures… a single coherent organism filling all space and place, yet composed of an infinitude of individual existences… I saw moreover that these things were present in teeming myriads in the church I stood in; that they were intermingled with and were passing unobstructedly through both myself and all my fellow-worshippers… The heavenly hosts drifted through the human congregation as wind passes through a grove of trees. [W.H. Wilmhurst]

Took my daily walk at 4pm today in 89º of frost… I paused to listen to the silence… The day was dying, the night being born – but with great peace. Here were imponderable processes and forces of the cosmos, harmonious and soundless. Harmony, that was it! That was what came out of the silence – a gentle rhythm, the strains of a perfect chord, the music of the spheres, perhaps.
It was enough to catch that rhythm, momentarily to be myself a part of it. In that instant I could feel no doubt of man’s oneness with the universe. The conviction came that that rhythm was too orderly, too harmonious, too perfect to be a product of blind chance – that, therefore, there must be a purpose in the whole and that man was part of that whole and not an accidental offshoot. It was a feeling that transcended reason; that went to the heart of man’s despair and found it groundless. The universe was a cosmos, not a chaos; man was as rightfully part of that cosmos as were the day and night. [Admiral Byrd]

One afternoon I was lying down resting after a long walk on the Plain… The grass was hot and I was on an eye-level with insects moving about. Everything was warm, busy and occupied with living. I was relaxed but extraneous to the scene.
Then it happened: a sensation of bliss. No loss of consciousness, but increased consciousness… I could feel the earth under me right done to the centre of the earth, and I belonged to it and it belonged to me. I also felt that the insects were my brothers and sisters, and all that was alive was related to me, because we were all living matter that died to make way for the next generation… And I felt and experienced everything that existed, even sounds and colours and tastes, all at once, and it was blissful… I had a conviction that a most important truth had been enunciated: that we are all related – animal, vegetable and mineral – so no one is alone. I have never forgotten this experience. [Anon.]

One night when the land was still fresh from the rain, I was wandering near our camp enjoying the moonlight when an immense exaltation took possession of me. It was as though the White Goddess of the moon had thrown some bewitching power into her rays. It seemed to me that our arid satellite was itself a living presence bounding in the sky… Indeed, the whole night was dancing about me.
It appeared that the moonlight had ceased to be a physical thing and now represented a state of illumination in my own mind. As here in the night landscape the steady white light threw every olive leaf and pebble into sharp relief, so it seemed that my thoughts and feelings had been given an extraordinary clarity and truth.
So powerfully was I moved by this sense of possession that I climbed up onto a high outcrop of rock against the mouth of the wadi and knelt down there. The moonlight swam round, and in, my head as I knelt looking across the plain to the shining silver bar of the Mediterranean.
From far behind me, still muffled in the folds of the mountain, I heard the bronze sound of the camel-bells. To my sharpened but converging senses they seemed like a row of brown flowers blooming in the moonlight. In truth the sound of bells came from nothing more remarkable than a caravan, perhaps twenty camels with packs and riders, coming down the wadi on its way northward to Haifa. But even now I cannot recognize that caravan in such everyday terms; my memory of it is dreamlike, yet embodies one of the most intense sensuous and emotional experiences of my life. For those minutes, and I have no notion how many they were, I had the heightened sensibility of one passionately in love and with it the power to transmute all that the senses perceived into symbols of burning significance. This surely is one of the best rewards of humanity…
The bells came nearer and another sound mingled with theirs; a low, monotonous chanting. I looked behind me for a moment and saw the dark procession swaying out from behind the last bend in the wadi, then I turned back so that the column should pass me and enter my world of vision from behind. I found myself comprehending every physical fact of their passage as though it were a part of my own existence. I knew how the big soft feet of the camels pressed down upon and embraced the rough stones of the path; I knew the warm depth of their fur and the friction upon it of leather harness and the legs of the riders; I knew the blood flowing through the bodies of men and beasts and thought of it as echoing the life of the anemones which now showed black among the rocks around me. The sound of bells and the chanting seemed rich and glowing as the stuff of the caravan itself…
As the moon leapt and bounded in the sky, I took full possession of a love and confidence that have not yet forsaken me. [Jacquetta Hawkes]

I was sitting on a low wall on the outskirts of the town of Chittagong. Across the road was a wayside teashop stall, with the proprietor in full view serving two customers. The branches of two small trees next to the stall waved in the moderately strong breeze and the sun shone with some glare on the white dusty road, along which came some fishermen with baskets of fish on their heads. From the second storey of a nearby building I could hear a nautch tune. Then, as the fishermen came abreast of me, one fish still alive, flapped up and seemed to stand on its tail and bow. I felt great compassion for the fish.
Suddenly everything was transformed, transfigured, translated, transcended. All was fused into one. I was the fish. The sun sang and the road sang. The music shone. The hands of the stall keeper danced. All in time with the same music. They were the music and I was the music and I was the fish, the fishermen, the hands of the stall-keeper, the trees, the branches, the road, the sun, the music; all one and nothing separate. Not parts of the one but the one itself. [Anon.]

As I was watching [the sun rise above the trees in a Calcutta street], suddenly, in a moment, a veil seemed to be lifted from my eyes. I found the world wrapt in an inexpressible glory with its waves of joy and beauty bursting and breaking on all sides. The thick cloud of sorrow that lay on my heart in many folds was pierced through and through by the light of the world, which was everywhere radiant…
There was nothing and no one whom I did not love at that moment… I stood on the veranda and watched the coolies as they tramped down the road. Their movements, their forms, their countenances seemed strangely wonderful to me, as if they were all moving like waves in the great ocean of the world. When one young man placed his hand upon the shoulder of another and passed laughingly by, it was a remarkable event to me… I seemed to witness, in the wholeness of my vision, the movements of the body of all humanity, and to feel the beat of the music and the rhythm of a mystic dance. [Rabindranath Tagore]

Crossing a bare common, in snow puddles, at twilight, under a clouded sky, without having in my thought any occurrence of special good fortune, I have enjoyed a perfect exhilaration. I am glad to the point of fear. [Ralph Waldo Emerson]

 

EDUCATION

If you would thoroughly know anything, teach it to others. [Tryon Edwards]

We do not really know anything at all until a long time after we have learned it. [Joseph Joubert]

Lessons are not given, they are taken. [Cesare Pavese]

Some people will never learn anything, for this reason, because they understand every thing too soon. [Alexander Pope]

Knowledge has to be sucked into the brain, not pushed into it. [Victor F. Weisskopf]

School is a foretaste of life. [Georg Brandes]

The one exclusive sign of thorough knowledge is the power of teaching. [Aristotle]

Education is a social process; education is growth; education is not a preparation for life but is life itself. [John Dewey]

To begin with, no school subject should be treated like a bitter pill that will go down only if sugar-coated. The merest hint of this confirms the pupil’s belief that he faces something dreadful and is a victim. [Jacques Barzun]

It is because the body is a machine that education is possible. Education is the formation of habits, a superinducing of an artificial organisation upon the natural organisation of the body: so that acts, which at first required a conscious effort, eventually became unconscious and mechanical. [T.H. Huxley]

Universities are meant to pass the torch of civilization, not just download data into student skulls, and the values of the academic community are strongly at odds with those of all would-be information empires. Teachers at all levels, from kindergarten up, have proven to be shameless and persistent
software and data pirates. Universities do not merely ‘‘leak information’’ but vigorously broadcast free thought. [Bruce Sterling]

Education is habit-forming rather than information; illumination rather than indoctrination, inspiration rather than compulsion. [Edwin Conklin]

A little learning is a dangerous thing;
Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring:
There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,
And drinking largely sobers us again. [Alexander Pope]

If while you are in school, there is a shortage of qualified personnel in a particular field, then by the time you graduate with the necessary qualifications, that field’s employment market is glutted. [Marguerite Emmons]

[Latin] taught mental agility, it taught a proper aesthetic sense, and the hard work involved taught generations of boys the value of ‘grind’ and showed them how to develop their powers of concentration. [C.W. Valentine]

You don’t understand anything until you learn it more than one way. [Marvin Minsky]

It is glorious to become a learner again at my time of life. [Bruno Walter]

Getting an education was a bit like a communicable sexual disease. It made you unsuitable for a lot of jobs and then you had the urge to pass it on. [Terry Pratchett]

You want to try to put something that you learn in your own language, so that it’s no longer something that’s merely memorized but something you transfer from your head to your gut — you simplify it and put it in your own language to the point where it seems almost obvious and intuitive. It’s only when you understand your science in this very obvious, intuitive way that you have a chance of thinking of something new. [Steven Chu]

Female education in this instance is merely futile, but it can be worse. It can, Gissing discloses, bring about physical and mental breakdown if pursued with unfeminine zeal. An acquaintance of Beatrice and Ada’s, Jessica Morgan, aims to become a graduate of London University. Jessica has never been much to look at – ‘a dolorous image of frustrate sex,’ with ‘hysteric determination’ glaring from her face. But as she labours for her matriculation, her appearance deteriorates alarmingly. Her complexion is ruined; her hair falls out. What she gains, moreover, is not genuine knowledge. Her head fills up with a ‘thrice-boiled essence of history’ and ‘ragged scraps of science.’ The examinations, when they arrive, prove too much for her. She collapses on the last day with an overtaxed brain and is carried out delirious. She never really recovers. The last we see of her is as a recruit to the Salvation Army, her face half-hidden by a ‘hideous bonnet,’ her eyes fixed in a ’stare of weak-minded fanaticism.’ [John Casey]

The Educated look down on the illiterate because they do not know the wonders of knowledge. The Uneducated look down on the illiterate because they have to deal with problems. [Edgar Allen Poe]

The more one learns, the more one discovers the increasing magnitude of the unknown, as anyone who has tried to do ‘exhaustive’ research knows very well. [June Singer]

There is none who cannot teach somebody something, and there is none so excellent but he is excelled. [Baltasar Gracian]

Most men are unwilling to be taught. [Samuel Johnson]

The basic proposal of the new education is to be that dunces and idlers must not be made to feel inferior to intelligent and industrious pupils. That would be ‘undemocratic.’ [C.S. Lewis]

What you grow up with you are given dogmatically, what you find you conquer yourself. [Remedios Varo]

When a good scientific paper earns a student as much glory as we shower upon the half-back who scored the winning touchdown, we shall have restored the balance that is largely missing from our schools. [Wernher von Braun]

Not to know is bad; not to wish to know is worse. [Wolof proverb]

An education isn’t how much you have committed to memory, or even how much you know. It’s being able to differentiate between what you know and what you don’t. [Anatole France]

Please forget whatever you’ve been studying at school; for you have not learned it. [Edmund Landau]

One can lead a child to knowledge but one cannot make him think. [Robert Heinlein]

… the man who has learned to think and to reason and to compare and to discriminate and to analyse, who has refined his taste, and formed his judgement, and sharpened his mental vision, will not indeed at once be a lawyer, or a pleader, or an orator, or a statesman, or a physician, or a good landlord, or a man of business, or a soldier, or an engineer, or a chemist, or a geologist, or an antiquarian, but he will be placed in that state of intellect in which he can take up any one of the sciences or callings I have referred to… with an ease, a grace, a versatility, and a success, to which another is a stranger. In this sense, then,… mental culture is emphatically useful. [Cardinal Newman]

… he did not set us on the right roads but off the roads. He disturbed our complacency. With him each one could acquire the technique that corresponded to his own temperament. [Matisse on Gustave Moreau's teaching]

Education… has produced a vast population able to read but unable to distinguish what is worth reading. [G.M. Trevelyan]

When school children study analytic geometry, they should be made aware that his seemingly trivial and esoteric subject exists to us only because of the heroic efforts of a succession of brilliant minds, culminating in the work of Descartes. Its depth, originality, and profundity are lost on students. It has been carefully polished and refined so exquisitely, presented so elegantly and simply, that students myopically receive it as a trifle. [J.D. Philips]

And how is “education” supposed to make me smarter? [Homer Simpson]

Only the educated are free. [Epictetus]

The mind is not a vessel to be filled but a fire to be kindled. [Plutarch]

Consider the unlearned, unaware of their ignorance, who think they know everything! As knowledge increases, ignorance decreases, but this kind of ignorance – unlearned ignorance – is no more than the lack of knowledge. With knowledge comes awareness of ignorance – learned ignorance – and the more we know, the more aware we become of what we do not know. [Edward Robert Harrison]

Education enables you to express assent or dissent in graduated terms. [William Cory]

Teaching to unsuspecting youngsters the effective use of formal methods is one of the joys of life because it is so extremely rewarding. [Edsger Dijkstra]

School days, I believe, are the unhappiest in the whole span of human existence. They are full of dull, unintelligible tasks, new and unpleasant ordinances, brutal violations of common sense and common decency. [H.L Mencken]

[Geoffrey Pike] told the boys [at Wellington] that even at the worst period of his imprisonment in Germany [during WW1], when he thought he was going to be shot, he had never been so miserable as when he had been at school there. [John Michell]

The man who is too old to learn was probably always too old to learn. [Henry S. Haskins]

I used to teach schoolchildren. With me there was a much better teacher (better in that she could interest and control a class and organise things and was in fact a very admirable and sensible person). One day she came into the room where I had been teaching and found a series of (to my mind) the most surprising and beautiful water-colours. ‘What are these?’ said she. I explained that they were copies of Raphael made by eleven- and twelve-year-old children. I would have gone to explain how interested I was by their resemblance, not to Raphael but rather to Simone Martini, for they had all the shapes beautifully right but none of the internal drawing or the sentiment, but I was checked by her look of horror.
‘You’ve made them copy from Raphael?’ she said. Her expression was exactly that of someone who had been casually informed that I had committed a series of indecent assaults upon the brats. And in fact in subsequent conversation it appeared that this was very nearly what she did feel. For her, what she called ’self-expression’ was as precious as virginity.
The worry of the thing was that these creative virgins were coming to school with traced drawings of Mickey Mouse and pictures from the lids of cereal packets and had indeed been violated 1,000 times before I ever introduced them to the forbidden delights of the Divine Urbinate, as Claude Philips used to call him. [Quentin Bell]

 

EFFEMINACY

‘The men of the twenties,’ Crisp noted drily, ‘searched themselves for vestiges of effeminacy as though for lice.’ The word ‘effeminate,’ as it has come to be used in recent years, implies some kind of loss, or lack, but the OED charts a fascinating progress – or regress – of the word. ‘That has become like a woman: womanish, unmanly, enervated, feeble; self-indulgent, voluptuous; unbecomingly delicate or over-refined.’ This is the usual modern understanding of ‘effeminacy,’ covering a whole range of types and behaviours from the dandy to the fop to the ‘sissy boy’ and the ‘nelly’. But the idea that effeminates are ‘self-indulgent, voluptuous,’ appears to derive – as does a pseudo-etymology of the word itself – from the notion of men excessively ‘devoted to women.’ This, at least, is a common Renaissance sense – that effeminacy is generated by sexual voluptuousness directed toward women, not toward men. Historically, then, ‘effeminacy’ is misogynistic as well as homophobic – no surprise, really, since, once again, what is being protected here is a notion of manhood or manliness as social norm. On the other hand, there also exist meanings for ‘effeminate’, albeit now marked ‘obsolete’ in the OED, that use the word ‘without implying reproach: gentle, tender, compassionate’…
So ‘effeminate’ can mean a condition caused by women (by excessive sexual interest in them) or the condition of being turned into a ‘woman’ (with the implication that the ‘effeminate’ man is not at all sexually interested in women). ‘Woman’ is, in either case, a stigmatized and fantasized agent. In expressing condemnation of various types of men, it is always women who are scapegoated. [Marjorie Garber]

… the charge of ‘effeminacy’ against men is not one of transvestism, much less of homosexuality (the word ‘effeminate’ meant something much closer to ‘self-indulgent, voluptuous,’ and hence ‘womanish’ or enslaved to women, in the period), but rather one of profligacy. Clothing – and the changeability of fashion – is an index of destabilization, displeasing to the monarch as to the sermonizer, since it renders the Englishman illegible, incapable of inscription. The Englishman satirized here is in effect a kind of commodity fetishist, whose obsession with commodity and style ignores the old values: ‘his estate and condition’. Later in the sermon women are equally taken to task: for their self-absorption, for rich apparel, face painting, hair dyeing, and questionable morals, since though they claim to be making themselves attractive for their husbands they go abroad for admiration, seeking to entice others. What is offensive, then, about excess of apparel for either gender is that it has a deleterious effect upon patriotic pride and upon both the national and the domestic economy.
But notice, particularly, that it is ‘excess’ that is stigmatized and deplored. Excess, that which overflows a boundary, is the space of the transvestite. Dancing shirts, ruffles, face painting – all of the Homily’s iconographic indicators of excess could be dislocated from the context of sumptuary laws and rearticulated as signs of another kind of vestimentary transgression, one that violated expected boundaries of gender identification or gender decorum. For one kind of crossing, inevitably, crosses over into another: the categories of ‘class’ and ‘rank’, ‘estate and condition’, which seem to contain and to regulate gender (‘earls and above’; ‘knights’ wives’), are in turn, interrogated by it. [Marjorie Garber]

(Dudley Moore (as shop assistant in a tailor’s) shows Sir Arthur (Peter Cook) a suit).
Dudley Moore: I think that’s rather nice, sir.
Sir Arthur Streeb-Greebling: I like it. The only thing that strikes me is that it is a trifle effeminate.
Dudley Moore: Effeminate, sir? Effeminate? I wouldn’t say it was effeminate.
Sir Arthur Streeb-Greebling: I would say it was effeminate, yes.
Dudley Moore: I wouldn’t say it was effeminate.
Sir Arthur Streeb-Greebling: I’ve just said it. It is effeminate. It is effeminate.
Dudley Moore: Well, sir, we had Max Schmeling the boxer in here the other day, and he went away with a replica of this very suit. And I wouldn’t call him effeminate, would you, sir?
Sir Arthur Streeb-Greebling: Max Schmeling? No, I wouldn’t call him effeminate. No.
Dudley Moore: He’s not effeminate, sir. He’s never been near a woman in his life. He wouldn’t touch one, you know, sir.
Sir Arthur Streeb-Greebling: It really worries me, this effeminate thing, because my wife is extremely effeminate, you know. Ghastly business. I don’t know where she picked it up. She sort of goes flimflamming about the place. It’s most depressing.
Dudley Moore: Well, we don’t want people having difficulty trying to distinguish between the pair of you, do we?
Sir Arthur Streeb-Greebling: Certainly not.

Men who care passionately for women attach themselves at least as much to the temple and to the accessories of the cult as to their goddess herself. [Marguerite Yourcenar]

Femininity is quintessentially a male attribute. [Mary Daly]

For the Greeks, the unnameable aspect of eros was passivity during coitus. If the male beloved (eromenos) has to be so careful and to observe so many rules to distinguish his behaviour beyond any shadow of a doubt from that of the male prostitute, who, ‘despite having a man’s body, sins a woman’s sins,’ it is not simply because of the indignity attached to whoever accepts the woman’s part, thus debasing his sexual status. Rather, it is the very pleasure of the woman, the pleasure of passivity, that is suspect and perhaps conceals a profound malignancy. This treacherous pleasure incites the Greek man to rage against the grossness inherent in the physiology and anatomy of these aesthetically inferior beings, obliged to parade ‘prominent, shapeless breasts, which they keep bound up like prisoners.’ But he rages precisely because he senses that this grossness might conceal a mocking power that eludes male control…
But it wasn’t so much love between women that scandalised the Greeks – to their credit they were not easily scandalised – as the suspicion, which had taken root in their minds, that women might have their own indecipherable erotic self-sufficiency, and that those rites and mysteries they celebrated, and in which they refused to let men participate, might be the proof of this. And behind it all, their most serious suspicion had to do with pleasure in coitus. Only Tiresias had been able to glimpse the truth, and that was precisely why he was blinded. [Roberto Calasso]

The paradigmatic body upon which these models of the self were negotiated was implicitly male. For this reason, the problem of effeminacy frequently served as a test case for the reliability of the semiotics of the body. For John Bulwer, ‘effeminacy’ had several implications. Occasionally, he used this or similar terms misogynistically to describe the presence in men of behaviours that he attributed to women. More frequently, he used the term effeminacy to describe the arrogance, affectation, and sloth of the ruling classes, and what he perceived as their difference from the bourgeois values of dependability and productivity. In his manuals on the gestures of the hands, Bulwer distinguished effeminate gestures by their difference from the normative gestures representative of Protestant bourgeois values – the handshake, by which business partners sealed their negotiations and showed trustworthiness, and the hands raised in prayer or thanksgiving. In Bulwer’s ‘Alphabet of Manual Expression,’ the extended, open, or offered hand appeared frequently as a sign of good will. To the open hand, he contrasted excessive gesturing with the hands, which he described as ‘subtle gesticulation and toying behaviour’ – terms generally used to describe the actions of courtiers and women. Excessive gesturing was like the ‘sleight of hand’ of magicians, pickpockets, and actors, all of whom ‘mock the eye.’ Gestural excess, then, was the lowest common denominator of all sorts of effeminacy.
Bourgeois ideology was increasingly concerned with limiting excess through a criticism of its content. Throughout his treatise on gestures, Bulwer seems caught between understanding effeminacy as a sign of excessive or dissimulated interiority (a false use of one’s body), or as a new kind of interiority, a new content (a characteristic use of the body by a particular kind of person). At one point, Bulwer argued that wagging the hand in a swinging gesture indicated that ‘kind of wantonness and effeminacy’ that should disqualify a man from military service. Moreover, as a habitual mannerism, wagging the hand was not only effeminate as a gesture, it indicated an inherent effeminacy of the subject.
Bulwer’s hypothesis that habitual behaviours indicated innate character was part of the accumulating discourse that, by 1700, would produce the knowledge that a man who had sex habitually with other men was innately different from a man who had sex habitually with women. This corresponded with the politically motivated disclosures of the molly subculture in the first two decades of the eighteenth century. The mollies were an underground society of men who met in taverns to have sex with other men and to parody in improvised performances the increasingly normative concept of companionate heterosexual marriage prevalent among the Puritan bourgeoisie…

In 1644, Bulwer cautioned the speaker against standing with arms akimbo: ‘To set the arms agambo or aprank, and to rest the turned-in back of the hand upon the side is an action of pride and ostentation, unbeseeming the hand of an orator.’ Bulwer’s invocation of ‘pride and ostentation’ recalled the attribution of the deadliest of the seven deadly sins – pride – to the ruling classes…
Setting the arm akimbo with the hand turned back was undoubtedly cultivated by the aristocrats: it appeared in many of their portraits during the mannerist and baroque periods…
But by the mid-eighteenth century, the bourgeois strategy of specifying an affected bodily style as sodomy – a transcoding from the connection of aristocratic spectacularity with sexual excess – had produced a reading of this gesture as characteristic of the effeminate sodomite. In a 1761 satire called The Fribbleriad, David Garrick assigned the gesture to two sexually suspect ‘fribbles,’ one of whom ‘had a thumb stuck to his hips, and jutting bum’ while the other had ‘kimbow’d arm and tossing head’…[?]

 

ELEGANCE

It is not possible for a man to be elegant without a touch of femininity. [Vivienne Westwood]

I can’t have been elegant at the ball because you noticed me. [Beau Brummell]

A woman dressed by Chanel back in the twenties and thirties – like a woman dressed by Balenciaga in the fifties and sixties – walked into a room and had a dignity, an authority, a thing beyond a question of taste. [Diana Vreeland]

… no movement he made was superfluous. [Lee Miller on Man Ray]

Elegance is an essentially modern concept. It is not a word found in descriptions of Queen Elizabeth I or Marie Antoinette. In Jane Austen’s novels it is a term more likely to be used to describe men than women. It is a state of mind, a physical manner of presentation that only really came into existence when women took on the silhouettes and shapes of male fashion, which aim at elongating and narrowing the body, rather than the traditional bulk of female fashion, which filled space and constrained movement.
Sleek, svelte and stripped of unnecessary ornament, elegance became a manifestation of the machine age, which came into its own in the twentieth century when functionally efficient design was achieved by removing all references to the past in order to facilitate as well as reveal an object’s purpose…
Elegance has traditionally been the province of the male, certainly since the early years of the nineteenth century, when masculine dress became sober and simple, relying for its effects not on decoration but on perfection of cut and quality of material. Beau Brummell was the icon of the new approach, leading men’s fashion away from Regency foppery to the more sober approach to dress that is exemplified by Savile Row tailors. The make silhouette was honed and perfected during the nineteenth century when women’s fashion – in strong and sociologically interesting contrast – ran the gamut of decorative idiocies, from the crinoline to the bustle. In fact, it can be argued convincingly that modern fashion for women only began when they adopted the male silhouette in the early years of this century.
It began as a high-fashion look with Chanel but soon broadened under the influence of film. By the mid-Thirties, the elegant woman of power played by Joan Crawford, the sexually mysterious woman portrayed by Marlene Dietrich and the androgynous woman of mystery, personified by Greta Garbo all dressed in the way that Patou called ‘the American silhouette’: long and slender. It is these women, their appearance and aura, who inspire modern designers in their search for elegance…
What made Garbo and her contemporaries fascinating and lasting icons – as opposed to the myriad of pretty, lesser stars that Hollywood swallowed up and threw away with alarming rapidity – was the fact that, in different ways, they all appeared on the screen as strong, complex characters, able to hold their own in any situation and having many characteristics which in real life would be considered masculine. They looked their best in tailored suits and the simplest narrow evening dresses that eschewed fluffy femininity for direct and uncompromising female power. [Colin MacDowell]

Elegance is the quality of conduct which transforms the greatest amount of being into appearance. [Jean-Paul Sartre]

Invisibility seem to me a sine qua non of elegance. Elegance ceases to exist once it is noticed. [Jean Cocteau]

Egypt is history’s first romance of hierarchy. Pharaoh, elevated and sublime, contemplated life’s panorama. His eye was the sun disk at the apex of the social pyramid. He had point of view, an Apollonian sight-line. Egypt invented the magic of image. The mystique of kingship had to be projected over thousands of miles to keep the nation together. Conceptualisation and projection: in Egypt is forged the formalistic Apollonian line that will end in modern cinema, master genre of our century. Egypt invented glamour, beauty as power and power as beauty. Egyptian aristocrats were the first Beautiful People. Hierarchy and eroticism fused in Egypt…

Egyptian art is glyptic, that is carved or engraved. It is based on the incised edge, which I identify as the Apollonian element in Western culture. Stone is obdurate, unregenerate nature. The incised edge is the line drawn between nature and culture. It is the steely autograph of the Western will. We will find the sharp Apollonian contour in psychology as well as art. Western personality is hard, impermeable, intractable. Spengler says ‘the brilliant polish of the stone in Egyptian art’ makes the eye ‘glide’ along the statue surface. The West’s armoured ego begins in the shiny stone idealisations of Old Kingdom Pharaohs, objets d’art, and objets de culte. The green diorite statue of enthroned Chephren from Giza is a masterpiece of smooth, glossy, Apollonian definitiveness. Its hardness of surface repels the eye. This masculine hardness is an abolition of female interiority. There are no warm womb-spaces in aristocratic Egyptian art. The body is a shaft of frozen Apollonian will. The flatness of Egyptian wall-painting and relief serves the same function, obliterating woman’s inner darkness. Every angle of the body is crisp, clean, and sunlit. Sagging maternal breasts of the Willendorf kind usually appear, oddly enough, only on male fertility gods like Hapi, the Nile god. Egypt is the first to glamorise small breasts. The breast as vernal adornment rather than rubbery milk sac, outline rather than volume: Apollonian Egypt made the first shift of value from femaleness to femininity, an advanced erotic art form…

Egypt invented interior décor, civilised living; it made beauty out of social life. The Egyptians were the first aesthetes. An aesthete does not necessarily dress well or collect art works: an aesthete is one who lives by the eye. The Egyptians had ‘taste.’ Taste is Apollonian discrimination, judgement, connoisseurship; taste is the visible logic of objects. Arnold Hauser says of the Middle Kingdom, ‘The stiffly ceremonial forms of courtly art are absolutely new and come into prominence here for the first time in the history of human culture.’ The Egyptians lived by ceremony; they ritualised social life. The aristocratic house was a cool, airy temple of harmony and grace; the minor arts had unparalleled quality of design. Jewellery, make-up, costume, chairs, tables, cabinets… Artefacts from other Near Eastern cultures – the golden bull’s lyre from Ur, for example – seem cluttered, bulky, muscle-bound. In their cult of the eye, the Egyptians saw edges. Even their stylised gestures in art have a superb balletic contour. The Egyptians invented elegance. Elegance is reduction, simplification, condensation. It is spare, stark, sleek. Elegance is cultivated abstraction…

I spoke of the Egyptian’s invention of femininity, an aesthetic of social practice removed from nature’s brutal female machinery. Aristocratic Egyptian women’s costume, an exquisite tunic of transparent pleated linen, must be called slinky, a word we still use for formfitting evening gowns. Slinkiness is the nocturnal stealth of cats. The Egyptians admired sleekness, in greyhounds, jackals, and hawks. Sleekness is smooth Apollonian contour. But slinkiness is the sinuous craft of daemonic darkness, which the cat carries into day… [Camille Paglia]

The androgyne of manners inhabits the world of the drawing room and recreates that world wherever it goes, through manner and speech. The salon is an abstract circle where male and female, like mathematical ciphers, are equal and interchangeable. Personality becomes a sexually undifferentiated formal mask. Rousseau says of the eighteenth-century salon, ‘Every woman at Paris gathers in her apartment a harem of men more womanish than she.’ The salon is politics by coterie, a city-state or gated forum run on a barter economy of gender exchange.
Elegance, the ruling principle of the salon, dictates that all speech must be wit, in symmetrical pulses of repartee, a malicious stichomythia. Pope complained that Lady Mary Wortley Motagu and the epicene Lord Hervey had ‘too much wit’ for him. He sensed the icy cruelty of the beau monde, to whom moral discourse is alien because it elevates the inner world over the outer… The salon, like the petrified object-world venerated by the aesthete, is a spectacle of dazzling surfaces. Words, faces, and gestures are exhibited in a blaze of hard glamour. Though he toys with the idea of spiritual hermaphroditism, Pope loathes the androgyne of manners, whom he satirises as the Amazonian belles and effeminate beaux of the Rape of the Lock. The salon is populated by sophisticates of a classical literacy, but its speed of dialogue and worship of the ephemeral inhibit deliberation and reflection, recklessly breaking with the past. Pope might have said, had the word been available, that the salon was too chic. The androgyne of manners – the male feminine in his careless, lounging passivity, the female masculine in her brilliant, aggressive wit – has the profane sleekness of chic…

Kenneth Clark says of Cellini’s and Giambologna’s streamlined Mannerist figures: ‘The goddess of mannerism is the eternal feminine of the fashion plate. A sociologist could no doubt give ready answers why embodiments of elegance should take this somewhat ridiculous shape – feet and hands too fine for honest work, bodies too thin for child-bearing, and heads too small to contain a single thought. But elegant proportions may be found in many objects that are exempt from these materialist explanations – in architecture, pottery, or even handwriting. The human body is not the basis of these rhythms but their victim. Where the sense of chic originates, how it is controlled, by what inner pattern we unfailingly recognise it – all these are questions too large and too subtle for a parenthesis. One thing is certain. Chic is not natural. Congreve’s Millamant or Baudelaire’s dandy warn us how hateful, to serious votaries of chic, is everything that is implied by the word ‘nature.’
Smoothness and elongation: the Mannerist figure is a chain of polished ovoids hung on a mannequin’s frame. Like Spenser’s aristocrats, Lord Henry Wotton, with his ‘long nervous fingers,’ is an ectomorph, an undulating ribbon of Mannerist Art Nouveau. The ectomorphic line is a suave vertical, repudiating nature by resisting gravity. But the Mannerist figure, overcome by worldly fatigue, sinks back towards earth in languorous torsion. The androgyne of manners can be seen in effete collapse in Henry Lamb’s painting of Lytton Strachey turning his back to a window, his long denatured limbs draped over an armchair like wet noodles. Because of its swift verbal genius, the androgyne of manners is best represented as sleekness and speed. Count Robert de Montesquiou, model for Huysman’s Des Esseintes and Proust’s Charlus, was called a ‘greyhound in evening dress,’ a perfect phrase for Lord Henry.
Sleekness in a male is usually a hermaphroditic motif. Cinema evokes this theme in its topos of the well-bred English ‘gentleman,’ a word that cannot be perfectly translated into any other language. The English gentleman shows the influence of Castiglione’s theory of courtesy as late as the eighteenth century. Movies from the Thirties through the Fifties used actors of this kind to illustrate a singular male beauty, witty and plushed, uniting sensitivity of response to intense heterosexual glamour: Leslie Howard, Rex Harrison, Cary Grant, Fred Astaire, David Niven, Michael Wilding, George Hamilton. The idiomatic qualities are smoothness and elongation: smooth both in manner and appearance, long in ectomorphic height and Nordic cranial contour. I think, for instance, of the astounding narrowness of Cary Grant’s shiny black evening pumps in Indiscreet. The smoothness and elongation of figure are best shown off by a gleaming tuxedo, signifying a renunciation of masculine hirsutism. The debonair cinematic gentleman is usually prematurely balding, with hair swept back at the temples. His receding hairline is sexually expressive, suggesting hermaphroditic gentility, a grace of intellect and emotion. [Camille Paglia]

It takes that je ne sais quoi which we call sophistication for a woman to be magnificent in a drawing-room when her faculties have departed but she herself has not yet gone home. [James Thurber]

Elegance is not a dispensable luxury but a factor that decides between success and failure. [Edsger Dijkstra]

 

ENGLISH

The atmosphere of English casualness is most attractive. It is pleasant to see things done without fuss. It is engaging to meet a man (as I once did in Naples) who will casually discuss Plato’s Republic for an hour and then indolently arise and declare: ‘I must push on; my boat leaves for India in half an hour.’ [Irwin Edman]

[In England] most of us are not men or women but members of a vast seedy, overworked, overlegislated, neuter class, with our drab clothes, our ration books and murder stories, our envious, stricken, old-world apathies and resentments. [Cyril Connolly]

Complacent mental illness is the English disease. [Cyril Connolly]

Englishmen never will be slaves: they are free to do whatever the Government and public opinion allow them to do. [George Bernard Shaw]

I have occasionally remarked that the only entirely creditable incident in English history is the sending of one hundred pounds to Beethoven on his deathbed by the London Philharmonic Society; and it is the only one that historians never mention. [George Bernard Shaw]

My child: one word of warning first. Let me complete my friend Lucifer’s similitude of the classical concert. At every one of those concerts in England you will find rows of weary people who are there, not because they really like classical music, but because they think they ought to like it. Well, there is the same thing in heaven. A number of people sit there in glory, not because they are happy, but because they think they owe it to their position to be in heaven. They are almost all English. [George Bernard Shaw]

Now the English are ill with precision; unpunctuality is the second greatest sin, ranking just below murder; in shaving, no hair must be overlooked; the minute of a visit are counted before it begins; the fence around a property is sacred; a book consists of a number of letters, no one lies. [Elias Canetti]

… in real sound stupidity the English are unrivalled. [Walter Bagehot]

In no other country, compared with England, do we find such numerous and formidable examples of this extreme scourge [of insanity]. In some measure this may arise from the habitual pride and hauteur of the English character; partly from the commercial greatness which it has long been her boast to enjoy; and partly from the unnatural style of living too generally adopted. [Alfred Beaumont Maddock]

There is something in port which is in pre-established harmony with the best English character. [Lord Saintsbury]

… cursing young Englishman, who was half sportsman, half peasant, half gentleman and altogether insufferable. [Felix Mendelssohn]

Why do English people find it so hard to dance fluidly in time?… Dancing is not a pleasure but a social necessity for them, an expected thing… A vestigial classic upbringing with all the stoic virtues of Empire builders precludes anything which smacks of indiscipline. Don’t let go. Freeze in the straight jacket of inhibition. Establish your age, class, and identity. The only time the mask slips is after an evening of careful drinking when the moment for the last dance reels around. [Jean Peters]

But Lord! To see the absurd nature of Englishmen that cannot forbear laughing and jeering at everything that looks strange. [Samuel Pepys]

It is a part of English hypocrisy – or English reserve – that whilst we are fluent enough in grumbling about small inconveniences, we insist on making light of any great difficulties or griefs that may beset us. [Max Beerbohm]

Whatever is not boring here is not English… If only London were not so black and the people not so heavy and dull, and if only there were no sooty smell or fogs, I might already have learnt English. But these English are so different from the French, whom I have become attached to just as if they were my own people. They consider everything in terms of money; they love art because it is a luxury. They are good and kind souls, but so eccentric that I quite understand that if I stayed here I myself could become petrified or turned into a machine. [Frederic Chopin]

For Byron, fresh from the cold fogs of England, the clear skies, the turquoise water glistening in the brilliant sunshine became a symbol for the whole climate of Eastern life… The description of the sun setting over the Morea ‘in one unclouded blaze of living light’… symbolised his whole Greek experience, the open brightness as opposed to the clouded murkiness of English weather, the freedom and frankness of life and manners in contrast to the English reserve and hypocrisy. [Leslie Marchand]

In general they’re gayer than English people seem to have been for fifty years at least. Contemporary England is peculiar for being the most highly organised country, in the social sense, for ensuring the moral and material welfare of everybody – pullulating with decent laws, with high-minded committees, with societies for preventing or encouraging this or that – and yet it has produced, in consequence, the dullest society in western Europe: a society blighted by blankets of negative respectability, and of dogmatic domesticity. The teenagers don’t seem to care for this, and have organised their underground of joy. [Colin MacInnes]

England is the paradise of individuality, eccentricity, heresy, anomalies, hobbies, and humours. [George Santayana]

Winkleman [sic] on this subject made a remark which is at least worth copying. Your poets and philosophers, said he, have always been Englishmen and either patriots or courtiers. They have had views and ends which gave a certain degree of importance to their works… But it has made them incapable of attaining the highest degree of excellence. [Crabb Robinson]

The French want no-one to be their superior. The English want inferiors. The Frenchman constantly raises his eyes above him with anxiety. The Englishman lowers his beneath him with satisfaction. [Alexis de Tocqueville]

[Barbey d'Aurevilly's] highly eccentric view of England (ce pays des grotesques,’ he called Victoria’s kingdom, ‘où le spleen, l’excentricité, la richess et le gin, travaillent perpétuellement à faire un carnaval…’). [Ellen Moers]

The reason for the large numbers of students taking English was given frankly by a somewhat disaffected instructor: many of the students proposed to end up working for airlines or banks, in which English was the worldwide lingua franca. This all but terminally consigned English to the level of a technical language stripped of expressive and aesthetic characteristics and denuded of any critical or self-conscious dimension. You learned English to use computers, respond to orders, transmit telexes, decipher manifests, and so forth. That was all. [Edward Saïd]

To the peoples of antiquity the isle of Britain was the very home and environment of mystery, a sacred territory, to enter which was to encroach upon a region of enchantment, the dwelling of the gods, the shrine and habitation of a cult of peculiar sanctity and mystical power. Britain was, indeed, the insula sacra of the West, an island veiled and esoteric, the Egypt of the Occident. [Lewis Spence]

Besides the perpetual lamentations after beef & beer, the stupid bigoted contempt for every thing foreign, and insurmountable incapacity of acquiring even a few words of any language, rendered him like all other English servants, an incumbrance. – I do assure you the plague of speaking for him, the comforts he required (more than myself by far) the pilaws (a Turkish dish of rice and meat) which he could not eat, the wines which he could not drink, the beds where he could not sleep, & the long list of calamities such as stumbling horses, want of tea!!! &c which assailed him, would have made a lasting source of laughter to a spectator, and of inconvenience to a Master. [Lord Byron]

To disagree with three fourths of the British public on all points is one of the first elements of sanity. [Oscar Wilde]

After a young man has employed his time to advantage at a public school, and has continued his application to various branches of science till the age of twenty, you ask, what are the advantages he is likely to reap from a tour abroad…?
However persuaded he may be of the advantages enjoyed by the people of England, he will see the harshness and impropriety of insulting the natives of other countries with an ostentatious enumeration of those advantages; he will perceive how odious those travellers make themselves, who laugh at the religion, ridicule the customs, and insult the police of the countries through which they pass, and who never fail to insinuate to the inhabitants that they are all slaves and bigots. Such bold Britons we have sometimes met with, fighting their way through Europe, who, by their continual broils and disputes, would lead one to imagine, that the angel of the Lord had pronounced on each of them the same denunciation which he did on Ishmael the son of Abraham, by his handmaid Hagar: ‘And he will be a wild man, and his hand will be against every man, and every man’s hand against him.’ If the same unsocial disposition should creep into our politics, it might arm all the powers in Europe against Great Britain, before she gets clear of her unhappy contest with America. [John Moore]

… it is a well-known fact that the British have no aptitude for getting outside their skins and placing themselves in the position of other people. [Simone Weil]

[England is a place] where the worship of beauty and the passion of love are considered infamous. [Oscar Wilde]

What a pity it is that we have no amusements in England but vice and religion! [Sydney Smith]

I think it’s very unhealthy for a society to love the police the way the English do. [Joe Orton]

England – what colour is that? Russet brown? It’s redder, it’s paler. And that? Redder, brighter, tan. Leaves wet and fallen in the wood. And the orange, pale creamy brown orange fields, ploughed.
The winding lanes, brambles, the grass banks, the tangled hedges, wolds, a square tower on a church, the orchard and double-snowdrops, the pool glimmering like cut glass, clogged with waterweeds.
Escaped periwinkle, purple. Grey stone houses and buildings part of the land, fences of stone, overlying, indefinite, rising around. [Elizabeth Smart]

Eccentricity exists particularly in the English, and partly, I think because of that peculiar and satisfactory knowledge of infallibility that is the hallmark and birthright of the British nation. [Edith Sitwell]

… when you meet Englishmen in a foreign country, their weaknesses are all the more glaring because of the contrast. They are the gods of boredom, chasing from one country to another in gleaming carriages, and leaving a grey dust-cloud of sadness in their wake wherever they go. There is also their curiosity without interest, their well-heeled clumsiness, insolent stupidity, four-square egoism and delight in melancholy subjects. [Heinrich Heine]

No one can be as calculatedly rude as the British, which amazes Americans, who do not understand studied insult and can only offer abuse as a substitute. [Paul Gallico]

Of course, I remind myself patriotically, Britain isn’t the only country with labour problems. But is there any other country, I wonder, where you can’t discover what the problem is? From time to time we are addressed over the loudspeaker; but the voice – the characteristic voice of British officialdom, fussy, adenoidal, using vocabulary a little above its understanding – offers no explanations. Instead it chides – there is no other word for it – chides us for being restless and impatient and blocking the exits. The Americans, who find it quaint to be chided, laugh and clap. The British automatically form queues for newspapers, currency, cups of tea, spread their coats on the floor and lay their children to sleep, and generally behave as though they are back in the Blitz. [David Lodge]

Let the power workers dim the street lamps, or even plunge whole districts into darkness, the lights of righteousness and duty burn all the brighter from 10,000 darkened drawing rooms in Chelsea or the Surrey hills. ‘Sir, May I, writing by candlelight, express my total support for the government in their attempt to halt the unbelievably inflated wage claims now being made’…
Historians have often paid tribute to this peculiar character of the British. It is in grave adversity; in states of emergency, that they have noticed this flaring-up of the British spirit. Only then do those proper guardians of the conscience of the community – the retiring middle-classes – shed their usual reticence and openly articulate their values and commitments…
‘Sir,’ wrote one unfortunate gentleman whose carriage windows were smashed in the rioting: ‘I am subscriber to various charities and hospitals, which I shall discontinue. I have always advocated the cause of the people. I shall do so no more’…
But wounded and long-suffering righteousness, on these occasions, takes second place to the firm disciplinary mode. ‘Sir,’ demanded one correspondent in 1886, ‘What is the use of having a highly paid Commissioner of Police, with proportionately highly paid deputies, if they are afraid of the responsibility attaching to their posts?… When there is a kennel riot in any kennel of hounds, the huntsmen and whips do not wait to get the special orders of the master, but proceed to restore order at once’…
‘Sir… On returning home from the Prince’s Levée I was walking through Pall Mall, in uniform. It was gradually filling with very suspicious-looking “unemployed” at that time, two of whom, turning towards me, one said, rather significantly, ‘Why, who the – is this chap?’
‘As I passed the War Office entrance, formerly the Duke of Buckingham’s, a blind fiddler, led by a little girl, came by… playing some odd tune or other, when a young guardsman on sentry stepped out and said, in a commanding tone, “You stop that noise”… I thought “Now there is a man of common sense and of action.” It was a little thing to stop at the time, but when the snowball which a child or a blind fiddler could set rolling on the top of the hill reaches the bottom it has become in this country an immovable monster, in other countries a destroying avalanche’…
John E. Williams had been reported, in 1886, as having deplored that the unemployed were not well enough organised – not to riot and destroy property – but to occupy the bank, Stock Exchange and government offices. ‘Sir,’ wrote one Timesian, ‘if correctly reported Williams must be an atrocious miscreant, compared with whom Gashford in Barnaby Rudge is a virtuous person.’ [E.P. Thompson]

We were to stay at Paak Hok Tung, a village half a mile down the river. American and English missionaries have made a settlement there. Walking up the tidy path between playing-fields, college buildings, and villa gardens, you might fancy yourself at home in one of the pleasanter London suburbs. And it was in a pleasant, cultured suburban drawing-room that our missionary host and hostess gave us tea. Had we had a nice journey, yes: Auden had had to pay thirty dollars duty on his camera. Oh, how tiresome; but you’ll get it back. Was it usually so hot in Canton at this time of year? No, it wasn’t. Five days ago, it had been quite chilly.
Somewhere, from far away across the river, came a succession of dull, heavy thuds; felt rather than heard. And then, thin and distinct, the whine which a mosquito makes, when it dives for your face in the dark. Only this wasn’t a mosquito. More thuds. I looked around at the others. Was it possible that they hadn’t noticed? Clearing my throat, I said as conversationally as I could manage: ‘Isn’t that an air-raid?’
Our hostess glanced up, smiling, from the tea-tray: ‘Yes, I expect it is. They come over about this time, most afternoons… Do you take sugar and milk?’
Yes, I took both; and A piece of home-made sultana cake as well, to cover my ill-bred emotions. It was all very well for Auden to sit there so calmly, arguing about the Group Movement. He had been in Spain. My eyes moved over this charming room, taking in the tea-cups, the dish of scones, the book-case with Chesterton’s essays and Kipling’s poems, the framed photograph of an Oxford college. My brain tried to relate these images to the sounds outside; the whine of the power-diving bomber, the distant thump of the explosions. Understand, I told myself, that these noises, these objects are part of a single, integrated scene. Wake up. It’s all quite real. And, at that moment, I really did wake up. At that moment, suddenly, I arrived in China.
‘They’re moving off now,’ our hostess told me. She had the kindly air of one who wishes to reassure a slightly nervous child about a thunderstorm. ‘They never stay very long.’ [Christopher Isherwood]

If the natives of this island either from the peculiar constitution of the air they breathe, or the immoderate quantity of flesh-meats they eat, or of the malt liquors they drink or any other secret causes, are more disposed to coughs, catarrhs, and consumptions, than the neighbouring nations; they are no less obnoxious to hypochondriacal and hysterical affections, vulgarly called the spleen and vapours, in a superior and distinguishing degree. And of all the chronical distempers that afflict the body, or disturb the mind, these two, consumptions and the spleen are the most rife and prevalent; and either directly or by their own power, or by introducing other diseases, make the greatest havoc and destruction among the people. [Richard Blackmore]

England’s not a bad country. It’s just a mean, cold, ugly, divided, tired, clapped-out, post-industrial slag-heap covered in polystyrene hamburger cartons. [Margaret Drabble]

Rabelais gives a number of characterisations repeating the popular blazons. For instance, he writes: saoul comme un Anglais (drunk as an Englishman). This was a persistent blazon of the English; even in the oldest, thirteenth-century collection England is defined by this trait: Li mieldre buveor en Engleterre, ‘the best drunkards are in England’. [Mikhail Bakhtin]

Always in England if you had the type of brain that was capable of understanding T.S. Eliot’s poetry or Kant’s logic, you could be sure of finding large numbers of people who would hate you violently. [D.J. Taylor]

… English educators were obsessed with the development of character rather than the inculcation of knowledge. [John Wain]

England is pre-eminently a land of atmosphere… English landscape, if we think only of the land and the works of man upon it, is seldom on the grand scale. Charming, clement, and eminently habitable, it is almost too domestic, as if only home passions and caged souls could live there. But life the eyes for a moment above the line of roofs or treetops, and there the grandeur you miss on the earth is spread gloriously before you. [George Santayana]

… our conversations about the weather are not really about the weather at all: English weather-speak is a form of code, evolved to help us overcome our natural reserve and actually talk to each other. Everyone knows, for example, that ‘Nice day, isn’t it?’, ‘Ooh, isn’t it cold?’, ‘Still raining, eh?’ and other variations on the theme are not requests for meteorological data: they are ritual greetings, conversation-starters or default ‘fillers’…
The English have clearly chosen a highly appropriate aspect of our own familiar natural world as a social facilitator: the capricious and erratic nature of our weather ensures that there is always something new to comment on, be surprised by, speculate about, moan about, or, perhaps most important, agree about…. [Kate Fox]

… while there may indeed be something distinctive about English humour, the real ‘defining characteristic’ is the value we put on humour…
Serious matters can be spoken of seriously, but one must never take oneself too seriously. The ability to laugh at ourselves, although it may be rooted in a form of arrogance, is one of the more endearing characteristics of the English…
And Americans, although among the easiest to scoff at, are by no means the only targets of our cynical censure. The sentimental patriotism of leaders and the portentous earnestness of writers, artists, actors, musicians, pundits and other public figures of all nations are treated with equal derision and disdain by the English, who can spot the slightest hint of self-importance at twenty paces, even on a grainy television picture and in a language we don’t understand…
… the tiniest sign that a speaker may be overdoing the intensity and crossing the line from sincerity to earnestness – will be spotted and picked up on immediately, with scornful cries of ‘Oh, come off it!’….
What is unique about English humour is the pervasiveness of irony and the importance we attach to it. Irony is the dominant ingredient in English humour, not just a piquant flavouring,,,
‘The problem with the English,’ complained one American visitor, ‘is that you never now when they are joking – you never know whether they are being serious or not’…
The English may not always be joking, but they are always in a state of readiness for humour. We do not always say the opposite of what we mean, but we are always alert to the possibility of irony….
The English are rightly renowned for their use of understatement, not because we invented it or because we do it better than anyone else, but because we do it so much…
The reasons for our prolific understating are not hard to discover: our strict prohibitions on earnestness, gushing, emoting and boasting require almost constant use of understatement. Rather than risk exhibiting any hint of forbidden solemnity, unseemly emotion or excessive zeal, we go to the opposite extreme and feign dry, deadpan indifference. The understatement rule means that a debilitating and painful chronic illness must be described as ‘a bit of a nuisance’; a truly horrific experience is ‘well, not exactly what I would have chosen’; a sight of breathtaking beauty is ‘quite pretty’; an outstanding performance or achievement is ‘not bad’; an act of abominable cruelty is ‘not very friendly’; and an unforgivably stupid misjudgement is ‘not very clever’; the Antarctic is ‘rather cold’ and the Sahara ‘a bit too hot for my taste’; and any exceptionally delightful object, person or event, which in other cultures would warrant streams of superlatives, is pretty much covered by ‘nice’, or, if we wish to express more ardent approval, ‘very nice’….

Our instinctive avoidance of earnestness results in a way of conducting business or work-related discussions that the uninitiated foreigner finds quite disturbing: a sort of offhand, dispassionate, detached manner – always giving the impression, as one of my most perceptive foreign informants put it, ‘of being rather underwhelmed by the whole thing, including themselves and the product they were supposed to be trying to sell me’. This impassive, undemonstrative demeanour seems to be normal practice across all trades and professions, from jobbing builders to high-price barristers. It is not done to get too excited about pne’s products or services – one must not be seen to care too much, however desperate one may in fact be to close a deal; this would be undignified… ther is nothing the English detest more than an over-zealous salesman, and excessive keenness will only make us cringe and back off…
… we then compound the error by making remarks such as ‘Well, it’s not bad, considering’ or ‘You cold do a lot worse,’ when trying to convince someone that our loft conversions or legal acumen or whatever are really the best that money can buy. Then we have a tendency to say ‘Well, I expect we’ll manage somehow,’ when we mean ‘Yes, certainly, no trouble’ and ‘That would be quite helpful,’ when we mean ‘For Christ’s sake, that should have been done yesterday!’; and ‘We seem to have a bit of a problem,’ when there has been a complete and utter disaster…
It takes foreign colleagues and clients a while to realise that when the English say ‘Oh really? How interesting!’ they might well mean ‘I don’t believe a word of it, you lying toad’. Or they might not. They might just mean ‘I’m bored and not really listening but trying to be polite.’ Or they might be genuinely surprised and truly interested. You’ll never know. [Kate Fox]

Ritual moaning in the workplace is a form of social bonding, an opportunity to establish and reinforce common values by sharing a few gripes and groans about mutual annoyances and irritations. In all English moaning rituals, there is a tacit understanding that nothing can or will be done about the problems we are moaning about. We complain to each other, rather than tackling the real source of our discontent, and we neither expect nor want to find a solution to our problems – we just want to enjoy moaning about them. Our ritual moaning is purely therapeutic, not strategic or purposeful: the moan is an end in itself…
The appropriate tone is encapsulated in the English moan-ritual catchphrase ‘Typical!’ which you will hear many times a day, every day, in every workplace in the country. ‘Typical!’ is also used in moaning rituals in many other contexts, such as on delayed trains or buses, in traffic jams, or indeed where anything goes wrong. Along with ‘nice’, ‘typical’ is one of the most useful and versatile words in the English vocabulary – a generic, all-purpose term of disapproval, it can be applied to any problem, annoyance, mishap or disaster, from the most insignificant irritation to adverse events of national or even international importance…
There is something quintessentially English about ‘Typical!’ It manages simultaneously to convey huffy indignation and a sense of passive, resigned acceptance, an acknowledgement that things will invariably go wrong, that life is full of little frustrations and difficulties (and wars and terrorists), and that one must simply put up with it. In a way ‘Typical!’ is a manifestation of what used to be called the English ’stiff upper lip’: it is a complaint, but a complaint that also expresses a very English kind of grudging forbearance and restraint – a sort of grumpy, cynical stoicism…
But now I see that there is also almost a perverse sense of satisfaction. When we say ‘Typical”‘ we are expressing annoyance and resentment, but we are also, in some strange way, pleased that our gloomy predictions and cynical assumptions about the ways of the world have been proved accurate. We may have been thwarted and inconvenienced, but we have not been taken unawares. We knew this would happen, we ‘could have told you’ that the hotel food would be dire, the dishwasher would not be delivered, the train would be delayed, for we in our infinite wisdom know that such is the nature of hotels, dishwashers and trains. [Kate Fox]

… in the true English style, burying under a calmness that seemed all but indifference, the real attachment. [Jane Austen]

In left-wing circles it is always felt that there is something slightly disgraceful in being an Englishman, and that it is a duty to snigger at every English institution, from horse-racing to suet puddings. It is a strange fact, but it is unquestionably true, that almost any English intellectual would feel more ashamed of standing to attention during ‘ God Save the King’ than of stealing from a poor box. [George Orwell]

[The English Creed:] God is an Englishman, probably educated at Eton, secondly that all good women are naturally frigid, thirdly that it is better to be dowdy than smart, {and fourthly, that} England is going to rack and ruin. [E.M. Delafield]

The people of England are never so happy as when you tell them they are ruined. [Arthur Murray]

Alberich’s dream come true – Nibelheim, world dominion, activity, work, everywhere the oppressive feeling of steam and fog. [Richard Wagner on London]

… the synthesis of fashion, music and politics which has become London’s principal export to the world…

For all the propaganda of classlessness – whether the sixties popcult model or the eighties entrepreneurial model – England is a highly static society, with a strongly defined ruling class and a narrow definition of the acceptable. If you fall outside of it for any reason, you’re marginal. As with any cluster of minorities, if you put them together, you make a majority: pop – a marginal industry in itself – is a place where many of them meet, as dreamers and misfits from all classes, to transform, if not the world, then their world…
These were neighbourhoods fierce in territorial loyalties, inner-urban enough to be city-wise, yet not poor enough to be a ghetto: English pop was a product of comparative affluence. Marginal zones, such as these areas of London, promised the illusion of transformation. ‘Dressing up was always a big part of going out’…
Pop is one of the very few areas in English society where members of different classes can mix on anything resembling equal terms. Its history is full of interactions between middle class, often Jewish, often homosexual entrepreneurs and working class, male performers…

Britain’s postwar decline began in wartime British dreams,’ writes Corelli Barnett in Audit of War. ‘As a consequence, the British people never had to face the reality about themselves and their future place in the world’…
The incidence of films celebrating England’s endurance and victory was in a direct ration to the refusal of its people to see the need for change. England was smug and static, full of imperial pretension…

7.6.77: … It’s as though the nation has been taken over by the spirit of Jack Warner – that embodiment of the postwar consensus with his stoicism in the face of austerity ans his homilies: ‘Mustn’t grumble’; ‘Have another cup of tea’. This collective forelock-tugging marks an acceptance of England’s stasis which the Punks totally reject, but the really scary thing about it is that the resentment which always lurks behind English phlegm is now directed against anybody who is different, who dares to disagree…

There were two other factors which added to the Sex Pistol’s perfervid momentum, as, for three months, the group and their supporters ran wild through the crumbling capital city like the historically dispossessed. Since June, the country had been undergoing a heat wave, the hottest since 1941. In England, heat changes everything. The English national emotion is depression and it is endemic, brought on by long, grey winters whose dampness never quite leaves the air, even during summer. Extra-hot summers boil out both the dampness and the national reserve, as life takes to the streets and English isolation melts. ‘Caroline and I used to stay up until four in the morning,’ say Jonh Ingham. ‘The windows would be open all night, and then the sun’s coming up: that was in the spring, and the weather just kept on going. You want to get out; you feel really great because it’s sunny and warm and there’s this great joie de vivre. The weather had a lot to do with everyone’s positiveness’…

‘Anger is an energy,’ sang John Lydon years later. at nineteen, his shyness masked a volcano of sarcasm and verbal hostility. The four Johns were all in the same predicament: ‘We were all extremely ugly people. We were outcasts, the unwanted.’ The group were caught in an impossible double-bind: intelligent in a working-class culture which did not value intelligence, yet unable to leave that culture because of lack of opportunity. The result? an appalling frustration…

‘Hippy culture had gone very mainstream: for the first time Bohemia embraced fast-food. it was about saying yes to the modern world. Punk, like Warhol, embraced everything that cultured people, and hippies, detested: plastic, junk-food, B-movies, advertising, making money – although no one ever did. You got so sick of people being so nice, mouthing an enforced attitude of goodness and health. Punk was liberating and new: the idea of smoking sixty cigarettes a day and staying up all night on speed’…

… a reductio ad absurdum of the story of pop music so far: the Beatles, the Girl Groups, the Stooges, Herman’s Hermits, pulped down into songs so brief that they reflected the fragmented attention timespan of the first TV generation. There was no melody, only distortion and sheer, brutal speed…

The inevitable condemnations of Punk reflected its contradictory desires and its stupidities, but they were couched in terms so biased and based on an implicit definition of social acceptability that was so restrictive, that it was easy to reject them. If you did so, the whole thing collapsed like a pack of cards. If you were a punk, you suddenly found yourself a scapegoat, an outsider. This realisation – part delicious, part terrifying – radicalised a small but significant part of a generation…

With their syphilitic, archaic language – ‘vile,’ ‘poxy,’ ‘bollocks’ – and this costume which theatricalised poverty, the punks were the postmodern children of Dickens. Inspired by amphetamines and the style which amphetamines had suggested, their gestures were jerky, violent and unpredictable, their demeanour was loutish, and their faces as white as zombies’. Dramatising catatonia, the punks showed up the rest of the public: they were not narcoticised by England’s dreaing, and they flaunted the fact. [Jon Savage]

If there is one characteristic aspect of the English imagination, it lies in mocking that which comes too close for ordinary self-expression. It is a question of satirising emotion, or even passion, itself. [Peter Ackroyd]

 

EVOLUTION

Biology needs a better word than “error” for the driving force in evolution. Or maybe “error” will do after all, when you remember that it came from an old root meaning to wander about, looking for something. [Lewis Thomas]

The theory of natural selection would never have replaced the doctrine of divine creation if evident, admirable design pervaded all organisms. Charles Darwin understood this, and he focused on features that would be out of place in a world constructed by perfect wisdom.… Darwin even wrote an entire book on orchids to argue that the structures evolved to ensure fertilization by insects are jerry-built of available parts used by ancestors for other purposes. Orchids are Rube Goldberg machines; a perfect engineer would certainly have come up with something better. This principle remains true today. The best illustrations of adaptation by evolution are the ones that strike our intuition as peculiar or bizarre. [Stephen Jay Gould]

It seems the height of antiquated hubris to claim that the universe carried on as it did for billions of years in order to form a comfortable abode for us. Chance and historical contingency give the world of life most of its glory and fascination. I sit here happy to be alive and sure that some reason must exist for “why me?” Or the earth might have been totally covered with water, and an octopus might now be telling its children why the eight legged God of all things had made such a perfect world for cephalopods. Sure we fit. We wouldn’t be here if we didn’t. But the world wasn’t made for us and it will endure without us. [Stephen Jay Gould]

History includes too much chaos, or extremely sensitive dependence on minute and unmeasurable differences in initial conditions, leading to massively divergent outcomes based on tiny and unknowable disparities in starting points. And history includes too much contingency, or shaping of present results by long chains of unpredictable antecedent states, rather than immediate determination by timeless laws of nature. Homo sapiens did not appear on the earth, just a geologic second ago, because evolutionary theory predicts such an outcome based on themes of progress and increasing neural complexity. Humans arose, rather, as a fortuitous and contingent outcome of thousands of linked events, any one of which could have occurred differently and sent history on an alternative pathway that would not have led to consciousness. [Stephen Jay Gould]

The Darwinian principle of natural selection yields temporal change – ‘evolution’ in the biological definition – by a twofold process of generating copious and undirected variation within a population, and then passing only a biased (selected) portion of this variation to the next generation. In this manner, the variation within a population at any moment can be converted into differences in mean values (such as average size or average braininess) among successive populations through time. For this fundamental reason, we call such theories of change ‘variational’ as opposed to more conventional, and more direct, models of ‘transformational’ change imposed by natural laws that mandate a particular trajectory based on inherent, and therefore predicable, properties of substances and environments. (A ball rolling down an inclined plane does not reach the bottom because selection has favoured the differential propagation of moving versus stable elements of its totality, but because gravity dictates this temporal sequence and result when round balls roll down smooth planes}.
To illustrate the peculiar properties of variational theories like Darwin’s in an obviously caricatured, but not inaccurate, description: Suppose that a population of elephants inhabits Siberia during a warm interval before the advance of an ice sheet. The elephants vary, at random and in all directions, in their amount of body hair. As the ice advances and local conditions become colder, elephants with more hair will tend to cope better, by the sheer good fortune of their superior adaptation to changing climates – and they will leave more surviving offspring on average. (This differential reproductive success must be conceived as broadly statistical, and not guaranteed in every case. In any generation, the hairiest elephant of all may, in the flower of youthful strength but before any reproductive action, fall into a crevasse and die). Because offspring inherit their parental degree of hairiness, the next generation will include a higher proportion of densely clad elephants (who will continue to be favoured by natural selection as the climate becomes still colder). This process of increasing average hairiness may continue for many generations, leading to the evolution of woolly mammoths.
This little fable can help us to understand how peculiar, and how contrary to all traditions of Western thought and explanation, the Darwinian theory of evolution, and variational theories of historical change in general, must sound to the common ear. All the odd and fascinating properties of Darwinian evolution flow from the variational basis of natural selection – including the sensible and explainable, but quite unpredictable, nature of the outcome (dependent upon complex and contingent changes in local environments), and the nonprogressive character of the alteration (adaptive only to these unpredictable local circumstances and not building a ‘better’ elephant in any cosmic or general sense). [Stephen Jay Gould]

In the picture conveyed by these two related fallacies, evolution becomes, first of all, the transformation of one kind of entity into another, body and soul. So fish evolve into amphibians in a ‘conquest’ of the land, and apes leave the safety of the trees, eventually to become human by facing the dangers of terra firma with a weapon in their liberated ahnd and a fresh twinkle of insight emanating from an enlarged organ behind their eye. In the second component of this transformational view, descendants win victory from the heart of their valour in the face of natural selection – for ‘later’ means ‘better’, as the land yields to explorational metaphors of conquest or colonization while the African savannas, for the first time in planetary history, ring with sounds of progress now expressed in the voice of real language.
But evolution proceeds by the branching of bushes, not by the morphing of one form into another, with the old disappearing into the triumph of the new. Novelties begin as little branches on old trees, not as butterflies of Michael Jordan refashioned from the caterpillar components of Joe Airball. Moreover, most novelties, at least in their origin, grow as tiny twigs of addition to persisting and vigorous bushes, not as higher realizations of ancestors that literally gave their all to a transcendence of their former grubby selves. [Stephen Jay Gould]

In short, evolution is not so much progress as it is simply change. It does not leave all its primitive forms behind. It carries them over from age to age, well knowing that they are the precious base of the pyramid on which the more fantastic and costly experiments must be carried. [Donald Culrose Peattie]

The fact that life evolved out of nearly nothing, some 10 billion years after the universe evolved out of literally nothing, is a fact so staggering that I would be mad to attempt words to do it justice. [Richard Dawkins]

Thus, horses have very stiff backbones, and a consequence of this is that people can ride them. However, we would not say that the function of a horse’s backbone is to enable people to ride horses, because we do not think that horse’s backbones evolved as they did so as to enable people, in the future, to ride. [John Maynard Smith]

Theories of evolution must provide for the creative acts which brought such theories into existence. [Michael Polanyi]

Evolution advances, not by a priori design, but by the selection of what works best out of whatever choices offer. We are the products of editing, rather than of authorship. [George Wald]

Evolution is a tinkerer. [Francois Jacob]

There is no more need to postulate an élan vital or a guiding purpose to account for evolutionary progress than to account for adaptation, for degeneration or any other form of specialization.… The purpose manifested in evolution, whether in adaptation, specialization, or biological progress, is only an apparent purpose. It is just as much a product of blind forces as is the falling of a stone to earth or the ebb and flow of the tides. It is we who have read purpose into evolution, as earlier men projected
will and emotion into inorganic phenomena like storm or earthquake. [Julian Huxley]

Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution. [Theodosius Dobzhansky]

Any living cell carries with it the experience of a billion years of experimentation by its ancestors. [Max Delbruck]

We fondly imagine that evolution drives toward higher intelligence. But eagles would think evolution favoured flight, elephants would naturally prefer the importance of great strength, sharks would feel that swimming was the ultimate desirable trait, and eminent Victorians would be quite convinced
that evolution preferred Victorians. [Gregory Benford]

In this endless sequence of evolution, ‘mankind’ was just an accident, an infinitely precious one in view of what was to follow, but certainly belated and of small significance if viewed on the scale of the earth’s existence. One prehistorian famously used a telling metaphor to describe it: if we imagine the entire biological evolution of life on earth as contained within the cycle of one solar year, with the very first signs of life appearing on 1 January, the earliest prehominid species would appear at about five thirty on the afternoon of 31 December; Neanderthal man would show up at about twenty minutes to midnight, and the entire existence of Homo sapiens, from the stone age to our own time, would be contained in the last few minutes of the year. [Fernand Braudel]

The only thing that changes in evolution is the genes. Nothing else. [Lewis Wolpert]

 

EXECUTION

But I’d rather tell you of another meeting I had with a man last year. There was a strange incident in his life, strange because it so rarely happens. This man had once been taken, together with others, to a place of execution where a sentence of death was read out to him. he was to be shot for a political crime. Twenty minutes later his reprieve was read out to him, another penalty for his crime being substituted. Yet the interval between the two sentences – twenty minutes or, at least, a quarter of an hour – he passed in the absolute certainty that in a few minutes he would be dead. I very much liked to listen to him when he used to recall his impressions of those moments, and I questioned him several times about it. he remembered everything with the most extraordinary distinctness, and he used to say that he would never forget anything he had been through during those minutes. Three posts were dug into the ground about twenty paces from the scaffold, which was surrounded by a crowd of people and soldiers, for there were several criminals. The first three were led to the posts and tied to them; the death vestments (long, white smocks) were put on them, and white caps were drawn over their eyes so that they should not see the rifles; next a company of several soldiers was drawn up against each post. My friend was the eight on the list and his would therefore be the third turn to be marched to the posts. The priest went to each of them with the cross. it seemed to him then that he had only five more minutes to live. He told me that those five minutes were like an eternity to him, riches beyond the dreams of avarice; he felt that during those five minutes he would live through so many lives that it was quite unnecessary for him to think of the last moment, so that he had plenty of time to make all sorts of arrangements: he calculated the exact time he needed to take leave of his comrades, and that he could do in two minutes, then he would spend another two minutes in thinking of himself for the last time, and, finally, one minute to take a last look round. He remembered very well that he had decided to do all this and that he had divided up the time in exactly that way. He was dying at twenty-seven, a strong and healthy man; taking leave of his comrades, he remembered asking one of them quite an irrelevant question and being very interested indeed in his answer. Then, after he had bidden farewell to his comrades, came the two minutes he had set aside for thinking of himself; he knew beforehand what he would think about: he just wanted to imagine, as vividly and as quickly as possible, how it could be that now, at this moment, he was there and alive and in three minutes he would merely be something – someone or something – but what? And where? All that he thought he would be able to decide in those two minutes! There was a church not far off, its gilt roof shining in the bright sunshine. He remembered staring with awful intensity at that roof and the sunbeams flashing from it; he could not tear his eyes off those rays of light: those rays seemed to him to be his new nature, and he felt that in three minutes he would somehow merge with them… The uncertainty and the feeling of disgust with that new thing which was bound to come any minute were dreadful, but he said that the thing that was most unbearable to him at the time was the constant thought, ‘What if I had not to die! What if I could return to life – oh, what an eternity! And all that would be mine! I should turn every minute into an age, I should lose nothing, I should count every minute separately and waste none!’ He said that this reflection finally filled him with bitterness that he prayed to be shot as quickly as possible. [Fyodor Dostoyevsky]

 

EXERCISE

Exercise is bunk. If you are healthy, you don’t need it; if you are sick, you shouldn’t take it. [Henry Ford]

The need for exercise is a modern superstition, invented by people who ate too much, and had nothing to think about. Athletics don’t make anybody either long-lived or useful. [George Santayana]

I believe that every human has a finite number of heartbeats. I don’t intend to waste any of mine running around doing exercises. [Neil Armstrong]

 

EXPERIENCE

… experience is not a matter of having actually swum the Hellespont, or danced with the dervishes, or slept in a doss-house. It is a matter of sensibility and intuition, of seeing and hearing the significant things, of paying attention at the right moments, of understanding and coordinating. Experience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what happens to him. [Aldous Huxley]

The belief that all genuine education comes about through experience does not mean that all experiences are genuinely or equally educative. [John Dewey]

But although all our knowledge begins with experience, it does not follow that it arises from experience. [Immanuel Kant]

I once told an audience of school children that the world would never change if they did not contradict their elders. I was chagrined to find next morning that this axiom outraged their parents. Yet it is the basis of the scientific method. A man must see, do and think things for himself, in the face of those who are sure that they have already been over all that ground. In science, there is no substitute
for independence. [Jacob Bronowski]

Experience is simply the name we give our mistakes. [Oscar Wilde]

Mr. Palomar vacillates at length between these two views of the question. Then he decides: ‘There is no contradiction between the two positions. The break between the generations derives from the impossibility of transmitting experience, of saving others from making the mistakes we have already made. The real distance between two generations is created by the elements they have in common, that require the cyclical repetition of the same experiences, as in the behaviour of animal species, handed down through biological heredity. The elements of real difference between us and them are, on the contrary, the result of the irreversible changes that every period evolves; these differences are the result of the historical legacy that we have handed on to them, the true legacy for which we are responsible, even if unconsciously sometimes. This is why we have nothing to teach: we can exert no influence on what most resembles our own experience; in what bears our own imprint we are unable to recognise ourselves. [Italo Calvino]

To most men, experience is like the stern lights of a ship, which illumine only the track it has passed. [Samuel Coleridge]

A smooth sea never made a skilled mariner. [English proverb]

The world either breaks or hardens the heart. [Chamfort]

Suffering passes, the having suffered never passes… Victory may indeed be achieved over what has been experienced, and yet that experience is still in our possession as a permanent enhancement and extension of the reality of our spiritual life. What has once been lived through cannot possibly be effaced. That which has been continues to exist in a transfigured form. Man is by no means a completely finished product. Rather he moulds and creates himsefl in and through his experience of life. [Berdyaev]