Failure – Friendship
FAILURE
One must be a god to be able to tell successes from failures without making a mistake. [Anton Chekhov]
It is not likely that any complete life has ever been lived which was not a failure in the secret judgement of the person that lived it. [Mark Twain]
I only learn what to do when I have failures. [Buckminster Fuller]
A man has but one life to lose; he can but strive; and if he fails at last and dies with nothing done, an unremembered weed, a sea-wrack on the barren shore, why, so have lived and died, hoped and despaired, petulantly struggled and then calmly sunk, thousands before him. [J.A. Symonds]
Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better. [Samuel Beckett]
It is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation. [Herman Melville]
If you’re not failing every now and again, it’s a sign you’re not doing anything very innovative. [Woody Allen]
There is a time when the word ‘eventually’ has the soothing effect of a promise, and a time when the word evokes in us bitterness and scorn. [Eric Hoffer]
Frustration is one of the great things in art; satisfaction is nothing. [Malcolm McLaren]
… we often learn more from bold mistakes than from cautious equivocation. [Daniel Dennett]
The world is divided into two categories: failures and unknowns. [Francis Picabia]
The most important of my discoveries have been suggested to me by my failures. [Humphry Davy]
Failure is instructive. The person who really thinks learns quite as much from his failures as from his successes. [John Dewey]
The only people, scientific or other, who never make mistakes are those who do nothing. [T.H. Huxley]
… an artist with a promising future behind him. [Theodore Lunortislaw on John Gay]
The aesthetics of failure are alone durable. He who does not understand failure is lost. [Jean Cocteau]
I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work. [Thomas Edison]
The real failure is not the man who does not succeed in great things – who ever has? – but in little things, making a home, keeping a friend, keeping a woman happy, earning his living like anyone else. He is the most miserable failure. [Cesare Pavese]
FANATICISM
Every man is dangerous who only cares for one thing. [G.K. Chesterton]
Fanaticism consists in redoubling your effort when you have forgotten your aim. [George Santayana]
The enthusiasts whom I have known all had the dreadful fault that, at the least spark which fell upon them, they always went up in flames like fireworks prepared long in advance – always in the same manner and always with the same uproar – whereas the feeling of a reasonable man is always proportionate to the impression. The frivolous man keeps cold-bloodedly arguing after his first impression, while the reasonable man turns round now and then to see what instinct has to say. [Georg Lichtenberg]
A fanatic is one who can’t change his mind and won’t change the subject. [Winston Churchill]
Nothing is more dangerous than idea, when you have only one idea. [Alain]
Fanatics are picturesque, mankind would rather see gestures than listen to reasons. [Friedrich Nietzsche]
FASCINATION
As for ‘fascination’, this calls for the creation of an induced trance, as when you stand for a long while in a moonlit landscape and feel the stillness wrap itself around you like a mummy cloth. It is a state of undefined expectancy, in which the whole being becomes as it were a passive sense, an eye that now sees one thing only, an ear that follows, precedes, obeys – obeys by preceding; where the whole being becomes untenanted by itself, a desert like this lunar landscape, awaiting the impact of a will outside itself. [Paul Valéry]
But what does it mean to be stupid if not to be stupefied, to watch in stupefaction the spectacle before one’s eyes, in fascination, gazing upon the object with an (evil) eye as it gazes back in a miasma of vision? When one looks stupidly one looks with stunned desire. In ancient Rome (during its decline), when stupefied by gazing at entertainers, as a sign of appreciation of their power and a favour to them (to release them from the gaze of the viewer) an audience member could only clap hands across the line of sight, applaud, to break the spell of fascination. When one looks stupidly, one does not seek to break the spell, one will not clap to break that spell, that movement in front one’s eyes. Instead one will be as passive as one can, an audience to the spell indefinitely, hesitant, making that moment of hesitation stretch into an infinite deference. The performance never ends. [Thomas L. Dumm]
Boredom is just the reverse side of fascination: both depend on being outside rather than inside a situation, and one leads to the other. [Arthur Schopenhauer]
FASHION
… this world in which reality and fantasy mingle and become confused, a world in which we go adorned in our dreams. it is a world of microcosmic detail and of the grand gesture, of long term obsessions and love at first sight, of hysterical excitement and abject despair…
The pointlessness of fashion, what Veblen hated, is precisely what makes it valuable. It is in this marginalised area of the contingent, the decorative, the futile, that not simply a new aesthetic but a new cultural order may seed itself. Out of the cracks in the pavements of cities grow the weeds that begin to rot the fabric…
Fashion – a performance art – acts as vehicle for this ambivalence; the daring of fashion speaks dread as well as desire; the shell of chic, the aura of glamour, always hide a wound. [Elisabeth Wilson]
Photography paradoxically enhanced both the mystery and the suggestiveness of fashion – and fashion magazines come on rather like pornography: they indulge the desire of the ‘reader’ who looks at the picture, to be each perfect being reflected in the pages, while simultaneously engaging erotically with a femininity… that is constantly being redefined. [Elisabeth Wilson]
Vain trifles as they seem, clothes have, as they say, more important offices than merely to keep us warm. They change our view of the world and the world’s view of us. [Virginia Woolf]
Where’s the man could ease a heart
Like a satin gown? [Dorothy Parker]
Once literacy and a rich vocabulary of visual, aural and dramatic expression exist, then society has a permanently available resource in which all the tabooed, fantastic, possible and impossible dreams of humanity can be explored in blueprint. [Bernice Martin]
Modern jazz boy’s girl – short hemlines, seamless stockings, pointed-toe high-heeled stiletto shoes, crepe nylon rattling petticoat, short blazer jacket, hair done up into the elfin style. face pale – corpse colour with a dash of mauve, plenty of mascara. [Colin MacInnes]
I felt myself shining in the dark. Silk is on my knee. My silk legs rub smoothly together. The stones of a necklace lie cold on my throat… I am arrayed, I am prepared… My hair is swept up in one curve. My lips are precisely red. I am ready now to join men and women on the stairs, my peers. I pass them, exposed to their gaze, as they are to mine… I now begin to unfurl, in this scent, in this radiance, as a fern when its curled leaves unfurl… I feel a thousand capacities spring up in me. I am arch, gay, languid, melancholy by turns. I am rooted, but I flow. All gold, flowing that way, I say to this one, ‘Come…’ He approaches. He makes towards me. This is the most exciting moment I have ever known. I flutter. I ripple… Are we not lovely sitting together here, I in my satin, he in black and white? [Virginia Woolf]
It had happened two or three times already… She looked in the glass and saw herself… Well, what was it?… But this was something else. This was a mysterious face; both dark and glowing: hair tumbling down, pushed back and upwards, as if in currents of fierce energy. Was it the frock that did it? Her body seemed to assemble itself harmoniously within it, to be centralised, to expand, both static and fluid; alive. It was the portrait of a young girl in pink. All the room’s reflected objects seemed to frame, to present her, whispering: Here are You… [Rosamund Lehmann]
The rush of power to the head is not as becoming as a new hat. [Helen van Slyke]
I have heard with admiring submission the experience of the lady who declared that the sense of being well-dressed gives a feeling of inward tranquillity, which religion is powerless to bestow. [Ralph Waldo Emerson]
Fashion is one of the last repositories of the marvellous. [Christian Dior]
Clothing gives human beings their anthropological, social and religious identity, in a word – their being. From this perspective, nudity is a negative state. A privation, loss, dispossession… being unclothed meant finding oneself in a degraded and shamed position, typical of prisoners, slaves or prostitutes, of those who are demented or cursed. [Mario Perniola]
Fashion exists essentially in terms of its own endless disorientation, which is no doubt why it has often fascinated poets. [Marcel Jean]
Far fetched and dear bought is best for ladies. [English proverb]
I believe there can be no pleasure in the world comparable to that of a woman who knows everyone’s eyes are on her, giving her gladness and energy. [Comtesse Greffulhe]
A frivolous hat does not mean a frivolous heart, nor fragile high-heeled slippers an addled mind. [Hortense Odlum]
She is beautiful, her elegance is unusual and daring, hers and hers alone. Knowing how to dress like that is a sign of intelligence; it surpasses good taste and becomes art. [Liane de Pougy]
He who goes against the fashion is himself its slave. [L.P. Smith]
Clothing does a great deal more than simply clad the body for warmth, modesty or comfort…
The body, as a physical form, is trained to manifest particular postures, movements and gestures. The body is a natural form that is culturally primed to fit its occupancy of a chosen social group. Body trainings create certain possibilities (such as special skills, knowledges, physical disciplines), impose constraints (such as not spitting, not slouching, not being naked) in the process of acquiring a range of body habits that are expected and taken for granted in a particular cultural milieu. They form part of a ‘habitus’ – simultaneously a set of habits and a space inhabited, as a way of being in the world. Rules and codes are inhabited through the prohibitions and transgressions. Bodies are worn through technologies of movement, restraint, gesture and projection…
In this sense, fashion is a technology of civility…
The body is not a given, but actively constructed through how it is used and projected. Clothes are an index of codes of display, restraint, self-control, and affect-transformation… Accordingly, fashion has no absolute or essential meaning. [Jennifer Craik]
All the substances of every realm of nature can now enter into the composition of a woman’s dress… porcelain, sandstone and earthenware have suddenly appeared in sartorial art. These substances are worn as belts, as hat pins, etc… and I have even seen an adorable handbag composed entirely of those glass eyes which can be found at oculists… Slippers are being made of Venice glass and hats of Baccarat crystal. Not to mention the gowns painted in oils, the woollens in bright colours, the gowns curiously stained with ink… I have seen a young woman on the boulevard dressed in tiny mirrors that were appliquéd to the fabric. In sunlight the effect was dazzling. it was like a walking gold mine. Later it began to rain, and the lady looked like a silver mine. Nutshells make pretty pendants, especially if one alternates them with hazelnuts. Gowns embroidered with coffee-beans, cloves, garlic, onions, and bunches of dried grapes will continue to be fashionable for formal wear. fashion becomes practical, scorns nothing, and ennobles everything. it does for substances what the romantics did for words. [Apollinaire]
Man wishes her to be carnal, her beauty like that of fruits and flowers; but he would also have her smooth, hard, changeless as a pebble. The function of ornament is to make her share more intimately in nature and at the same time to remove her from the natural, it is to lend to palpitating life the rigour of artifice.
Woman becomes plant, panther, diamond, mother-of-pearl, by blending flowers, furs, jewels, shells, feathers with her body; she perfumes herself to spread an aroma of the lily and the rose. But feathers, silk, pearls, and perfumes serve also to hide the animal crudity of her flesh, her odour. She paints her mouth and her cheeks to give them the solid fixity of a mask; her glance she imprisons deep in kohl and mascara, it is no more than the iridescent ornament of her eyes; her hair, braided, curled, shaped, loses its disquieting plant-like mystery.
In woman dressed and adorned, nature is present but under restraint, by human will remoulded nearer to man’s desire. A woman is rendered more desirable to the extent that nature is more highly developed in her and more rigorously confined: it is the ’sophisticated’ woman who has always been the ideal erotic object. And the taste for a more natural beauty is often only a specious form of sophistication…
Through adornment… woman allies herself to nature while bringing to nature the need of artifice; for man she becomes flower and gem – and for herself also. Before bestowing upon him the undulations of water, the warm softness of furs, she takes them herself. Her relation to her knick-knacks, her rugs, her cushions, and her bouquets is much less intimate than to the feathers, pearls, brocades, and silks she blends with her flesh; their iridescent hues and their soft textures make up for the harshness of the erotic universe that is her lot… The heterosexual woman, dedicated to the crude masculine embrace – even if she likes it and all the more if she does not – has no fleshly prey to embrace other than her own body, so she perfumes it to change into a flower, and the gleam of diamonds in her necklace mingles with the lustre of her skin; in order to possess them, she identifies herself with all the riches of the world. She covets not only their sensuous delights, but sometimes their sentimental and ideal values also. This jewel is a souvenir, that one a symbol. There are women who make of themselves a nosegay, an aviary; there are others who are museums, still others who are hieroglyphics. Georgette Leblanc writes as follows in her Mémoires, recalling her youthful years:
‘I was always dressed like a picture. I would go for a week as a Van Eyck, as one of Rubens’s allegories, or as Memling’s Virgin. I can still see myself crossing a Brussels street one winter’s day in a dress of amethyst velvet, trimmed with silver braid borrowed from some chasuble. Dragging a long train which I scorned to lift, I conscientiously swept the pavement. My yellow fur hood framed my blonde hair, but the most unusual item was the diamond set on a circlet in the middle of my forehead. The reason for all this? Simply that I enjoyed it and it made me feel I was living quite unconventionally. The more I was laughed at, the more burlesque my attire became. I would have been ashamed to change any detail of my appearance because it was made fun of. That would have seemed a degrading surrender… At home it was different. My models were the angels of Gozzoli and Fra Angelico, the figures of Burne-Jones and Watts. I was always dressed in azure and gold; my flowing robes spread about me in manifold trains.’
The best examples of this magical appropriation of the universe are found in asylums for the insane. The woman who fails to control her love for precious objects and for symbols forgets her own true appearance and ventures to dress extravagantly. Thus the little girl regards dressing up as a disguise that changes her into a fairy, a queen, or a flower; she thinks herself beautiful when she is loaded with wreaths and ribbons, because she identifies herself with this marvellous finery…
The social significance of the toilette allows woman to express, by her way of dressing, her attitude towards society. If she is submissive to the established order, she will assume a discreet and stylish personality. Here there are many possible nuances: she can present herself as fragile, childlike, mysterious, frank, austere, gay, sedate, rather bold, demure. Or if, on the contrary, she scorns the conventions, she will make it evident by her originality. It is noteworthy that in many novels the ‘emancipated woman’ differentiates herself by an audacity of dress that emphasises her nature as sexual object, therefore her independence…
Even if each woman dresses in conformity with her status, a game is still being played: artifice, like art, belongs to the realm of the imaginary. It is not only that girdle, brassiere, hair-dye, make-up, disguise body and face, but that the least sophisticated of women, once she is ‘dressed,’ does not present herself to observation; she is, like the picture or statue, or the actor on the stage, an agent through whom is suggested someone not there – that is, the character she represents, but is not. It is this identification with something unreal, fixed, perfect as the hero of a novel, as a portrait or a bust, that gratifies her; she also strives to identify herself with this figure and thus to seem to herself to be stabilised, justified in her splendour.
In just this way, in Marie Bashkirtsev’s Ecrits intimes we see her tirelessly multiplying her image in page after page. She spares us not one of her costumes; with each new toilette, she believes herself quite transformed, and she renews her self-adoration.
‘I took a large shawl of Mother’s, I cut a hole for my head and sewed the sides together. This shawl, falling in folds, gave me an Oriental, Biblical, exotic air.
‘I go to Laferrièrés and Caroline in three hours makes me a gown in which I seem enveloped in a cloud. It is just a piece of English crepe which she drapes on me and which makes me thin, elegant, tall.
‘Enveloped in a flowering robe of warm wool, I was a figure of Lefebure, who knows so well how to bring out his young and lissom bodies under modest draperies.’
She repeats this refrain day after day: ‘I was charming in black… In grey I was charming… I was in white, charming’…
If the toilette has so much importance for many women, it is because in illusion it enables them to remould the outer world and their inner selves simultaneously. A German novel, The Young Girl in Artificial Silk, by I Keun, describes the passion of a young girl for a cloak of white fur. She loved its sensuous warmth and, enveloped in its precious folds, she experienced a feeling of beatitude and security; and in it she possessed a world of beauty and a destiny quite beyond her in reality. [Simone de Beauvoir]
Fashion is only the attempt to realize art in living forms and social intercourse. [Francis Bacon]
She looked fresh and brilliant, her hair piled in a braided crown. Her business dress, cut low in the bodice, was of silk shirred all over in two inch bands, tight in the waist and very short. She had steel studded buckles on her high-heeled shoes and long black kid gloves. She threw her black astrakhan coat on the sofa, with an enormous handbag in calf and gold. She had a wide bracelet of brilliants, much perfume, and no colour in her cheeks but a dark red lipstick which brought out the darkness in her eyes. [Christina Stead]
The same costume will be
Indecent 10 years before its time
Shameless 5 years before its time
Outré 1 year before its time
Smart
Dowdy 1 year after its time
Hideous 10 years after its time
Ridiculous 20 years after its time
Amusing 30 years after its time
Quaint 50 years after its time
Charming 70 years after its time
Romantic 100 years after its time
Beautiful 150 years after its time. [James Laver]
There was a whole glamorous cult of the male uniform, against which the frivolous, flowery, veiled hats and precious silk stockings of the women appeared in melting contrast…
“By the late 1940s fashion photography was expressing this romantic, slightly morbid mood with an imagery of women in cloudy tulle dresses floating against castle walls, landscape gardens or a desolating backdrop of bomb damage or slums; or of perfectly elegant women in sheathlike black stepping along like cranes against the facade of a city street. Yet although the New Look was supposed to be so feminine, there was a weird masculinity about it all. The models were tall as guardsmen, and their street clothes resembled those of guardsmen in mufti, or City men leaning against furled umbrellas. They wore the highest high heels, and hobble skirts with sharply jutting hips and flying panels which bore faint memories of Gothic architecture, but the hard hats looked like City bowlers. [Elizabeth Wilson]
The shape that I am calling the ’sweetheart line’ produced the Hollywood screen and reproduced by the garment industry, was created from a mixture of period nostalgia and the high fashion lead of the New Look. The sweetheart line depended on bras that were molded to a point and often strapless, corsets and girdles, and crinolines – layered, ruffled slips made of stiffened organza and net that supported the bell-shaped skirts to their great width at the hemline. it was a style of dress that dominated the evening gown, in tulle, lace, satin, or organza, and was also common in daytime dresses, particularly spring and summer cottons. The ‘princess,’ the ‘true-woman,’ the ‘débutante,’ and the ‘bride’ were all connotations born by this dress as it enveloped America’s would-be sweethearts…
But the question is still why this shape should carry those connotations and, therefore, why it is able to annex the connotations of princess, débutante, or bride that became attached to this exaggerated feminine. The answer can be found in part by examining the outline of the dress.
Not coincidentally, the sweetheart line has become the image used for the symbol of a woman’s toilet, as contrasted with the male outline that is represented by broad shoulders and trousered legs. The outline can also be seen as combination of heart shapes; one with the curves at the breasts to a point at the waist, another inverted from a point at the waist to a scalloped hem. The dress shape follows the curves of an idealised average of a woman’s body shape and proportion, but spreads out discreetly from the wider hips to conceal the real sign of sexual difference, the pubic area. It inverts the triangle of pubic veil to provide this cover. Then it further metaphorises its function as cover to the woman’s sexual organs by layers of ruffles and folds, in laces, tulles, organzas, satins, chiffons – materials that are soft, translucent, transparent, or shiny. The flowers that often adorn the dress are again metaphorically referred to by one’s imaginary view of this full-skirted style from underneath. Freud’s young male discovering sexual difference through his fictional crawl underneath his mother’s skirt would here only be exposed to the terrain of metaphor. [Maureen Turim]
To the enthusiast, fashion is the most seductive of addictions. We have only to turn to the pages of Vogue to be immersed in a sensuous world of colours and tactile luxury: ‘Fitted salmon silk double-breasted jacket… burgundy elastic halterneck… salmon-pink satin-finish lycra skirt with taupe stretch lace hem… burgundy mousseline scarf trimmed with gold coins… dusty rose pleated satin Belgrave shoes… long silk crepe tunic… with ankle-length crystal-pleated cream silk crepe skirt.. cameo earrings… Finely textured bright yellow wool bouclé… black suede high heels…’
It was not so different in the 1860s: ‘A dress of lilac silk covered with clouds of tulle in the same shade in which clusters of lilies of the valley were to be drowned. A veil of white tulle was to be thrown like a mist over the mauve clouds and the flowers, and finally, a sash with flowing ends should suggest the reins on Venus’ chariot.’ [?]
Great dance dresses have a spirit of their own. They project allure into the wearer and into the evening…
… the white dresses, each one with three pairs of white slippers, as the world has always been a bit dirty…
… my Balenciaga dress that was like wearing clouds of smoke in grey tulle, with a strapless gold bodice cut like a beautiful shell. That was one of the great dresses of our time. It had nothing to do with me, although naturally it was very becoming. It was Balenciaga and his mastery. I only wore it maybe four times in New York because that dress needed a big audience, and a big Parisian ballroom… I gave it to my maid as that was the thing to do, give the dress to the maid who had maintained it so beautifully. [Diana Vreeland]
I was introduced to the diverse tactility of high fashion at an early age, when I happened to discover my sister’s crushed velvet loon pants, draped over the back of a chair. A simple child, I first admired the manner in which the crimson fabric caught the light; the contrasting shades of light and dark, where the material had creased, implied a certain richness, verging on luxury. Advancing, with my clammy hands outstretched, towards my sister’s most cherished and grooviest gear, I suddenly felt sure that the touch of the garment would be as satisfying as its decadent hue.
I was not mistaken. The crushed velvet appeared more smooth, and more soft, than any other man-made substance my grubby paws had previously encountered. I felt quite sure that the Queen’s robes must be made of crushed velvet. I longed to be free of my flannels and to have a pair of crushed velvet loon pants of my very own. I put this suggestion to my mother, who looked at me oddly. My sister moaned and went to hide the seductive trousers in question.
That was my first experience of aspirational touch with regard to fabric. Later, of course, one became too embarrassed and too conditioned to admit (as a male) to relishing the touch of different garments. Rather, the question of touch was shunted to the sidelines of adolescent curiosity in all matters sensual.
The feel of one’s school uniform was, for the most part, depressing. The touch of new shirts was nice, for it suggested freshness, but the remainder of the teenage male wardrobe was on the whole best left unfingered. Girls, on the other hand, seemed to have a spectacular – if mysterious – time, fiddling around in changing rooms and getting to grips with the relationship between their bodies and clothes. [Michael Bracewell]
This is what used to happen. I watched my mother dress. A cloud of perfume and mauve powder scented the room and the semi-darkness between the chintzes with their multicoloured designs of exotic trees and birds of paradise. Beyond the open door the brilliant gaslight in the dressing-room illuminated the wardrobe and the mirror which reflected the scene in greater beauty and depth. It was also in this mirror that I watched the preparations. My mother, who looked slim, monumental and shorter than normal from where I sat between the chest of drawers and the fireplace, seemed to be held up by her long stiff Raudnitz gown in red velvet embroidered with jet, with leg of mutton sleeves; her arms, shoulders and neck glimmered palely above the red velvet draped over her plain corsage, and at any moment, I thought, this velvet might be turned into the back of the Comédie-Française stage seen against the edge of the boxes; a tortoiseshell fan, the quiver of black lace, the mother of pearl lorgnette is raised, discreet applause. This at least is what I imagined, during the ceremonial fitting of the long gloves which were so difficult to put on; they were like dead skins which begin to live, cling and take shape, as each finger was fitted in turn; and then finally came that adorable touch, that feminine gesture immortalised by Mayol, of buttoning the little sky-light at the wrist, and I would kiss the exposed palm. It was the end of the show, the prologue to the real show for which all this elegance was invented, and the wardrobe mirror revealed my mother to me – what am I saying, revealed a madonna encased in velvet, strangled in diamonds, emplumed with a nocturnal aigrette, a glittering chestnut bristling with rays of light, tall, distrait, torn between her last reminders that I should be good and her last glance in the mirror. Kneeling prostrate on the floor the maid spread out the train of the dress and finally confirmed on my mother the nobility of a Spanish Virgin. Next a fur coat concealed the clusters and darts of light, mother bent down, kissed me rapidly and left for that murmuring ocean of jewels, feathers and heads, where she was to pour herself out like a red river and mingle her velvet with the velvet of the theatre, her glitter with the glitter of the chandelier and the girandole. [Jean Cocteau]
Mountains breathe, move, slide against one another, climb up and penetrate into each other, and the century-long slowness of this rhythm escapes us, revealing a static spectacle. The cinema has shown us that plants gesticulate and that only a difference in tempo between the animal and vegetable kingdoms led us to believe in the serenity of nature. We must change our minds; we climb down, not that those admirable fast-motion films have let us into the secret of a rose, the birth of a bean or the explosion of a crocus.
A similar film should be made of the slow-moving periods and fashions that succeed one another. Then it would be really exciting to see at high-speed dresses growing longer, shorter and longer; sleeves growing fulller, tighter, fuller again; hats going down and up, perching on top, lying down flat, becoming decorative then plain; bosoms growing fuller then slighter, provocative and ashamed; waists changing places between breasts and knees; the ocean swell of hips and haunches; stomachs which advance and retreat; petticoats which cling and froth; underwear which disappears and reappears; cheeks which go hollow, then full, then paler and redder and pale again; hair which grows longer, disappears, grows again, becomes curly, smooth or frizzy, grows out or stands on end, twists and then untwists, bristles with combs and pins, abandons them and takes them up again; shoes which hide the toes and then lay them bare; braids knotted over prickly woollens. And silk conquers wool, wool conquers silk; tulle flats, velvet hangs heavy, sequins sparkle, satins crease, furs slip over dresses and around necks, going up and down and round the edges, and curling up in frenzied panic like the animals from whom they are taken.
Then we would see the frivolous accessories of the period when we grew up live with an intense life, assuming only graceful postures. [Jean Cocteau]
I have seen with my own eyes Otéro and Cavalieri lunching at Armenonville. It was no small affair. Armour, escutcheons, carcans, corsets, whalebones, braids, epaulieres, greaves, thighpieces, gauntlets, corselets, pearl baldricks, feather bucklers, satin, velvet and bejewelled halters, coats of mail – these knights-at-arms bristling with tulle, rays of light and eyelashes, these sacred scarabs armed with asparagus holders, these samouraïs of sable and ermine, these cuirassiers of pleasure who were harnessed and caparisoned early in the morning by robust soubrettes, seemed incapable, as they sat stiffly opposite their hosts, of extracting anything from an oyster beyond the pearl. Confronted with one of these beauties, any of our modern gigolos would take to his heels. A monocle, gaiters, a white moustache, great age and great fortune permitted one to aspire to such a tête-à-tête. The idea of undressing one of these ladies was an expensive undertaking which was better arranged in advance, like moving house, and before we can picture them in the midst of a chaos of underwear, hair and scattered limbs, we must intensify our powers of imagination to visualise a scandalous scene of murder. [Jean Cocteau]
Fashion is about pleasure and danger, conformity and the breaking of taboos. It expresses our ‘deeply felt desire to be superficial’; – our love of style for its own sake. This consumerism, this love of surface beauty and novelty is, is itself, neither admirable nor wicked. It is ambiguous, offering pleasure and enrichment on the one hand, waste and envy on the other. [?]
… fantasy itself is characterized not by the achievement of wished-for objects but by the arranging of, a setting out of, the desire for certain objects. [Elisabeth Cowie]
Fashion for the most part is nothing but the ostentation of riches. [John Locke]
Colour drained out of elegance… draped lamé and sequinned satin offered rivulets of light to the eye as they flowed and slithered over the shifting flanks and thighs of Garbo, Dietrich, Harlow and Lombard. These visions were built on the newly powerful sensuality of colourless texture in motion… sequins, marabous, white net and black lace developed a fresh intensity of sexual meaning in the world of colourless fantasy. [Anne Hollander]
I always felt we were selling dreams, not clothes. [Irving Penn]
In being unable to fulfil its promises, the fashion image replicates an absence or loss, and points towards whatever it is that one doesn’t have or can’t get, towards desire itself. [Caroline Evans & Minna Thornton]
It is very difficult in praising clothes not to use such adjectives as ‘right’, ‘good,’ ‘correct,’ ‘unacceptable’ or ‘faultless,’ which belong properly to the discussion of conduct, while in discussing moral shortcomings we tend very naturally to fall into the language of dress and speak of a person’s behaviour as being shabby, shoddy, threadbare, down at heel, botched or slipshod. [Quentin Bell]
Two of the most notorious clichés about the subject are frequently juxtaposed – the frigid Victorian woman and her ultra-modest, leg-concealing dress. Victorian wives who ‘endured’ the sexual act ‘in a sort of coma’ also hid their bodies under long, bell-shaped skirts ‘that concealed everything except the toe’…
The dress of Victorian women is presented as an instrument of seduction, masquerading as extremely modest apparel…
This is obviously one of the more crudely stated versions of Laver’s Attraction or Seduction Principle of women’s fashion, and of the theme of the ‘wicked Victorians.’ But in some form, this picture of Victorian sex and fashion appears in every history of the period. It is argued that many men and most women of the middle classes were neurotically anti-sexual: ‘the more repressed could see sex in everything.’ At the same time, some unspecified number of outwardly respectable men led ’secret’ sexual lives, generally of a perverted nature, and often in the company of prostitutes. Although women were rigidly classified as either Madonnas or Magdalens, both wives and whores wore clothing that was simultaneously concealing and indecent. Through a process of exaggeration and misplaced emphasis, nineteenth-century fashion is set within the familiar outline of a repressed, hypocritical, and perverted sexuality…
According to the historian Stephen Kern, ‘In no other age throughout history was the human body, in particular the female body, so concealed and disfigured by clothing.’ While men’s ‘drab’ and ’static’ clothing merely hid the body, women’s clothing constituted ‘an attack on the body as much as an effort to conceal it.’ ‘Not just the legs but the entire body was covered with a great deal of clothing’ – long sleeves, high collars, a hemline that ‘dropped to the ground and stayed there for a century,’ gloves, bonnets – amounting to a kind of ‘mummification.’ But it ‘was not enough just to cover the female body; Victorian clothing also abused it.’ Shoes and garters were a problem, but the ‘major assault on the body was achieved by the corset,’ which not only impeded ‘any inclination women might have had to exercise or enjoy their bodies,’ but also (allegedly) damaged the respiratory, circulatory, digestive, and reproductive systems.
Women wore these uncomfortable, physically restrictive, and probably unhealthy fashions because they were ‘caught between the contradictory demands to be both physically desirable and morally proper.’ The body was perceived as ‘bad’ – ie sexual – and so it was hidden, disfigured, and mutilated. At the same time, the instruments of this concealment and disfigurement generated an ‘exaggerated eroticism’…
This use of clothing to illustrate the allegedly repressive and conflict-ridden sexuality of the nineteenth century is seriously marred by an apparent lack of knowledge about the fashions of earlier periods. The female body was concealed and ‘disfigured’ during the Elizabethan era (to choose a supposedly sexually lusty period) at least as much as it was in the nineteenth century – as any picture of a woman in a stiff, elongated bodice and a farthingale will show…
If it is true that clothing ‘defined the role of each sex’ and influenced ‘the actions and attitudes of both wearer and viewer,’ then Victorians women’s clothing may be seen as reflecting and reinforcing the feminine role of a submissive, masochistic, and narcissistic being – an ‘exquisite slave.’ According to the art and fashion historian Helene Roberts: ‘Men were serious (they wore dark colours and little ornamentation), women were frivolous (they wore light pastel colours, ribbons, laces, and bows); men were active (their clothes allowed them movement), women inactive (their clothes inhibited movement); men were strong (their clothes emphasized broad chests and shoulders), women delicate (their clothing accentuated small waists, sloping shoulders, and a softly rounded silhouette); men were aggressive (their clothing had sharp definite lines and a clearly defined silhouette), women were submissive (their silhouette was indefinite, their clothing constricting).’
There is some truth to these arguments, but they are highly oversimplified, as is Roberts’s stylistic analysis of female dress. Men’s clothing in the nineteenth century did facilitate relatively greater ease of movement than women’s clothing did. Nevertheless, both the ease and practicality of men’s dress and the constriction of women’s have been exaggerated…
Victorian dresses… are sometimes deliberately designed to look more restrictive than they really were. Furthermore, although the middle-class male may have looked more practical and could stride along easily, he was hardly dressed for manual labour either. The middle-class woman, dressed for ‘leisure’ could have done as much. In general, the signs of leisure remained prestigious, while the signs of practicality and functionalism were only beginning to acquire prestige…
… most Victorians seem to have favoured ‘healthy’, ‘blooming’ girls. Their concept of good health differed, however, from our own: we prize physical strength and a relatively lean physique for both sexes; the Victorians interpreted relative fleshiness as evidence of health – again, for both men and women.
The dress reformers were also, in their own way, prejudiced in favour of masculine dress. In their view, most women were frivolous, and therefore, they wore colourful, changeable, decorative dress. In common with most Victorian dress reformers, feminist fashion historians today tend to perceive nineteenth-century men’s clothing as vastly superior to women’s, and interpret progress in large part in terms of the supposed approach of women’s clothes to the ‘utilitarian’ masculine model. One is entitled to ask, though, whether there is anything intrinsically superior about dark colours, unerotic tailoring, and an absence of ornamentation.
Even if we assume, for a moment, that the Victorian woman was supposed to be relatively frivolous, inactive, and delicate, there is still a leap of reasoning in the argument that she was also submissive, masochistic, and narcissistic. Yet Roberts is only one of many historians to imply that the only acceptable form of female sexuality in the nineteenth century was a repressed and ‘masochistic’ one: ‘The clothing of the Victorian woman clearly projected the message of a willingness to conform to the submissive-masochistic pattern.’ It seems far more likely that women’s dress was intended to convey the impression of beauty. The fashion might have been at times uncomfortable or inconvenient, but it diverted attention from possible deficiencies of nature, while drawing attention to attractive features, and ideally making the wearer look and feel pretty and charming. It has been pointed out that ‘The mind may take pleasure in something which to the body is a pain or at least an inconvenience.’ This is very different from saying that the mind takes pleasure in something because it is painful. A favourable self-image might well be preferred to a greater degree of physical comfort. The popular Victorian writer Mrs Oliphant for example, criticized the uncomfortable and inconvenient aspects of the dress of her day (and Roberts quotes her), but she also stressed that fashion helped even plain women ‘look their best,’ and she believed that most women’s hearts ‘beat with pleasure’ at the ‘exhilarating’ sensation of being ‘well dressed’.
Most Victorian women led quite restrictive and dependent lives. For the majority, marriage was the most desirable option, and it was thought to be important to dress well to attract a good husband. What is more doubtful is the suggestion that men were attracted to ’submissive,’ ‘masochistic,’ and ‘narcissistic’ women, and that women dressed to emphasize these qualities. If women were not expressing submission or courting pain, it does not seem legitimate in this context to speak of ‘masochism’.
Was the corset actually such an uncomfortable and unhealthy garment? Was it both antisexual and an agent of the sexual exploitation of women? Did it serve to keep women both economically dependent on men, because its use prevented women from working? The Victorian corset is viewed today with undisguised hostility, and has become the subject of a persistent mythology. Whether that view is accurate is another question entirely. Similarly, the fact that women were encouraged to pay attention to their appearance is not, per se, evidence of ‘narcissism.’ The casual use of terms with implication of sexual pathology does not seem useful for an understanding of the motivations of conventionally fashionable women.
It is worth pointing out, however, that the antipathy that Kern, for example, feels toward ‘grossly artificial’ style of dress, together with his assumption that modern dress is ‘natural’ lead him to interpret articles of clothing (such as the corset) as almost necessarily bad. Yet we perceive modern dress as ‘natural’ and as following (rather than distorting or concealing) the lines of the body, primarily because we are used to seeing people look the way they do now. Out perceptions of the body are conditioned by its clothed appearance. (In retrospect, the 1950s brassiere looks as ‘artificial’ as the corset).
Similarly, his belief that ‘rationality’ and ‘comfort’ are (or should be) the primary determinant of dress leads him to assume that Victorian women would have preferred to wear other types of clothing, had they been permitted to do so. Thus, at one point, he suggests that Victorian men ‘did not allow’ women to wear the ’subdued attire’ that they ‘chose’ for themselves. He ignores the social constraints placed on both men and women, while the idea that many women might have liked their clothes and thought that they were attractive appears never to have crossed his mind. [Valerie Steele]
Since virtually every single event in the decade, from the property boom to the Jubilee, has been in the worst possible taste, it seems only right and proper that a mute sartorial response should surface as black shiny plastic slit-sided dresses; camouflage combat trousers, as if either you did not know there was a war on or else in ironic comment on the fact that nobody seems to acknowledge there is a war on; chains everywhere, as if you had not been born free; and blouses printed with excerpts from dirty books…
I’m perfectly prepared to believe, since the media tell me so, that the ‘punk’ style was originally, at any rate, long ago, a spontaneously generated phenomenon, a dandyism of the abyss put together out of odds and Army Surplus Store ends and mum’s old clothes by the Savage generation in its brief leisures between making Dole Queue Rock, vandalising telephone boxes and visits to the VD clinic and de-infestation centre. A visual representation of a conscious state of deprivation, in fact, a state of mind. (What state of mind? ‘When I have inspired universal disgust, then I shall have conquered solitude,’ as Baudelaire, himself often short of a bob or two, said at a not dissimilar time of conflicting ideologies).
As a style of conspicuous outrage, it abundantly succeeded: look at November’s 19 magazine survey of parents on punks: ‘They are the poisonous pus of a sick society.’ ‘Diabolical! Just a load of dropouts!’…
Yet the whole ‘punk’ thing was too self-aware, too conscious, too much like a put-on to be absolutely serious. Those babes in bondage, with coiffures and cosmetic effects as from an 18th-century madhouse, like a street theatre version of the Marat/Sade. And the French Revolution offers us an interesting example of self-conscious sartorial Bad Taste in another period of conflicting ideologies: the ‘victim style’ of the Directory, chalk-white face, convict haircut and the scarlet ribbon or the red line round the neck as a tribute to the guillotine. There is nothing new under the sun.
The victim-style of the 1970s has a behavioural style to match. They never smile, these infants of the recession; they sneer. Defiant untouchables, tattooed at the extremities and accessorised with offensive weapons, lips and fingernails stained black and blue and the skin round their eyes painted up like rococo window frames. This hard-edge, impersonal, constricted glamour, with its troubling elements of narcissism and fetishism, is almost too apt an illustration of a spirited reaction to impotence. There is too much irony in it, it is too knowing to be serious.
Irony is the self-defence of the down-and-out. The heavy irony of the punks blunts the style’s offensive edge before it can even wound you. It makes you feel old, that is the cruellest thing, but it is basically a style of self-mockery. Arguing, perhaps, a low state of self-esteem in those who sport it. Warpaint was never put on to frighten the other side so much as to bolster the faint hearts of the wearers…
All these styles, all predominantly masculine, were the specific uniform of an aggressive subculture with a taste for physical violence that remained universally offensive to everybody except the peer group involved. Punk retains only the visual and linguistic aggression of these styles; it crosses with porn and self-mutilation; girls can do it and it had gone upmarket, with the most amazing speed, to fuse with the upmarket vogue for tacky glitter that has been bubbling under since the early days of the magazine called Andy Warhol’s Interview.
Styles of conspicuous outrage may start off as an expression of pride in extremis. But those who cannot work because there is none to be had and so make their play, their dancing, their clothes, into a kind of work, for reasons of self-respect, have a lot in common with those who either do not need to work or whose work is a kind of play, like pop musicians and fashion models. The only difference is, the rich have more money, Scott, and pay through the nose for gold plastic wrap miniskirts, plastic raincoats, safety pins (sequinned specially for them) and bondage jackets made up in good tweed.
Therefore the style of the late seventies finds the underprivileged and the overprivileged in the same visual category, both bearing upon them the marks, as it were, the proudly born buboes, of what Reimut Reiche called, in another context in the late sixties, a ‘pariah elite.’ A self-conscious pariah elite, with an aesthetic of the tawdry, the parodic, a playboy decadence. [Angela Carter]
This desire for intensity and immediacy of experience spoke of disgust with contemporary popular culture as well as with the establishment. Music, fashion and existing subcultural styles, all seemed irrelevant to the lives of youths who wanted to kick back at the complacency of glam rock and the tired rebellion of ageing hippies. Punks expressed their boredom and contempt for morality through a compendium of references scoured from the underside of mainstream culture…
This nihilistic bravado of self-mutilation was aped in the multiple piercings of many punks. The style was self-absorbed, parading its self-inflicted wounds in front of a society it saw as bland and uncaring, while threatening the destruction of that society with its anarchic, cut-up graphics and antagonistic musical style…
Punk created another world, parallel to the ‘norm’ of the cities it inhabited, where skinny youths flaunted the violent secrets of sado-masochism in bondage suits and unravelling string jumpers, and swaggered with cocky delight at the outrage they inevitably provoked.
Whereas previous subcultures had usually cast women as marginal figures, with clothes that were imitations of their male peers, punk allowed young women a strong, if intimidating dress code. It flouted accepted notions of femininity, preferring to shock with ripped fishnet stockings, plastic mini-skirts and garishly unnatural make-up. As one commentator pointed out: ‘By hi-jacking the imagery of sexual perversion, and inverting the meaning of bondage clothing, Westwood made young women’s fashion threatening and overtly hostile for the first time.’ It was a look that combined the obvious sexuality of the dress of prostitutes with a violent retraction of the sexual invitation that the latter’s clothes represent…
Westwood was clear as to the reasons for the unease such clothing caused: ‘We were interested in what we thought was rebellious, in wanting to annoy English people – and the way to do that was through sex’…
Punk deliberately sought to cloud the meaning of clothing; the multiple references brought together in one outfit confused and challenged the onlooker, precluding a simple interpretation. The punk body was clothed in brutal pornographic styles ripped from the seedy environs of male-dominated Soho sex shops and flaunted in a bold statement of the power of the city street as an arena for the disenfranchised to express their revolt. Fetish-wear – latex mini-skirts, bondage buckles and zips, fishnet stockings and patent stilettos – was used as a call to arms by young women. They were not adopting these styles to be viewed as available or submissive – the traditional interpretation of such explicitly sexual attire – but to challenge the soft sentimentality usually assigned to female teenagers, who were expected to dream of romance rather than project hard-core eroticism. They were defiantly public in their challenge to genteel morality. Parading the city dressed in the revealing styles more commonly associated with prostitutes, they threatened the careful balance between the concealed, forbidden world of the sexual and the openness and vulnerability of the streets. As Elizabeth Wilson has pointed out: ‘ “Streetwalker” is an old term and street people a new.. one, but both tell us that to spend too much time on the street – outdoors in the city – is to become morally suspect.’
This moral uncertainty was stretched to breaking point; punk was loaded with pornographic content, yet it was itself openly bored with, and contemptuous of, sex, which was seen as a mechanical act, lacking emotion. These conflicting messages were presented as a means to transgress social codes and expose the false modesty of the mainstream. Sado-masochistic dress was used as a means to an anarchic end, rather than as part of a sexual ritual as it was by true sexual fetishists. [Rebecca Arnold]
FEAR
One cannot refuse to eat just because there is a chance of being choked. [Chinese Proverb]
For it is wrong to suppose that the scale of our fears corresponds to that of the dangers by which they are inspired. A man may be afraid of not sleeping and not in the least afraid of a serious duel, afraid of a rat and not of a lion. [Marcel Proust]
It’s better to get mugged than to live a life of fear. [Freeman Dyson]
FOLLY
One should not be ashamed of one’s follies; otherwise one’s wisdom has little value. [Friedrich Nietzsche]
Neither man nor woman can be worth anything until they have discovered that they are fools. This is the first step toward becoming either estimable or agreeable; and until it is taken there is no hope. [Viscount Melbourne]
There are two kinds of fool. One says, “This is old, and therefore good.” And one says “This is new, and therefore better. [John Brunner]
I am a man of passions, capable of and subject to doing more or less foolish things – which I happen to regret, more or less, afterwards. [Vincent Van Gogh]
There is a foolish corner in the brain of the wisest man. [Aristotle]
The folly of mistaking a paradox for a discovery, a metaphor for a proof, a torrent of verbiage for a spring of capital truths, and oneself for an oracle is inborn in us. [Paul Valéry]
If people never did silly things, nothing intelligent would ever get done. [Ludwig Wittgenstein]
The most common of all follies is to believe passionately in the palpably untrue. [H.L. Mencken]
Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt. [Abraham Lincoln]
The ultimate result of shielding man from the effects of folly is to people the world with fools. [Herbert Spencer]
FOOTBALL
Across the centuries we have seen the same ritual of territorial dominance, trials of strength, gang fights, mockery against elders and authorities, and antagonism towards ‘outsiders’ as typical focuses for youthful energy and aggressive mischief. Even under vastly different social conditions there are striking continuities between the violent interruptions to pre-industrial fairs and festivals, and the customary eruptions during modern Bank Holidays or the weekly carnival of misrule at contemporary football games – where the football rowdy, with his territorial edginess, mascots, emblems and choral arrangements in the ‘rough music’ tradition, must seem like the incarnation of the unruly apprentice, or the late-Victorian Hooligan. [Geoffrey Pearson]
The natural state of the football fan is bitter disappointment, no matter what the score. [Nick Hornby]
If all the qualities that make football irresistible to countless millions have ever been embodied in one supreme player, that man is Pele.
The history of the game brims with great performances and unforgettable talents. But none of the others – not even the imperial Alfredo Di Stefano or the electrifying George Best – could pervade the field with quite the divine sense of superiority that radiated naturally from Pele at the height of his powers.
His relationship with the ball was different from that achieved by anyone else. Other great footballers concentrate on mastering the ball and using it like a tool. For him it often seemed to be a living ally, dancing between and around his sprinting feet as if it chose to be there. He appeared able to run at maximum speed without concerning himself with an ordinary mortal’s problems of control. The impression given by his explosive, dribbling surges was of the ball somehow galloping with him, matching every adjustment of his stride while it mischievously frustrated the most determined attempts to dispossess him.
There seemed to be scarcely anything he could not do with a ball but the mesmeric trickery invariably had deadly motive. He saw or sensed everything that mattered on the field, being one of the many Brazilian virtuosos whose sophisticated understanding of the game’s subtleties totally refutes the silly notion that their country’s best teams operate on untutored instinct and raw flair. Though a shade less than 5ft 8ins tall, he was a sturdily built and immensely forceful player, amazingly athletic and resilient. His passing was varied, precise and imaginative and his finishing with either foot, or with the headers his soaring leaps afforded him, was violently decisive. It brought nearly 1,300 goals in his career.
Even such a catalogue of his capacities cannot convey anything like the true impact of Pele in his prime. Permeating all these gifts, and heightening their effect, there was the magic of his spirit, the way he was able to blend ferocious competitiveness with real joy in the beauties of football.
Anyone who thinks that last line is fanciful should consider his quest in the World Cup finals of 1970 for a goal so exceptional that it would be seen as unique, unrepeatable, Pele’s goal. When Czechoslovakia’s goalkeeper, Viktor, took advantage of an apparently unthreatening moment to move off his line, Pele frightened the wits out of him by trying to score from the Brazilian segment of the centre circle. Raising his right leg in a prodigious backlift and swinging it through with the flowing, effortless rhythm of a perfect golf shot, he sent the ball in a fast arc towards goal. Viktor’s contorted features revealed the extent of his painful embarrassment as he stumbled back under the ball and then spun helplessly to watch it swoop less than a yard outside a post.
Later, against Uruguay in the semi-final, he twice almost scored that unique goal, once after inflicting a miraculous dummy on the goalkeeper, Mazurkiewicz, once directly returning a mis-hit goal-kick from poor Mazurkiewicz with an incredible volley. [Hugh McIlvanney]
Time stands still for sport’s greatest moments, as if giving us mere mortals the chance to capture their beauty and register their significance…
My moment took place during the World Cup of 1970. Like a first kiss haunting every subsequent love affair, it plays a constant internally programmed video loop, recurring every four years like some benevolent malarial angel, her wand waving the projectionist into action every mid-morning of every first day of every tournament ever since.
With the headrush of the first celebratory drink in the month of excess to follow, it comes alive. It is late in the game, in fact the final game. Brazil-Italy, 3-1 the scoreline. The fortnight’s foreplay we can both share later, but for this one moment in time, Pele has the ball and is considering his options while his italian opponents stand off in trepidation. It is a defence which has spent most of its destructive lifespan breaking down Europe’s best in its catenaccio approach to international club competition, but we’re not in Europe now, we’re in Mexico, and this movie is mine, it’s my generation’s, it’s Brazil’s and it’s Pele’s. With no hint of a quick glance back or shout of a familiar nickname, Pele nonchalantly lays off a ball to his right, of a pace, balance and length as precise as the technology which was then sending astronauts to the moon. But to whom? For that split second, even now, and every World Cup morning ever after, neither I, nor the Italian defence, nor half the world watching on TV can anticipate Carlos Alberto’s blind-side run down the right touchline. The Brazil team captain meets Pele’s ball perfectly, hitting it over 20 yards out at a height normally occupied by Flymo mowers and at a speed heightened by the rarefied atmosphere of the Aztec stadium’s elevated altitude. It crashes into the corner of the net with a righteous climactic force that earns Carlos Alberto sporting immortality and minutes later thrusts the World Cup into Brazil’s hands for ever. Jules Rimet, his name on the original trophy won for the third and final time by a Brazil of rare skill and adventure, could rest in blissful peace. With this final goal of his competition, the World Cup’s visionary administrator’s will and testament had been well and truly served… [Peterjon Cresswell]
Isn’t it funny that our proudest memories are of England teams that lost? The greatest England side ever outplaying Brazil in 1970, hitting the bar, missing an open goal, pulling off the greatest save in the history of the game, and losing 1-0, albeit to a goal from Jairzinho that still ranks among my favourites. Tostao’s swerve, Pele’s defence-destroying side-foot, and the winger’s glorious, unanswerable cross-shot and whooping, ecstatic run to the bench. Or the quarter-final defeat in the same year, the heat and altitude of Leon unbearable, Banksie crocked with a mysterious stomach ailment, England 2-0 up and cruising, and then Beckenbauer, Seeler, Müller, and 3-2 to the Hun. I watched that at home with my parents, and never was there so much misery in one household. It’s rumoured that after the contest a German journalist shouted: ‘We’ve beaten you at your national game!’ And the great Geoffrey Green of the Times replied: ‘Yes, and we’ve beaten you at yours. Twice.’ [Steve Grant]
Yet even Best’s extravagances were a joy, so long as you weren’t Denis Law making a killer run, only to find that the ball had not arrived because Georgie had opted to beat the defender twice. He was most likely to inflict such humiliation on desperadoes who had threatened to break his leg.
With feet as sensitive as a pick-pocket’s hands, his control of the ball under the most violent pressure was hypnotic. The bewildering repertoire of feints and swerves, sudden stops and demoralising spurts, exploited a freakish elasticity of limb and torso, tremendous physical strength and resilience for so slight a figure and balance that would have made Isaac Newton decide he might as well have eaten the apple. It was Paddy Crerand… who declared that the Irishman gave opponents twisted blood. He was an excellent header of the ball and a courageous, effective challenger when the opposition had it, and he reacted to scoring chances with a deadliness that made goalkeepers dread him…
For those who witnessed Best’s brief zenith in the’60s, the effect went beyond the realization that we were seeing the world’s most popular game played better than all but two or three men in its long history have ever played it. Sport at its finest is often poignant, if only because it is almost a caricature of the ephemerality of human achievements, and Best’s performances were doubly affecting for some of us because they coincided with an uneasy suspicion that football was already in the process of separating itself from its roots. [Hugh McIlvanney]
The point about football in Britain is that it is not just a sport people take to, like cricket or tennis or running long distances. It is inherent in the people. It is built into the urban psyche, as much a common experience to our children as are uncles and school. It is not a phenomenon; it is an everyday matter. There is more eccentricity in deliberately disregarding it than in devoting a life to it. It has more significance in the national character than theatre has. [Arthur Hopcraft]
FREEDOM
They who would give up an essential liberty for temporary security, deserve neither liberty or security. [Benjamin Franklin]
The true danger is when liberty is nibbled away, for expedience, and by parts. [Edmund Burke]
My definition of a free society is a society where it is safe to be unpopular. [Adlai E. Stevenson]
Liberty, as it is conceived by current opinion, has nothing inherent about it; it is a sort of gift or trust bestowed on the individual by the state pending good behaviour. [Mary McCarthy]
The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding. [Louis D. Brandeis]
The excessive worship of liberty is usually a materialistic passion. It is founded on a belief that man is the prisoner of external forces, and that, if he were released from them, it would be into a heaven upon earth. [Robert Lynd]
Freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed. [Martin Luther King]
Freedom is what you do with what’s been done with you. [Jean-Paul Sartre]
A dictatorial, authoritarian, doctrinaire system starts from the axiom that the individual is subordinate, in the very nature of things, to the collectivity; from it alone does right and life come to him; the citizen belongs to the state as the child to his family, he is in its power and possession, and he owes it submission and obedience in all things… Labour would be regimented and ultimately enslaved through a state policy of brotherhood… What would freedom, universal happiness, civilization have gained? Nothing. We would merely have changed our chains and the social idea would have made no step forward; we would still be under the same arbitrary power, not to say under the same economic fatalism. [Proudhon]
Freedom only for the supporters of the government, only for the members of one party – however numerous they may be – that is not freedom. Freedom is always freedom for the man who thinks differently. [Rosa Luxembourg]
Only very slowly and late have men come to realize that unless freedom is universal it is only extended privilege. [Christopher Hill]
Ubi dubium, ibi libertas (Where there is doubt, there is freedom). [Latin tag]
The basic test of freedom is perhaps less in what we are free to do than in what we are free not to do. It is the freedom to refrain, withdraw, abstain which makes a totalitarian regime impossible. [Eric Hoffer]
What greater misfortune for a state can be conceived than that honourable men should be sent like criminals into exile, because they hold diverse opinions which they cannot disguise? What, say I, can be more hurtful than that men who have committed no crime or wickedness should, simply because they are enlightened, be treated as enemies and put to death, and that the scaffold, the terror of evil-doers, should become the stage where the highest examples of tolerance and virtues are displayed to the people with all the marks of ignominy that authority can devise? [Spinoza]
It follows that the ultimate aim of government is not to to rule… by Fear, not to exact obedience, but to free men from fear, that they may live in all possible security… the object of government is not to change men from rational beings into beasts or puppets, but to enable them to develop their minds and bodies in security and to employ their reason unshackled:… in fact the true aim of government is Liberty… This outlook is the antithesis of the fear of life apparent in Calvin or St. Augustine. We do not need to deny life to gain salvation. On the contrary, in the words of Jesus, the aim of mankind is ‘To have life and to have it more abundantly’ and the State must be directed to this clear end. [Spinoza]
When people are free to do as they please, they usually imitate each other… [Eric Hoffer]
We are free, we are civilised, to little purpose, if we grudge to any portion of the human race an equal measure of freedom and civilisation. [Lord Macaulay]
Freedom would be not to choose between black and white but to abjure such prescribed choices. [Theodor Adorno]
If liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they do
not want to hear. [George Orwell]
Freedom is the recognition of necessity. [Friedrich Engels]
FRIENDSHIP
If you want to know who your friends are, get yourself a jail sentence. [Charles Bukowski]
In friendship nobody has a double. [Friedrich Schiller]
A friend to all is a friend to none. [Aristotle]
It is wise to apply the oil of refined politeness to the mechanism of friendship. [Colette]
Anybody can sympathize with the sufferings of a friend, but it requires a very fine nature to sympathize with a friend’s success. [Oscar Wilde]
Some people are like popular songs that you only sing for a short time. [La Rochefoucauld]
But lasting joys the man attend
Who has a polished female friend. [Cornelius Whur]
The endearing elegance of female friendship. [Samuel Johnson]
Don’t believe your friends when they ask you to be honest with them. All they really want is to be maintained in the good opinion they have of themselves.
[Albert Camus]
The Bible tells us to forgive our enemies, not our friends. [Margot Asquith]
Most friendships are formed by caprice or by chance, mere confederacies in vice or leagues in folly. [Samuel Johnson]
The feeling of friendship is like that of being comfortably filled with roast beef; love like being enlivened with champagne. [James Boswell]
True intimacy rests on a common sense of what things are pudenda and tacenda. [Paul Valéry]
Friendship should be surrounded with ceremonies and respects, and not crushed into corners. [Ralph Waldo Emerson]
Grief can take care of itself; but to get the full value of a joy you must have somebody to divide it with. [Mark Twain]
We were friends and have become estranged. But this was right, and we do not want to conceal and obscure it from ourselves as if we had reason to feel ashamed. We are two ships each of which has its goal and course; our paths may cross and we may celebrate a feast together, as we did – and then the good ships rested so quietly in one harbour and one sunshine that it may have looked as if they had reached their goal and as if they had one goal. But then the almighty force of our tasks drove us apart again into different seas and sunny zones, and perhaps we shall never see each other again; perhaps we shall meet again but fail to recognise each other: our exposure to different seas and suns has changed us. That we have become estranged is the law above us; by the same token we should also become more venerable for each other – and the memory of our former friendship more sacred. There is probably a tremendous but invisible stellar orbit in which our very different ways and goals may be included as small parts of this path; let us rise up to this thought. But our life is too short and our power of vision too small for us to be more than friends in the sense of this sublime possibility. – Let us then believe in our star friendship even if we should be compelled to be earth enemies. [Friedrich Nietzsche]
One needs friends mainly in order to become more impudent, that is, more oneself. One practises one’s boastings in front of them, one’s high-handedness, one’s vanities; in front of them one acts worse and better than one really is. One is not ashamed of any untruth: the friend who knows one, knows how true it could become. [Elias Canetti]
What is detestable is the pride of those too sparing in their friendships. [Euripides?]
‘Tis the privilege of friendship to talk nonsense, and have her nonsense respected. [Charles Lamb]
No guest is so welcome in a friend’s house that he will not become a nuisance after three days. [Titus Maccius Plautus]
