Habit – Hygiene
HABIT
It may, incidentally, be observed that the regularity of a habit is usually in direct proportion to its absurdity. [Marcel Proust]
We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit. [Aristotle]
I believe that we learn by practice… it is the performance of a dedicated precise set of acts, physical or intellectual, from which come shape of achievement, a sense of one’s being, a satisfaction of spirit. [Martha Graham]
What a man thinks, he becomes. That is the ancient secret. [from the Upanishads]
Could the young but realize how soon they will become mere walking bundles of habits, they would give more heed to their conduct while in the plastic state. [William James]
In associating with Southey, not only was it necessary to salvation to refrain from touching his books, but various rites, ceremonies, and usages must be rigidly observed. At certain appointed hours only was he open to conversation; at the seasons which had been predestined from all eternity for holding intercourse with his friends. Every hour of the day had its commission – every half-hour was assigned to its own peculiar, undeviating function. The indefatigable student gave a detailed account of his most painstaking life, every moment of which was fully employed and strictly pre-arranged, to a certain literary Quaker lady.
‘I rise at five throughout the year, from six till eight I read Spanish; then French, for one hour; Portuguese next, for half an hour – my watch lying on the table; I give two hours to poetry; I write prose for two hours; I translate for so long; I make extracts so long’; and so of the rest, until the poor fellow had fairly fagged himself into his bed again.
‘And, pray, when dost thou think, friend?’ she asked, drily, to the great discomfort of the future Laureate. [Thomas Jefferson Hogg]
HAIR
Body hair is an example. Many peoples prefer to remove hair on the body to distinguish themselves from brute creation. Depilation is a form of body decoration found all over the world; the face, the eyebrows, the pubic regions and the legs are the parts most subjected to this practice. The numerous advertisements for depilatories and the curious popularity of the shaven face demonstrate our desire to look unlike animals.
The Egyptians shaved off their body hair using depilatory creams, razors and pumice stones. Julius Caesar had his facial hair plucked out with tweezers and shaved himself all over, particularly before battle. The Roman poet Ovid, advising women in his Ars Amatoria, told them to ‘let no rude goat find his way beneath your arms and let not your legs be rough with bristling hair.’ Hindus believe they are more desirable without body hair. Even Australians consider that a handsome man is a man with no body hair except on the head and face, and spend hours plucking and shaving superfluous hair. The facts seem odd: we go to extremes to remove natural hair, yet pubic hair and armpit and body hair are natural sexual stimulants and grow in areas where the skin contains scent glands. Pubic hair is a scented recognition signal and a stimulant to sexual excitement – yet we shave it off. The reason is clear: a hairy body is an animal body. Wild men, like Esau the hunter, are hairy. Body hair is beastly and has to go in the interests of humanity. [Robert Brain]
A more generous view, however, recognises in the hairlessness of our species the enhancement of the skin as a sense organ and of the parts of the body as foci of optical interest. For in man the sensory nerves running through the spine are much more numerous than in any of the furry tribes, while the range and subtlety of the sign stimuli afforded not only by our nakedness but also by our various modes of covering and uncovering it evoke responses of considerably more diversity than those of mere animal appetite and consummation. The hairless face has become an organ of exquisite mobility, capable of a range and refinement of social signalling infinitely more versatile than the social ‘releasers’ (the bird cries, flourished antlers, and tail flashes) of the animal kingdom. [Joseph Campbell]
Even as the external symptom of the coarseness that is gaining the upper hand, you see its constant concomitant, the long beard, that sign of sex in the middle of the face which states that a man prefers the masculinity he has in common with the animals to humanity, since he wants first to be a male (mas), and only subsequently a human being. Shaving off beards in all highly civilised ages and countries is the result of a correct feeling to the contrary by virtue whereof one would like to be first of all a human being, to some extent a human being in abstracto, setting aside the animal sexual difference. On the other hand, length of beard has always kept pace with barbarism, which its name seems to imply. Thus beards flourished in the Middle Ages, that millennium of coarseness and ignorance whose style and fashion our noble present-timers [Jetztzeitler] strive to imitate. [Arthur Schopenhauer]
Hair style is the final tip-off whether or not a woman really knows herself. [Hubert de Givenchy]
HAPPINESS
What do you take me for, an idiot? [Charles de Gaulle when a journalist asked him if he was happy]
It has long been an axiom of mine that the little things are infinitely the most important. [Arthur Conan Doyle]
There is a fundamental need in man to know three things: who he is, where he lives, and what time it is. With satisfying answers to those three questions, most of us could live in relative peace with the world and ourselves. [Hal Borland]
Ask yourself whether you are happy and you cease to be so. [John Stuart Mill]
One feels inclined to say that the intention that man should be ‘happy’ is not included in the plan of ‘Creation.’ [Sigmund Freud]
Happiness, only a by-product. [Geoffrey Madan]
There has never yet been a man in our history who led a life of ease whose name is worth remembering. [Theodore Roosevelt]
We are never as unhappy as we think, nor as happy as we had hoped. [La Rochefoucauld]
If only we’d stop trying to be happy we could have a pretty good time. [Edith Wharton]
It is the chiefest point of happiness that a man is willing to be what he is. [Desiderius Erasmus]
… happiness is like a butterfly which appears and delights us for one brief moment, but soon flits away. [Anna Pavlova]
Happiness isn’t something you experience; it’s something you remember. [Oscar Levant]
One of the secrets of a happy life is continuous small treats. [Iris Murdoch]
The search for happiness is one of the chief sources of unhappiness. [Eric Hoffer]
“What would you call the highest happiness?” Wratislaw was asked. “The sense of competence”, was the answer, given without hesitation. [John Buchan]
Satisfaction of one’s curiosity is one of the greatest sources of happiness in life. [Linus Pauling]
Life is made up, not of great sacrifices or duties, but of little things, in which smiles and kindness, and small obligations given habitually, are what preserve the heart and secure comfort. [Humphry Davy]
Consider any individual at any period of his life, and you will always find him preoccupied with fresh plans to increase his comfort. [Alexis de Tocqueville]
He asserted that the present was never a happy state to any human being; but that, as every part of life, of which we are conscious, was at some point of time a period yet to come, in which felicity was expected, there was some happiness produced by hope. Being pressed upon this subject, and asked if he really was of opinion, that though, in general, happiness was very rare in human life, a man was not sometimes happy in the moment that was present, he answered, ‘Never, but when he is drunk.’ [James Boswell]
For example, disliking idle talk about the ease of being happy in ‘a world bursting with sin and sorrow,’ he became heated when a friend, said Mrs. Thrale, continued to push the argument. As if to clinch the matter, the friend pointed to his wife’s sister, who was present, and said she ‘was really happy, and called upon the lady to confirm his assertion.’ When she did so with a smug and pert superiority, Johnson burst out: ‘If your sister-in-law is really the contented being she professes herself… her life gives the lie to every research of humanity, for she is happy without health, without beauty, without money, and without understanding.’ [When Mrs. Thrale later] expressed something of the horrour I felt, ‘The same stupidity (said he) which prompted her to extol a felicity she never felt, hindered her from feeling what shocks you on repetition. I tell you, the woman is ugly, and sickly, and foolish, and poor; and would it not make a man hang himself to hear such a creature say, it was happy.’ [Walter Jackson Bate]
Precisely the least, the softest, lightest, a lizard’s rustling, a breath, a flash, a moment—a little makes the way of the best happiness. [Friedrich Nietzsche]
The truly important things in life – love, beauty, and one’s own uniqueness – are constantly being overlooked. [Pablo Casals]
Why do people adopt poses, play the dandy, the sceptic, the stoic or the careless trifler? Because they feel there is something superior in facing life according to a standard and a discipline they have imposed on themselves, if only in their mind. And, in fact, this is the secret of happiness; to adopt a pattern of behaviour, a style, a mould into which all our impressions and expressions must fall and be remodelled. Every life lived according to a pattern that is consistent, comprehensive and vital, has a classic symmetry. [Cesare Pavese]
To be happy is to be able to become aware of oneself without fright. [Walter Benjamin]
I drove up the mountain and found a dairy, bought some milk, and asked permission to camp under an apple tree. The dairy man had a PhD. in mathematics, and he must have had some training in philosophy. He liked what he was doing and didn’t want to be anywhere else — one of the very few contented people I met in my whole journey. [John Steinbeck]
For the happiest life, days should be rigorously planned, nights left open to chance. [Mignon McLaughlin]
I can sympathize with people’s pains, but not with their pleasures. There is something curiously boring about somebody else’s happiness. [Aldous Huxley]
Yes, I am proud of the fact that I experience the character of Epicurus quite differently from perhaps everybody else. Whatever I hear or read of him, I enjoy the happiness of the afternoon of antiquity. I see his eyes gaze upon a wide, white sea, across rocks at the shore that are bathed in sunlight, while large and small animals are playing in this light, as secure and calm as the light and his eyes. Such happiness could be invented only by a man who was suffering continually. It is the happiness of eyes that have seen the sea of existence become calm, and now they can never weary of the surface and of the many hues of this tender, shuddering skin of the sea. Never before has voluptuousness been so modest. [Friedrich Nietzsche]
The danger of the happiest. – To have refined senses, including the sense of taste; to be accustomed to the most exquisite things of the spirit as if they were simply the right and most convenient nourishment; to enjoy a strong, bold, audacious soul; to go through life with a calm eye and firm step, always prepared to risk all – festively, impelled by the longing for undiscovered worlds and seas, people and gods; to hearken to all cheerful music as if it were a sign that bold men, soldiers, seafarers were probably seeking their brief rest and pleasure there – and in the most profound enjoyment of the moment, to be overcome by tears and the whole crimson melancholy of the happy: who would not wish that all this might be his possession, his state! This was the happiness of Homer! The state of him that gave the Greeks their gods – no, who invented his own gods for himself! But we should not overlook this: With this Homeric happiness in one’s soul one is also more capable of suffering than any other creature under the sun. This is the only price for which one can buy the most precious shell that the waves of existence have ever yet washed on the shore. As its owner one becomes ever more refined in pain and ultimately too refined; any small dejection and nausea was quite enough in the end to spoil life for Homer. He had been unable to guess a follish little riddle posed to him by some fishermen. Yes, little riddles are thr danger that confronts those who are happiest.- [Friedrich Nietzsche]
Happiness is the word that immediately rises to the mind at the thought of Edward Gibbon: and happiness in its widest connotation – including good fortune as well as enjoyment. Good fortune, indeed, followed him from the cradle to the grave in the most tactful way possible; occasionally it appeared to fail him; but its absence always turned out to be a blessing in disguise…
One sees in such a life an epitome of the blessings of the eighteenth century – the wonderful medeu agau of that most balmy time – the rich fruit ripening slowly on the sun-warmed well, and coming inevitably to its delicious perfection. it is difficult to imagine, at any other period in history, such a combination of varied qualities, so beautifully balanced – the profound scholar who was also a brilliant man of the world – the votary of cosmopolitan culture, who never for a moment ceased to be a supremely English ‘character.’ The ten years of Gibbon’s life in London afford an astonishing spectacle of interacting energies. By what strange power did he succeed in producing a masterpiece of enormous erudition and perfect form, while he was leading the gay life of a man about town, spending his evenings at White’s or Boodle’s or the Club, attending Parliament, oscillating between his house in Bentinck Street, his country cottage at Hampton Court, and his little establishment at Brighton, spending his summers in Bath or Paris, and even, at odd moments, doing a little work at the Board of Trade, to show that his place was not entirely a sinecure? Such a triumph could only have been achieved by the sweet reasonableness of the eighteenth century. ‘Monsieur Gibbon n’est point mon homme,’ said Rousseau. Decidedly! The prophet of the coming age of sentiment and romance could have nothing in common with such a nature. It was not that the historian was a mere frigid observer of the golden mean – far from it. He was full of fire and feeling. His youth had been at moments riotous – night after night he had reeled hallooing down St. James’s Street. Old age did not diminish the natural warmth of his affections; the beautiful letter – a model of its kind – written on the death of his aunt, in his fiftieth year, is a proof of it. But the fire and the feeling were controlled and co-ordinated. Boswell was a Rousseau-ite, one of the first of the Romantics, an inveterate sentimentalist, and nothing could be more complete than the contrast between his career and Gibbon’s. He, too, achieved a glorious triumph; but it was by dint of the sheer force of native genius asserting itself over the extravagance and disorder of an agitated life – a life which, after a desperate struggle, seemed to end at last in darkness and shipwreck. With Gibbon there was never any struggle: everything came naturally to him – learning and dissipation, industry and indolence, affection and scepticism – in the correct proportions; and he enjoyed himself up to the very end.
To complete the picture one must notice another antithesis: the wit, the genius, the massive intellect, were housed in a physical mould that was ridiculous. A little figure, extraordinarily rotund, met the eye, surmounted by a top-heavy head, with a button nose, planted amid a vast expanse of cheek and ear, and chin upon chin rolling downward. Nor was this appearance only; the odd shape reflected something in the inner man. Mr. Gibbon, it was noted, was always slightly over-dressed; his favourite wear was flowered velvet. He was a little vain, a little pompous; at the first moment one almost laughed; then one forgot everything under the fascination of that even flow of admirably intelligent, exquisitely turned, and most amusing sentences. Among all his other merits this obviously ludicrous egotism took its place. The astonishing creature was able to make a virtue even of absurdity. Without that touch of nature he would have run the risk of being too much of a good thing; as it was there was no such danger; he was preposterous and a human being. [Lytton Strachey]
If all our happiness is bound up entirely in our personal circumstances it is difficult not to demand of life more than it has to give. [Bertrand Russell]
HEALTH
As a people we have become obsessed with health… there is something fundamentally, radically unhealthy about all this… we have lost confidence in the human body. [Lewis Thomas]
It is a distortion to picture the human being as a teetering, fallible contraption, always needing watching and patching, always on the verge of flapping to pieces; this is the doctrine that people hear most often, and most eloquently, on all our information media… The great secret of medicine, known to doctors but still hidden from the public, is that most things get better by themselves. [Lewis Thomas]
I remember going to the British Museum one day to read up the treatment for some slight ailment of which I had touch. I got down the book, and read all I came to read; and then, in an unthinking moment, I idly turned the leaves, and began to indolently study diseases. Bright’s disease, I was relieved to find, I had only in a modified form, and so far as that was concerned, I might live for years. Cholera I had, with severe complications: and diphtheria I seemed to have been born with. I plodded conscientiously through the twenty-six letters, and the only malady I could conclude I had not got was housemaid’s knee. [Jerome K. Jerome]
The first symptom of returning disease, of going wrong, is the sense that something is going wrong. This point cannot be emphasized too strongly. The patient does not experience a precisely formulated and neatly tabulated list of symptoms, but an intuitive, unmistakable sense that ‘there is something the matter’. It is not reasonable to expect him to be able to define exactly what is the matter, for it is the indefinable sense of ‘wrongness’ that indicates to him and to us, the general nature of his malaise: the sense of wrongness which he experiences is, so to speak, his first glimpse of a wrong world. [Oliver Sacks]
Defects, disorders, diseases … can play a paradoxical role, by bringing out latent powers, developments, evolutions, forms of life, that might never be seen, or even be imaginable, in their absence… Thus while one may be horrified by the ravages of developmental disorder or disease, one may sometimes see them as creative too – for if they destroy particular paths, particular ways of doing things, they may force on it an unexpected growth and evolution. [Oliver Sacks]
One’s own clothes are replaced by an anonymous white nightgown, one’s wrist is clasped by an identification bracelet with a number. One becomes subject to institutional rules and regulations. One is no longer a free agent; one no longer has rights; one is no longer in the world-at-large. It is strictly analogous to becoming a prisoner and humiliatingly reminiscent of one’s first day at school. One is no longer a person, one is now an inmate. [Oliver Sacks on being a hospital patient]
The difficulty of defining disease is implied in the very structure of the word: “dis-ease.” So many different kinds of disturbances can make a person feel not at ease and lead him to seek the aid of a physician that the word ought to encompass most of the difficulties inherent in the human condition. [René Dubos]
If a medical and social consensus defined freckles as a disease, this benign and often winsome skin condition would become a disease. Patients would consult physicians complaining of freckles, physicians would diagnose and treat freckles, and presumably, in time, we would have a National Institute of Freckle Research. [Robert P. Hudson]
One is reminded of the famous Andy Capp cartoon in which Flo is reading an item from a newspaper. ‘It sez ‘ere,’ she intones, ‘that people wot don’t smoke or drink live longer.’ ‘Serves ‘em right.’ replies her recumbent spouse. [John Naughton]
I refuse to spend my life worrying about what I eat. There is no pleasure worth forgoing just for an extra three years in the geriatric ward. [John Mortimer]
If I think of Death at all it is merely as a negation of life, a close, a last and necessary chord. What I dread is disease, that is, bad, disordered life, not Death, and disease, so far, I have escaped. [Jane Harrison]
The infectious diseases replace each other, and when one is rooted out it is apt to be replaced by others which ravage the human race indifferently whenever the conditions of health are wanting. They have this property in common with weeds and other forms of life, as one species recedes another advances. [William Parr]
Six prisoners in the Harris county jail in Texas, quite impressed by the official report on the ill effects of tobacco, announced yesterday that they had decided to quit smoking because they were determined not to die of lung cancer. The six men, imprisoned for various crimes, are all condemned to die in the electric chair. [?]
Your health is bound to be affected, if day after day you say the opposite of what you feel, if you grovel before what you dislike and rejoice at what brings you nothing but misfortune. Our nervous system isn’t just a fiction, it’s part of our physical body, and our soul exists in space and is inside us, like the teeth in our mouth. It can’t be forever violated with impunity. [Boris Pasternak]
If you resolve to give up smoking, drinking and loving, you don’t actually live longer; it just seems longer. [Clement Freud]
Pagan thinkers had seen health as a ‘concord’ or ‘blend’ of opposing qualities, terms which interrelate with their language for the body politic. Christians connected health with faith and an absence of sin, a state which had to be maintained against outside invaders and tempters. Their image of the human body conformed to their image of the Church as a sinless Body, set apart from a demonic world. [Robin Lane Fox]
People who are always taking care of their health are like misers who are hoarding a treasure which they have never spirit enough to enjoy. [Laurence Sterne]
It is better to lose health like a spendthrift than waste it like a miser. [Robert Louis Stevenson]
A human being who is first of all an invalid is all body; therein lies his inhumanity and his debasement.” [Thomas Mann]
One of the chief objects of medicine is to save us from the natural consequences of our vices and follies. The moment it becomes moral it becomes quackery. A scientific physician should have no opinion about the ethical standards and deserts of his patient. [H.L. Mencken]
I have been inclined to feel from time to time that there ought to be a hagiology of medical science and that we ought to have saints’ days to commemorate the great discoveries which have been made for all mankind, and perhaps for all time — or for whatever time may be left to us. Nature, like many of our modern statesmen, is prodigal of pain. I should like to find a day when we can take a holiday, a day of jubilation, when we can fête good Saint Anaesthesia and chaste and pure Saint Antiseptic. [Winston Churchill]
The office of medicine is but to tune this curious harp of man’s body and to reduce it to harmony. [Francis Bacon]
For Alcmaeon of Crotona, a contemporary of Pythagoras, disease was due to a breakdown of equilibrium between hot and cold, wet and dry, the contrary elements which constitute us. When one of them prevails and dictates, disease results; hence it is only the ‘monarchy’, as he said of one of these elements, whereas health would result from an equality among them.
This vision has something true about it: no disequilibrium that does not appear from an abusive pre-eminence of one organ or another at the expense , from its ambition to impose itself, to proclaim, to shout its presence: by dint of contention, of insistence, it deranges the whole organism and compromises its future. A sick organ is an organ that emancipates itself from the body and tyrannizes over it, destroys the body and itself, and this solely in order to show off, to turn itself into a star. {E.M. Cioran]
To have a disease is to feel unclean, contaminated, defective. [Marc Ian Barasch]
If you start to think about your physical or moral condition, you usually find that you are sick. [?]
Use your health, even to the point of wearing it out. That is what it is for. Spend all you have before you die; and do not outlive yourself. [George Bernard Shaw]
There are people who strictly deprive themselves of each and every eatable, drinkable and smokable which has in any way acquired a shady reputation. They pay this price for health. And health is all they get for it. How strange it is. It is like paying out your whole fortune for a cow that has gone dry. [Mark Twain]
And truly the whole state of sickness is such; for what else is it but a magnificent dream for a man to lie-a-bed, and draw daylight curtains about him; and, shutting out the sun, to induce a total oblivion of all the works which are going on under it? To become insensible to all the operations of life, except the beatings of one feeble pulse?
If there be a regal solitude, it is a sickbed. How the patient lords it there; what caprices he acts without control! How king-like he sways his pillow – tumbling and tossing and shifting, and lowering, and thumping, and flattening, and moulding it, to the ever-varying requisitions of his throbbing temples.
He changes sides oftener than a politician. Now he lies full length, then half-length, obliquely, transversely, head and feet quite across the bed; and now one accuses him of tergiversation…
How sickness enlarges a man’s self to himself; he is his own exclusive object. Supreme selfishness is inculcated upon him as his only duty… he has nothing to think of but how to get well. [Charles Lamb]
Keep up the spirits of your patient with the music of the viol and the psaltery, or by forging letters telling of the death of his enemies or (if he be a cleric) by informing him that he has been made a bishop. [Henri de Mondeville]
Medicine may be defined as the art of keeping a patient quiet… until nature kills him or cures him. [Gilles Menage]
A Lazar-house it seemed, wherein were laid
Numbers of all diseas’d, all maladies,
Of ghastly spasm, or racking torture, qualms
Of heart-sick agony, all feverous kinds,
Convulsions, epilepsies, fierce catarrhs,
Intestine stone and ulcer, colic pangs,
Demonic frenzy, moping melancholy,
And moonstruck madness, pining atrophy,
Marasmus, and wide-wasting pestilence,
Dropsies, and asthmas, and joint-racking rheums.
Dire was the tossing, deep the groans, despair
Tended the sick busiest from couch to couch. [John Milton]
Illness is not something a person has. It’s another way of being. [Jonathan Miller]
During another visit to Auteuil, when Marcel was nine years old, the family took a walk in the near-by Bois de Boulogne with some friends. On the way back he seized by a fit of suffocation, and seemed on the point of dying before the eyes of his terrified father. His lifelong disease of asthma had begun. Medically speaking, his malady was involuntary and genuine; but asthma, we are told, is often closely linked to unconscious conflicts and desires, and for Proust it was to be, though a dread master, a faithful servant. In his attacks of asthma the same causes were at work as in his childhood fits of hysterical weeping; his unconscious mind was asking for his father’s pity and his mother’s love; and his breathlessness reproduced, perhaps, the moment of suffocation which comes equally from tears or from sexual pleasure. He sinned through his lungs, and in the end his lungs were to kill him. Other great writers, Flaubert and Dostoyevsky, suffered from epilepsy, which stood in an inseparable and partly causal relation to their art. Asthma was Proust’s epilepsy. In early years it was the mark of his difference from others, his appeal for love, his refuge from duties which were foreign to his still unconscious purpose; and in later life it helped him to withdraw from the world and to produce a work ‘de si longue haleine.’ Meanwhile, however, he was only a little boy choking and writhing in the scented air under the green leaves, in the deadly garden of spring. [George D. Painter]
HELL
Maybe this world is another planet’s Hell. [Aldous Huxley]
One of the most horrible, yet most important, discoveries of our age has been that, if you really wish to destroy a person and turn him into an automaton, the surest method is not physical torture, in the strict sense, but simply to keep him awake, ie. in an existential relation to life without intermission. [W.H. Auden]
Hell is not interesting; it is merely terrible. Whenever it has not been humanised – as by Dante, who populated it with men of letters and other public figures, thus distracting attention from the penal technicalities – whenever anyone has simply tried to give an original idea of it, even the most imaginative people have not got beyond oafish torments and puerile distortions of earthly peculiarities. But it is precisely the emptiness of the thought of inconceivable, inexorable, everlasting punishment and torment, the premise of a change for the worst impervious to any attempt to reverse it, that has the attraction of an abyss. The same is true of lunatic asylums, which on earth are the ultimate habitation of the lost. [Robert Musil]
That is the secret delight and security of hell, that it is not to be informed on, that it is protected from speech, that it just is, but cannot be public in the newspaper, be brought by word to critical knowledge, wherefore precisely the words ’subterranean,’ ‘cellar,’ ‘thick walls,’ ’soundlessness,’ ‘forgottenness,’ ‘hopelessness,’ are the poor, weak symbols. One must just be satisfied with symbolism, my good man, when one is speaking of hell, for there everything ends – not only the word that describes, but everything altogether. This is indeed the chiefest characteristic and what in most general terms is to be uttered about it: both that which the newcomer thither first experiences, and what at first with his as it were sound senses he cannot grasp, and will not understand, because his reason or what limitation soever of his understanding prevents him, in short because it is quite unbelievable enough to make him turn white as a sheet, although it is opened to him at once on greeting, in the most emphatic and concise words, that ‘here everything leaves off.’ Every compassion, every grace, every sparing, every last trace of consideration for the incredulous, imploring objection ‘that you verily cannot do so unto a soul’: it is done, it happens, and indeed without being called to any reckoning in words; in soundless cellar, far down beneath God’s hearing, and happens to all eternity. [Thomas Mann]
We are our own demons, we expel ourselves from our paradise. [Goethe]
HERMIT
Whilst these persons of varying respectability were trying, in their several ways, to preserve their lives, others, equally, or more, praiseworthy, were trying to escape the consequences of being alive. And, in aid of this praiseworthy desire, certain noblemen and country squires were advertising for Ornamental Hermits. Nothing, it was felt, could give such delight to the eye, as the spectacle of an aged person with a long grey beard, and a goatish rough robe, doddering about amongst the discomforts and pleasures of Nature.
The Honble Charles Hamilton, whose estate was at Pains’ Hall, near Cobham, Surrey, and who lived in the reign of King George II, was one of these admirers of singularity and silence, and having advertised for a hermit, he built a retreat for this ornamental but retiring person on a steep mound in his estate.
This hermitage annoyed Mr. Horace Walpole, who announced that it was ridiculous to set aside a quarter of one’s garden to be melancholy in: and indeed, the retreat seems to have been remarkable more for discomfort than for its beauty, for we learn that there was ‘an upper apartment, supported in part by contorted legs and roots of trees, which formed the entrance to the cell.’ Still, Mr. Hamilton seems to have found no difficulty in procuring the hermit; and in any case, a professional discomfort was only to be expected by the hermit, who, according to the terms of the agreement, must ‘continue in the hermitage seven years, where he should be provided with a Bible, optical glasses, a mat for his feet, a hassock for his pillow, an hour-glass for his timepiece, water for his beverage and food from the house. He must wear a camlet robe, and never, under any circumstances, must he cut his hair, beard, or nails, stray beyond the limits of Mr. Hamilton’s grounds, or exchange one word with the servant.’ If he remained without breaking one of these conditions, in the grounds of Mr. Hamilton for seven years, he was to receive, as a proof of Mr. Hamilton’s admiration and satisfaction, the sum of seven hundred pounds. But if, driven to madness by the intolerable tickling of the beard, or the scratching of the camlet robe, he broke any of the conditions laid down, he was not to receive a penny! It is a melancholy fact that the Ornamental Hermit stayed in his retreat for exactly three weeks! [Edith Sitwell]
What marks the monks in the course of their long lifes is a silence of the spirit, a childish innocence, an apparently meaningless goodness. They become like good children playing at being good. Their simplicity is more obvious than their depth. Their ceremonies are second nature to them, and they perform them with reverent relish, though by no means always with a young man’s exactitude. These good old men have always given me particular pleasure, but if a novice realises that the vocation of a young monk was to become an old monk, I think he would be terrified. Of course there is an analogy with ordinary family life. But if the rough celibacy, community isolation, and the long, sober intoxication of prayer, the monks in old age develop the kind of eccentricity that Oxford dons used to exhibit before they were permitted to marry. Old monks are wild as well as simple. They perch more lightly on the globe than the rest of us…
I have known some over thirty years, and the process of maturing leading to a modest spiritual authority is both usual and remarkable. It is unlike any normal success in life, and seems rather to be based on an early acceptance and digestion of failure with a subsequent diminution of the ego… One of the worst cankers of monastic life is a disguised ambition that recurs when religious certainty has hardened into complacent self-righteousness. This leads to a lack of kindness and a stubborn narrowness of view, all too often to be observed in monastic history. Outright corruption is much less dangerous to the spirit…
At any visitor’s first entry into a monastery, time seems to stand still. If one spends a week or a month, a different scale and pattern of time imposes itself, which at first one resists as if one were in prison. When this new time-scale is accepted, it soaks into one’s bones and penetrates ones mind. it has nothing to do with death or eternity, but it involves a tranquil, unhurried, absolutely dominating rhythm. This specially undisturbed yet specially rhythmical sense of time is the greatest difference between monastic life and any other. Beyond the rhythm of days is the underlying rhythm of seasons and festivals. The liturgy sets the pace: above all, the night hours and early morning hours. No one, as David Knowles remarks, can really understand the monstic vocation who has not seen the sun come slowly up at the end of a long night office, through the great east windows of an abbey church…
Western monastic architecture, with its tall bell-towers, its severe and regular pillars that seem to be assembled by sober music, its sober cloisters and high windows is obviously the product of this same rhythmic sense. Somewhere on a well-shaft in a monastic cloister I remember the words, O sobria ebrietas, O ebria sobrietas: O sober drunkenness, O drunken sobriety. Even the water and the light and darkness are mystical symbols, and real ones. They are part of one long, inexorable drama. All this seems more marvellous and more strange to us than it would have done in the past, because much of human life was once determined by the rhythms of days and seasons…
I have never been quite certain to what extent monasteries existed physically for the sake of outsiders. The founders would not have thought so. Yet the handsomest Spanish and Italian monasteries seem to rear up like stage scenery, like something imagined, like the sketch of an ideal. To become a monk or a hermit is to dramatise oneself, as Shakespeare and Scott realised. In their dailt life were the monks dramatising themselves for one another’s sake, or communally for a communal self-image, or were they really doing it in some way for the others, for those outside the walls? Psychological states do exist in which one might play out some long drama for the sake of those who would never see it. If this is an ingredient in the life of monks, and if the silence they enter when they say, I will go unto the altar of my God, is meant to be a silence overheard by us, and haunting us, then its strangest effect is attained not in the realities but among the ruins of monasteries. [Peter Levi]
HISTORY
History… is, little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind. [Edward Gibbon]
Properly speaking, history is nothing but the crimes and misfortunes of the human race. [Pierre Bayle]
Human history in essence is the history of ideas. [H.G. Wells]
History … is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake. [James Joyce]
The history of science, like the history of all human ideas, is a history of irresponsible dreams, of obstinacy, and of error. [Karl Popper]
… what experience and history teach is this – that peoples and governments never have learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it. [Hegel]
There is nothing to history. No progress, no justice. There is nothing but random horror. [William Gibson and Bruce Sterling]
History is, strictly speaking, the study of questions; the study of answers belongs to anthropology and sociology. To ask a question is to declare war, to make some issue a casus belli; history proper is the history of battles, physical, intellectual or spiritual and, the more revolutionary the outcome, the greater the historical interest. [W.H. Auden]
History is the autobiography of a madman. [Alexander Herzen]
Biographical history, as taught in our public schools, is still largely a history of boneheads: ridiculous kings and queens, paranoid political leaders, compulsive voyagers, ignorant generals — the flotsam and jetsam of historical currents. The men who radically altered history, the great scientists and mathematicians, are seldom mentioned, if at all. [?]
Histories of the downfalls of great kingdoms, and revolutions of empires, are read with great tranquillity. [Samuel Johnson]
… he who calls what has vanished back again into being, enjoys a bliss like that of creating. [Niebuhr]
My sweet, harmless comrades were tortured, mutilated, burnt alive. History is a laboratory in which we learn that nothing works, or ever can. [Michael Swanwick]
We later civilisations… we too now know that we are mortal.
We had long heard tell of whole worlds that had vanished, of empires sunk without a trace, gone down with all their men and all their machines into the unexplorable depths of the centuries, with their gods and their laws, their academies and their sciences pure and applied, their grammars and their dictionaries, their Classics, their Romantics, and their Symbolists, their critics and the critics of their critics… We were aware that the visible earth is made of ashes, and that ashes signify something. Through the obscure depths of history we could make out the phantoms of great ships laden with riches and intellect; we could not count them. But the disasters that had sent them down were, after all, none of our affair.
Elam, Nineveh, Babylon were but beautiful vague names, and the total ruin of those worlds has as little significance for us as their very existence. But France, England, Russia… these, too, would be beautiful names. Lusitania, too, is a beautiful name. And we see now that the abyss of history is deep enough to hold us all. We are aware that a civilisation has the same fragility as a life. The circumstances that could send the works of Keats and Baudelaire to join the works of Menander are no longer inconceivable; they are in the newspapers. [Paul Valéry]
In turning the pages of one of the papers my eye catches the following sentence: ‘By the light of modern science and thought, we are in a position to see that each normal human being in some way repeats historically the life of the human race.’ This is a very typical modern assertion; that is, it is an assertion for which there is not and never has been a single spot or speck of proof. We know precious little about what the life of the human race has been; and none of our scientific conjectures about it bear the remotest resemblance to the actual growth of a child. According to this theory, a baby begins by chipping flints and rubbing sticks together to find fire. One so often sees babies doing this. About the age of five the child, before the delighted eyes of his parents, founds a village community. By the time he is eleven it has become a small city state, replica of ancient Athens. Encouraged by this, the boy proceeds, and before he is fourteen has founded the Roman Empire. But now his parents have a serious setback. Having watched him so far, not only with pleasure, but with a very natural surprise, they must strengthen themselves to endure the spectacle of decay. They have now to watch their child going through the decline of the Western Empire and the Dark Ages. They see the invasion of the Huns and that of the Norsemen chasing each other across his expressive face. He seems a little happier after he has ‘repeated’ the Battle of Chalons and the unsuccessful Siege of Paris; and by the time he comes to the twelfth century, his boyish face is as bright as it was of old when he was ‘repeating’ Pericles or Camillus. I have no space to follow this remarkable demonstration of how history repeats itself in the youth; how he grows dismal at twenty-three to represent the end of Medievalism, brightens because the Renaissance is coming, darkens again with the disputes of the later Reformation, broadens placidly through the thirties as the rational eighteenth century, till at last, about forty-three, he gives a great yell and begins to burn the house down, as a symbol of the French Revolution. Such (we shall all agree) is the ordinary development of a boy. [G.K. Chesterton]
History is the most dangerous product that the chemistry of the intellect has elaborated. Its properties are well-known. It produces dreams, it makes peoples drunk, engenders in them false memories, exaggerates their reflexes, maintains their old wounds, torments them in their sleep, leads them to the delirium of grandeur or of persecution, and makes nations bitter, haughty, insupportable and vain. [Paul Valéry]
The most persistent sound which reverberates through man’s history is the beating of war drums. [Arthur Koestler]
Anyone who manages to experience the history of humanity as a whole as his own history will feel in an enormously generalised way all the grief of an invalid who thinks of health, of an old man who thinks of the dreams of his youth, of a lover deprived of his beloved, of the martyr whose ideal is perishing, of the hero on the evening after a battle that has decided nothing but brought him wounds and the loss of his friend. But if one endured, if one could endure this immense sum of grief of all kinds while yet being the hero who, as the second day of battle breaks, welcomes the dawn and his fortune, being a person whose horizon encompasses thousands of years past and future, being the heir of all the nobility of all past spirit – an heir with a sense of obligation, the most aristocratic of old nobles and at the same time the first of a new nobility – the like of which no age has yet seen or dreamed of: if one could burden one’s soul with all of this – the oldest, the newest, losses, hopes, conquests, and the victories of humanity; if one could finally contain all this in one soul and crowd it into a single feeling – this would surely have to result in a happiness that humanity has not known so far: the happiness of a god full of power and love, full of tears and laughter, a happiness that, like the sun in the evening, continually bestows its inexhaustible riches, pouring them into the sea, feeling richest, as the sun does, only when even the poorest fisherman is still rowing with golden oars! This godlike feeling would then be called – humaneness. [Friedrich Nietzsche]
The Historical Point of View, put briefly, means that when a learned man is presented with any statement in an ancient author, the one question he never asks is whether it is true. He asks who influenced the ancient writer, and how far the statement is consistent with what he said in other books, and what phase in the writer’s development, or in the general history of thought, it illustrates, and how it affected later writers, and how often it has been misunderstood (specially by the learned man’s colleagues) and what the general course of criticism on it has been for the last ten years, and what is the ‘‘present state of the question.’’ To regard the ancient writer as a possible source of knowledge—to anticipate that what he said could possibly modify your thoughts or your behaviour—this would be rejected as unutterably simple-minded. And since we cannot deceive the whole human race all the time, it is most important thus to cut every generation off from all others; for where learning makes a free commerce between the ages there is always the danger that the characteristic errors of one may be corrected by the characteristic truths of another. But thanks be to our Father and the Historical Point of View, great scholars are now as little nourished by the past as the most ignorant mechanic who holds that ‘‘history is bunk. [C.S. Lewis]
HOME
The ordinary arts we practice every day at home are of more importance to the soul than their simplicity might suggest. [Thomas Moore]
It is the place of renewal and of safety, where for a little while there will be no harm or attack and, while every sense is nourished, my soul rests. [Mary Sarton]
Objects that are cherished in this way really are born of an intimate light, and they attain to a higher degree of reality than indifferent objects, or those that are defined by geometric reality. For they produce a new reality of being, and they take their place not only in an order but in a community of order. From one object in a room to another, housewifely care weaves the ties that unite a very ancient past to the new epoch. The housewife awakens furniture that was asleep.
If we attain to the limit at which dream becomes exaggerated, we experience a sort of consciousness of constructing the house, in the very pains we take to keep it alive, to give it all its essential clarity. A house that shines from the care it receives appears to have been rebuilt from the inside; it is as though it were new inside. In the intimate harmony of walls and furniture, it may be said that we become conscious of a house that is built by women, since men only know how to build a house from the outside, and they know little or nothing of the ‘wax’ civilisation. [Gaston Bachelard]
For our house is our corner of the world. As has often been said, it is our first universe, a real cosmos in every sense of the word. If we look at it intimately, the humblest dwelling has beauty. Authors of books on ‘the humble home’ often mention this feature of the poetics of space. But this mention is much too succinct. Finding little to describe in the humble home, they spend little time there; so they describe it as it actually is, without really experiencing its primitiveness, a primitiveness which belongs to all, rich and poor alike, if they are willing to dream.
But our adult life is so dispossessed of the essential benefits, its anthropocosmic ties have become so slack, that we do not feel their first attachment in the universe of the house…
… all really inhabited space bears the essence of the notion of home. In the course of this work, we shall see that the imagination functions in this direction whenever the human being has found the slightest shelter: we shall see the imagination build ‘walls’ of impalpable shadows. Comfort itself with the illusion of protection – or, just the contrary, tremble behind thick walls, mistrust the staunchest ramparts. In short, in the most interminable of dialectices, the sheltered being gives perceptible limits to his shelter. He experiences the house in its reality and in its virtuality, by means of thought and dreams. It is no longer in its positive aspects that the house is really ‘lived’, nor is it only in the passing hour that we recognize its benefits. An entire past comes to dwell in a new house. The old saying: ‘we bring our lares with us’ has many variations. And the daydream deepens to the point where an immemorial domain opens up for the dreamer of a home beyond man’s earliest memory… the house is not experienced from day to day only, on the thread of a narrative, or in the telling of our own story. Through dreams, the various dwelling places in our lives co-penetrate and retain the treasures of former days. And after we are in the new house, when memories of other places we have lived in come back to us, we travel to the land of Motionless Childhood, motionless the way all Immemorial things are. We live fixations, fixations of happiness. We comfort ourselves by reliving memories of protection. Something closed must retain our memories, while leaving them their original value as images. Memories of the outside world will never have the same tonality as those of home and, by recalling these memories, we add to our store of dreams; we are never real historians, but always near poets, and our emotion is perhaps nothing but an expression of a poetry that was lost…
… if I were asked to name the chief benefit of the house, I should say: the house shelters day-dreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace. Thought and experience are not the only things that sanction human values. The values that belong to daydreaming mark humanity in its depths. Daydreaming even has a privilege of autovalorisation. It denies direct pleasure from its own being. Therefore, the places in which we have experienced daydreaming reconstitute themselves in a new daydream, and it is because our memories of former dwelling-places are relived as daydreams that these dwelling-places of the past remain in us for all time…
In the life of a man, the house thrusts aside contingencies, its councils of continuity are unceasing. Without it, man would be a dispersed being. It maintains him through the storms of the heavens and through those of life. It is body and soul. It is the human being’s first world. Before he is ‘cast into the world’, as claimed by certain hasty metaphysics, man is laid in the cradle of the house. And always, in our daydreams, the house is a large cradle. A concrete metaphysics cannot neglect this fact, this simple fact, all the more since this fact is a value, an important value, to which we return in our daydreaming. Being is already a value. Life begins well, it begins enclosed, protected, all warm in the bosom of the house…
Within the being, in the being of within, an enveloping warmth welcomes being. Being reigns in a sort of earthly paradise of matter, dissolved in the comforts of an adequate matter. It is as though in this material paradise, the human being were bathed in nourishment, as though he were gratified with all the essential benefits… [Gaston Bachelard]
To make up for the lack of effective domestic work, a new type of house work was invented that took up the slack and enriched the ritual of conspicuous consumption. I mean the care of furniture. The fixtures of the medieval household were equipment: chairs to sit on, beds to sleep in; icons to pray before; so much and no more. Furniture is really a re-invention of the baroque period: for by furniture one means useless or super-refined equipment, delicate vases to dust, inlays and precious woods to polish, metal work to keep shiny, curtains to be shaken and cleaned, bric-à-brac and curios to be washed.
Display outstrpped use; and the care of furniture commanded time that once went to the weaving of tapestries, the embroidery of garments, the making of useful household preserves, perfumes, and simples. These new burdens were inflicted upon housewives and domestics at the very moment that the form of the house itself had changed, multiplying the number of private chambers to be supplied with wood, coal, water, and raising the height of dwellings from two flights of stairs to five, one below ground.
Up to the seventeenth century, at least in the North, building and heating had hardly advanced far enough to permit the arrangement of a series of private rooms in the dwelling. But now a separation of functions took place within the house as well as within the city as a whole. Space became specialized, room by room. In England, following the pattern of the great houses, the kitchen was broken off from the scullery, where the dirty work was done; and the various social functions of the kitchen were taken over by the living-room and the parlour. The ‘use of the common dinner table for the household,’ Holm tells us, ‘died out in the early years of the seventeenth century, and the servants thenceforward took their meals below stairs.’
So wide did the gap become between classes that even the humane Emerson, seeking to restore this democratic form, met rebellion on the part of his servants and was forced to abandon the practice. The dining-room could no longer be treated as a sleeping apartment, too; and though in the seventeenth century a lady’s bedroom still served as a reception room for her guests, whether or not the bed stood in an alcove, in the eighteenth a special room for meeting and conversation, the drawing-room, the salon, came into existence. And the rooms no longer opened into each other: they were grouped along the corridor, like houses on its public counterpart, the new corridor street. The need for privacy produced this special organ for public circulation.
Privacy was the new luxury of the well-to-do; only gradually did the servant and the shopkeeper’s assistants and the industrial workers have a trace of it. Even in the fine houses of the nineteenth century the domestics often slept in the kitchen or in a bunk adjacent to it, or in dormitories. Now, privacy had been reserved, in the medieval period, for solitaries, for holy persons who sought refuge from the sins and distractions of the outside world: only lords and ladies might dream of it otherwise. In the seventeenth century it went with the satisfaction of the individual ego. The lady’s chamber became a boudoir, literally a ’sulking place,’ the gentleman had his office or his library, equally inviolate; and in Paris he might even have his own bedroom, too, as husband and wife pursued their separate erotic adventures. For the first time not merely a curtain but a door separated each individual member of the household from every other member.
Privacy, mirrors, heated rooms: these things transformed full-blown love-making from a seasonal to a year-round occupation: another example of baroque regularity. In the heated room, the body need not cower under a blanket: visual erethism added to the effect of tactile stimuli: the pleasure of the naked body, symbolized by Titian and Rubens and Fragonard, was part of that dilation of the senses which accompanied the more generous dietary, the freer use of wines and strong liquors, the more extravagant dresses and perfumes of the period.
Flirtation and courtship created those movements of suspense and uncertainty, of blandishment and withdrawal, that serve as safeguards against satiety: a counterpoise to the regimentation of habit. These lusty men and women were never so much at home as when they were in bed; an undercurrent of erotic interest thus permeated the household, sometimes bawdy, sometimes brutal, sometimes romantic, sometimes tender – every shade from the bedroom of Juliet to that in which Joseph Andrews almost lost his virtue. The private need of the bedroom even penetrated the garden: the summer-house, the temple of love, or the more aristocratic maze, composed of high-box hedges: places remote from the prying eyes and admonitory footsteps of even the servants. [Lewis Mumford]
HOMOSEXUALITY
… as defined by the ancient civil or canonical codes, sodomy was a category of forbidden acts; their perpetrator was nothing more than the juridical subject of them. The nineteenth-century homosexual became a personage, a past, a case history, and a childhood, in addition to being a type of life, a life form, and a morphology, with an indiscreet anatomy and possibly a mysterious physiology. [Michel Foucault]
To deprive lesbianism of ts aura of the forbidden may for some women rob it of its compulsive charm. Or we may suspect that the experience of passionate love, whether with a man or a woman, requires a superstructure of what is essentially romantic imagery, and an investment of the lover with magical, remote and transforming qualities… Romanticism at least acknowledges that sexual passion is as much about imagination as biology. And it would be possible to argue that homosexuality represents the ultimate triumph of the imaginative over the biological. [Elisabeth Wilson]
There is no such thing as a homosexual or a heterosexual person. There are only homo- or heterosexual acts. Most people are a mixture of impulses if not practises. [Gore Vidal]
According to Kinsey et al, instead of using the terms ‘heterosexual’ or ‘homosexual’ as ‘substantives which stand for persons, or even as adjectives to describe persons, they may be better used to describe the nature of the overt sexual relations, or of the stimuli to which an individual erotically responds.’ They are basically quite correct here, even if their proposal is rather abstract, and ignores the present situation; for given the very real historical opposition between individuals who recognize their homoerotic desires and those who desperately deny these, it is impossible today to avoid distinguishing between manifest homosexuals and heterosexuals. In other words, it would be a dangerous and illusory terminological concealment of the real contradiction that exists between heterosexuality and homosexuality; this is a night in which all cats are gay… [Mario Mieli]
Late capitalist society, while it may extend to homosexuality the legal sanction of tolerance, still imposes on homosexuals a mark of infamy, ridicule or compassion, confining them to a more or less gilded ghetto in which the homosexual is induced to act out his role in a caricatured way. [?]
Man loves himself first and foremost, with every sort of passionate emotion, and seeks to procure for himself every conceivable pleasure, and since he himself must be either male or female, is subject from the beginning to passion for his own sex. It cannot be otherwise, and unprejudiced examination of anyone who will consent to it, gives proof. The question, therefore, is not whether homosexuality is exceptional, perverse – that does not come under discussion – what we have to ask is, why it is so difficult to consider this phenomenon of passion between people of the same sex, to judge it and discuss it, without prejudice, and then we have also to ask how it comes about that, in spite of his homosexual nature, man is also able to feel affection for the opposite sex. [Georg Groddeck]
Ah, did you but know how delicate is one’s enjoyment when a heavy prick fills the behind, when, driven to the balls, it flutters there, palpitating, and then, withdrawn to the foreskin, it hesitates, and returns, plunges in again, up to the hair! No, no, in the wide world there is no pleasure to rival this one; it is the delight of philosophers, that of heroes, it would be that of the gods were not the parts used in this divine conjugation the only gods we on earth should reverence! [Sade]
Until the end of the seventeenth century, sodomy was taken to be a symptom of the excessive pride of the aristocrats… ‘Pride, Luxury, and Irreligion, were the Infernal Parents of Sodomy’…
At least since John Cassian’s De institutis coenobionum, the capital sin of pride had been described as the originary sin, the cause of all other sins… Pride was the misuse or perversion of free will, the opposition of the self to God. In turning away from God, the proud man perversely abandoned his proper self; pride was therefore the origin and epitome of the Augustinian concept of sin as privation. The proud man’s excessive concern with himself actually recreated him as lacking being…
According to Augustine, to turn from God to oneself ‘is to come nearer to nothingness.’ The sin of pride was the refusal of divine plan (which interpolated individuals into their proper selves) and the occupation of a stance outside God’s order, a place which was nowhere…
As a symptom of pride, sodomy, too, was a misuse or excess of the will: for the aristocrat, as Coke had noted, sodomy was a perverse wilfulness toward pleasure. But by the eighteenth century, these traditional representations of proud aristocrats as homosexual were reversed, and the newly visible sodomite was described in the theological terms of pride, as a self against (his) self. With the increased visibility of the mollies around 1700, there seems to have been a tendency to explain homosexuality by, not the cardinal sin of fornicatio, but the cardinal sin of pride. This happened when sodomy was understood, not just as a slippage in ‘normal’ (heterosexual) behaviour, but as a consciously willed and repeated set of behaviours that set the self against the normative order. Like the perverse will described by Augustine, the sodomite ‘turn[ed] aside from… substance… boasting [him]self an outcast.’ It was this boastfulness (a specifically queer pride) which most disturbed homophobic critics… [?]
The virtuosi were gentlemen of leisure who compensated for the increasing shortage of royal posts by creating new social roles for themselves as amateur scientists and antiquaries, collectors of natural and artificial rarities, and artistic connoisseurs…
Butler’s ‘Virtuoso’ was ignorant of himself, and the tasks he set himself were a misuse of his nature. The virtuoso was anti-utilitarian because he did not contribute to the study of ‘man.’ He did not contribute to the study of (and construction of) normative human subjectivity…
… the virtuosi were insubstantial because they lacked interiority. In Shaftesbury’s system, the ability to define (know) the truth about one’s self was primary to, and the origin of, all political, social, ethical, and even aesthetic dscourses. Shaftesbury was the philosopher of the bourgeois internalization of the look…
By rereading aristocratic arbitrariness as lacking being, bourgeois consciousness guaranteed identity by securing the consistency and continuity of the subject’s actions. Human will was structured by the necessity of identity (equivalency); the threat of nonresolution mandated the will as resolution, as deliberation and discipline, and also in the ocularcentric sense of a clarification of one’s impulses…
What guaranteed the sociality of this speculative habit was ‘taste’, the sense of the fitting or the becoming. Taste, as a common way of seeing (an interesting displacement of bodily functions), guaranteed the identity of looks, not only within the subject, but also between agents…
Against the virtuosi, who could be aligned with a revival of aristocratic privilege based on excessive and pleasurable knowledges, Shaftesbury opposed the critic, whose leadership of taste regulated such privileges according to morality and normality. It was only through taste, Shaftesbury asserted, repeating his insistence that manners and morals should be one and the same, that the virtuosi could become virtuous.
Shaftesbury identified the greatest good as those networks of friendship between men that Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has called homosocialism. Shaftesbury distinguished this male-male sociality from more ‘effeminate’ intercourses between men and women, and from the suspect sexuality of the more marginal virtuoso… In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, the virtuoso kept his collection in a cabinet – a special room or closet for the private display of his knacks, rarities, intricate machines, or trivialities. As an externalization of his personal and antisocial taste, the virtuoso’s cabinet threatened the homosocialism of philosophy, especially in the Greek model of the public forum or dialogue favoured by Shaftesbury and others. Whereas the (homosexual/virtuoso) cabinet was close(te)d, the homosocial body was open, extended, repercussive.
Where English philosophy was knowledge of the useful and the proper, especially regarding the relations among social beings, virtuosity was knowledge in and about itself, and therefore excessive. Where philosophy was public, virtuosity was private. And where philosophy was an art of spectatorship – the individual subject as possessor of a gaze originating inward and turned outward – virtuosity was an art of spectacle, an art of excessive collecting, a narcissistic absorption of the gaze creating the subject as s/he who is seen collecting, knowing, demonstrating. In sum, where philosophy discovered the relations among things and proposed models for proper identifications, virtuosity exploited the differences among things, seeking out the monstrous and the excessive rather than the proper and the decorous…
… the hostile representational tactics whereby increasingly ‘visible’ homosexuals were ‘recognised’ by their excessivity, while simultaneously ‘seen’ critically as lacking psychic substance. In other words, the fribble had come to stand in for, or enclose, the absence of subjectivity (conscience, sincerity, identity, utility, sensibility) once assigned by the bourgeoisie to the aristocrats as a class. It is interesting to note, then, that ‘fribble’ itself meant lacking or incapacitated: ‘to fribble’ was to falter verbally (to stammer) or physically (to totter).
In creating homosexuality as a nonidentity (as unspeakable, as fribblish, as offstage), the bourgeoisie were casting off onto the concept of homosexuality all the traits associated with the obsolete aristocrats – not only sodomy, but also arbitrariness, excessiveness, and, most emphatically, social impotency. For this reason, what was most bothersome about newly visible sodomites like the mollies was that they occupied this no-place, this lack, mimetically, as the basis of improvisations within an increasingly normative society…
As described by Ward, both the molly houses and the virtuoso clubs were hermaphroditical, obscuring all those social distinctions upon which identifications depend. The molly houses and the virtuosi clubs did not enclose, reflect, or reproduce stable identifications: they were border spaces where the necessity of primary (gender, class, occupational, etc) identifications was exchanged for improvisation and experimentation. Indeed, as these descriptions of the molly houses as collapsing social distinctions suggest, occupying a nonidentity as a sodomite required a prior un-speaking, or unidentification of ‘proper’ identifications; that is, molly parodies enabled not a misrecognition as ‘womanly’, but an unidentification from the self-knowledges mandated by critics like Shaftesbury.
In suggesting above that the mollies were proud, I meant that they had been described, not just as practising sodomy (the bisexual Restoration rakes had done this), but as occupying a place (the ‘I’ as a place from which to speak) as a sodomite. [?]
HYGIENE
Hygiene is the corruption of medicine by morality. [H.L. Mencken]
As we know it, dirt is essentially disorder. There is no such thing as absolute dirt: it exists in the eye of the beholder. If we shun dirt, it is not because of craven fear, still less dread or holy terror. Nor do our ideas about disease account for the range of our behaviour in cleaning or avoiding dirt. Dirt offends against order. Eliminating it is not a negative movement, but a positive effort to organise the environment…
For I believe that ideas about separating, purifying, demarcating and punishing transgressions have as their main function to impose system on an inherently untidy experience. It is only by exaggerating the difference between within and without, above and below, male and female, with and against, that a semblance of order is created…
There are two notable differences between our contemporary European ideas of defilement and those, say, of primitive cultures. One is that dirt avoidance for us is a matter of hygiene or aesthetics and is not related to our religion… The second difference is that out idea of dirt is dominated by the knowledge of pathogenic organisms. The bacterial transmission of disease was a great nineteenth-century discovery… So much has it transformed our lives that it is difficult to think of dirt except in the context of pathogenicity. Yet obviously our ideas of dirt are not so recent…
If we can abstract pathogenicity and hygiene from our notion of dirt, we are left with the old definition of dirt as matter out of place. This is a very suggestive approach, it implies two conditions: a set of ordered relations and a contravention of that order. Dirt, then, is never a unique, isolated event. Where there is dirt there is system. Dirt is the by-product of a systematic ordering and classification of matter, in so far as ordering involves rejecting inappropriate elements…
We can recognise in our own notions of dirt that we are using a kind of omnibus compendium which includes all the rejected elements of ordered systems. It is a relative idea. Shoes are not dirty in themselves, but it is dirty to place then on the dining-table; food is not dirty in itself, but it is dirty to leave cooking utensils in the bedroom, or food bespattered on clothing; similarly, bathroom equipment in the drawing room; clothing lying on chairs; out-of-doors things indoors, upstairs things downstairs, underclothing appearing where over-clothing should be, and so on. In short, our pollution behaviour is the reaction which condemns any object or idea likely to confuse or contradict cherished classifications…
When we honestly reflect on our busy scrubbings and cleanings in this light we know that we are not mainly trying to avoid disease. We are separating, placing boundaries, making visible statements about the home that we are intending to create out of the material house…
We fear pathogenicity transmitted through micro-organisms. Often our justification of our own avoidances through hygiene is sheer fantasy…
Granted that disorder spoils pattern; it also provides the materials of pattern. Order implies restriction; from all possible materials, a limited selection has been made and from all possible relations a limited set has been used. So disorder by implication is unlimited, no pattern has been realised in it, but its potential for patterning is indefinite. This is why, though we seek to create order, we do not simply condemn disorder. We recognise that it is destructive to existing patterns; also that it has potentiality. It symbolises both danger and power.
Ritual recognises the potency of disorder. In the disorder of the mind, in dreams, faints and frenzies, ritual expects to find powers and truths which cannot be reached by conscious effort. Energy to command and special powers of healing come to those who can abandon rational control for a time…
In ritual form is treated as it it were quick with power to maintain itself in being, yet always liable to attack. Formlessness is also credited with powers, some dangerous, some good…
To have been in the margins is to have been in contact with danger, to have been at a source of power…
… all margins are dangerous. If they are pulled this way or that the shape of fundamental experience is altered. Any structure of ideas is vulnerable at its margins. We should expect the orifices of the body to symbolise its specially vulnerable points. Matter issuing from them is marginal stuff of the most obvious kind. Spittle, blood, milk, urine, faeces or tears by simply issuing forth have traversed the boundary of the body. So also have bodily parings, skin, nail, hair clippings and sweat. The mistake is to treat bodily margins in isolation from all other margins. There is no reason to assume any primacy for the individual’s attitude to his own bodily and emotional experience, any more than for his cultural and social experience. This is the clue which explains the unevenness with which different aspects of the body are treated in the rituals of the world…
To ask why saliva and genital secretions are more pollution worthy than tears. If I can fervently drink his tears, wrote Jean Genet, why not the limpid drop on the end of his nose? To this we can reply: first that nasal secretions are not so limpid as tears. They are more like treacle than water. When a thick rheum oozes from the eye it is no more apt for poetry than nasal rheum. But admittedly clear, fast-running tears are the stuff of romantic poetry: they do not defile. This is partly because tears are naturally pre-empted by the symbolism of washing. tears are like rivers of moving water. They purify, cleanse, bathe the eyes, so how can they pollute? But more significantly tears are not related to the bodily functions of digestion or procreation. Therefore their scope for symbolising social relations and social processes is narrower…
In the course of any imposing of order, whether in the mind or in the external world, the attitude to rejected bits and pieces goes through two stages. First they are recognisably out of place, a threat to good order, and so are regarded as objectionable and vigorously brushed away. At this stage they have some identity: they can be seen to be unwanted bits of whatever it was they came from, hair or food or wrappings. This is the stage at which they are dangerous; their half-identity still clings to them and the clarity of the scene in which they obtrude is impaired by their presence. But a long process of pulverising, dissolving and rotting awaits any physical things that have been recognised as dirt. In the end all identity is gone. The origin of the various bits and pieces is lost and they have entered into the mass of common rubbish. It is unpleasant to poke about in the refuse to try to recover anything, for this revives identity. So long as identity is absent, rubbish is not dangerous. It does not even create ambiguous perceptions since it clearly belongs in a defined place, a rubbish tip of one kind or another. Even the bones of buried kings rouse little awe and the thought that the air is foll of the dust of corpses of bygone races has no power to move. Where there is no differentiation there is no defilement.
In this final stage of total disintegration, dirt is utterly undifferentiated. Thus a cycle has been completed. Dirt was created by the differentiating activity of mind, it was a by-product of the creation of order. So it started from a state of non-differentiation; all through the process of differentiating its role was to threaten the distinctions made; finally it returns to its true indiscriminable character. Formlessness is therefore an apt symbol of beginning and of growth as it is of decay. [Mary Douglas]
But other excreta are slimy or glutinous. Snot, for instance (which is usually produced, after all, when we weep), gives rise to something very different from the sympathy which tears evoke. It is nasty, viscous stuff, to be sniffed back, wiped away, or deliberately blown out and disposed of, as fast as possible. Such substances as phlegm, ear wax, vomit, and – most famously of all – menstrual blood have always aroused similar revulsion. Saliva, semen, and sweat (the last runs like tears but stinks as it ages) are sometimes easy to contemplate, sometimes not: intimacy and affection are often required, and elaborate proofs of cleanliness and control, to make the difference. Effluvia and defluxions remind us of the symptoms of disease as well. Tears are striking but acceptable; a rheumy discharge from the eyes, one the other hand, is appalling – it is, for example, one of the attributes of the demons of pollution in Greek mythology, the Furies, whose presence causes people to shudder with horror. (Shuddering, incidentally, is one of the primary reactions to pollution and disgust. Shuddering, shivering, or ‘goose-bumps’ are the body’s outline, its skin, reacting to threat. The word ‘horror’ itself refers to the ultimate physical response to fear, which is the skin reacting so violently that tiny muscles in it contract and the hair stands erect – the basic meaning of horror in Latin is ‘hair standing on end’).
Negative physical reactions to body waste are common everywhere, though seldom experienced so strongly as by us; what is more unusual is our own extension of the category of stuffs arousing loathing to cover anything slimy. We hate whatever oozes, slithers, wobbles. Disgust at these physical properties may prevent from liking, or even trying, to eat brains, lungs, eyes (the specificity of these animal parts – their reminding us of functions in living bodies – adds an extra dimension to our distaste). Some of us go so far as to refuse to eat okra, oysters, frog, sticky rice or rice puddings, soft-boiled eggs, and the more glutinous porridges. The word ’slime’ is from lime or ‘glue,’ and is related to the Greek leimax (French limace), a snail. Anglo-Saxons, more squeamish than the French, often find the idea of eating snails as abhorrent as eating frogs, merely because these creatures (when alive) are slimy and slippery; it is the thought of them, not the taste, which is off-putting.
We feel happiest with what is either hard or soft, either solid or liquid: anything that is neither is ’suspect,’ or too indeterminate to be safe. we prefer clear forms, firm outlines. One of the reasons why scuttling mice or cockroaches terrify otherwise sensible people is that they live in the cracks and joints of houses and furniture: they suggest that our lines, edges, and corners are not as secure as we rely upon them to be; they remind us how little we really are in control. Namelessness, shapelessness are liable to be associated in our minds with ooze. [Margaret Visser]
One of the great modern demands is for cleanliness. Seldom in the history of the world have people washed as much as we do. We constantly wash ourselves, our clothes, our dishes, curtains, carpets, and cars. We have invented machinery to wash for us, and instead of resting on our laurels we have furiously raised our expectations about cleanliness higher and higher, so that home-makers work as hard now as they have ever done to keep their families ‘clean.’ The idea seems to be that if you can be even cleaner, then you must. Demonstrative cleanliness plays for us something of the role of pollution observances in India or in the ancient world: submission to purity rules becomes a precondition of acceptance in society. If we are not very careful, cleanliness rules can matter more to us than morality. In a social gathering such as the ‘cocktail party’ described earlier, a known murderer or thief is likely to receive a warmer welcome from the host and guests than a filthy, smelly, but innocent tramp could hope for. Dirty people are by definition outsiders in our world: they offend sensibilities and give troubling intimations of the possibility of loss of control. The bodily proprieties, as we have seen, are extremely strict nowadays; they prove to other people that those who maintain them are exercising what others intensely desire of their fellow citizens: in offensiveness, self-control, and obliging assurances that they need no help.
Where food is concerned, cleanliness is always so important that demands for it easily become obsessive. Cutlery, glasses, and plates must impeccably gleam before we can bear to begin eating. Modern design in tableware often stresses smooth forms and plain colours; glasses are clear, simple, and colourless. Such objects are easy to clean, but also encourage us to appreciate how clean they are – streamlined shapes, which modernity often claims as its hallmark, have what are called ‘clean lines.’ We like our fruit perfect (never a spot or a bruise), and our fast food is abundantly wrapped and cartoned (coverings suggest that everything is under control). It has taken a great deal of sophisticated reasoning to make the public realise that a perfect, spot-free apple is achieved with the help of pesticides, and that invisible, tasteless chemicals might actually be harmful. People understand the danger that chemical compounds can represent by thinking of them as pollution, a form of dirt. The discovery that detergents – cleansing agents! – can cause pollution was a fearful and paradoxical revelation in the 1960s.
At many periods in our history – often during the most stylised, elegant centuries of all – our own ancestors were freely and unconcernedly filthy. The recent and all but universal agreement to wash our bodies, our clothing, and our hair as much as we do expresses submission to a constraint massively underwritten by a very modern social consensus. Cleanliness is essential for good health; and smelly people repel others. These two axioms are sufficient to keep us all in line. For most of us, most of the time, it is the social sanction that is most decisive. We wash for other people and at their insistence, even though – and perhaps with the result that – feeling clean makes us personally ‘feel good.’ Keeping our houses clean has nothing like the same urgency that we feel for the washing of ourselves: glowing fresh bodies often issue from very dirty living quarters. The safe cleanliness promised by fast-food operators is one of their product’s most powerful selling points, for people who cheerfully leave dirty dishes for a week in the kitchen – provided that no one comes to visit.
The word ‘proper’ in French is propre, meaning ‘one’s own,’ the noun being propriété or ‘property’ – something one takes possession of by ‘appropriating’ it. At the end of the sixteenth century in France a new meaning was added to the original sense. Propre, ‘one’s own; distinctive, characteristic, and intrinsic to oneself,’ now also signified ‘elegant’ and ‘correct.’ Elegant people, literally ‘choosy’ people, were fastidious and ‘naturally’ graceful, with a je ne sais quoi. They stood out – but also fitted in; they were ‘proper.’ To do something proprement was also to do it ‘appropriately’ – a word to which, in the seventeenth century, the English language gave a new sense to match the French meaning. Since then the concept has undergone another momentous and revealing revolution: propre in French is now the commonest word for ‘clean.’
Since complying with the rule of cleanliness facilitates acceptance by others and breaking it means instant ostracism, washing constantly is essential for social mobility. A clean person is ready and acceptable at all times for meetings with old and new acquaintances. It is not all that easy to get to know people; it is therefore simply not worthwhile being dirty and risking our chances. In addition, being clean is a basic requirement that most people living in modern conditions can meet – which is one reason why it can be so implacably upheld; it provides an efficient means of sifting out the few diehards and giving the vast majority a chance to show that they like being thought proper. The trouble we go to in order to be always clean now takes up a good deal of the effort we are prepared to expend on mannerly behaviour. There are so many of us, we live and move in such proximity, and it is so difficult for us all to behave, that preserving bodily cleanliness has become a sort of charm of talisman, and a proof that at least we are trying. [Margaret Visser]
Anything that undermines confidence in the scheme of classification on which people base their lives sickens them as though the very ground on which they stood precipitously dropped away. The vertigo produced by thee loss of cognitive orientation is similar to that produced by the loss of physical orientation. Philosophic nausea, certain forms of schizophrenia, moral revulsion, negative experience, the horror of having violated a taboo, and the feeling of having been polluted are all manifestations of this mental mal me mer, occasioned by the sudden shipwreck of cognitive orientation which casts one adrift in a world without structure.
People will regard any phenomena that produces this disorientation as “disgusting” or “dirty”. [Murray S. Davis]
