Works and Days

“The trouble with modern education is you never know how ignorant people are. With anyone over fifty you can be fairly confident what’s been taught and what’s been left out. But these young people have such an intelligent, knowledgeable surface, and then the crust suddenly breaks and you look down into depths of confusion you didn’t know existed.”

(Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited)

“What Ulysses saves from the power of the lotus, from Circe’s drugs, and from the Siren’s song, is not just the past or the future. Memory truly counts–for an individual, a society, a culture–only if it holds together the imprint of the past and the plan for the future, if it allows one to do things without forgetting what one wanted to do, and to become without ceasing to be, to be without ceasing to become.”

Italo Calvino (Corriere della serra, 10 August 1975)

from Laudator Temporis Acti

• The Desire for Knowledge and the Names of Things
• Home Sweet Home
• (another) Home Sweet Home
• Homecoming
• The Just

Pugin, Ruskin, and the Gothic Revival

“There is nothing worth living for but Christian architecture and a boat.”

A big hotel crowds the ruins a little, now, and drives a brisk trade
with summer tourists. We descended into the gorge and had a supper which
would have been very satisfactory if the trout had not been boiled.
The Germans are pretty sure to boil a trout or anything else if left to
their own devices. This is an argument of some value in support of the
theory that they were the original colonists of the wild islands of the
coast of Scotland. A schooner laden with oranges was wrecked upon one
of those islands a few years ago, and the gentle savages rendered the
captain such willing assistance that he gave them as many oranges as
they wanted. Next day he asked them how they liked them. They shook
their heads and said:

“Baked, they were tough; and even boiled, they warn’t things for a
hungry man to hanker after.”

Every noun has a gender, and there is no sense or system in the distribution; so the gender of each must be learned separately and by heart. There is no other way. To do this one has to have a memory like a memorandum-book. In German, a young lady has no sex, while a turnip has. Think what overwrought reverence that shows for the turnip, and what callous disrespect for the girl. See how it looks in print–I translate this from a conversation in one of the best of the German Sunday-school books:

“Gretchen. Wilhelm, where is the turnip?
“Wilhelm. She has gone to the kitchen.
“Gretchen. Where is the accomplished and beautiful English maiden?
Wilhelm. It has gone to the opera.”

Mark Twain, The Awful German Language from “A Tramp Abroad”

Pontem perpetui mansuram in saecula mundi.

Caius Julius Lacer, engineer of the Puente Romano de Alcantara.

1870— Joseph B. Strauss—1938
“The Man who Built the Bridge.”
Here at the Golden Gate is the
Eternal Rainbow that he conceived
And set to form, a promise indeed
That the race of man shall
Endure unto the Ages.

Chief Engineer of the Golden Gate Bridge 1929-1937

Inscription below the statue of Joseph Strauss near the Golden Gate bridge.

The tradition is dead; our task is to revivify life that has passed away. We know that ghosts cannot speak until they have drunk blood; and the spirits which we evoke demand the blood of our hearts. We give it to them gladly; but if they then abide our question, something from us has entered into them; something alien, that must be cast out, cast out in the name of truth!

Wilamowitz, lecture given at Oxford on June 3 1908, quoted in Lee T. Pearcy, The Grammar of Our Civility

When the attackers approached the house they were not sure whether Gunnar was at home, and wanted someone to go right up to the house to find out. They sat down on the ground, while Thorgrim the Easterner climbed on to the roof. Gunnar caught sight of a red tunic at the window. He lunged out with his halberd and struck Thorgrim in the belly. Thorgrim dropped his shield, lost his footing, and toppled down from the roof. He strode over to where Gizur and the others were sitting.

Gizur looked up at him and asked, “Is Gunnar at home?”

“That’s for you to find out,” replied Thorgrim. “But I know that his halberd certainly is.”

And with that he fell dead.

– Njal’s saga (Magnusson/Pálsson translation)

“Whether,” says Bergson, “it is a question of dealing with the life of the body or that of the mind, the intellect proceeds with the sharpness, the rigidity, and the brutality of a tool not designed for such use… Intellect exhibits a congenital lack of comprehension for life” (L’Evolution creatrice, 7th ed.; 1911, p. 179).

Quoted in Pöschl, The Art of Vergil