Excerpt, Água Viva by Clarice Lispector (trans. Stefan Tobler)

But I don't know how to capture what's happening now except by living everything that happens to me here and now and whatever it may be. I let the free horse run fiery in its pure noble joy. I, who run nervously and only reality delimits me. And when the day reaches its end I hear the crickets and become entirely full and unintelligible. Then come the early hours bulging full of thousands of blaring little birds. And each thing that happens to me I live it here by noting it down. Because I want to feel in my probing hands the living and quivering nerve of the today.

Beyond thought I reach a state. I refuse to divide it up into words--and what I cannot and do not want to express ends up being the most secret of my secrets. I know that I'm scared of the moments in which I don't use thought and that's a momentary state that is difficult to reach, and which, entirely secret, no longer uses the words with which thoughts are produced. Is not using words to lose your identity? is it getting lost in the harmful essential shadows?

I lose the identity of the world inside myself and exist without guarantees. I achieve whatever is achievable but I live the unachievable and the meaning of me and the world and you isn't obvious. It's fantastic, and I handle myself in these moments with immense delicacy. Is God a form of being? the abstraction that materializes in the nature of all that exists? My roots are in the divine shadows. Drowsy roots. Wavering in the dark shadows.


-- Clarice Lispector, Água Viva, trans. Stefan Tobler, New Directions Press, copyrights 1973 (the Heirs of Clarice Lispector) and 2012 (Stefan Tobler, translation, and Benjamin Moser, introduction), p. 64.

Excerpt, "The Retreat from Gettysburg," Brig. Gen. John Imboden, C.S.A., 1887

After dark I set out from Cashtown to gain the head of the column during the night. My orders had been peremptory that there should be no halt for any cause whatever. If an accident should happen to any vehicle, it was immediately to be put out of the road and abandoned. The column moved rapidly, considering the rough roads and the darkness, and from almost every wagon for many miles issued heart-rending wails of agony. For four hours I hurried forward on my way to the front, and in all that time I was never out of hearing of the groans and cries of the wounded and dying. Scarcely one in a hundred had received adequate surgical aid, owing to the demands on the hard-working surgeons from still worse cases that had to be left behind. Many of the wounded in the wagons had been without food for thirty-six hours. 

Their torn and bloody clothing, matted and hardened, was rasping the tender, inflamed, and still oozing wounds. Very few of the wagons had even a layer of straw in them, and all were without springs. The road was rough and rocky from the heavy washings of the preceding day. The jolting was enough to have killed strong men, if long exposed to it. From nearly every wagon as the teams trotted on, urged by whip and shout, came such cries and shrieks as these:

'O God! Why can't I die!'

'My God! Will no one have mercy and kill me!'

'Stop! Oh! For God's sake, stop just for one minute; take me out and leave me to die on the roadside.'

'I am dying! I am dying! My poor wife, my dear children, what will become of you?'

Some were simply moaning; some were praying, and others uttering the most fearful oaths and execrations that despair and agony could wring from them; while a majority, with a stoicism sustained by sublime devotion to the cause they fought for, endured without complaint unspeakable tortures, and even spoke words of cheer and comfort to their unhappy comrades of less will or more acute nerves. Occasionally a wagon would be passed from which only low, deep moans could be heard. No help could be rendered to any of the sufferers. No heed could be given to any of their appeals. Mercy and duty to the many forbade the loss of a moment in the vain effort then and there to comply with the prayers of the few. On! On! we must move on. The storm continued, and the darkness was appalling. There was no time even to fill a canteen with water for a dying man; for, except the drivers and the guards, all were wounded and utterly helpless in that vast procession of misery. During this one night I realized more of the horrors of war than I had in all the two preceding years.

-- Brig. Gen. John Imboden (1823-1895), Confederate States of America, from "The Confederate Retreat from Gettysburg," 1887.

"The Grapes of Wrath" - Tom Joad's "I'll be there" speech

-- from "The Grapes of Wrath," dir. John Ford (based on The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck, 1939), 20th Century Fox, 1940. Tom Joad played by Henry Fonda.

from "Murder by the Book" by Rex Stout, 1951

We were getting reports by phone from Saul and Fred and Orrie, and Friday a little before six Saul came in person. The only reason I wouldn't vote for Saul Panzer for President of the United States is that he would never dress the part. How he goes around New York, almost anywhere, in that faded brown cap and old brown suit, without attracting attention as not belonging, I will never understand. Wolfe has never given him an assignment that he didn't fill better than anyone else could except me, and my argument is why not elect him President, buy him a suit and hat, and see what happens?

-- Rex Stout, Murder by the Book, New York: Bantam, e-book, 2010.

Excerpt, "Nazi Literature in the Americas" by Roberto Bolaño

Silvio Salvático

Buenos Aires, 1901--Buenos Aires, 1994

As a young man Salvático advocated, among other things, the re-establishment of the Inquisition; corporal punishment in public; a permanent war against the Chileans, the Paraguayans, or the Bolivians as a kind of gymnastics for the nation; polygamy; the extermination of the Indians to prevent further contamination of the Argentinian race; curtailing the rights of any citizen with Jewish blood; a massive influx of migrants from the Scandinavian countries in order to effect a progressive lightening of the national skin color, darkened by years of promiscuity with the indigenous population; life-long writer's grants; the abolition of tax on artists' incomes; the creation of the largest air force in South America; the colonization of Antarctica; and the building of new cities in Patagonia.

He was a soccer player and a Futurist.

From 1920 to 1929, in addition to frequenting the literary salons and fashionable cafes, he wrote and published more than twelve collections of poems, some of which won municipal and provincial prizes. From 1930 on, burdened by a disastrous marriage and numerous offspring, he worked as a gossip columnist and copy-editor for various newspapers in the capital, hung out in dives, and practiced the art of the novel, which stubbornly declined to reveal its secrets to him. Three titles resulted: Fields of Honor (1936), about semi-secret challenges and duels in a spectral Buenos Aires; The French Lady (1949), a story of prostitutes with hearts of gold, tango singers, and detectives; and The Eyes of the Assassin (1962), a curious precursor to the psycho-killer movies of the seventies and eighties. 

He died in an old-age home in Villa Luro, his worldly possessions consisting of a single suitcase full of books and unpublished manuscripts.

His books were never republished. His manuscripts were probably thrown out with the trash or burned by the orderlies.


-- Roberto Bolaño, "Silvio Salvático," in chapter "Forerunners and Figures of the Anti-Enlightenment," from Nazi Literature in the Americas, trans. Chris Andrews, New Directions, 2008, pp. 47-48.

From "Nevsky Prospect" by Nikolai Gogol

But before we say who Lieutenant Pirogov was, it would be as well to describe the society in which Pirogov moved. There are officers who make up a kind of middle class in the society of St. Petersburg. At soirees, at dinners given by a councilor of state or an actual councilor of state who has attained this rank after forty years of toil, you will always meet one of these. Several pale daughters as completely colorless as St. Petersburg, some of whom are over-ripe, a tea-table, a piano, dancing in the drawing-room--all this is inseparable from the bright epaulet which shines in the lamplight between a well-behaved blonde and the black dress-coat of a brother or a friend of the family. These cold-blooded young women are very hard to move or make laugh; for this one must use great art, or more exactly, no art at all. You must speak neither too cleverly nor too wittily so that the trifles which all women love are included. In this one must give the above-mentioned gentlemen their due. They have a special gift for listening to these colorless beauties and making them laugh. Exclamations drowned in laughter: "Oh, do stop it! Aren't you ashamed to make such jokes!" are often their highest reward. In the upper classes one meets them rarely, or rather, never. They are driven thence by what this class of society calls the aristocrats; however they are considered educated and well brought-up people. They like to discuss literature; they praise Bulgarin, Pushkin and Grech and speak with scorn and barbed witticisms about A.A. Orlov. They never miss a single public lecture, whether it is about book-keeping or even about forestry. You will always meet one of them at the theater whatever the piece, even if some sort of "Filatka" is on, which is an insult to their discerning taste. They are always at the theater. They are the most useful people for the theater directors. They are particularly fond of good verse in the drama and of calling loudly on the actors; many of them when taking the examinations for the civil service, or preparing for it, finally keep a cabriolet and pair. Then their circle of acquaintance widens. At last they attain to marriage with a merchant's daughter who can play the piano and has a hundred thousand or thereabouts in ready cash and a heap of bearded relatives: but they cannot reach this honored state until they have at least become colonels; because Russian beards, despite the fact that they still give off an odor of cabbage will by no means see their daughters marry anyone save generals or at the least colonels.

These are the main characteristics of young men of this kind. But Lieutenant Pirogov possessed a large number of talents which belonged to him personally. He declaimed verses wonderfully from "Dimitri Donskoy" and "The Misfortune of Being Clever," and had a special gift for making smoke-rings with his pipe so well that he could suddenly thread about ten of them on one another. He knew how to tell pleasant anecdotes about how a field-gun is a field-gun and a howitzer a howitzer. Indeed, it is rather difficult to give a list of all the talents with which fate had rewarded Pirogov. He liked to discuss actresses and dancers but no longer expressed himself so crudely on the subject as a young ensign does. He was very pleased with his rank, to which he had only recently been promoted, and although sometimes he would say as he stretched out on the divan: "Oh, oh! Vanity! All is vanity! What if I am a lieutenant?" yet secretly his new dignity was very flattering to him: he often tried to give a covert hint of it in conversation, and once when he came across a copyist clerk in the street who seemed rude to him, he immediately stopped him and made him see in a few curt words that he had a lieutenant to deal with and not any other officer--and he tried to express this and more eloquently because at that moment two rather good-looking ladies were passing. Pirogov, generally, had a passion for everything elegant and encouraged the painter Piskarev; though, indeed, this might have been due to a desire to see his virile features in a portrait. But enough of Pirogov's qualities. Man is such a wonderful being that one can never enumerate all his good qualities and the more deeply you look into him the more new peculiarities you find and their description might be endless.


-- Nikolai Gogol, "The Nevsky Prospect," 1835, collected in Diary of a Madman and Other Stories, Dover Thrift Editions.

Excerpts from Sand and Foam by Kahlil Gibran

from Sand and Foam

Only once have I been made mute. It was when a man asked me, "Who are you?"

*

Remembrance is a form of meeting.

*

Do not the spirits who dwell in the ether envy man his pain?

*

One may not reach the dawn save by the path of the night.

*

Seven times have I despised my soul:

The first time when I saw her being meek that she might attain height.

The second time when I saw her limping before the crippled.

The third time when she was given to choose between the hard and the easy, and she chose the easy.

The fourth time when she committed a wrong, and comforted herself that others also commit wrong.

The fifth time when she forbore for weakness, and attributed her patience to strength.

The sixth time when she despised the ugliness of a face, and knew not that it was one of her own masks.

And the seventh time when she sang a song of praise, and deemed it a virtue.

*

When you long for blessings that you may not name, and when you grieve knowing not the cause, then indeed you are growing with all things that grow, and rising toward your greater self.

*

My loneliness was born when men praised my talkative faults and blamed my silent virtues.

*

When Life does not find a singer to sing her heart she produces a philosopher to speak her mind.

*

The real in us is silent; the acquired is talkative.

*

Every seed is a longing.

*

Let us not be particular and sectional. The poet's mind and the scorpion's tail rise in glory from the same earth.

*

Trees are poems that the earth writes upon the sky. We fell them down and turn them into paper that we may record our emptiness.

*

Inspiration will always sing; inspiration will never explain.

*

We live only to discover beauty. All else is a form of waiting.

*

Your most radiant garment is of the other person's weaving;

You most savory meal is that which you eat at the other person's table;

Your most comfortable bed is in the other person's house.

Now tell me, how can you separate yourself from the other person?

*

How shall my heart be unsealed unless it be broken?

*

If it were not for your guests all houses would be graves.

*

You will be quite friendly with your enemy when you both die.

*

The only one who has been unjust to me is the one to whose brother I have been unjust.

*

Oftentimes I have hated in self-defense; but if I were stronger I would not have used such a weapon.

*

Only those beneath me can envy or hate me.

I have never been envied nor hated; I am above no one.

Only those above me can praise or belittle me.

I have never been praised nor belittled; I am below no one.

*

The truly good is he who is one with all those who are deemed bad.

*

Strange that we all defend our wrongs with more vigor than we do our rights.

*

It is the honor of the murdered that he is not the murderer.

*

They spread before us their riches of gold and silver, of ivory and ebony, and we spread before them our hearts and our spirits;

And yet they deem themselves the hosts and us the guests.

*

The most pitiful among men is he who turns his dreams into silver and gold.

*

You cannot judge any man beyond your knowledge of him, and how small is your knowledge.

*

The highest virtue here may be the least in another world.

*

The obvious is that which is never seen until someone expresses it simply.

*

I have learned silence from the talkative, toleration from the intolerant, and kindness from the unkind; yet strange, I am ungrateful to these teachers.

*

The silence of the envious is too noisy.

*

Man is two men; one is awake in darkness, the other is asleep in light.

*

In truth you owe naught to any man. You owe all to all men.

*

Sadness is but a wall between two gardens.

*

Only when a juggler misses catching his ball does he appeal to me.

*

Behold here is a paradox; the deep and high are nearer to one another than the mid-level to either.

*

Should you sit upon a cloud you would not see the boundary line between one country and another, nor the boundary stone between a farm and a farm.

It is a pity you cannot sit upon a cloud.

*

Every thought I have imprisoned in expression I must free by my deeds.

-- Khalil Gibran, Sand and Foam, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1981 (37th printing), 1926.

Excerpt from "How Fiction Works" by James Wood

Section 39

Flaubertian realism, like most fiction, is both lifelike and artificial. It is lifelike because detail really does hit us, especially in big cities, in a tattoo of randomness. And we do exist in different time signatures. Suppose I am walking down a street. I am aware of many noises, much activity, a police siren, a building being demolished, the scrape of a shop door. Different faces and bodies stream past me. And as a I pass a cafe, I catch the eye of a woman, who is sitting alone. She looks at me, I at her. A moment of pointless, vaguely erotic urban connection, but the face reminds me of someone I once knew, and sets a train of thought going. I walk on, but that particular face in the cafe glows in my memory, is held there, and is being temporally preserved, while around me noise and activities are not being similarly preserved—are entering and leaving my consciousness. The face, you could say, is playing at 4/4, while the rest of the city is humming along more quickly at 6/8.

The artifice lies in the selection of detail. In life, we can swivel our heads and eyes, but in fact we are like helpless cameras. We have a wide lens, and must take whatever comes before us. Our memory selects for us, but not much like the way literary narrative selects. Our memories are aesthetically untalented.

-- James Wood, How Fiction Works, New York: Picador, 2008, pp. 56-7.

Excerpts from the Preamble of the Omaha Platform, July 4, 1892

NATIONAL PEOPLE’S PARTY PLATFORM

July 4, 1892

Preamble

The conditions which surround us best justify our co-operation; we meet in the midst of a nation brought to the verge of moral, political, and material ruin. Corruption dominates the ballot-box, the Legislatures, the Congress, and touches even the ermine of the bench. The people are demoralized; most of the States have been compelled to isolate the voters at the polling places to prevent universal intimidation and bribery. The newspapers are largely subsidized or muzzled, public opinion silenced, business prostrated, homes covered with mortgages, labor impoverished, and the land concentrating in the hands of capitalists. The urban workmen are denied the right to organize for self-protection, imported pauperized labor beats down their wages, a hireling standing army, unrecognized by our laws, is established to shoot them down, and they are rapidly degenerating into European conditions. The fruits of the toil of millions are boldly stolen to build up colossal fortunes for a few, unprecedented in the history of mankind; and the possessors of those, in turn, despise the republic and endanger liberty. From the same prolific womb of governmental injustice we breed the two great classes—tramps and millionaires.

...

We have witnessed for more than a quarter of a century the struggles of the two great political parties for power and plunder, while grievous wrongs have been inflicted upon the suffering people. We charge that the controlling influences dominating both these parties have permitted the existing dreadful conditions to develop without serious effort to prevent or restrain them. Neither do they now promise us any substantial reform. They have agreed together to ignore, in the coming campaign, every issue but one. They propose to drown the outcries of a plundered people with the uproar of a sham battle over the tariff, so that capitalists, corporations, national banks, rings, trusts, watered stock, the demonetization of silver and the oppressions of the usurers may all be lost sight of. They propose to sacrifice our homes, lives, and children on the altar of mammon; to destroy the multitude in order to secure corruption funds from the millionaires.

Assembled on the anniversary of the birthday of the nation, and filled with the spirit of the grand general and chief who established our independence, we seek to restore the government of the Republic to the hands of “the plain people,” with which class it originated. We assert our purposes to be identical with the purposes of the National Constitution; to form a more perfect union and establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty for ourselves and our posterity.

We declare that this Republic can only endure as a free government while built upon the love of the whole people for each other and for the nation; that it cannot be pinned together by bayonets; that the civil war is over, and that every passion and resentment which grew out of it must die with it, and that we must be in fact, as we are in name, one united brotherhood of free men.

Our country finds itself confronted by conditions for which there is no precedent in the history of the world; our annual agricultural productions amount to billions of dollars in value, which must, within a few weeks or months, be exchanged for billions of dollars' worth of commodities consumed in their production; the existing currency supply is wholly inadequate to make this exchange; the results are falling prices, the formation of combines and rings, the impoverishment of the producing class. We pledge ourselves that if given power we will labor to correct these evils by wise and reasonable legislation, in accordance with the terms of our platform.

We believe that the power of government—in other words, of the people—should be expanded (as in the case of the postal service) as rapidly and as far as the good sense of an intelligent people and the teachings of experience shall justify, to the end that oppression, injustice, and poverty shall eventually cease in the land.

While our sympathies as a party of reform are naturally upon the side of every proposition which will tend to make men intelligent, virtuous, and temperate, we nevertheless regard these questions, important as they are, as secondary to the great issues now pressing for solution, and upon which not only our individual prosperity but the very existence of free institutions depend; and we ask all men to first help us to determine whether we are to have a republic to administer before we differ as to the conditions upon which it is to be administered, believing that the forces of reform this day organized will never cease to move forward until every wrong is remedied and equal rights and equal privileges securely established for all the men and women of this country.


-- Ignatius Donnelly, Preamble to the National People's (Populist) Party Platform, delivered July 4, 1892. Accessed at "History Matters," George Mason University.

Excerpt, "By Night in Chile" by Roberto Bolaño

When I got back to my house I went straight to my Greek classics. Let God’s will be done, I said. I’m going to reread the Greeks. Respecting the tradition, I started with Homer, then moved on to Thales of Miletus, Xenophanes of Colophon, Alcmaeon of Croton, Zeno of Elea (wonderful), and then a pro-Allende general was killed, and Chile restored diplomatic relations with Cuba and the national census recorded a total of 8,884,746 Chileans and the first episodes of the soap opera The Right to be Born were broadcast on television, and I read Tyrtaios of Sparta and Archilochos of Paros and Solon of Athens and Hipponax of Ephesos and Stesichoros of Himnera and Sappho of Mytilene and Anakreon of Teos and Pindar of Thebes (one of my favorites), and the government nationalized the copper mines and then the nitrate and steel industries and Pablo Neruda won the Nobel Prize and Díaz Casanueva won the National Literature Prize and Fidel Castro came on a visit and many people thought he would stay and live in Chile forever and Pérez Zujovic the Christian Democrat ex-minister was killed and Lafourcade published White Dove and I gave it a good review, you might say I hailed it in glowing terms, although deep down I knew it wasn't much of a book, and the first anti-Allende march was organized, with people banging pots and pans, and I read Aeschylus and Sophocles and Euripides, all the tragedies, and Alkaios of Mytilene and Aesop and Hesiod and Herodotus (a titan among authors), and in Chile there were shortages and inflation and black marketeering and long lines for food and Farewell's estate was expropriated in the Land Reform along with many others and the Bureau of Women’s Affairs was set up and Allende went to Mexico and visited the seat of the United Nations in New York and there were terrorist attacks and I read Thucydides, the long wars of Thucydides, the rivers and plains, the winds and the plateaus that traverse the time-darkened pages of Thucydides, and the men he describes, the warriors with their arms, and the civilians, harvesting grapes, or looking from a mountainside at the distant horizon, the horizon where I was just one among millions of beings still to be born, the far-off horizon Thucydides glimpsed and me there trembling indistinguishably, and I also reread Demosthenes and Menander and Aristotle and Plato (whom one cannot read too often), and there were strikes and the colonel of a tank regiment tried to mount a coup, and a cameraman recorded his own death on film, and then Allende’s naval aide-de-camp was assassinated and there were riots, swearing, Chileans blaspheming, painting on walls, and then nearly half a million people marched in support of Allende, and then came the coup d’état, the putsch, the military uprising, the bombing of La Moneda and when the bombing was finished, the president committed suicide and that put an end to it all. I sat there in silence, a finger between the pages to mark my place, and I thought: Peace at last.

-- Roberto Bolaño, By Night in Chile, New Directions, 2003.

Excerpt, "Mrs Dalloway" by Virginia Woolf

Quiet descended on her, calm, content, as her needle, drawing the silk smoothly to its gentle pause, collected the green folds together and attached them, very lightly, to the belt. So on a summer's day waves collect, overbalance, and fall; collect and fall; and the whole world seems to be saying "that is all" more and more ponderously, until even the heart in the body which lies in the sun on the beach says too, That is all. Fear no more, says the heart, committing its burden to some sea, which sighs collectively for all sorrows, and renews, begins, collects, lets fall. And the body alone listens to the passing bee; the wave breaking; the dog barking, far away barking and barking.


-- Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway, 1925, p. 33-34.

Samuel Johnson on Debtor's Prisons, 1758

It is vain to continue an institution which experience shows to be ineffectual. We have now imprisoned one generation of debtors after another, but we do not find that their numbers lessen. We have now learned, that rashness and imprudence will not be deterred from taking credit; let us try whether fraud and avarice may be more easily restrained from giving it...

Those who made the laws have apparently supposed, that every deficiency of payment is the crime of the debtor. But the truth is, that the creditor always shares the act, and often more than shares the guilt, of improper trust. It seldom happens that any man imprisons another but for debts which he suffered to be contracted in hope of advantage to himself, and for bargains in which proportioned his own profit to his own opinion of the hazard; and there is no reason, why one should punish the other for a contract in which both concurred.


-- Samuel Johnson, Idler #22, 1758, quoted in Margaret Atwood, Payback, 2008.

A.C. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy -- excerpt

This central feeling is the impression of waste. With Shakespeare, at any rate, the pity and fear which are stirred by the tragic story seem to unite with, and even to merge in, a profound sense of sadness and mystery, which is due to this impression of waste. 'What a piece of work is man,' we cry; 'so much more beautiful and so much more terrible than we knew! Why should he be so if this beauty and greatness only tortures itself and throws itself away?' We seem to have before us a type of the mystery of the whole world, the tragic fact which extends far beyond the limits of tragedy. Everywhere, from the crushed rocks beneath our feet to the soul of man, we see power, intelligence, life and glory, which astound us and seem to call for our worship. And everywhere we see them perishing, devouring one another and destroying themselves, often with dreadful pain, as though they came into being for no other end. Tragedy is the typical form of this mystery, because that greatness of soul which it exhibits oppressed, conflicting and destroyed, is the highest existence in our view. It forces the mystery upon us, and it makes us realise so vividly the worth of that which is wasted that we cannot possibly seek comfort in the reflection that all is vanity.

-- A.C. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy [1904], New York 1968, pp. 28-9; quoted in T.J. Clark, "For a Left With No Future," NLR 74, Mar/Apr 2012, p. 59.

Excerpt from "Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?" by Jeanette Winterson

Like most people I lived for a long time with my mother and father... that's how Oranges begins, and it ends with the young woman, let's call her Jeanette, returning home to find things much the same -- a new electronic organ to add a bit of bass and percussion to the Christmas carols, but otherwise, it's life as it ever was -- the giant figure of mother stooped inside the cramped house, filling it with Royal Albert and electrical goods, totting up the church accounts in a double ledger, smoking into the night underneath a haze of fly spray, her fags hidden in a box marked RUBBER BANDS.

Like most people, when I look back, the family house is held in time, or rather it is now outside of time, because it exists so clearly and it does not change, and it can only be entered through a door in the mind.

I like it that pre-industrial societies, and religious cultures still, now, distinguish between two kinds of time -- linear time, that is also cyclical because history repeats itself, even as it seems to progress, and real time, which is not subject to the clock or the calendar, and is where the soul used to live. This real time is reversible and redeemable. It is why, in religious rites of all kinds, something that happened once is re-enacted -- Passover, Christmas, Easter, or, in the pagan record, Midsummer and the dying of the god. As we participate in the ritual, we step outside of linear time and enter real time.

Time is only truly locked when we live in a mechanised world. Then we turn into clock-watchers and time-servers. Like the rest of life, time becomes uniform and standardised.

***

When I left home at sixteen I bought a small rug. It was my roll-up world. Whatever room, whatever temporary place I had, I unrolled the rug. It was a map of myself. Invisible to others, but held in the rug, were all the places I had stayed -- for a few weeks, for a few months. On the first night anywhere new I liked to lie in bed and look at the rug to remind myself that I had what I needed even though what I had was so little.

Sometimes you have to live in precarious and temporary places. Unsuitable places. Wrong places. Sometimes the safe place won't help you.

Why did I leave home when I was sixteen? It was one of those important choices that will change the rest of your life. When I look back it feels like I was at the borders of common sense, and the sensible thing to do would have been to keep quiet, keep going, learn to lie better and leave later.

I have noticed that doing the sensible thing is only a good idea when the decision is quite small. For the life-changing things, you must risk it.

And here is the shock -- when you risk it, when you do the right thing, when you arrive at the borders of common sense and cross into unknown territory, leaving behind you all the familiar smells and lights, then you do not experience great joy and huge energy.

You are unhappy. Things get worse.

It is a time of mourning. Loss. Fear. We bullet ourselves through with questions. And then we feel shot and wounded.

And then all the cowards come out and say, "See, I told you so."

In fact, they told you nothing.

-- Jeanette Winterson, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?, 2011.

from "The Lady with the Dog" by Anton Chekhov

He had two lives: one, open, seen and known by all who cared to know, full of relative truth and of relative falsehood, exactly like the lives of his friends and acquaintances; and another life running its course in secret. And through some strange, perhaps accidental, conjunction of circumstances, everything that was essential, of interest and of value to him, everything in which he was sincere and did not deceive himself, everything that made the kernel of his life, was hidden from other people; and all that was false in him, the sheath in which he hid himself to conceal the truth -- such, for instance, as his work in the bank, his discussions at the club... all that was open. And he judged of others by himself, not believing in what he saw, and always believing that every man had his real, most interesting life under the cover of secrecy and under the cover of night. All personal life rested on secrecy, and possibly it was partly on that account that civilised man was so nervously anxious that personal privacy should be respected.


-- Anton Chekhov, "The Lady with the Dog," 1899.

Excerpt, "The Mysterious Stranger" by Mark Twain

CHAPTER IX

It was wonderful, the mastery Satan had over time and distance. For him they did not exist. He called them human inventions, and said they were artificialities. We often went to the most distant parts of the globe with him, and stayed weeks and months, and yet were gone only a fraction of a second, as a rule. You could prove it by the clock. One day when our people were in such awful distress because the witch commission were afraid to proceed against the astrologer and Father Peter's household, or against any, indeed, but the poor and the friendless, they lost patience and took to witch-hunting on their own score, and began to chase a born lady who was known to have the habit of curing people by devilish arts, such as bathing them, washing them, and nourishing them instead of bleeding them and purging them through the ministrations of a barber-surgeon in the proper way. She came flying down, with the howling and cursing mob after her, and tried to take refuge in houses, but the doors were shut in her face. They chased her more than half an hour, we following to see it, and at last she was exhausted and fell, and they caught her. They dragged her to a tree and threw a rope over the limb, and began to make a noose in it, some holding her, meantime, and she crying and begging, and her young daughter looking on and weeping, but afraid to say or do anything.

They hanged the lady, and I threw a stone at her, although in my heart I was sorry for her; but all were throwing stones and each was watching his neighbor, and if I had not done as the others did it would have been noticed and spoken of. Satan burst out laughing.

All that were near by turned upon him, astonished and not pleased. It was an ill time to laugh, for his free and scoffing ways and his supernatural music had brought him under suspicion all over the town and turned many privately against him. The big blacksmith called attention to him now, raising his voice so that all should hear, and said:

"What are you laughing at? Answer! Moreover, please explain to the company why you threw no stone."

"Are you sure I did not throw a stone?"

"Yes. You needn't try to get out of it; I had my eye on you."

"And I - I noticed you!" shouted two others.

"Three witnesses," said Satan: "Mueller, the blacksmith; Klein, the butcher's man; Pfeiffer, the weaver's journeyman. Three very ordinary liars. Are there any more?"

"Never mind whether there are others or not, and never mind about what you consider us - three's enough to settle your matter for you. You'll prove that you threw a stone, or it shall go hard with you."

"That's so!" shouted the crowd, and surged up as closely as they could to the center of interest.

"And first you will answer that other question," cried the blacksmith, pleased with himself for being mouthpiece to the public and hero of the occasion. "What are you laughing at?"

Satan smiled and answered, pleasantly: "To see three cowards stoning a dying lady when they were so near death themselves."

You could see the superstitious crowd shrink and catch their breath, under the sudden shock. The blacksmith, with a show of bravado, said:

"Pooh! What do you know about it?"

"I? Everything. By profession I am a fortune-teller, and I read the hands of you three - and some others - when you lifted them to stone the woman. One of you will die to-morrow week; another of you will die to-night; the third has but five minutes to live - and yonder is the clock!"

It made a sensation. The faces of the crowd blanched, and turned mechanically toward the clock. The butcher and the weaver seemed smitten with an illness, but the blacksmith braced up and said, with spirit:

"It is not long to wait for prediction number one. If it fails, young master, you will not live a whole minute after, I promise you that."

No one said anything; all watched the clock in a deep stillness which was impressive. When four and a half minutes were gone the blacksmith gave a sudden gasp and clapped his hands upon his heart, saying, "Give me breath! Give me room!" and began to sink down. The crowd surged back, no one offering to support him, and he fell lumbering to the ground and was dead. The people stared at him, then at Satan, then at one another; and their lips moved, but no words came. Then Satan said:

"Three saw that I threw no stone. Perhaps there are others; let them speak."

It struck a kind of panic into them, and, although no one answered him, many began to violently accuse one another, saying, "You said he didn't throw," and getting for reply, "It is a lie, and I will make you eat it!" And so in a moment they were in a raging and noisy turmoil, and beating and banging one another; and in the midst was the only indifferent one - the dead lady hanging from her rope, her troubles forgotten, her spirit at peace.

So we walked away, and I was not at ease, but was saying to myself, "He told them he was laughing at them, but it was a lie - he was laughing at me."

That made him laugh again, and he said, "Yes, I was laughing at you, because, in fear of what others might report about you, you stoned the woman when your heart revolted at the act - but I was laughing at the others, too."

"Why?"

"Because their case was yours."

"How is that?"

"Well, there were sixty-eight people there, and sixty-two of them had no more desire to throw a stone than you had."

"Satan!"

"Oh, it's true. I know your race. It is made up of sheep. It is governed by minorities, seldom or never by majorities. It suppresses its feelings and its beliefs and follows the handful that makes the most noise. Sometimes the noisy handful is right, sometimes wrong; but no matter, the crowd follows it. The vast majority of the race, whether savage or civilized, are secretly kind-hearted and shrink from inflicting pain, but in the presence of the aggressive and pitiless minority they don't dare to assert themselves. Think of it! One kind-hearted creature spies upon another, and sees to it that he loyally helps in iniquities which revolt both of them. Speaking as an expert, I know that ninety-nine out of a hundred of your race were strongly against the killing of witches when that foolishness was first agitated by a handful of pious lunatics in the long ago. And I know that even to-day, after ages of transmitted prejudice and silly teaching, only one person in twenty puts any real heart into the harrying of a witch. And yet apparently everybody hates witches and wants them killed. Some day a handful will rise up on the other side and make the most noise - perhaps even a single daring man with a big voice and a determined front will do it - and in a week all the sheep will wheel and follow him, and witch-hunting will come to a sudden end.

"Monarchies, aristocracies, and religions are all based upon that large defect in your race - the individual's distrust of his neighbor, and his desire, for safety's or comfort's sake, to stand well in his neighbor's eye. These institutions will always remain, and always flourish, and always oppress you, affront you, and degrade you, because you will always be and remain slaves of minorities. There was never a country where the majority of the people were in their secret hearts loyal to any of these institutions."

I did not like to hear our race called sheep, and said I did not think they were.

"Still, it is true, lamb," said Satan. "Look at you in war - what mutton you are, and how ridiculous!"

"In war? How?"

"There has never been a just one, never an honorable one - on the part of the instigator of the war. I can see a million years ahead, and this rule will never change in so many as half a dozen instances. The loud little handful - as usual - will shout for the war. The pulpit will - warily and cautiously - object - at first; the great, big, dull bulk of the nation will rub its sleepy eyes and try to make out why there should be a war, and will say, earnestly and indignantly, "It is unjust and dishonorable, and here is no necessity for it." Then the handful will shout louder. A few fair men on the other side will argue and reason against the war with speech and pen, and at first will have a hearing and be applauded; but it will not last long; those others will outshout them, and presently the anti-war audiences will thin out and lose popularity. Before long you willsee this curious thing: the speakers stoned from the platform, and free speech strangled by hordes of furious men who in their secret hearts are still at one with those stoned speakers - as earlier - but do not dare to say so. And now the whole nation - pulpit and all - will take up the war-cry, and shout itself hoarse, and mob any honest man who ventures to open his mouth; and presently such mouths will cease to open. Next the statesmen will invent cheap lies, putting the blame upon the nation that is attacked, and every man will be glad of those conscience-soothing falsities, and will diligently study them, and refuse to examine any refutations of them; and thus he will by and by convince himself that the war is just, and will thank God for the better sleep he enjoys after this process of grotesque self-deception."

-- Mark Twain, Chapter 9 of The Mysterious Stranger, originally published 1916.

Excerpt, "Essay on Man" by Alexander Pope

Modes of Self-love the passions we may call;
'Tis real good or seeming moves them all:
But since not every good we can divide,
And Reason bids us for our own provide,
Passions, tho' selfish, if their means be fair,
List under Reason, and deserve her care;
Those that imparted court a nobler aim,
Exalt their kind, and take some virtue's name.

In lazy apathy let Stoics boast
Their virtue fix'd; 'tis fix'd as in a frost;
Contracted all, retiring to the breast;
But strength of mind is Exercise, not Rest:
The rising tempest puts in act the soul,
Parts it may ravage, but preserves the whole.
On life's vast ocean diversely we sail,
Reason the card, but Passion is the gale;
Nor God alone in the still calm we find,
He mounts the storm, and walks upon the wind.

Passions, like elements, tho' born to fight,
Yet, mix'd and soften'd, in his work unite:
These 'tis enough to temper and employ;
But what composes man can man destroy?
Suffice that Reason keep to Nature's road;
Subject, compound them, follow her and God.
Love, Hope, and Joy, fair Pleasure's smiling train,
Hate, Fear, and Grief, the family of Pain,
These mix'd with art, and to due bounds confin'd,
Make and maintain the balance of the mind;
The lights and shades, whose well-accorded strife
Gives all the strength and colour of our life.

Pleasures are ever in our hands or eyes,
And when in act they cease, in prospect rise:
Present to grasp, and future still to find,
The whole employ of body and of mind.
All spread their charms, but charm not alike;
On diff'rent senses diff'rent objects strike;
Hence diff'rent passions more or less inflame,
As strong or weak the organs of the frame;
And hence one Master-passion in the breast,
Like Aaron's serpent, swallows up the rest.

As man, perhaps, the moment of his breath,
Receives the lurking principle of death,
The young disease, that must subdue at length,
Grows with his growth, and strengthens with his strength:
So, cast and mingled with his very frame,
The mind's disease, its Ruling Passion, came;
Each vital humour, which should feed the whole,
Soon flows to this in body and in soul;
Whatever warms the heart or fills the head,
As the mind opens and its functions spread,
Imagination plies her dangerous art,
And pours it all upon the peccant part.

Nature its mother, Habit is its nurse;
Wit, spirit, faculties, but make it worse;
Reason itself but gives it edge and power,
As Heav'n's bless'd beam turns vinegar more sour.

We, wretched subjects, tho' to lawful sway,
In this weak queen some fav'rite still obey:
Ah! if she lend not arms as well as rules,
What can she more than tell us we are fools?
Teach us to mourn our nature, not to mend,
A sharp accuser, but a helpless friend!
Or from a judge turn pleader, to persuade
The choice we make, or justify it made;
Proud of an easy conquest all along,
She but removes weak passions for the strong:
So when small humours gather to a gout,
The doctor fancies he has driv'n them out.

Yes, Nature's road must ever be preferr'd;
Reason is here no guide, but still a guard;
'Tis hers to rectify, not overthrow,
And treat this passion more as friend than foe:
A mightier Power the strong direction sends,
And sev'ral men impels to sev'ral ends:
Like varying winds, by other passions toss'd,
This drives them constant to a certain coast.
Let Power or Knowledge, Gold or Glory, please,
Or (oft more strong than all) the love of ease;
Thro' life 'tis follow'd, ev'n at life's expense;
The merchant's toil, the sage's indolence,
The monk's humility, the hero's pride,
All, all alike, find Reason on their side.
Th' Eternal Art educing good from ill,
Grafts on this passion our best principle:
'Tis thus the mercury of man is fix'd,
Strong grows the virtue with his nature mix'd;
The dross cements what else were too refin'd,
And in one int'rest body acts with mind.

As fruits ungrateful to the planter's care,
On savage stocks inserted, learn to bear,
The surest Virtues thus from Passions shoot,
Wild Nature's vigour working at the root.
What crops of wit and honesty appear
From spleen, from obstinacy, hate, or fear!
See anger, zeal, and fortitude supply;
Ev'n av'rice prudence, sloth philosophy;
Lust, thro' some certain strainers well refin'd,
Is gentle love, and charms all womankind;
Envy, to which th'ignoble mind's a slave,
Is emulation in the learn'd or brave;
Nor virtue male or female can we name,
But what will grow on pride or grow on shame.

Thus Nature gives us (let it check our pride)
The Virtue nearest to our Vice allied:
Reason the bias turns to good from ill,
And Nero reigns a Titus if he will.
The fiery soul abhorr'd in Catiline,
In Decius charms, in Curtius is divine:
The same ambition can destroy or save,
And makes a patriot as it makes a knave.


-- Alexander Pope, Essay on Man, Epistle 2 ("Of the Nature and State of Man, With Respect to Himself as an Individual,") Argument III ("The Passions, and their use. The predominant passion, and its force. Its necessity, in directing men to different purposes. Its providential use, in fixing our principle, and ascertaining our virtue."), 1732-1744.

Excerpt, Interview with John Cassavetes

The dilemma of our country is the dilemma of the common man. His house, with his television set, and his credit card standing, his sexual confusion and his nagging business obligations have taken up too much of his time for him to realize the importance of his human needs. Films reflect better than anything else the systems that we live under, the feelings of the people. All the feelings of the people, the bad and the good, and only with films do you really have a chance to see where you are.

There's too little trust between people. Our children disappear -- popping pills, sucking smoke and pushing needles -- in some far-off reaches of the country where clean air and soft water still can be found. Our children are dying for lack of guidance and, more importantly, ideals. They don't believe in hope, but only in the present. Our industry refers to this group as the 'youth market'! It continues prognosticating what will be successful and forcing down the tortured throats of its audience pop-art solutions for politics and freedom in preview houses where a cross-section of the classes go to have their emotions tested, their laughs counted and their intelligence translated into box-office potential.

The people who make films have gone crazy. There's a responsibility not to express the worst part of your panic. They need to express life. In my whole life I've never known anyone who's been murdered. There was a time when life was important. Not this weird stuff but the way people really live. As a boy I worried about going to a party and talking to people. I worried about how to get my cowlick down. Other things that worry people are how to stay married, how to make kids proud but no so proud they lose their identity. I hate to see this business about the world being tougher than it is. There's such a continual series of put-downs. We just dehumanize ourselves to such a great extent that nothing really counts, nothing really matters.

The cause of motion pictures should not be a dehumanizing one. Major companies are making pictures that are disgusting. They make anti-war movies but exploit it by making money on those anti-war pictures, by publicizing and selling them. People on screen are stripped naked and left there to die. The thinking is supposedly committed to a revolutionary spirit but lacks the depth of intentions necessary for such discussions. Audiences begin to accept this exploitation as part of their lives. They find themselves laughing at what isn't funny, angered by what they don't care about, and influenced and contaminated by hours of heartfelt, unmotivated propaganda.

Motion pictures, whether art or not, should reflect in human terms the needs of their audience. If relating to one another only ends in cheap momentary revelations, communication of the spirit, of the heart, will be distrusted and unwanted too. There isn't anyone making any films that relate to anyone as far as I'm concerned -- the human part of anyone. If your characters can communicate with other people, and not put them down by being heroes or anti-heroes, then you succeed. How simple it is for people to care on their own level, and how lovely it is and how much confidence it can give people to see that -- characters revealing themselves in the smallest form.

There is no real art in America other than business, and anyone who thinks that there is is crazy. People who are artistic and who are working for big companies are dead, are dead men. You can't work for a big company and have any respect for yourself unless you're out to make money. People plunge their careers and their lives headlong into making money -- and when they get it, they don't like it, they don't need it and they don't know what to do with it. Money is the last refuge of people who've been scared by life, whose only way to survive is to acquire as much money and power as they can -- to protect themselves. But from what? We've got to realize that money is useless beyond whatever it takes to feed, clothe and house yourself. As a matter of fact, the more you have beyond that -- whatever it takes to free you from those basic concerns -- the more difficult it is to find out what really matters and to get it for yourself.

Before the war, America was a country of great innocence and idealism. Since then, it's been completely undermined by its people's hunger for profits. And that hunger is not limited to any ethnic group. I see it in everyone: Italian-, English- and German-American, Irish Catholics and, yes, even Greeks. Everybody's been going for the money and saying the hell with society. I see people just throwing away their values, all the things that their ancestors and fathers always treasured. They've put money up as the goal of life, but money is no measure of the value of a man -- any man. I know a lot of millionaires who do nothing but sit alone in their houses and wish they could have a friend to drink with or a woman they could truly love. All they have is their money. But they're really not greedy for money; they're interested in the zeros -- in the game of making two dollars into $20 into $2,000,000 into $20,000,000; nothing is enough.

In retrospect the old Hollywood glamour wasn't that bad. There was nothing wrong with Lubitsch. It comes to mind that maybe there really wasn't an America -- that maybe it was only Frank Capra. In talking with my friends, with my peers, fellow workers, I find that nothing has changed with them. They are willing to work. They are willing to steep themselves in ideas of human interest, in things that make sense humanly. Audiences care about people that they admire, people who will fight the odds of conformity with innocent weapons, people who fall in love and are crushed, who fight the enemy and die, who sacrifice, who sweat, who burp and work hard to make life more satisfactory. This, believe it or not, is what many good actors, directors and writers would be willing to substitute reviews and financial rewards for. Give the audience the vaguest permission or cause to feel real emotions, and they will take the challenge.


-- John Cassavetes, uncited interview excerpt reprinted in Ray Carney's Cassavetes on Cassavetes, pp. 269-71.

Excerpt, "The Soul of Man" by Oscar Wilde

It will be a marvellous thing—the true personality of man—when we see it. It will grow naturally and simply, flowerlike, or as a tree grows. It will not be at discord. It will never argue or dispute. It will not prove things. It will know everything. And yet it will not busy itself about knowledge. It will have wisdom. Its value will not be measured by material things. It will have nothing. And yet it will have everything, and whatever one takes from it, it will still have, so rich will it be. It will not be always meddling with others, or asking them to be like itself. It will love them because they will be different. And yet while it will not meddle with others, it will help all, as a beautiful thing helps us, by being what it is. The personality of man will be very wonderful. It will be as wonderful as the personality of a child.

In its development it will be assisted by Christianity, if men desire that; but if men do not desire that, it will develop none the less surely. For it will not worry itself about the past, nor care whether things happened or did not happen. Nor will it admit any laws but its own laws; nor any authority but its own authority. Yet it will love those who sought to intensify it, and speak often of them. And of these Christ was one.

‘Know thyself’ was written over the portal of the antique world. Over the portal of the new world, ‘Be thyself’ shall be written. And the message of Christ to man was simply ‘Be thyself.’ That is the secret of Christ.

When Jesus talks about the poor he simply means personalities, just as when he talks about the rich he simply means people who have not developed their personalities. Jesus moved in a community that allowed the accumulation of private property just as ours does, and the gospel that he preached was not that in such a community it is an advantage for a man to live on scanty, unwholesome food, to wear ragged, unwholesome clothes, to sleep in horrid, unwholesome dwellings, and a disadvantage for a man to live under healthy, pleasant, and decent conditions. Such a view would have been wrong there and then, and would, of course, be still more wrong now and in England; for as man moves northward the material necessities of life become of more vital importance, and our society is infinitely more complex, and displays far greater extremes of luxury and pauperism than any society of the antique world. What Jesus meant, was this. He said to man, ‘You have a wonderful personality. Develop it. Be yourself. Don’t imagine that your perfection lies in accumulating or possessing external things. Your affection is inside of you. If only you could realise that, you would not want to be rich. Ordinary riches can be stolen from a man. Real riches cannot. In the treasury-house of your soul, there are infinitely precious things, that may not be taken from you. And so, try to so shape your life that external things will not harm you. And try also to get rid of personal property. It involves sordid preoccupation, endless industry, continual wrong. Personal property hinders Individualism at every step.’ It is to be noted that Jesus never says that impoverished people are necessarily good, or wealthy people necessarily bad. That would not have been true. Wealthy people are, as a class, better than impoverished people, more moral, more intellectual, more well-behaved. There is only one class in the community that thinks more about money than the rich, and that is the poor. The poor can think of nothing else. That is the misery of being poor. What Jesus does say is that man reaches his perfection, not through what he has, not even through what he does, but entirely through what he is. And so the wealthy young man who comes to Jesus is represented as a thoroughly good citizen, who has broken none of the laws of his state, none of the commandments of his religion. He is quite respectable, in the ordinary sense of that extraordinary word. Jesus says to him, ‘You should give up private property. It hinders you from realising your perfection. It is a drag upon you. It is a burden. Your personality does not need it. It is within you, and not outside of you, that you will find what you really are, and what you really want.’ To his own friends he says the same thing. He tells them to be themselves, and not to be always worrying about other things. What do other things matter? Man is complete in himself. When they go into the world, the world will disagree with them. That is inevitable. The world hates Individualism. But that is not to trouble them. They are to be calm and self-centred. If a man takes their cloak, they are to give him their coat, just to show that material things are of no importance. If people abuse them, they are not to answer back. What does it signify? The things people say of a man do not alter a man. He is what he is. Public opinion is of no value whatsoever. Even if people employ actual violence, they are not to be violent in turn. That would be to fall to the same low level. After all, even in prison, a man can be quite free. His soul can be free. His personality can be untroubled. He can be at peace. And, above all things, they are not to interfere with other people or judge them in any way. Personality is a very mysterious thing. A man cannot always be estimated by what he does. He may keep the law, and yet be worthless. He may break the law, and yet be fine. He may be bad, without ever doing anything bad. He may commit a sin against society, and yet realise through that sin his true perfection.

There was a woman who was taken in adultery. We are not told the history of her love, but that love must have been very great; for Jesus said that her sins were forgiven her, not because she repented, but because her love was so intense and wonderful. Later on, a short time before his death, as he sat at a feast, the woman came in and poured costly perfumes on his hair. His friends tried to interfere with her, and said that it was an extravagance, and that the money that the perfume cost should have been expended on charitable relief of people in want, or something of that kind. Jesus did not accept that view. He pointed out that the material needs of Man were great and very permanent, but that the spiritual needs of Man were greater still, and that in one divine moment, and by selecting its own mode of expression, a personality might make itself perfect. The world worships the woman, even now, as a saint.

Yes; there are suggestive things in Individualism. Socialism annihilates family life, for instance. With the abolition of private property, marriage in its present form must disappear. This is part of the programme. Individualism accepts this and makes it fine. It converts the abolition of legal restraint into a form of freedom that will help the full development of personality, and make the love of man and woman more wonderful, more beautiful, and more ennobling. Jesus knew this. He rejected the claims of family life, although they existed in his day and community in a very marked form. ‘Who is my mother? Who are my brothers?’ he said, when he was told that they wished to speak to him. When one of his followers asked leave to go and bury his father, ‘Let the dead bury the dead,’ was his terrible answer. He would allow no claim whatsoever to be made on personality.

And so he who would lead a Christlike life is he who is perfectly and absolutely himself. He may be a great poet, or a great man of science; or a young student at a University, or one who watches sheep upon a moor; or a maker of dramas, like Shakespeare, or a thinker about God, like Spinoza; or a child who plays in a garden, or a fisherman who throws his net into the sea. It does not matter what he is, as long as he realises the perfection of the soul that is within him. All imitation in morals and in life is wrong. Through the streets of Jerusalem at the present day crawls one who is mad and carries a wooden cross on his shoulders. He is a symbol of the lives that are marred by imitation. Father Damien was Christlike when he went out to live with the lepers, because in such service he realised fully what was best in him. But he was not more Christlike than Wagner when he realised his soul in music; or than Shelley, when he realised his soul in song. There is no one type for man. There are as many perfections as there are imperfect men. And while to the claims of charity a man may yield and yet be free, to the claims of conformity no man may yield and remain free at all.

Individualism, then, is what through Socialism we are to attain to. As a natural result the State must give up all idea of government. It must give it up because, as a wise man once said many centuries before Christ, there is such a thing as leaving mankind alone; there is no such thing as governing mankind. All modes of government are failures. Despotism is unjust to everybody, including the despot, who was probably made for better things. Oligarchies are unjust to the many, and ochlocracies are unjust to the few. High hopes were once formed of democracy; but democracy means simply the bludgeoning of the people by the people for the people. It has been found out. I must say that it was high time, for all authority is quite degrading. It degrades those who exercise it, and degrades those over whom it is exercised. When it is violently, grossly, and cruelly used, it produces a good effect, by creating, or at any rate bringing out, the spirit of revolt and Individualism that is to kill it. When it is used with a certain amount of kindness, and accompanied by prizes and rewards, it is dreadfully demoralising. People, in that case, are less conscious of the horrible pressure that is being put on them, and so go through their lives in a sort of coarse comfort, like petted animals, without ever realising that they are probably thinking other people’s thoughts, living by other people’s standards, wearing practically what one may call other people’s second-hand clothes, and never being themselves for a single moment. ‘He who would be free,’ says a fine thinker, ‘must not conform.’ And authority, by bribing people to conform, produces a very gross kind of over-fed barbarism amongst us.


-- Oscar Wilde, "The Soul of Man," 1891/5, from Project Gutenberg at http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext97/slman10h.htm.

Excerpt, "Don Juan" by Lord Byron

CANTO THREE, Stanzas 1-14

I
Hail, Muse! et cetera.—We left Juan sleeping,
Pillow'd upon a fair and happy breast,
And watch'd by eyes that never yet knew weeping,
And loved by a young heart, too deeply blest
To feel the poison through her spirit creeping,
Or know who rested there, a foe to rest,
Had soil'd the current of her sinless years,
And turn'd her pure heart's purest blood to tears!

II
Oh, Love! what is it in this world of ours
Which makes it fatal to be loved? Ah, why
With cypress branches hast thou wreathed thy bowers,
And made thy best interpreter a sigh?
As those who dote on odours pluck the flowers,
And place them on their breast—but place to die—
Thus the frail beings we would fondly cherish
Are laid within our bosoms but to perish.

III
In her first passion woman loves her lover,
In all the others all she loves is love,
Which grows a habit she can ne'er get over,
And fits her loosely—like an easy glove,
As you may find, whene'er you like to prove her:
One man alone at first her heart can move;
She then prefers him in the plural number,
Not finding that the additions much encumber.

IV
I know not if the fault be men's or theirs;
But one thing's pretty sure; a woman planted
(Unless at once she plunge for life in prayers)
After a decent time must be gallanted;
Although, no doubt, her first of love affairs
Is that to which her heart is wholly granted;
Yet there are some, they say, who have had none,
But those who have ne'er end with only one.

V
'T is melancholy, and a fearful sign
Of human frailty, folly, also crime,
That love and marriage rarely can combine,
Although they both are born in the same clime;
Marriage from love, like vinegar from wine—
A sad, sour, sober beverage—by time
Is sharpen'd from its high celestial flavour
Down to a very homely household savour.

VI
There's something of antipathy, as 't were,
Between their present and their future state;
A kind of flattery that's hardly fair
Is used until the truth arrives too late—
Yet what can people do, except despair?
The same things change their names at such a rate;
For instance—passion in a lover's glorious,
But in a husband is pronounced uxorious.

VII
Men grow ashamed of being so very fond;
They sometimes also get a little tired
(But that, of course, is rare), and then despond:
The same things cannot always be admired,
Yet 't is "so nominated in the bond,"
That both are tied till one shall have expired.
Sad thought! to lose the spouse that was adorning
Our days, and put one's servants into mourning.

VIII
There's doubtless something in domestic doings
Which forms, in fact, true love's antithesis;
Romances paint at full length people's wooings,
But only give a bust of marriages;
For no one cares for matrimonial cooings,
There's nothing wrong in a connubial kiss:
Think you, if Laura had been Petrarch's wife,
He would have written sonnets all his life?

IX
All tragedies are finish'd by a death,
All comedies are ended by a marriage;
The future states of both are left to faith,
For authors fear description might disparage
The worlds to come of both, or fall beneath,
And then both worlds would punish their miscarriage;
So leaving each their priest and prayer-book ready,
They say no more of Death or of the Lady.

X
The only two that in my recollection
Have sung of heaven and hell, or marriage, are
Dante and Milton, and of both the affection
Was hapless in their nuptials, for some bar
Of fault or temper ruin'd the connection
(Such things, in fact, it don't ask much to mar):
But Dante's Beatrice and Milton's Eve
Were not drawn from their spouses, you conceive.

XI
Some persons say that Dante meant theology
By Beatrice, and not a mistress—I,
Although my opinion may require apology,
Deem this a commentator's fantasy,
Unless indeed it was from his own knowledge he
Decided thus, and show'd good reason why;
I think that Dante's more abstruse ecstatics
Meant to personify the mathematics.

XII
Haidée and Juan were not married, but
The fault was theirs, not mine; it is not fair,
Chaste reader, then, in any way to put
The blame on me, unless you wish they were;
Then if you'd have them wedded, please to shut
The book which treats of this erroneous pair,
Before the consequences grow too awful;
'T is dangerous to read of loves unlawful.

XIII
Yet they were happy,—happy in the illicit
Indulgence of their innocent desires;
But more imprudent grown with every visit,
Haidée forgot the island was her sire's;
When we have what we like, 't is hard to miss it,
At least in the beginning, ere one tires;
Thus she came often, not a moment losing,
Whilst her piratical papa was cruising.

XIV
Let not his mode of raising cash seem strange,
Although he fleeced the flags of every nation,
For into a prime minister but change
His title, and 't is nothing but taxation;
But he, more modest, took an humbler range
Of life, and in an honester vocation
Pursued o'er the high seas his watery journey,
And merely practised as a sea-attorney.


-- Lord Byron, Don Juan, 1819-24