Syracuse started flat, with used-car dealers and junkyards. Then came stucco bars and appliance stores in converted clapboard houses. It was late Friday afternoon, with rush hour and week-end traffic starting to overlap. Parker pushed the Olds through the traffic, making the best time he could. South Salina Street. The stores got taller and older, the traffic heavier, till they were downtown, where all the streets were one way the wrong way.”I hate this city,” Parker said.
”It’s a city,” Handy replied. “They’re all like this.”
”I hate them all, then.
— Richard Stark, The Outfit
If a man have neither wife nor other to rule his household, know you how it is with the house? I know, and will tell you. If he be rich, and have plenty of grain, the sparrows and the moles eat their fill thereof. It is not set in order, but all so scattered abroad that the whole house is the fouler for it. If he have oil, it is all neglected and spilt; when the jars break and the oil is spilled, he casts a little earth on the spot, and all is done! In his bed, know you how he sleeps? He lies in a pit, with the sheets as they chance to have tumbled upon the bed; and they are never changed until they are torn. Even so in his dining-hall; here on the ground are melon-rinds, bones, and salad leaves, everything left lying on the ground without pretense of sweeping. He wipes the trenchers off; the dog licks them; so they are washed. His pipkins are all foul with grease: go and see how they stand! Know you how such a man lives? —even as a brute beast.
— St. Bernardino
He who does not turn up the earth with the plough ought to write the parchment with his fingers.
— St. Ferreol
He made no pretentions to botany, and knew nothing of groups or classification; he did not care in the least to decide between Tournefort and the natural method; he took no part, either for the utricles or against the cotyledons, or for Jussieu against Linnaeus. He did not study plants, he loved flowers. He had much respect for the learned, but still more for the ignorant; and, while he fulfilled his duty in both these respects, he watered his beds every summer evening with a tin watering-pot painted green.
— Les Miserables
For conduct which to clearer minds seems merely sane, was in those days to be performed only by rare vision and self-mastery.
— Olaf Stapledon, Last and First Men
Did I exist before my birth? No. Shall I, after my death? No. What am I? A little dust, aggregated by an organism. What have I to do on this earth! I have the choice to suffer or to enjoy. Where will suffering lead me? To nothing. But I shall have suffered. Where will enjoyment leave me? To nothing. But I shall have enjoyed. My choice is made. I must eat or be eaten, and I choose to eat. It is better to be the tooth than the grass.
— Les Miserables
One generation abandons the enterprises of another like stranded vessels.
— Thoreau, Walden
Human thought has no limit. At its risk and peril, it analyses and dissects its own fascination. We could almost say that, by a sort of splendid reaction, it fascinates nature; the mysterious world which surrounds us returns what it receives; it is probable that the contemplators are contemplated.
— Les Miserables
Set not thy foot to make the blind to fall;Nor wilfully offend thy weaker brother:
Nor wound the dead with thy tongue’s bitter gall,
Nor rejoice thou upon the fall of other.
— Pybrac, Quatrains (17th c.)
Then he asked himself:If he were the only one who had done wrong in the course of his fatal history? If, in the first place, it were not a grievous thing that he, a workman, should have been in want of work; that he, an industrious man, should have lacked bread. If, moreover, the fault having been committed and avowed, the punishment had not been savage and excessive. If there were not a greater abuse, on the part of the law, in the penalty, than there had been, on the part of the guilty, in the crime.
He questioned himself if human society could have the right alike to crush its members in the one case by its unreasonable carelessness, and in the other by its pitiless care; and to keep a poor man for ever between a lack and an excess, a lack of work, an excess of punishment.
If it were not outrageous that society should treat with such rigid precision those of its members who were most poorly endowed in the distribution of wealth that chance had made, and who where, therefore, most worthy of indulgence.
These questions asked and decided, he condemned society and sentenced it.
He sentenced it to his hatred.
— Les Miserables
The guillotine is the concretion of the law; it is called the Avenger: it is not neutral and does not permit you to remain neutral.
— Victor Hugo, Les Miserables
So parents often err, many fond mothers especially, doat so much upon their children, like Aesop’s ape, till in the end they crush them to death, Corporum nutrices animarum novercaie, pampering up their bodies to the undoing of their souls: they will not let them be corrected or controlled, but still soothed up in everything they do, that in conclusion “they bring sorrow, shame, heaviness to their parents” (Eccles. xxx, 8, 9), “become wanton, stubborn, wilful, and disobedient”; rude, untaught, headstrong, incorrigible, and graceless. “They love them so foolishly,” saith Cardan, “that they rather seem to hate them, bringing them up not to virtue but injury, not to learning but to riot, not to sober life and conversation but to all pleasure and licentious behaviour.
— Anatomy of Melancholy
Many mortal men came to see fair Psyche, the glory of her age, they did admire her, commend, desire her for her divine beauty, and gaze upon her; but as on a picture; none would marry her, quod indotata [because she had no dowry]; fair Psyche had no money. So they do by learning.
— Anatomy of Melancholy (paraphrasing Apuleius)
Extracts from Olaf Stapledon’s “Last and First Men”
The following was originally published in 1931. I found it remarkably prescient.
In the Far West, the United States of America openly claimed to be custodians of the whole planet. Universally feared and envied, universally respected for their enterprise, yet for their complacency very widely despised, the Americans were rapidly changing the whole character of man’s existence. By this time every human being throughout the planet made use of American products, and there was no region where American capital did not support local labour. Moreover the American press, gramophone, radio, cinematograph and televisor ceaselessly drenched the planet with American thought. Year by year the aether reverberated with echoes of New York’s pleasures and the religious fervours of the Middle West. What wonder, then, that America, even while she was despised, irresistibly moulded the whole human race. This, perhaps, would not have mattered, had America been able to give of her very rare best. But inevitably only her worst could be propagated. Only the most vulgar traits of that potentially great people could get through into the minds of foreigners by means of these crude instruments. And so, by the floods of poison issuing from this people’s baser members, the whole world, and with it the nobler parts of America herself, were irrevocably corrupted.
Meanwhile, Bramanti went on: “Sublime Hierogam of the Chemical Wedding, Sublime Rodostauric Psychopomp, Sublime Referendarium of the Most Arcane Arcana, Sublime Steganograph of the Hieroglyphic Monad, Sublime Astral Connector Utriusque Cosmi, Sublime Keeper of the Tomb of Rosencreutz… Imponderable Archon of the Currents, Imponderable Archon of the Hollow Earth, Imponderable Archon of the Mystic Pole, Imponderable Archon of the Labyrinths, Imponderable Archon of the Pendulum of Pendula…” Bramanti paused, and it seemed to me that he uttered the last formula with reluctance: “And the Imponderable Archon of Imponderable Archons, the Servant of Servants, Most Humble Secretary of the Egyptian Oedipus, Lowest Messenger of the Masters of the World and Porter of Agarttha, Last Thurifer of the Pendulum, Claude-Louis, Comte de Saint-Germain, Prince Rackoczi, Comte de Saint-Martin, and Marchese di Aglie, Monsieur de Surmont, Mr. Welldone, Marchese di Monferrato, of Aymar, and of Belmar, Count Sol-tikoff, Knight Schoening, Count of Tzarogy!
— Umberto Eco, Foucault’s Pendulum
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