Soliloquy of a mayfly, imagined by Benjamin Franklin in a 1778 letter to Madame Brillon:

It was the opinion of learned philosophers of our race, who lived and flourished long before my time, that this vast world, the Moulin Joly, could not itself subsist more than eighteen hours; and I think there was some foundation for that opinion, since, by the apparent motion of the great luminary that gives life to all nature, and which in my time has evidently declined considerably towards the ocean at the end of our earth, it must then finish its course, be extinguished in the waters that surround us, and leave the world in cold and darkness, necessarily producing universal death and destruction. I have lived seven of those hours, a great age, being no less than four hundred and twenty minutes of time. How very few of us continue so long! I have seen generations born, flourish, and expire. My present friends are the children and grandchildren of the friends of my youth, who are now, alas, no more! And I must soon follow them; for, by the course of nature, though still in health, I cannot expect to live above seven or eight minutes longer. What now avails all my toil and labor in amassing honey-dew on this leaf, which I cannot live to enjoy! What the political struggles I have been engaged in for the good of my compatriot inhabitants of this bush, or my philosophical studies for the benefit of our race in general! for in politics what can laws do without morals? Our present race of ephemeræ will in a course of minutes become corrupt, like those of other and older bushes, and consequently as wretched. And in philosophy how small our progress! Alas! art is long, and life is short! My friends would comfort me with the idea of a name they say I shall leave behind me; and they tell me I have lived long enough to nature and to glory. But what will fame be to an ephemera who no longer exists? And what will become of all history in the eighteenth hour, when the world itself, even the whole Moulin Joly, shall come to its end and be buried in universal ruin?

Franklin added, “To me, after all my eager pursuits, no solid pleasures now remain, but the reflection of a long life spent in meaning well, the sensible conversation of a few good lady ephemeræ, and now and then a kind smile and a tune from the ever amiable Brillante.”

In June 1829, English curate Patrick Brontë brought home a box of 12 wooden toy soldiers for his 12-year-old son Branwell. Branwell shared them with his sisters: “This is the Duke of Wellington! It shall be mine!” shouted 13-year-old Charlotte, and 11-year-old Emily and 9-year-old Anne soon took up avatars of their own. This was the start of an enormous imaginative undertaking — soon the four had invented names and personalities for their soldiers and had begun inventing a shared history in which the “Young Men” traveled to the west coast of Africa; settled there after a war with the indigenous Ashantee; elected Arthur Wellesley, the Duke of Wellington, as their leader; and founded the Great Glass Town at the delta of the River Niger.

This was just the beginning. After 1831 Emily and Ann “seceded” to create a related imaginary country they called Gondal, and after 1834 Charlotte and Branwell developed Glass Town into Angria, yet another imaginary nation. Together and variously they edited magazines, wrote histories, and composed stories, poems, and plays about these shared fantasy world, with alliances, feuds, and love affairs that play out across Africa and the Pacific. Here’s the start of “A Day at Parry’s Place,” written by 14-year-old Charlotte in a fanciful magazine in 1830:

‘Oh, Arthur!’ said I, one morning last May. ‘How dull this Glass Town is! I am positively dying of ennui. Can you suggest anything likely to relieve my disconsolate situation?’

‘Indeed, Charles, I should think you might find some pleasant employment in reading or conversing with those that are wiser than yourself. Surely you are not to emty-headed & brainless as to be driven to the extremity of not knowing what to do!’ Such was the reply to my civil question, uttered with the prettiest air of gravity imaginable.

‘Oh, yes! I am, brother! So you must furnish me with some amusement.’

‘Well, then, Charles, you have often spoken of a visit to Captain Parry’s Palace as a thing to be desired. You have now time for the accomplishment of your wish.’

Together, four young siblings in a quiet parsonage in Haworth filled 484 pages documenting their imaginary world before maturity sent them on to other pursuits. “As the sisters grew older, Anne — once as close as a twin — gradually ceased to share Emily’s personal vision of the saga, just as the partnership between Charlotte and Branwell slowly disintegrated as their interests and aesthetic vision changed with maturity,” writes Christine Alexander in Tales of Glass Town, Angria, and Gondal (2010). “[But] the young Brontës nourished each other’s imaginations and developed in their youthful writings the independent styles and themes that can be seen fully developed in their mature poetry and famous novels.”

Elmore Leonard’s 10 rules for good writing:

1. Never open a book with weather.
2. Avoid prologues.
3. Never use a verb other than “said” to carry dialogue.
4. Never use an adverb to modify the verb “said.”
5. Keep your exclamation points under control.
6. Never use the words “suddenly” or “all hell broke loose.”
7. Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly.
8. Avoid detailed descriptions of characters.
9. Don’t go into great detail describing places and things.
10. Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.

“My most important rule is one that sums up the 10: If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.”

This shepherd thought poetic thoughts
As by the flocks he sat;
But while he wrote his verses,
The goat fed on his hat.

Children’s author and illustrator Peter Newell collected a whole series of such reversible images in Topsys and Turvys (1893) and a sequel. He followed these up with The Hole Book (1908), in which young Tom Potts accidentally fires a gun, sending a bullet through a town; The Slant Book (1910), a book shaped like a rhombus in which a runaway baby carriage careens downhill; and The Rocket Book (1912), in which a janitor’s son sends a rocket upward through 21 successive floors of an apartment building.

The Hole Book was manufactured with a hole right through it — on each page the physical hole shows the mayhem caused by the bullet, deflating bagpipes, severing kite strings, sounding a bass drum, and blowing up a car, among many other things. It’s finally stopped by a cake:

And this was lucky for Tom Potts,
The boy who fired the shot —
It might have gone clean round the world
And killed him on the spot.

From the notebooks of Samuel Butler:

• “When I was a boy at school at Shrewsbury, old Mrs. Brown used to keep a tray of spoiled tarts which she sold cheaper. They most of them looked pretty right till you handled them. We are all spoiled tarts.”
• “Words are like money; there is nothing so useless, unless when in actual use.”
• “They say the test of [literary power] is whether a man can write an inscription. I say ‘Can he name a kitten?’ And by this test I am condemned, for I cannot.”
• “The extremes of vice and virtue are alike detestable; absolute virtue is as sure to kill a man as absolute vice is, let alone the dullnesses of it and the pomposities of it.”
• “When fatigued, I find it rests me to write very slowly with attention to the formation of each letter. I am often thus able to go on when I could not otherwise do so.”
• “Is life worth living? This is a question for an embryo, not for a man.”
• “When a man is in doubt about this or that in his writing, it will often guide him if he asks himself how it will tell a hundred years hence.”
• “Life is one long process of getting tired.”
• “I believe that more unhappiness comes from this source than from any other — I mean from the attempt to prolong family connection unduly and to make people hang together artificially who would never naturally do so. The mischief among the lower classes is not so great, but among the middle and upper classes it is killing a large number daily. And the old people do not really like it much better than the young.”

“The true writer will stop everywhere and anywhere to put down his notes,” he wrote, “as the true painter will stop everywhere and anywhere to sketch.”

In 1925 naturalist Henry Beston built a cottage on Cape Cod and fell in love with the sea:

Sound of surf in these autumnal dunes — the continuousness of it, sound of endless charging, endless incoming and gathering, endless fulfilment and dissolution, endless fecundity, and endless death. I have been trying to study out the mechanics of that mighty resonance. The dominant note is the great spilling crash made by each arriving wave. It may be hollow and booming, it may be heavy and churning, it may be a tumbling roar. The second fundamental sound is the wild seething cataract roar of the wave’s dissolution and the rush of its foaming waters up the beach — this second sound diminuendo. The third fundamental sound is the endless dissolving hiss of the inmost slides of foam. The first two sounds reach the ear as a unisonance — the booming impact of the tons of water and the wild roar of the up-rush blending — and this mingled sound dissolves into the foam-bubble hissing of the third. Above the tumult, like birds, fly wisps of watery noise, splashes and counter splashes, whispers, seethings, slaps, and chucklings. An overtone sound of other breakers, mingled with a general rumbling, fells earth and sea and air.

He left the cottage two years later, moved back to Quincy, and proposed to Elizabeth Coatsworth. When she learned that he had many notes from his stay on the beach but no manuscript, she said, “No book, no marriage,” and The Outermost House was published in 1928.

The sea itself claimed the cottage in 1978.

(Via The Oxford Book of the Sea, 1992.)

Striking excerpts from the writings of Scottish novelist Muriel Spark, from Penelope Jardine’s 2018 collection A Good Comb:

• The superstition of today is the science of yesterday.
• Providers are often disliked, often despised.
• I think “waiter” is such a funny word. It is we who wait.
• It is impossible to persuade a man who does not disagree, but smiles.
• I’m not lonely before they come. I’m only lonely when they go away.
• Dangerous people often seem boring.
• She was astonishingly ugly, one was compelled to look at her.
• I am an honest man … when treating of the few existing subjects to which honesty is due.
• Suffering isn’t in proportion to what the sufferer deserves.
• He exhausted his capacity for conversation when he became an Englishman.

Jardine’s title comes from the observation “It calms you down, a good comb,” remarked by an unnamed character in Spark’s 1960 novel The Ballad of Peckham Rye.