“Man and Bird”

A Man with a Shotgun said to a Bird:

‘It is all nonsense, you know, about shooting being a cruel sport. I put my skill against your cunning — that is all there is of it. It is a fair game.’

‘True,’ said the Bird, ‘but I don’t wish to play.’

‘Why not?’ inquired the Man with a Shotgun.

‘The game,’ the Bird replied, ‘is fair as you say; the chances are about even; but consider the stake. I am in it for you, but what is there in it for me?’

Not being prepared with an answer to the question, the Man with a Shotgun sagaciously removed the propounder.

— Ambrose Bierce, Fantastic Fables, 1899

| Literature

Constraint

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Animaux_sauvages_-_ll._de_Jean_Matet_-_btv1b10573583s_(11_of_12).jpg

Art is limitation; the essence of every picture is the frame. If you draw a giraffe, you must draw him with a long neck. If, in your bold creative way, you hold yourself free to draw a giraffe with a short neck, you will really find that you are not free to draw a giraffe.

— G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, 1908

| Art · Literature · Quotations

A Crowded Verse

The names of 13 Jane Austen characters are hidden in the following lines as anagrams of complete consecutive words. For example, “was ill” yields WALLIS. (The names to be found are women’s first names and men’s surnames, as in Austen.) In most cases the anagrams are hidden in two words, but twice they’re in three, once in four, and once in a single word. What are they?

The other day when I was ill
And not a soul I knew came nigh,
Jane Austen was my daily fare —
I rather liked to be laid by.
Each line or page enthralls me quite,
I there can let no man deride;
I may be ill as a wight can be,
But, Jane with me, am satisfied.
In bed my ease is nil, yet I’ll
Be lying therein at any rate
Content. With Jane to chortle at
How can I rail at Fate?

Click for Answer
| Language · Literature · Poems · Puzzles

A Literary Effort

Byron swam the Hellespont. On May 3, 1810, the 22-year-old poet and a Lieutenant Ekenhead of the frigate Salsette swam the breaststroke from Sestos to Abydos, crossing from Europe to Asia in an hour and 10 minutes as they sought to emulate Leander’s nightly swims to Hero. “The whole distance … including the length we were carried by the current, was computed by those on board the frigate at upwards of four English miles.”

“I plume myself on this achievement more than I could possibly do on any kind of glory, political, poetical, or rhetorical,” Byron wrote. He commemorated the feat in Don Juan:

A better swimmer you could scarce see ever,
He could, perhaps, have pass’d the Hellespont,
As once (a feat on which ourselves we prided)
Leander, Mr. Ekenhead, and I did.

The feat is often regarded as a founding achievement in open-water swimming, and an event is held each year in its memory.

| Literature

In a Word

verbarian
adj. relating to words

gasconade
n. boastful or bombastic language

philautia
n. self-conceit; undue regard for oneself

procacious
adj. cheeky, provocative

An odd little detail from Boswell’s Life of Johnson:

“His next instructor in English was a master, whom, when he spoke of him to me, he familiarly called Tom Brown, who, said he, ‘published a spelling-book, and dedicated it to the UNIVERSE; but, I fear, no copy of it can now be had.'”

| Literature

“The Adventure of the Tall Man”

After Arthur Conan Doyle’s death, his biographer Hesketh Pearson claimed to have discovered among his papers the scenario of an uncompleted tale.

A girl appeals to Sherlock Holmes for help — her uncle has been found shot in his bedroom, and her lover has been arrested as a suspect. The lover has recently had a quarrel with the old man; a revolver is found in his house that could have fired the fatal shot; and he owns a ladder whose feet match marks below the dead man’s window and which bears incriminating soil on its feet. The girl suspects another man who has been paying court to her.

Holmes and Watson go to the village, where they discover a pair of stilts in a disused well. When the accused man is found guilty of murder, Holmes is driven to a desperate stratagem: He dresses an actor as the murdered man, mounts him on the stilts, and has him approach the villain’s bedroom window, crying, “As you came for me, I have come for you!” Terrified, the man makes a full confession: He had planted the revolver and smeared the ladder’s feet with soil, hoping to win the girl and her money.

Pearson adds, apparently without intending the pun, “Presumably Doyle scrapped this because he felt on reflection that the episode of the stilts was rather tall.”

Of the story, Richard Lancelyn Green wrote, “there is no evidence to show that it is by [Doyle] and strong internal evidence to suggest that it’s not.” For what it’s worth, Robert A. Cutter completed the adventure in 1947.

| Hoaxes · Literature

Elevated Thoughts

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Montaigne_1576_R.jpg
Image: Wikimedia Commons

The joists in the tower in which Montaigne wrote his Essays are inscribed with his favorite quotations from Greek and Latin authors, many of which appear in his writings: “It is not so much things that torment man, as the opinions he has of things.” “Every reasoning has its contrary.” “Wind swells bladders, opinion swells men.”

He wrote, “The room pleases me because it is somewhat difficult of access, and retired, as much on account of the utility of the exercise, as because I there avoid the crowd. Here is my seat, my place, my rest. I try to make it purely my own, and to free this single corner from conjugal, filial, and civil community.”

The numbers in the diagram below correspond to this table in the German Wikipedia. English translations are here.

In large Latin letters on the central rafter are the words “I DO NOT UNDERSTAND. I PAUSE. I EXAMINE.”

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ch%C3%A2teau_de_Montaigne_-_tower_-_sketch_of_2nd_floor_with_library.svg
Image: © Roman Eisele / CC BY-SA 4.0
| Literature · Quotations

“A Matter of Method”

A Philosopher seeing a Fool beating his Donkey, said:

‘Abstain, my son, abstain, I implore. Those who resort to violence shall suffer from violence.’

‘That,’ said the Fool, diligently belaboring the animal, ‘is what I’m trying to teach this beast — which has kicked me.’

‘Doubtless,’ said the Philosopher to himself, as he walked away, ‘the wisdom of fools is no deeper nor truer than ours, but they really do seem to have a more impressive way of imparting it.’

— Ambrose Bierce, Fantastic Fables, 1899

| Literature · Society

First Things First

George Orwell’s six rules of writing, from “Politics and the English Language,” 1946:

  1. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
  2. Never use a long word where a short one will do.
  3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
  4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.
  5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
  6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

But “one could keep all of them and still write bad English.”

| Language · Literature

The Bell Tolls

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cathedral_Church_of_St_Paul,_monument_to_John_Donne_City_of_London_1079157_20230822_0206.jpg
Image: Wikimedia Commons

John Donne may have posed for his own funerary monument. In his Lives of 1658, Izaak Walton writes:

… Dr. Donne sent for a Carver to make for him in wood the figure of an Urn, giving him directions for the compass and height of it; and, to bring with it a board of the height of his body. These being got, then without delay a choice Painter was to be in a readiness to draw his picture, which was taken as followeth. — Several Charcole-fires being first made in his large Study, he brought with him into that place his winding-sheet in his hand; and, having put off all his cloaths, had this sheet put on him, and so tyed with knots at his head and feet, and his hands so placed, as dead bodies are usually fitted to be shrowded and put into the grave. Upon this Urn he thus stood with his eyes shut, and with so much of the sheet turned aside as might shew his lean, pale, and death-like face; which was purposely turned toward the East, from whence he expected the second coming of his and our Saviour. Thus he was drawn at his just height; and when the picture was fully finished, he caused it to be set by his bed-side, where it continued, and became his hourly object till his death …”

It’s not clear whether this really happened — the sketch, if there was one, has been lost. The statue stands in St. Paul’s Churchyard in London.

| Death · Literature