A Smile More Brightened

In September 1931 the Weekend Review pointed out the “regrettable omission of any reference to tooth-brushing in the description of Adam and Eve retiring for the night” in Book IV of Paradise Lost. It challenged its readers to improve Milton’s text; polymath Edward Marsh inserted these lines:

[… and eas’d the putting off
These troublesome disguises which wee wear,]
Yet pretermitted not the strait Command,
Eternal, indispensable, to off-cleanse
From their white elephantin Teeth the stains
Left by those tastie Pulps that late they chewd
At supper. First from a salubrious Fount
Our general Mother, stooping, the pure Lymph
Insorb’d, which, mingl’d with tart juices prest
From pungent Herbs, on sprigs of Myrtle smeard,
(Then were not Brushes) scrub’d gumms more impearl’d
Than when young Telephus with Lydia strove
In mutual bite of Shoulder and ruddy Lip.
This done (by Adam too no less) the pair
[Straight side by side were laid …]

Marsh called this “the cleverest thing I ever did.” “The mordacious Telephus and Lydia are ‘of course,’ as the gossip-writers would say, from Horace, Odes, I, xiii. Martin Armstrong, who had set the competition, gave me the first prize, and was good enough to express the hope that future editors of Milton would put my lines in the appropriate place.”

(From Marsh’s 1939 memoir A Number of People.)

The Engine

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_Engine_(Gulliver).png

Gulliver’s Travels describes a device by which “the most ignorant person, at a reasonable charge, and with a little bodily labour, might write books in philosophy, poetry, politics, laws, mathematics, and theology, without the least assistance from genius or study”:

He then led me to the frame, about the sides whereof all his pupils stood in ranks. It was twenty feet square, placed in the middle of the room. The superfices was composed of several bits of wood, about the bigness of a die, but some larger than others. They were all linked together by slender wires. These bits of wood were covered, on every square, with paper pasted on them; and on these papers were written all the words of their language, in their several moods, tenses, and declensions; but without any order. The professor then desired me ‘to observe; for he was going to set his engine at work.’ The pupils, at his command, took each of them hold of an iron handle, whereof there were forty fixed round the edges of the frame; and giving them a sudden turn, the whole disposition of the words was entirely changed. He then commanded six-and-thirty of the lads, to read the several lines softly, as they appeared upon the frame; and where they found three or four words together that might make part of a sentence, they dictated to the four remaining boys, who were scribes. This work was repeated three or four times, and at every turn, the engine was so contrived, that the words shifted into new places, as the square bits of wood moved upside down.

As it permutes sets of words, it’s arguably a forerunner of the modern computer.

Fundamentals

In 1955, the editor of a Michigan high school newspaper wrote to E.E. Cummings, asking his advice for students who wanted to follow in his footsteps. He sent this reply:

A Poet’s Advice to Students

A poet is somebody who feels, and who expresses his feeling through words.

This may sound easy. It isn’t.

A lot of people think or believe or know they feel — but that’s thinking or believing or knowing; not feeling. And poetry is feeling — not knowing or believing or thinking.

Almost anybody can learn to think or believe or know, but not a single human being can be taught to feel. Why? Because whenever you think or you believe or you know, you’re a lot of other people: but the moment you feel, you’re nobody-but-yourself.

To be nobody-but-yourself — in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else — means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.

As for expressing nobody-but-yourself in words, that means working just a little harder than anybody who isn’t a poet can possibly imagine. Why? Because nothing is quite as easy as using words like somebody else. We all of us do exactly this nearly all of the time — and whenever we do it, we’re not poets.

If, at the end of your first ten or fifteen years of fighting and working and feeling, you find you’ve written one line of one poem, you’ll be very lucky indeed.

And so my advice to all young people who wish to become poets is: do something easy, like learning how to blow up the world — unless you’re not only willing, but glad, to feel and work and fight till you die.

Does this sound dismal? It isn’t.

It’s the most wonderful life on earth.

Or so I feel.

(From the Ottawa Hills Spectator, Oct. 26, 1955.)

“A Sound of Clinking Waiters”

“Description of things and atmosphere” from the notebooks of F. Scott Fitzgerald:

  • “The island floated, a boat becalmed, upon the almost perceptible curve of the world.”
  • “The first lights of the evening were springing into pale existence. The Ferris wheel, pricked out now in lights, revolved leisurely through the dusk; a few empty cars of the roller coaster rattled overhead.”
  • “Farther out in the water there were other lights where a fleet of slender yachts rode the tide with slow dignity, and farther still a full ripe moon made the water bosom into a polished dancing floor.”
  • “It was a cup of a lake with lily pads for dregs and a smooth surface of green cream.”
  • “A region of those monotonous apartment rows that embody the true depths of the city — darkly mysterious at night, drab in the afternoon.”
  • “Spring came sliding up the mountain in wedges and spear points of green.”
  • “The music indoors was strange in the summer; it lay uneasily upon the pulsing heat, disturbed by the loud whir of the fans.”
  • “Drawing away from the little valley, past pink pines and fresh, diamond-strewn snow.”
  • “And perhaps, on the widest and shadiest of the porches there is even a hammock left over from the hammock days, stirring gently in a Victorian wind.”
  • “Bundled up children were splattering in for tea as if the outdoors were tired of them and wanted to change its dress in quiet dignity.”
  • “Out the window, the snow on the pine trees had gone lilac in the early dusk.”
  • “The sun had gone behind Naples, leaving a sky of pigeon’s blood and gold, and as they rounded the bay and climbed slowly toward Torredell Annunziata, the Mediterranean momentarily toasted the fading splendor in pink wine.”
  • “The sea was dingy grey and swept with rain. Canvas sheltered all the open portions of the promenade deck, even the ping-pong table was wet.”
  • “Is there anything more soothing than the quiet whir of a lawnmower on a summer afternoon?”
  • “In Spring when there was no leaf dry enough to crackle and the loudest sound was a dog barking in the next county.”
  • “The deep South from the air — a mosaic of baseball diamonds set between dark little woods.”

In his 1925 story “Love in the Night,” a “limousine crawled crackling down the pebbled drive.”

Academia

Caprices of Oxford dons, recounted in Maurice Bowra’s Memories: 1898-1939:

“In his quiet way [Wadham College Warden Joseph Wells] had an impressive authority, and it was told that once, when he heard a fearful row in the back quad, he walked up in the dark and said, ‘If you don’t stop at once, I shall light a match.’ They stopped.”

“[Oxford administrator Benjamin Parsons] Symons never admitted that he was wrong. An undergraduate was found drunk, and Symons abused another, quite innocent man for it, who said that his name was not that by which Symons had called him, but Symons would not admit it. ‘You’re drunk still. You don’t even know your own name. Go to your room at once.'”

“[Philosophy tutor Frank] Brabant kept a car and drove it badly, even by academic standards, which, from myopia, or self-righteousness, or loquacity, or absorption in other matters, are notoriously low. Once when I was with him, he drove straight into a cow and knocked it down, fortunately without damage. When the man in charge of it said quite mildly, ‘Look out where you are going,’ Brabant said fiercely, ‘Mind your own business,’ and drove on.”

See Metathesis.

Misc

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Samuel_Johnson_EMWEA.jpg

  • Dante’s 1305 essay “De vulgari eloquentia” contains a 27-letter word, sovramagnificentissimamente, “supermagnificently.”
  • Life Savers candies were invented by Hart Crane’s father.
  •  2746 = 2 + \sqrt{7\sqrt{4}}^{6} (Colin Rose)
  • RETROSUSCEPTION is an anagram of COUNTERRIPOSTES.
  • “Of all the reciprocals of integers, the one that I best like is 1/0 for it is a titan amongst midgets.” — Sam Linial

Lord David Cecil called Samuel Johnson “an outstanding example of the charm that comes from an unexpected combination of qualities. In general, odd people are not sensible and sensible people are not odd. Johnson was both and often both at the same time.”

Prospect

In Eric Cross’ 1942 book The Tailor and Ansty, Irish tailor and storyteller Timothy Buckley recounts the wisdom held by the old Irish, before “the people got too bloodyful smart and educated, and let the government or anyone else do their thinking for them.” They had a way of reckoning time that advances from the lifespan of a rail, a type of small bird, to the age of the world:

A hound outlives three rails.
A horse outlives three hounds.
A jock outlives three horses.
A deer outlives three jocks.
An eagle outlives three deer.
A yew-tree outlives three eagles.
An old ridge in the ground outlives three yew-trees.
Three times the time that the sign of a ridge will be seen in the ground will be as long as from the beginning to the end of the world.

“The tailor is wildly off,” notes philosopher Robert P. Crease, “in his estimate of the age of the universe, which is unlikely to be (lifetime of the rail) × 38. Still, his point is well made that the old Irish unit system may possess certain superiorities to ours in that it was ‘reckoned on the things a man could see about him, so that, wherever he was, he had an almanac.'”

01/31/2025 UPDATE: Reader Edward White writes:

There is actually a similar calculation found in the Cosmati Pavement, in Westminster Abbey: The inscription reads

If the reader wisely considers all that is laid down, he will find here the end of the primum mobile; a hedge (lives for) three years, add dogs and horses and men, stags and ravens, eagles, enormous whales, the world: each one following triples the years of the one before.

In other words the calculation is:

A hedge lives 3 years
A dog lives for 3 hedges (i.e. 9 years)
A man lives for 3 dogs (i.e. 27 years)
A stag lives for 3 men (i.e. 81 years)
A raven lives for 3 stags (i.e. 243 years)
An eagle lives 3 ravens (i.e. 729 years)
A whale lives 3 eagles (i.e. 2187 years)
And the world lives 3 whales (6561 years)

This is the same as the Irish peasant’s calculation, in that it involves 8 rounds of tripling, but it has different terms. Schott’s Quintessential Miscellany (Bloomsbury, 2011) has a similar list of calculations on page 104. They are quoted below in full:

Flemish folklore gave this estimate of animal life-spans, premised upon the belief that a town (or enclosure) lasted just three years:

A TOWN lives three YEARS,
A DOG lives three TOWNS,
A HORSE lives three DOGS
A MAN lives three HORSES,
An ASS lives three MEN,
A WILD GOOSE lives three ASSES,
A CROW lives three WILD GEESE,
A STAG lives three CROWS
A RAVEN lives three STAGS
& the PHOENIX lives three RAVENS

A German equivalent has it:

A FENCE lasts three YEARS;
A DOG lasts three FENCES;
A HORSE lasts three DOGS;
And a MAN three HORSES.

Hesiod (fl.c 8th BC) wrote:

The NOISY CROW lives nine generations of MEN who die in the bloom of years; the STAG attains the age of four CROWS; the RAVEN, in its turn, equals three STAGS in length of days; while the PHOENIX lives nine RAVENS. We nymphs, fair-of-tresses, daughters of Jove the aegis-bearer, attain to the age of ten PHOENIXES.

And, Italian folklore maintained:

A DOG lasts 9 years;
A HORSE lasts 3 DOGS: 27 years;
A MAN lasts 3 HORSES: 81 years;
A CROW lasts 3 MEN: 243 years;
A DEER lasts 3 CROWS: 729 years;
An OAK lasts 3 DEER: 2,187 years.

The principle was evidently very widespread across Europe.

[Here’s another translation of the Hesiod, this from Plutarch:

A screaming crow lives for nine generations
of men who have reached puberty; a deer is four crows;
the raven grows old at three deer; then the phoenix at nine ravens; and we at ten phoenixes,
we beautiful-haired nymphs, daughters of aegis-holding Zeus.]

(Thanks, Edward.)

Chesterton’s Fence

In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which will probably be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, ‘I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.’ To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: ‘If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.’

— G.K. Chesterton, The Thing: Why I Am a Catholic, 1929

Noted

At age 18, James Joyce wrote a play, A Brilliant Career. He began it with an inscription:

To
My own Soul I
dedicate the first
true work of my
life.

It’s the only one of his writings that bears a dedication.