“Oscar’s Morning Work”

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Image: Wikimedia Commons

Oscar Wilde, among his various stories told here of which he was always the aesthetic hero, related that once while on a visit to an English country house he was much annoyed by the pronounced Philistinism of a certain fellow guest, who loudly stated that all artistic employment was a melancholy waste of time.

‘Well, Mr. Wilde,’ said Oscar’s bugbear one day at lunch, ‘and pray how have you been passing your morning?’ ‘Oh! I have been immensely busy,’ said Oscar with great gravity. ‘I have spent my whole time over the proof sheets of my book of poems.’ The Philistine with a growl inquired the result of that.

‘Well, it was very important,’ said Oscar. ‘I took out a comma.’ ‘Indeed,’ returned the enemy of literature, ‘is that all you did?’ Oscar, with a sweet smile, said, ‘By no means; on mature reflection I put back the comma.’ This was too much for the Philistine, who took the next train to London.

— Syracuse [N.Y.] Standard, May 21, 1884

| Literature

More Madan

Excerpts from the notebooks of English belletrist Geoffrey Madan (1895-1947):

[Eton] masters asleep during Essay in various abandoned attitudes. Hornby like a frozen mammoth in a cave; Stone drooping; Vaughan like a monarch taking his rest; Churchill like a fowl on a perch with a film over his eyes.

A.E. Housman’s epitaph: the only member of the middle classes who never called himself a gentleman.

“It is the cause”: theory that Othello closes and lays down a Bible.

Gladstone’s Virgil quotations, like plovers’ nests: impossible to see till you’ve been shown.

“Love gratified is love satisfied, and love satisfied is indifference begun.” — Richardson

“It matters not at all in what way I lay this poker on the floor. But if Bonaparte should say it must be placed in this direction, we must instantly insist upon its being laid in some other one.” — Nelson

“Conservative: a man with an inborn conviction that he is right, without being able to prove it.” — Revd. T. James, 1844

“Lord Normanby, in recklessly opening the Irish gaols, has exchanged the customary attributes of Mercy and Justice: he has made Mercy blind, and Justice weeping.” — Lord Wellesley

| Literature · Quotations · Society

Constrained Writing

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In Paul Griffiths’ 2008 novel let me tell you, Ophelia tells her story using only the 481-word vocabulary given to her in Hamlet:

So: now I come to speak. At last. I will tell you all I know. I was deceived to think I could not do this. I have the powers; I take them here. I have the right. I have the means. My words may be poor, but they will have to do.

What words do I have? Where do they come from? How is it that I speak?

There will be a time for me to think of these things, but right now I have to tell you all that I may of me — of me from when I lay on my father’s knees and held up my hand, touching his face, which he had bended down over me. That look in his eyes. …

“Where other characters from the play speak, they are similarly confined to the words Shakespeare gave them. Gertrude, for example, can use only Ophelian words present also in her own language. The one exception is the prefatory statement, whose author has full access to his play vocabulary.” A longer excerpt is here.

| Language · Literature

Reflection

There was once a man who married a sweet little wife; but when he set out with her from her father’s house, he found that she had never been taught to walk. They had a long way to go, and there was nothing for him to do but to carry her; and as he carried her she grew heavier and heavier.

Then they came to a wide, deep river, and he found that she had never been taught to swim. So he told her to hold fast to his shoulder, and started to swim with her across the river. And as he swam she grew frightened, and dragged him down in her struggles. And the river was deep and wide, and the current ran fast; and once or twice she nearly had him under. But he fought his way through, and landed her safely on the other side; and behold, he found himself in a strange country, beyond all imagining delightful. And as he looked about him and gave thanks, he said to himself:

‘Perhaps if I hadn’t had to carry her over, I shouldn’t have kept up long enough to get here myself.’

— Edith Wharton, The Valley of Childish Things, and Other Emblems, 1896

| Literature · Society

In a Word

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paracosm
n. a detailed imaginary world, especially one created by a child

When English curate Patrick Brontë brought home a box of wooden soldiers in June 1829, his 12-year-old son Branwell shared them with his sisters. “This is the Duke of Wellington! It shall be mine!” cried 13-year-old Charlotte, and 11-year-old Emily and 9-year-old Anne took up heroes of their own. In the children’s shared imagination, the “Young Men” traveled to the west coast of Africa; settled there after a war with the indigenous Ashantee tribes; elected Arthur Wellesley, the Duke of Wellington, as their leader; and founded the Great Glass Town at the delta of the River Niger.

After 1831 Emily and Ann “seceded” to create a separate imaginary country, Gondal, and after 1834 Charlotte and Branwell developed Glass Town into yet another imaginary nation, Angria. In various combinations the four edited magazines, wrote histories, and composed stories, poems, and plays about these shared fantasy worlds, with alliances, feuds, and love affairs that play out across Africa and the Pacific.

These writings eventually filled 484 pages before maturing interests inevitably sent the Brontës in different directions, but this early work helped to shape the themes and styles of their later poems and novels.

| Language · Literature

Practice

While working on his chemistry doctorate in 1947, Isaac Asimov was dissolving catechol in water when it occurred to him that if it were any more soluble it would dissolve before it even touched the surface. Amused by the idea, he invented a fictional substance called thiotimoline, one of whose chemical bonds projects forward into the future and another backward into the past. This makes the chemical “endochronic”: It starts dissolving before it makes contact with water. His first thought was to make this into a science fiction story.

It occurred to me, however, that instead of writing an actual story based on the idea, I might write up a fake research paper on the subject and get a little practice in turgid writing. I did the job on June 8, 1947, even giving it the kind of long-winded title that research papers so often have — ‘The Endochronic Properties of Resublimated Thiotimoline’ — and added tables, graphs, and fake references to non-existent journals.

John W. Campbell of Astounding Science Fiction accepted the article and agreed to publish it under a pseudonym, lest it alienate Asimov’s examiners at Columbia. In the end he published it under Asimov’s own name, but there was no harm done — the examiners joked about it at his defense and it even brought him some fame among chemists. He went on to write three short stories about the substance — which has taken on a rich existence in the hands of other authors.

(Isaac Asimov, “The Endochronic Properties of Resublimated Thiotimoline,” Astounding Science Fiction 41:1 [1948], 120-125. Thanks, Peter.)

| Literature · Science & Math

Lessons Learned

Aphorisms of Lazarus Long, the 2,000-year-old protagonist of Robert A. Heinlein’s 1973 novel Time Enough for Love:

  • Always store beer in a dark place.
  • Small change can often be found under seat cushions.
  • If you don’t like yourself, you can’t like other people.
  • It’s amazing how much “mature wisdom” resembles being too tired.
  • Certainly the game is rigged. Don’t let that stop you; if you don’t bet, you can’t win.
  • Get a shot off fast. This upsets him long enough to let you make your second shot perfect.
  • The truth of a proposition has nothing to do with its credibility. And vice versa.
  • A brute kills for pleasure. A fool kills from hate.
  • It may be better to be a live jackal than a dead lion, but it is better still to be a live lion. And usually easier.
  • If it can’t be expressed in figures, it is not science; it is opinion.
  • Your enemy is never a villain in his own eyes. Keep this in mind; it may offer a way to make him your friend. If not, you can kill him without hate — and quickly.
  • Cheops Law: Nothing ever gets built on schedule or within budget.
  • No state has an inherent right to survive through conscript troops and, in the long run, no state ever has. Roman matrons used to say to their sons: “Come back with your shield, or on it.” Later on, this custom declined. So did Rome.
  • Never appeal to a man’s “better nature.” He may not have one. Invoking self-interest gives you more leverage.
  • By the data to date, there is only one animal in the Galaxy dangerous to man — man himself. So he must supply his own indispensable competition. He has no enemy to help him.
  • A zygote is a gamete’s way of producing more gametes. This may be the purpose of the universe.

And “A generation which ignores history has no past — and no future.”

| Literature · Quotations

“Mutual Problem”

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Said Jerome K. Jerome to Ford Madox Ford,
“There’s something, old boy, that I’ve always abhorred:
When people address me and call me ‘Jerome’,
Are they being standoffish, or too much at home?”
Said Ford, “I agree; it’s the same thing with me.”

— William Cole

| Language · Literature

Accessory

In 1812 Percy Shelley and his wife Harriet had committed themselves to a vegetarian diet. During their residence in Ireland that March, Harriet sent a note to a friend in Dublin:

Sunday morng.
17 Grafton Street

Mrs. Shelley’s comps. to Mrs. Nugent, and expects the pleasure of her company to dinner, 5 o’clock, as a murdered chicken has been prepared for her repast.

Isaac Bashevis Singer once said, “I am a vegetarian for health reasons — the health of the chicken.”

| Literature · Society