In Lieu of an Introduction

. . . he recommended to all those who might be impressed with a sense of their importance to bury a copy or copies of each work properly secured from damp, &c. at a depth of seven or eight feet below the surface of the earth; and on their death-beds to communicate the knowledge of this fact to some confidential friends, who in their turn were to send down the tradition to some discreet persons of the next generation; and thus . . . the knowledge that here and there the truth lay buried . . . and was to rise again in some distant age . . . —this knowledge at least was to be whispered down from generation to generation.

—Thomas De Quincey, “Walking Stewart”

Livius Andronicus: An Odyssey is peregrinatory, and an Iliad, no doubt, genocidal, but an Idyssey is gestational as regards idiosyncrasy--or oddness.

Dr Johnson: Nothing odd will do long. Tristram Shandy did not last.

Mrs Thatcher: There is no such thing as a womb with a view.

Ben Jonson: By G—, ’tis good, and if you like’t, you may!

—Petrus Tornarius, Imaginary Conversations

Bad Day

Fyodor Dostoevsky, manuscript of The Brothers Karamazov (1880)

"Bad day. Rainy day. Permeated by the suspicion that I am worn out and depleted by—oh, what the hell's the use?"—George Kennan, diary entry, U.S. Embassy, Moscow, September 26, 1934

Table d'hôte

Chaïm Soutine, The Table (ca. 1923), oil on canvas. Musée de l'Orangerie, Paris

Every angel is terrible.

—Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies, No. 1

200 billion vertebrates

Die every year to feed us;

I wonder if they think their lives

Are worth our human fuss.

Before they die, they suffer,

Confined to cruel spaces;

The last thing they live to see

Are killers’ human faces.

Okay, I’m writing doggerel—

It's lingua franca time!

Yahweh's sunk in holy dotage,

Something to do is whine.

At this late stage in mythic rage,

The desperate angels drivel.

Monday, April 21, 2025