Christmas Preparations 1881 Style

Nearly all of the Dunedin shops had on Friday night assumed their gala dress in preparation for the Christmas festivities, and, as a natural consequence, the streets were crowded until a tolerably late hour. Everyone appeared to have turned out for a preliminary glance at what would, on the morrow, be a scene of inextricable bustle and confusion.

The shops, of course, which offered the most brilliant display were the butchers, greengrocers, and grocers, in short, all those whose particular mission it is to minister to the more substantial needs of the festive season. All appeared, however, fully alive to the fact that if Christmas had not actually arrived it was close at hand, and might drop in unexpectedly at any moment, and all had accordingly bestirred themselves in some slight measure to do homage to the occasion. Among the butchers shops, all of which were more or less tastefully decorated, we must especially single out for mention those of Messrs Shand and Worth. The piece de resistance of the whole was the carcase of an enormous prize beast,… which weighed no less than 13cwt [660kgs]. The extended length of this leviathan almost occupied the space from floor to ceiling. …

Mr Vezey had devoted his energies most towards elaboration of detail, and… his windows were filled with carcases hanging in close rows, and tastefully decorated for the sacrifice whilst beneath this, on one side figures the head of a magnificent beast, rendered harmless for ill by the judicious impalement of an orange on either horn. Various other decorations of flowers and fruit were lavished upon the headpiece of this favoured animal, and the same profusion was observable in many other instances.

The grocery establishments were equally well to the fore, having as a rule crowded, one side of their windows with substantial goods— hams, sides of bacon, and devoted the other side to the display of lighter articles. … Messrs Bardsley and Co. also went out of their way to do honour to the season [and] enlivened their windows with several mechanical figures, which were the cause of wonder and delight to juvenile passers-by and the arrangement of fancy soaps, and groceries was highly artistic!

… The greengrocers also showed themselves unwilling to be left behind in the race, and in most instances, besides their ordinary commodities, laid in bountiful supplies of poultry of all sorts and sizes.

Quotation from: Otago Witness, 31 December 1881, p12.

Images of southern rata, Metrosideros umbellata flowering in Knox Church gardens, George Street, Dunedin, 19 December 2012.

Merry Christmas!

Perfect Speech

The perfect book or speech obeys in every respect the pure and merciless laws of what has been called logographic necessity.

The perfect speech contains nothing slipshod; it in there are no loose threads; it contains no word that has been picked at random; it is not marred by errors due to faulty memory or to any other kind of carelessness; strong passions and a powerful and fertile imagination are guided with ease by a reason which knows how to use the unexpected gift, which knows how to persuade and which knows how to forbid; it allows of no adornment which is not imposed by the gravity and aloofness of the subject matter; the perfect writer rejects with disdain and with some impatience the demand of vulgar rhetoric that expressions must be varied since change is pleasant.

Quotation: Thoughts on Machiavelli by Leo Strauss. Free Press,1958.

Inevitable

No, there was nothing more to be done. They had tried not to go over the precipice, but perhaps the fall was inevitable. And it comforted her to think that the future was certainly inevitable: cause and effect would go jangling forward to some good doubtless, but to none that she could imagine. At such moments the soul retires within, to float upon the bosom of a deeper stream, and has communion with the dead, and sees the world’s glory not diminished, but different in kind to what she supposed. She alters her focus until trivial things are blurred.

Quotation from: Howard's End by E.M. Forster.

The Guidance of Theories

To go on investigating without the guidance of theories, is like attempting to walk in a thick mist without a track and without a compass. We should get somewhere under these circumstances, but chance alone would determine whether we should reach a stony desert of unintelligible facts or a system of roads leading in some useful direction; and in most cases chance would decide against us.

August Weismann, "Significance of Sexual Production..." Essays upon Heredity, vol I, 1886, p305.

Duck Park

a Pair of ducks turned up one day and parked themselves at the bottom of the tree just outside my office. They clearly wanted a bit of peace and quiet.

It was not a particularly good spot for them -- too much foot traffic. The next day ducks tried again before moving up into the flower beds. But after another day, they moved on.

Mother

I had to go and visit Mother in the nursing home.

The home was decorated with the intention of making everything seem normal. Her room was much like any hospital room, with plastic ferns and fireproof drapes. The chairs, resembling wrought-iron garden furniture, were also synthetic and light. I had trouble with the ferns. I disliked having to touch them to see if they were real. It was a reflection on my relation to reality that I couldn’t tell at a glance. But then Mother didn’t know me, either, which was a more complex matter than the ferns.

Quotation from: Saul Bellow Him With His Foot in His Mouth Penguin 2011 [originally published 1984]

Passion is...

Unless love is passion it’s not love, but something else; and passion thrives not on satisfaction, but on impediment.

Passion doesn’t count the cost. Pascal said that the heart has its reasons that reason takes no account of. If he meant what I think, he meant that when passion seizes the heart it invents reasons that seem not only plausible but conclusive to prove that the world is well lost for love. It convinces you that honour is well sacrificed and that shame is a cheap price to pay. Passion is destructive. It destroyed Anthony and Cleopatra, Tristan and Isolde, Parnell and Kitty O’Shea. And if it doesn’t destroy it dies.

…self-confidence is a passion so overwhelming that beside it even lust and hunger are trifling. It whirls its victim to destruction in the highest affirmation of his personality. The object doesn’t matter; it may be worth while or it may be worthless. No wine is so intoxicating, no love so shattering, no vice so compelling.

Quotation: The Razor’s Edge by W. Somerset Maugham

Leaf Fall with Submission to Winter

On sunny days I can hear leaves fall on the cars, and onto the pavements, from inside my office.

They are big leaves from a row of chestnut trees which flank the car-park and the banks of the Leith. They are not horse chestnuts, but some variety of American chestnuts, which they call buckeyes.

All it needed was a couple of days rain

To leave the trees almost leafless. Winter has come.

Ink People

The characters in fiction are just wiggles of ink on paper (or chemical stains on celluloid). They are ink people. They live in ink houses inside ink towns. They work at ink jobs. They have inky problems. They sweat ink and cry ink, and when they are cut they bleed ink. And yet ink people press effortlessly through the porous membrane separating their inky world from ours. They move through our flesh-and-blood world and wield real power in it. As we have seen, this is spectacularly true of sacred fictions. The ink people of scripture have a real presence in our world. They shape our behaviours and our customs, and in so doing, they transform societies and histories.

Quotation: The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make us Human. By Jonathan Gottschall. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012

Use Your Meat Computer

I counted the food I had left. Four weeks’ worth, three weeks, two. I marked off the time with my eyebrow pencil. If I ate less, I could make it last longer. But if Amanda didn’t come soon, I’d be dead. I couldn’t really imagine it.

Glenn used to say the reason you can’t really imagine yourself being dead was that as soon as you say, “I’ll be dead,” you’ve said the word I, and so you’re still alive inside the sentence. And that’s how people got the idea of the immortality of the soul — it was a consequence of grammar. And so was God, because as soon as there’s a past tense, there has to be a past before the past, and you keep going back in time until you get to I don’t know, and that’s what God is. It’s what you don’t know — the dark, the hidden, the underside of the visible, and all because we have grammar, and grammar would be impossible without the FoxP2 gene; so God is a brain mutation, and that gene is the same one birds need for singing. So music is built in, Glenn said: it’s knitted into us. It would be very hard to amputate it because it’s an essential part of us, like water.

I said, in that case is God knitted in as well? And he said maybe so, but it hadn’t done us any good.

His explanation of God was a lot different from the Gardeners’ explanation. He said “God is a Spirit” was meaningless because you couldn’t measure a Spirit. Also he’d say Use your meat computer when he meant Use your mind. I found that idea repulsive: I hated the idea of my head being full of meat.

Quotation from: Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood, 2009. Virago.

Caustic

caustic:(in optics) The curve or surface formed by the reflection of parallel rays of light in a large-aperture concave mirror. The apex of the caustic lies at the principal focus of the mirror. Such a curve can sometimes be seen on the surface of the liquid in a cup as a result of reflection by the curved walls of the cup. A similar curve is formed by a convex lens with spherical surfaces refracting parallel rays of light.

Quotation from: A Dictionary of Physics. Ed. John Daintith. Oxford University Press, 2009. Oxford Reference Online. Oxford University Press.

The Truth is Sometimes Told

An historian must assume that truth is sometimes told. He must, assuming that, argue from probabilities, and, keeping in view the social forces operating in his own time, ask himself what was likely to have occurred in the past. This is what we see done. There are histories of England, of Australia, of the Jews. Now the books of the Bible that relate history are few. And unless we are to believe that all the events recorded as historical are absolutely true, the history books do not seem to me of a very high order. There is a want of philosophical grasp and outlook. In many cases they are dry chronicles of kings and war, and of the efforts of priests and prophets. They lack all the most interesting parts of history the record of the rise and development of the morals, the intelligence, the industry, and the wealth of the nation. But, as it happens, it is only of late that it has been recognised that true history is not wholly concerned about kings and battles.

…

The Bible was not written all at once. With it, as with other things, we behold a growth. It partakes, therefore, of the nature of other works. We do not find anything has happened like the fabled Minerva. Wisdom does not come all at once. The history of the Bible shows that it was only bit by bit compiled, and its history is the history of everything around us.

Quotation from: Address delivered by Robert Stout at the opening of the 1880 session of the Freethought Association.[Dunedin, New Zealand]

Otago Daily Times 21 February 1880

Mrs Bates sat in her rocking-chair

While, for an hour or more, the children played subduedly, intent, fertile of invention, united in fear of their mother’s wrath and in dread of their father’s homecoming. Mrs Bates sat in her rocking-chair making a ‘singlet’ of thick, cream coloured flannel, which gave a dull wounded sound as she tore off the grey edge. She worked at her sewing with energy, listening to the children, and her anger wearied itself, lay down to rest, opening its eyes from time to time and steadily watching, its ears raised to listen. Sometimes, even her anger quailed and shrank, and the mother suspended her sewing, tracing the footsteps that thudded along the sleepers outside; she would life her head sharply to bid the children “hush,” but she recovered herself in time, and the footsteps went past the gate, and the children were not flung out of their play-world.

...

Then she lighted a candle and went into the tiny room. The air was cold and damp, but she could not make a fire, there was no fireplace. She set down the candle and looked round. The candle-light glittered on the lustre-glasses, on the two vases that held some of the pink chrysanthemums in the room. Elizabeth stood looking at the flowers. She turned away, and calculated whether there would be room to lay him on the floor, between the couch and the chiffonier. She pushed the chairs aside. There would be room to lay him down and to step around him. Then she fetched an old red table-cloth, and another old cloth, spreading them down to save her bit of carpet. She shivered on leaving the parlour; so, from the dresser drawer she took a clean shirt and put it at the fire to air. All the time her mother-in-law was rocking herself in the chair and moaning.

Quotation from: The Odour of Chrysanthemums by D.H. Lawrence. Penguin. 2011

Useless Words

One great drawback to the book is the immense number of new and generally useless words contained in it. Technical words are more or less useful, according to their more or less universal acceptance; but almost every writer now seems to revel in inventing an entirely new set for his own use.

Many scientific men have been abused for a want of classical knowledge, and for introducing barbarous names; but if an intimate knowledge of classics induces the possessor to run riot in terminology, and gives him a fancied right to alter, amend, and invent, with indiscriminate license, then we say, better barbarous words than barbarous confusion.

Quotation from: The History of Creation [Review of] The History of Creation by Ernst Haeckel, Professor in the University of Jena. English Translation (H.S. King and Co., London 1875], by Captain F.W. Hutton. New Zealand Magazine, volume 1, no 3, July 1876, pp 251-263.

Chips and Shavings

The Problem of Poverty is so vast, complex, and many-sided, that its practical solution must be the work of generations for we have found its causation to be co-extensive with that of civilization itself. In the lathe of destiny, the vast amorphous mass of humanity has been slowly and painfully fashioned into a form that even now but dimly foreshadows some Divine ideal. But what of the chips and the shavings, the heaped-up refuse of ages, the myriads of broken hearts and ruined lives into whose very soul the graving iron has entered? Cast forth as refuse, they were condemned to live under those terrible laws which, while they developed their brethren into forms of strength and beauty, chained them down to an accelerating degeneration from age to age. It is manifestly worse than useless to approach such a problem as this as if it were merely one of the questions of the day. It is the mother of them all. From its teeming womb they sprang, and there, like the yelping brood of Sin, they kennel. In tracing its causes, with a view to palliation and cure, we must enter the domains of Physiology, Pscychology, Morality, Religion, and Politics.

In every age, man’s insight into his own nature is the measure of his power to interpret history. The historian can but read into the canvas of the past his own synthesis of the results of contemporary analysis. If, then, History is but Psychology writ large, what clue can she furnish to guide us through the labyrinth of complexities?

…

Luxury, like a canker, emasculates and enslaves the rich; want, ignorance, and vice, brutalize and make desparate the poor; till at length, what was denied to their prayers is conceded to their threats and the fear of revolution. The world, and especially England, whose traditions we have carried with us, has gone on complacently contemplating the increase of her trade and the progress of her upper-story civilisation, regardless of the pandemonium below.

Quotation: The Problem of Poverty in New Zealand, part II by Professor Duncan Macgregor. New Zealand Magazine. 1876.

Duncan Macgregor (1843-1906) was appointed to the inaugural chair of Moral and Mental Philosophy, Otago University in 1871. The potted biography at the New Zealand Dictionary of National Biography makes interesting reading.

Imbalance

Sometimes, gulls misjudge things. Here the post is just a tiny bit too small for the gull's feet.

Ooops, a wing stretched out for balance didn't seem to help and the only solution was to abandon the post.

Memento Ergo Sum

Cogito ergo sum. I close my eyes and go back sixteen years. Mother Marie-Therese writes it on the blackboard. Her arm is bare to the elbow: the sleeve of her habit is rolled up to avoid chalk dust. ‘I think therefore I am,’ she says. Where the Latin was just something to translate, the English jumps and my hand is up (unlike me, that) and when Mother sees me I ask wouldn’t it have been more correct for him to have said, Memento ergo sum?
‘Memento?’ With that winter frost smile of hers.
‘Yes, Mother. I remember, therefore I am.’
She sends her smile searching among the other girls in the class. But no one has a comment. As for Reverend Mother’s smile, it could mean, ‘A silly girl has misunderstood Descartes,’ or ‘See how we have engaged the attention of Mary Dunne.’
‘And why would you say that?’ she asks me.
‘Because’ (I am fifteen) ‘we are what we remember.’

…

I am, always have been, a fool who rushes in, a blurter-out of awkward truths, a speaker-up at parties who, the morning-after, filled with guilt, vows that never again, no matter what, but who, faced at the very next encounter with someone whose opinions strike me as unfair, rushes in again blurting out, breaking all vows.

Quotation: I Am Mary Dunne by Brian Moore. Penguin 2012 (1968)

Time Past

In the old days they would have given me a gold watch. I never understood why. Was it to remind the one who is being retired that his time is past? Instead of a watch I have been presented with a videotape of the ceremonies. My life here has ended. My day is done.

…

When we are young we assume that, in age, we will be able to look back and remember our lives. But just as we forget the details of a story a few months after hearing it, so do the years hang like old clothes, forgotten in the wardrobe of our minds. Did I wear that? What was I then?

Quotation: No Other Life by Brian Moore. Penguin 2011 (1993).

A Painful New Affliction

… I have been in a tizzy since reading his accusations. I wasn’t exactly in great shape when his letter arrived. Like many elderly men, I have to swallow all sorts of pills. I take Inderal and quinidine for hypertension and cardiac disorders, and I am also, for a variety of psychological reasons, deeply distressed and for the moment with ego defenceless.

…

Edad con Sus Disgracias is the title Goya gave to the etching of an old man who struggles to rise from the chamber pot, his pants dropped to his ankles. ‘Together with most weak hams,’ as Hamlet wickedly says to Plonius, being merciless about old men. To the disorders aforementioned I must add teeth with cracked roots, periodontia requiring antibiotics that gave me the runs and resulted in a hemorrhoid the size of a walnut, plus creeping arthritis of the hands. Winter is gloomy and wet in British Columbia, and when I awoke one morning in this land of exile from which I face extradition, I discovered that something had gone wrong with the middle finger of the right hand. The hinge had stopped working and the finger was curled like a snail – a painful new affliction.

Actually this image, from the Museo del Prado, is entitled Comer mucho (To Eat a Lot) was part of an album of sketches made between 1824-1828. The catalogue entry reads 'A heavy man, perhaps a tonsured friar, is poised above a toilet, either rising or, more likely, about to descend to relieve himself after having consumed a large meal. In the shadowy background, a second man observes the operation with a smile or smirk.' It is close enough to the image described above to warrant inclusion here.

Quotation From: Saul Bellow Him With His Foot in His Mouth Penguin 2011 [originally published 1984].

Visceral Opinion

Shags seem to spend a lot of time drying off their wings. This one was right in the middle of the University campus on a hot sunny day. There were plenty of people about, above the deeply channelled Water of Leith.

Until something clearly spooked it. Like all critters it made its visceral opinion known before flying off.

The Past is History

What is the future, after all, but a structure of hopes and expectations? Its residence is in the mind; it has no reality.

Of course, you might reply that the past is likewise a fiction.

The past is history, and what is history but a story made of air that we tell ourselves? Nevertheless, there is something miraculous about the past that the future lacks. What is miraculous about the past is that we have succeeded – God knows how – in making thousands and millions of individual fictions, fictions created by individual human beings, lock well enough into one another to give us what looks like a common past, a shared story.

The future is different. We do not possess a shared story of a future. The creation of the past seems to exhaust our collective creative energies. Compared with our fiction of the past, our fiction of the future is a sketchy, bloodless affair, as visions of heaven tend to be. Of heaven and even of hell.

She is not sure, as she listens to her own voice, whether she believes any longer in what she is saying. Ideas like these must have had some grip on her when years ago she wrote them down, but after so many repetitions they have taken on a worn, unconvincing air. On the other hand, she no longer believes very strongly in belief. Things can be true, she now thinks, even if one does not believe in them, and conversely. Belief may be no more, in the end, than a source of energy, like a battery which one clips into an idea to make it run. As happens when one writes: believing whatever has to be believed in order to get the job done.

Quotation: Elizabeth Costello by J.M.Coetzee. Vintage. 2004

A Tentative Outlay of Wrinkles

Concerning Mrs Harold Piper at thirty-five, opinion was divided – women said she was still handsome; men said she was pretty no longer. And this was probably because the qualities in her beauty that women had feared and men had followed had vanished. Her eyes were still as large and as dark and sad, but the mystery had departed; their sadness was no longer eternal, only human, and she had developed a habit, when she was startled or annoyed, of twitching her brows together and blinking several times. Her mouth also had lost: the red had receded and the faint down-turning of its corners when she smiled, that had added to the sadness of the eyes and been vaguely mocking and beautiful, was quite gone. When she smiled now the corner of her lips turned up. Back in the days when she revelled in her own beauty Evylyn had enjoyed that smile of hers – she had accentuated it. When she stopped accentuating it, it faded out and the last of her mystery with it.

...

If Evylyn’s beauty had hesitated in her early thirties in came to an abrupt decision just afterward and completely left her. A tentative outlay of wrinkles on her face suddenly deepened and flesh collected rapidly on her legs and hips and arms. Her mannerism of drawing her brows together had become an expression – it was habitual when she was reading or speaking and even while she slept. She was forty-six.

F.Scott Fitzgerald The Cut-Glass Bowl Penguin 2011