The Whole Earth Slanted

 

The sun struck, on steel, on bronze, on stone, on glass, on the grey water far beneath them, on the turret tops and the flashing windshields of crawling cars, on the incredible highways, stretching and snarling and turning for mile upon mile, on the houses, square and high, low and gabled, and on their howling antennae, on the sparse, weak trees, and on those towers, in the distance, of the city of New York.   

The plane titled, dropped and rose, and the whole earth slanted, now leaning against the windows of the plane, now dropping out of sight.  The sky was a hot, blank blue, and the static light invested in everything with its own lack of motion.  Only things could be seen from here, the work of people’s hands: but people did not exist.  The plane rose up, up, as though loath to descend from this high tranquillity; titled, and Yves looked down, hoping to see the Statue of Liberty, though he had been warned that it could not be seen from here; then the plane began, like a stone, to drop, the water rushed up at them, the motors groaned, the wings trembled, resisting the awful, downward pull.   

Then, when the water was at their feet, the white strip of the landing flashed into place beneath them.  The wheels struck the ground with a brief and heavy thud, and wires and light and towers went screaming by.  The hostess’ voice came over the speaker, congratulating them on their journey, and hoping to see them again soon.  The hostess was very pretty. He had intermittently flirted with her all night, delighted to discover how easy this was.  He was drunk and terribly weary, and filled with an excitement which was close to panic; in fact, he had burned his way to the outer edge of drunkenness and weariness, into a diamond-hard sobriety.  With the voice of the hostess, the people of this planet sprang out of the ground, pushing trucks and waving arms and crossing roads and vanishing into, or erupting out of buildings.  The voice of the hostess asked the passengers please to remain seated until the aircraft had come to a complete halt. 

Quotation from: Another Country by James Baldwin, Penguin Books 2001 

On the Shoulders of Giants

A 1907 article in the Nation ... 'Taking up what had become a topical theme, the article looked back to the 1870s, running off a list of the 'giants of the day' in thought, literature and science [25 names]

... and then it asked who from the present could be ranked alongside them. This trope of pygmies on the shoulders of giants is a constant discussion of this topic, though not, of course, of this topic alone.

 The article went onto consider the possibility that this apparent decline actually reflected the changed conditions of intellectual work.

Quotation from: Absent Minds by Stefan Collini. p.103

A Fabulous Place

It is a fabulous place: when the tide is in, a wave-churned basin, creamy with foam, whipped by the combers that roll in from the whistling buoy on the reef. But when the tide goes out the little water world becomes quiet and lovely. The sea is very clear and the bottom becomes fantastic with hurrying, fighting, feeding, breeding animals.

Crabs rush from frond to frond of the waving algae. Starfish squat over mussels and limpets, attach their million little suckers and then slowly lift with incredible power until the prey is broken form the rock. And then the starfish stomach comes out and envelops its food. Orange and speckled and fluted nudibranchs slide gracefully over the rocks, their skirts waving like the dresses of Spanish dancers. And black eels poke their heads out of crevices and wait for prey.

The snapping shrimps with their trigger claws pop loudly. The lovely, coloured world is glassed over. Hermit crabs like frantic children scamper on the bottom sand. And now one, finding an empty snail shell he likes better than his own, creeps out, exposing his soft body to the enemy for a moment, and then pops into the new shell. A wave breaks over the barrier, and churns the glassy water for a moment and mixes bubbles into the pool, and then it clears and is tranquil and lovely and murderous again. Here a crab tears a leg from his brother.

The anemones expand like soft and brilliant flowers, inviting any tired and perplexed animal to lie for a moment in their arms, and when some small crab or little tide-pool Johnnies accepts the green and purple invitation, the petals whip in, the stinging cells shoot tiny narcotic needles into the prey and it grows weak and perhaps sleepy while the searing caustic digestive acids melt its body down.

Quotation: Cannery Row John Steinbeck 1945

The Tyranny of the Library

Rooms, corridors, bookcases, shelves, filing cards and computerized catalogues assume that the subjects on which our thoughts dwell are actual entities, and through this assumption a certain book may be lent a particular tone and value. Filed under Fiction Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels is a humorous novel of adventure; under Sociology, a satirical study of England in the eighteenth century; under Children’s Literature, an entertaining fable about dwarfs and giants and talking horses; under Fantasy a precursor of science fiction; under Travel, an imaginary voyage; under Classics, a part of the Western literary canon. Categories are exclusive; reading is not—or should not be. Whatever classifications have been chosen, every library tyrannizes the act of reading, and forces the reader—the curious reader, the alert reader—to rescue the books from the category to which it has been condemned.

Quotation: A History of Reading by Alberto Manguel, London, Penguin, 2014

No Need to Grudge Taking a Little Trouble

The usual demand in such a work is that it shall be written in a "popular" style and in "popular" language--in other words, that all technical terms shall be avoided in descriptions. Books of this class are in the majority of cases unsatisfactory, usually lacking that scientific accuracy which is the first requirement of such works, but chiefly being defective in conciseness of description and exactness of phraseology. They fail to satisfy those who want scientific descriptions, and are not sufficiently explicit for those who have little knowledge of the subjects treated of.

A large technical vocabulary has grown up round the literature of ferns, which it is impossible to ignore altogether. No one can claim to a knowledge of these plants without knowing something also of this terminology; for it is impossible to examine ferns without finding characters and points of structure which our ordinary vocabulary fails to describe aptly. There is hardly any pursuit or study which has not a terminology of its own, and the student of ferns will find that there is such a terminology in his branch, and that it has to be mastered before he can make satisfactory progress in the identification of species.

The author has therefore deemed it advisable to write the descriptive part of the work in technical language, avoiding, however, all unnecessary multiplication of terms; and at the same time--by a clear introductory chapter on the structure of ferns and their allies, and by the aid of a complete glossary--to enable the reader to understand every term used. There is no serious difficulty in mastering these terms, as a little patient application will prove, and there is no satisfactory way of avoiding their use without sacrificing the scientific value of the descriptions.

If any are afraid to enter upon the study of our ferns because there are some apparently hard names to be got over, we would advise such persons to turn their attention to something else. If the subject is worth studying, no one need grudge taking a little trouble about it.

Quotation: Thomson, George Malcolm. The Ferns and Fern Allies of New Zealand: with instructions for their collection and hints on their cultivation. Dunedin: Wise & Co, 1882. p.vi

Charles Conversation

Charles conversation was as flat as a street pavement, on which everybody’s ideas trudged past, in their workaday dress, provoking no emotion, no laughter, no dreams.

…

She was getting generally more irritated with him.  As he grew older he became grosser in his ways.  He used to whittle down the corks of the empty bottles during dessert.  He sucked his teeth after eating.  When he drank soup he made a gulping noise at every mouthful. And now that he had begun to put on weight, his puffy cheeks seemed to be pushing his eyes, which had always been small, right up into his temples.

Quotation from: Madame Bovary by Gustav Flaubert

Stopping Time

I too read in bed. In the long succession of beds in which I spent the nights of my childhood, in strange hotel rooms where the lights of passing cars swept eerily across the ceiling, in houses whose smells and sounds were unfamiliar to me, in summer cottages sticky with sea spray or where the mountain air was so dry that a steaming basin of eucalyptus water was placed by my side to help me breathe, the combination of bed and book granted me a sort of home which I knew I could go back to, night after night, under whichever skies. 

No one would call out and ask me to do this or that; my body needed nothing, immobile under the sheets. What took place, took place in the book, and I was the story’s teller. Life happened because I turned the pages. I don’t think I can remember a greater comprehensive joy than that of coming to the few last pages and setting the book down, so that the end would not take place until at least tomorrow, and sinking back into my pillow with the sense of having actually stopped time.

Quotation from: A History of Reading by Aberto Manguel, London, Penguin, 2014.