A garland of quotations C
Culled from the finest C-shanties in literary history, and re-woven every Wednesday
When water stinks I break the dam,
In love I break it.
•Graves, Seven Days in New Crete (1949).
That there was a deluge once seems not to me so great a miracle as that there is not one always.
•Browne, Religio Medici (1643).
Said a witty misanthrope to me à propos of the iniquities of men, “It is only the uselessness of the first Deluge that preserves us from being visited by a second.”
•Chamfort, Maxims, Thoughts, Characters and Anecdotes (1796).
Dey mout er bin two deloojes, en den agin dey moutent.
•Joel Chandler Harris, Uncle Remus (1880).
“Après moi le déluge” is the unavowed motto of every person; if we admit that others survive us, it is in the hope that they will be punished for it.
•Cioran, The Trouble with Being Born (1973).
If it rains fire
you have to be as the water;
if it is a deluge of water
you have to be as the wind;
if it is the Great Flood,
you have to be as the sky;
and if it is the Very Last Flood of all the worlds,
you have to give up self
and become the Lord.
•Allama Prabhu, vacana 556 (C12).
My God, I read this day,
That planted Paradise was not so firm,
As was and is thy floting Ark; whose stay
And anchor thou art onely, to confirm
And strengthen it in ev’ry age,
When waves do rise, and tempests rage.
•Herbert, The Temple (1633).
In the last days of Atlantis, most news was bad news. However, once in awhile there was good news, as when Noah finished building his ark.
•Walter F. Laredo, Atlantis, Inspiration for Greatness (2006).
Noah retrieves the dove again,
Which bears him in its bill
A twig of olive to explain
That, if God sends them no more rain,
The world may prosper still.
•Graves, “After the Flood” (1964).
They say when Noah once regained the sod
He nursed a vine up his divining rod;
We know when God saved him, he saved the grape:
Let us be friends then with the Friends of God.
•Clarence K. Streit, Hafiz in Quatrains (1928).
One is also tempted to explain the various deluge myths as a reversal, of a sort familiar to psychoanalysis, of the true state of affairs. The first and foremost danger encountered by organisms which were all originally water-inhabiting was not that of inundation but of desiccation. The raising of Mount Ararat out of the waters of the flood would thus be not only a deliverance, as told in the Bible, but at the same time the original catastrophe which may have only later on been recast from the standpoint of land-dwellers
•Sàndor Ferenczi, Thalassa: A Theory of Genitality (1924).
MERRY CHRISTMAS, EVERYONE! WON’T BE WATER BUT FIRE NEXT TIME!
Sources: Chamfort: trans. William G. Hutchison, The Cynic’s Breviary (Elkin Mathews, 1902); Cioran: trans. Richard Howard (Arcade, 2012); Allama Prabhu: in A. K. Ramanujan, Speaking of Siva (Penguin, 1973); Graves: Man Does, Woman Is (Doubleday, 1964); Ferenczi: trans. H. A. Bunker (Psychoanalytic Qtly., 1938); some of this material is copyrighted, and I plead only fair use.
