A garland of quotations LXXVII
Culled from the finest self-reflectives in literary history, and re-woven every Wednesday
God asks the mirror: “I don’t have the emotional depth other people do, do you?”
He never wanted to, though he wanted to.
God stares into the full-length mirror in the foyer—
The border guard at the checkpoint stares back.
The guard won’t let him enter the mirror.
“I only have one feeling and you’re hurting my feeling!”
•Frederick Seidel, “Sunset at Swan Lake” (2016).
Satyr is a sort of Glass, wherein Beholders do generally discover every body’s Face but their Own.
•Swift, A Full and True Account of the Battel Fought Last Friday, Between the Antient and the Modern Books in St. James’s Library (1697)
Stalin…rewrote the official Short Biography of Stalin, putting in the sentence: “Stalin never allowed his work to be marred by the slightest hint of vanity, conceit or self-adulation.”
•Paul Johnson, Modern Times (1983).
Now Moses was a very humble man, more humble than anyone else on the face of the earth.
•The Fourth Book of Moses, Called Numbers 12:3.
I am reminded of this by having seen in a circulating library a copy of my Legends of Florence, in which some good careful soul had taken pains with a pencil to correct all the archaisms. Wherein he or she was like a certain Boston proof-reader, who in a book of mine changed the spelling of many citations from Chaucer, Spenser, and others into the purest, or impurest, Webster; he being under the impression that I was extremely ignorant of orthography. As for the writing in or injuring books, which always belong partly to posterity, it is a sin of vulgarity as well as morality, and indicates what people are more than they dream.
•Charles Godfrey Leland, Aradia; or, The Gospel of the Witches (1899).
Some readers, instead of trying to learn what the author wishes to report, either doze through a book or else seek to learn what the author may be trying to hide. The latter practice, however, is against the rules of the American Library Association, and should not be tolerated in any well-regulated classroom.
•Erasmus G. Addlepate, How to Read Two Books (1940).
I have now made a full avowal of all the plagiarisms of which I am aware myself; but I doubt not, many more may be found, of which I am at present totally unconscious.
•Matthew Lewis, “advertisement” to The Monk (1796).
Just as Narcissus, gazing at himself in the water (the ancients used this mobile element to symbolize the transitory, illusionary, material universe) lost his life trying to embrace a reflection, so man, gazing into the mirror of Nature and accepting as his real self the senseless clay he sees reflected, loses the opportunity afforded by physical life to unfold his immortal, invisible Self.
•Manly P. Hall, An Encyclopedic Outline of Masonic, Hermetic, Qabbalistic and Rosicrucian Symbolical Philosophy (1928).
I did not know
hunna ō
what sort of creature
hunna ō
I was;
hunna ō
as time went on
hunna ō
I gradually became aware.
•Shikata Shimukani, “Song of a Human Woman” (1940).
“But I’m not dead!” Tereza cried. “I can still feel!”
“So can we,” the corpses laughed.
•Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984).
References: Seidel: Widening Income Inequality (FSG, 2016); Moses: NIV; Shikata: in Donald L. Philippi, ed., Songs of Gods, Songs of Humans: The Epic Tradition of the Ainu (Princeton UP, 1979); some of this material is copyrighted, and I plead only fair use.