A garland of quotations XLVIII
Culled from the finest greybeard loons in literary history, and re-woven every Wednesday
We saw great numbers of albatrosses, a large brown and white bird of the goose kind, one of which Captain Salter shot, whose wings measured from their extremities fifteen feet.
•John Jewitt, The Adventures and Sufferings of John Jewitt, Only Survivor of the Crew of the Ship Boston (1815).
And a thousand thousand slimy things
Lived on; and so did I.
•Coleridge, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” (1798).
Job saw worse.
•Eco, Baudolino (2000).
Lucky Job, who was not obliged to annotate his lamentations!
•E.M. Cioran, The Trouble with Being Born (1973).
To recede like a snail flattening its enquiring horns
from nervous injuries, to fold like a moth’s envelope
into the seam of the branches, to hurl keys over a cliff once
and for all, so that any exchange is as far as Europe,
is persecution’s consequence. Howl, Timon, and turn
your scabbed back to the sun’s fire, into the salt that seals it
with its stinging. The true faith is Job’s poised curse
on a lost reputation…
•Derek Walcott, “To recede like a snail flattening its enquiring horns” (1997).
I am as poor as Job, my lord, but not so patient.
•Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part 2 (1597?).
Rabbi Yohanan wept when he came to this verse:
“Behold, He putteth no trust in His saints” (Job 15:15).
If He putteth no trust in His saints, in whom does he put trust?
One day he was going on a journey and saw a man gathering figs. He was leaving those that were ripe, and taking those that were green.
Rabbi Yohanan said to the man: Are not those better?
The man said to him:
I need them to take on a journey; these can keep, those cannot keep.
Rabbi Yohanan said:
That is why it is written: “Behold, He putteth no trust in His saints.”
•Hagigah, 5a.
I might well say, now indeed, that the latter end of Job was better than the beginning.
•Defoe, The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of York. Mariner (1719).
Many tell the tale of one Alexander, a man assigned to duty at sea. Alexander made a promise to God: if God would guide him to port, the he would be forever good—and never do anything to offend him. ¶Then, when he was actually in port and harbored in a secure place along the river bank, he declared: “Jesus, Jesus! I have indeed deluded You. Even now, I haven’t the slightest interest in ‘being good.’”
•Odo of Cheriton, Fabulae (ca. 1225).
…the story of the Italian, who, having been provoked by a person he met, put a poniard to his heart, and threatened to kill him if he would not blaspheme God; and the stranger doing so, the Italian killed him at once, that he might be damned, having no time to repent.
•J. W. Willis Bund, annotations to Thomas Browne’s Religio Medici, Hydriotaphia, and A Letter to a Friend (1869).
Sources: Cioran: trans. Richard Howard (Arcade, 2012); Walcott: The Bounty (FSG, 1997); Hagigah: Nahum N. Glatzer, ed., Hammer on the Rock: A Midrash Reader (Schocken, 1977); Odo: trans. John C. Jacobs, The Fables of Odo of Cheriton (Syracuse UP, 1985); some of this material is copyrighted, and I plead only fair use.