A garland of quotations XXXV
Culled from the finest exhaust fumes in literary history, and re-woven every Monday
All the Chinese bandits having chopped off all the foreign ears, we have time not only to consider the subject Atrocity, but the subject Bandits, and the subject Missionaries, and the subject Foreigners, and the subject Chinese. All politicians who are going to be elected have been elected; and all the artificial excitement in events which no one really regards as either very important or very interesting has been exhausted. All the historical events have happened.
•Laura Riding, Epilogue I (1935).
And does history repeat itself, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce? No, that’s too grand, too considered a process. History just burps, and we taste again that raw-onion sandwich it swallowed centuries ago.
•Julian Barnes, A History of the World in 10½ Chapters (1989).
A gloomy neo-Platonist of Christ’s College…believed that the cyclic periods of history were growing ever shorter and thus that at some non-unpredictable moment in the future the universe would go rigid and explode, just as the legendary bird called Ouida (so said Burlingame) was reputed to fly in ever diminishing circles, until at the end he disappeared into his own fundament.
•John Barth, The Sot-Weed Factor (1960).
With the world began a war which will end only with the world: the war of man against nature, of spirit against matter, of liberty against fatality. History is nothing other than the record of this interminable struggle.
•Jules Michelet, Introduction to Universal History (1830).
History consists, for the greater part, of the miseries brought upon the world by pride, ambition, avarice, revenge, lust, sedition, hypocrisy, ungoverned zeal, and all the train of disorderly appetites.
•Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790).
What is recollection but a revival of vexations, or history but a record of wars, treasons, and calamities? Death, which is considered as the greatest evil, happens to all. The greatest good, be it what it will, is the lot of but a part.
•Samuel Johnson, A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland (1775).
“I suppose history never lies, does it?” said Mr. Dick, with a gleam of hope.
“Oh dear, no, sir!” I replied, most decisively. I was ingenuous and young, and I thought so.
•Charles Dickens, David Copperfield (1850).
It will not do to push the simile too far; besides, unlike the good Dumas, one has a conscience. One does not play ducks and drakes with historical facts, or tamper with historical personages. And if Athos, Porthos & Co. are not historical by this time, I should like to know who are!
•George du Maurier, Trilby (1894).
Milan, the fifties, the state university. The event was a conference featuring a confrontation between analytic and Continental philosophers, Marxists and Catholics. The speaker was one of the last supporters of idealism (by then on Sunset Boulevard), and he was delivering a highly rhetorical eulogy of the Spirit (“That Spirit, which, by virtue of its Aufhebung unfolds itself as history in the world, etc., etc.”). At a certain point, one of the reserve idealists in the audience got to his feet and yelled, “Long live the Spirit!” ¶The speaker paled and, lips and voice atremble, said: “Sir, if you wish to make a game of things to which I have devoted my whole life.…” And the other, with a catch in his voice: “No, no, I was serious!” Upon which the speaker (and at this point the whole thing began to look more like something out of a Marx Brothers movie) threw open his arms and exclaimed: “If that’s the case, come into my arms!” The pair met and embraced on the podium, while most of the people in the lecture hall gave themselves over to gusts of scornful cackling.
•Umberto Eco, “That’s Texas, Baby!” L’Espresso (2005).
After all, history isn’t a bird, to be scared off by shouting.
•Abram Efros, ”Aladdin’s Lamp” (1918).
Reference: Eco: Turning Back the Clock: Hot Wars and Media Populism (Harcourt, 2007); Efros: from Semyon An-Sky, The Jewish Artistic Heritage (RA, 1994); some of this material is copyrighted, and I plead only fair use.