prose 24
The operative virtue of a key, the attractive virtue of a hook
In writing down my thought, it sometimes escapes me; but this makes me remember my weakness, that I constantly forget. This is as instructive to me as my forgotten thought; for I strive only to know my nothingness
Must we kill to prevent there being any wickedness? This is to make both parties wicked instead of one.
( Three from over 900 entries in 'Pensées' by Blaise Pascal (1623 -1662), better known as a religious philosopher and incredibly precocious mathematician. These thoughts first appeared in 1670 in what I now know is called a 'rifacimento' of the original MS; an authentic version did not come until 1844. They mostly reflect his deep religious scepticism. His mathematical work on conic sections is way beyond me, though he propounded it when only 16. But I can understand his climbing a tall Parisian tower to prove that the barometric pressure at the top was less than at ground level)
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Titles Through the vocabulary of Adam there is not such an animal as a count or a duke; neither can we connect any certain ideas with the words. Whether they mean strength or weakness: wisdom or folly; a child or a man; the rider of a horse; is all equivocal. What respect then can be paid to that which describes nothing? Imagination has given figure and character to centaurs and satyrs, down to all the fairy tribe; but titles baffle even the powers of fancy, and are a chimerical nondescript.
(An anonymous contribution to 'The Manual of Laconics' by John Taylor, 1838. Such books of potted wisdom began with Rev Charles Colton's 'Lacon: or Many things in Few Words; addressed to Those who Think', published in 1820. This idea that one could get the meat of important but long books from short carefully selected extracts led to further editions and many imitators like my battered Manual. Colton's eventful, unchurchmanlike, life involved gambling, setting up as a wine merchant, escaping creditors by fleeing to America, and ended when he shot himself in 1832 rather than face a painful operation)
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As for the making of knots, or figures, with divers coloured earths. that they may be under the windows of the house on that side on which the garden stands, they be but toys; you may see as good sights many times on tarts.
(Francis Bacon shows a pet hate in an otherwise very serious article on Gardens in his 'The Essays of Counsel, Civil and Moral', 1626. He is extremely particular in every detail; obviously this was a subject close to his heart. He lists the flowers which looked their best for each month of the year; those most fragrant; how the total number of acres should be divided; how surrounded with 'stately arched hedge.. some ten feet high and six feet broad'. Several pages end with 'But it is nothing for great princes... to add statues and such things for state and magnificence, which add nothing to the true pleasure of a garden')
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Masters and Ladies are usually quarrelling with the Servants for not shutting the Doors after them: But neither Masters nor Ladies consider that those Doors must be open before they can be shut, and that the Labour is double to open and shut the Doors; therefore the best and shortest, and easiest Way is to do neither. But if you are so often teased to shut the Door, that you cannot easily forget it, then give the Door such a Clap as you go out, as will shake the whole Room, and make everything rattle in it, to put your Master and Lady in Mind that you observe their Directions.
We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another.
(The pleasure of raking through the collected works of an author, well-known for some particular pieces, resides in discovering lesser gems from the same mind. The almost goon-like door-shutting paragraph above comes from Jonathan Swift's tongue-in-cheek 'Directions to Servants', in which he gives them apparently logical reasons for behaving atrociously. The final single line quotation is number 1 from forty nine 'Thoughts on Various Subjects', a collection of jottings he made when walking, and and which he and Pope agreed to exchange, both considering them 'as well worth preserving as some of their more deliberate reflexions'.)