BOB'S BITS

[Stanley]

There are many degrees of Probable, some of which lie closer to the Truth than others, in the determining of which lies the chief exercise of our Judgment. Huygens.

In the 1990s (perhaps it was Bill Clinton’s contribution to space science), our National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) named some of its more glamorous space probes after foreigners. Take for instance the “Huygens” mission, launched in October 1997 on the “Cassini” orbiter. It took over seven years, but in January 2005, the USS Huygens separated from Cassini and landed on Titan, Saturn’s largest moon, an amazing feat of science but in another way blind luck for avoiding splashing down in one of Titan’s methane seas. I’ve done Cassini in another note (and in another context), so let’s look at Christiaan Huygens. He was born on April 14, 1629, in The Hague, in very comfortable circumstances and into a family with great connections including (for instance) Galileo and Descartes. By the age of 15 Christiaan was considered an adept by Descartes himself, and sent off to university (first Leiden, then Breda) to study law and mathematics. His early works included what was apparently the first book on probability theory, then an early actuarial table, but he was (in the 1660s) already fascinated by astronomy and the observational and mathematical challenges of planetary orbits. He moved easily in the international college of the intellect, hobnobbed with Newton and Leibniz, Locke and Boyle, and, oh yes, while he was at it discovered Titan using a telescope of his own design. But Huygens’ work also helped Isaac Newton to do his stuff on orbits, so NASA had two really good reasons to name its unmanned voyager after a Dutchman. Well done, NASA. ©

[Stanley]

I shall endeavour to discover and promulgate the decrees of custom, who has so long possessed, whether by right or usurpation, the sovereignty of words. Samuel Johnson.

We may be getting back to a situation where major feats of scholarship can only be undertaken with the support of wealthy patrons, private or corporate, but we should not necessarily despair. Some fine work was accomplished that way, even in the humanities, as witness Samuel Johnson’s pioneering Dictionary of the English Language, first published on April 15, 1755. Hoping for a single patron when he began the task in the mid 1740s, Johnson made do with a syndicate, including (inter alia) several London booksellers and the Earl of Chesterfield. Johnson thought Chesterfield’s contribution especially niggardly, and wrote milord a famous letter (the very model of ingratitude) and (in the Dictionary) defined “patron” as “a wretch who supports with insolence, and is paid with flattery.” There is a modern abridgment of the dictionary edited by Jack Lynch where you can sample Johnson’s erudition under scholarly guidance (and come up with some pithy quotes, for instance Johnson’s definition of “oats”). Or you can read the whole 40,000-word effort in a facsimile edition in the University Library. It wasn’t the first English dictionary, but it was the model, and Johnson’s stress on common usage meanings conveys to us today the reality that a language is a living thing, subject to all the transmutations and perils of history. When 100 years later members of the London Philological Society first set out to create what would become the miraculous Oxford English Dictionary, Johnson’s historicity was their model and their inspiration. It took them 80 years to finish their task. Johnson took seven. ©

[Stanley]

The rewards of being sane may not be very many, but knowing what's funny is one of them. Kingsley Amis.

Every so often (or oftener) we are reminded that a sunny disposition does not always accompany literary talent. Just ask Hilary “Hilly” Bardwell, Lady Kilmarnock, who for a time (1948-1965) was married to Kingsley Amis and then, in a strange twist of fate and forgiveness, sheltered the man in her London residence so he could drink and write undisturbed. Kingsley Amis was, fittingly, a mustard-dealer’s son, born in London on April 16, 1922, and grew up poor and smart enough to be admitted to Oxford on a scholarship. There he met and formed a lifelong friendship with poet Philip Larkin, another “old devil” of greater literary genius, the inspiration for Amis’s second novel, That Uncertain Feeling (1955). Indeed Amis wanted to be a poet, but Larkin’s greater genius may have decided him on the lesser (as he saw it) art of fiction. Lesser or not, it’s Amis’s first novel (dedicated to Larkin) that should be read by every academic, aspiring academic, or anyone who feels in need of prolonged laughter. Lucky Jim (1954) follows the short career of Jim Dixon, a young historian in a provincial British university. At a disadvantage because of his class background, Dixon seeks entry to the washed world of tenure, but ultimately finds that world too absurd for words and (as he leaves the campus, bound for a good job in London) collapses in laughter at the thought of it. Amis himself would ultimately collapse in drink, a habit he controlled for a long time but one that “in the end . . . robbed him of his wit and charm as well as his health.” Felled by a stroke, Amis left Hilly’s house to die in hospital in October 1995. ©

[Stanley]

How true it is that words are but the vague shadows of the volumes we mean. Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie.

One thinks of censorship as a governmental sort of skullduggery, but really it’s a more universal activity. Parents do quite a bit of it, schools and churches, even universities. My undergraduate university library (U of Pennsylvania) kept a small number of novels in a steel cage until (circa 1962) a clever student protest forced it open. We don’t usually think of publishers getting into the act, but of course they do, sometimes for crass commercial reasons (the outrageous doesn’t always sell well), sometimes because they feel obliged to guard our morals. This was the fate of one of the more famous American pioneers of social realism, Theodore Dreiser, whose first book, Sister Carrie, was first published, by Doubleday, in 1900. Dreiser was not an especially good stylist, but he had something to say, and Sister Carrie says it. By the late 1960s the novel was a staple of literature and history courses, a brave essay in realism, in which our heroine succumbs to sin and Chicago, leaves much unhappiness in her wake, but still manages to find material success. A far cry, you might say, from Jane Austen or Louisa Alcott. This was not the way fiction was supposed to turn out. What I didn’t know was that there were missing passages, edited out at Doubleday’s insistence (40,000 words worth), and even more interesting is that the publisher, having decided the book was bad for morals (but under contract to publish it) decided not to promote the thing and it died in the bookstores. Under this passive censorship, Carrie sold 456 copies and earned Dreiser $68 in royalties. That’s about $1800 in today’s cash, but (until he was rediscovered by Mencken) Dreiser remained so poor that in 1912 he couldn’t afford to buy passage on the SS Titanic. What has all this to do with April 17? Well, ironically enough, it was the University of Pennsylvania Press that on April 17, 1981, published the full version of Sister Carrie, with Doubleday’s purgations stitched back into the original text. They advertised it, too. ©

[Stanley]

Ordinary men live among marvels and feel no wonder. George Henry Lewes.

One has to concede that there are not too many men best known to history for their relationship to a woman, but one such was George Henry Lewes, born on April 18, 1817. In the eyes of 19th-century English society, he started badly by being illegitimate, the son of a poet. He then compounded his sin by entering into an “open marriage” with Agnes Jarvis, already the mother of four children and with whom George himself had three children. Then, worse, in 1854, Lewes left Agnes for yet another woman. With this one he found lasting happiness and, more to the point of this essay, lasting fame, for this particular woman was Marian Evans, soon to be better known as George Eliot, the author of seven novels including Middlemarch (1872). Affairs were not exactly uncommon in Victorian England, but it was unusual for the illicit relationship to be publicly and proudly flaunted. And Lewes himself was no slouch as a writer. George Eliot thought not, and who are we to say otherwise? Indeed, after Lewes’ early death in 1878, Eliot spent two years editing his final collection of essays, Life and Mind, and more than that it is said that she had picked her pen name as an homage to her companion. Lewes, despite a lack of training and family status, made a name for himself as a writer on science and philosophy and, besides George Eliot/Marian Evans, counted among his friends John Stuart Mill and Thomas Carlyle. After Lewes took up with Eliot, he wrote a classic biography of Goethe. But her gifts were superior, and it is she we think of well before we remember George Lewes. ©

[Stanley]

I wish to speak a word for nature. Thoreau.

What does a St. Louis boy do when he graduates from MIT with a graduate degree in Chemical Engineering? Well, it’s obvious. He opens up a camera shop in Philadelphia. Richard Pough (pronounced “poe”) made that choice, after a brief stint at a Texas oil refinery. His family were not surprised, for from Brooklyn, where he was born on April 19, 1904, to St. Louis, where he grew up, they had involved Richard in nature expeditions, whether collecting rocks and fossils or birding, and it was the latter the young engineer had in mind when he took flight from oil and landed in photography. Indeed, it was pictures he took of hawk carcasses—hundreds of them, hunted as vermin—that in 1934 persuaded a wealthy New Yorker to buy and establish the Hawk Mountain Preserve in the Pennsylvania Alleghenies. In 1936 that became Richard Pough’s life work. He was hired by the National Audubon Society to spearhead preservation efforts, and he started right in on feathers in women’s fashion and wild birds (California linnets) being sold by Macy’s as caged pets. These efforts did not always make him popular, but Pough learned also to enlist the support of donors—small and large—for preservation efforts. He helped set up the Land Preservation Fund and the Nature Conservancy, wrote several notable Audubon guides, began the national discussion of DDT with a famous article in The New Yorker (1945), and was instrumental in establishing preserves all over the country. He always said there was nothing in it for him, but there must have been something; Richard Pough didn’t rest from his labors until 2003. ©

[Stanley]

I have nowhere met, excepting in romances, with fonder husbands, more affectionate parents, more impassioned lovers, than in the lunatic asylum. Philippe Pinel.

The French Revolution created a great divide in the West that has yet to be bridged, and it certainly provoked the rise of the first American party system. There was something about it, the guillotine perhaps, that created discomfort among the stiff-necked, but the guillotine itself was a humanitarian reform, intended to lessen (or at least shorten) the pain of execution, an employment of science for human welfare. Less ambiguously, the insane also benefited from revolutionary reform. Philippe Pinel, born on April 20, 1745, and a physician like his father and uncle, brought to Paris his belief that insanity was an illness with discoverable causes and discoverable cures. A provincial himself, he made no headway against metropolitan prejudices on this or other subjects, but the Revolution gave him his chance. Thrown to the top of the heap by the disorder, Pinel became chief physician at the Bicêtre, basically a hospital for criminals, where he adopted humane methods of treatment, and most dramatically removed the chains from the arms and legs of the insane. The act itself is immortalized in a great Romantic era painting by Robert-Fleury, as insane women, their chains cast aside, are suddenly bathed in light as if risen from the dead. Pinel was then appointed chief physician at the Salpêtrière, where he remained in charge until the great reaction of the 1820s when he was dismissed as too liberal for the Bourbons. Later in the century, devoted republicans raised a statue in his honor. Thus Philippe Pinel still stands guard at the Salpêtrière, a monument to the humane treatment of the mentally ill. ©

[Stanley]

The human heart has hidden treasures, in secret kept, in silence sealed. Charlotte Bronte.

Once you notice some obscure person, they tend to jump out at you in other contexts. So here comes George Lewes again, whose birthday was mentioned only last week. But before ever he met Marian Evans (George Eliot), Lewes had befriended (and defended) Charlotte Brontë, another woman novelist who had published as a man (“Currer Bell”), whom he met on one of her occasional visits to London. Charlotte Brontë, born on April 21, 1816, made a different choice than Marian Evans, and in 1848 let it be known that she was, really and indeed, a woman who could (and did) write. So were her almost equally extraordinary sisters Emily (“Ellis Bell”) and Anne (“Acton Bell”). It is possible that in revealing her sex, Charlotte opened her first (and most famous) work, Jane Eyre (1847), to more negative criticism as “coarse” and “improper.” After all, should a woman write so passionately? This oddly and extraordinarily literate family lived in the isolated hill town of Haworth, Yorkshire, where their father was ‘perpetual curate’ and their house nestled even higher on the windswept fells. There the children (including an ill-fated brother, Branwell) wrote reams of stories, creating their own place and time on paper and for their own amusement before they ventured down the hill and into the world of published literature. Their early deaths snuffed out their talent, made them the stuff of Victorian legend and romance, and encouraged gothic readings of their masterpieces, Charlotte’s Jane Eyre and Emily’s Wuthering Heights. Since Charlotte’s bicentennial is upon us next year, we will doubtless hear more of the whole brood and of their brooding. ©

[Stanley]

I had to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason.

Time was when beginning courses in ethics (mine was ‘Philosophy 2’) started with Hobbes and ended with Bentham and Mill. Nowadays, they stress modern, even contemporary philosophers. I’m sure there is good reason for this, but they miss some profound stuff. My professor, Elizabeth Flower, thought the high point of her course was reached when we hit Immanuel Kant and his Critique of Pure Reason (1781). Callow undergraduate that I was, I found it impenetrable (and ours was a severely shortened version), but there is no denying Kant’s importance. He was born in far eastern Prussia on April 22, 1724, descended from a Scots immigrant grandfather (oddly enough, for Kant would provide a major counterweight to the empirical common sense of David Hume) and a harness-maker father, and raised in the Christian pietist tradition. Kant was not a great student, and began his academic life as a private tutor, but on the side he was thinking deeply and by mid-life was recognized as a leading philosopher and a leading scientist as well. Kant’s scientific side became obscured by his eminence in philosophy, but in the late 19th century was rediscovered by the likes of Lord Kelvin and Thomas Huxley, who were particularly struck by Kant’s speculations on the nature of the universe—as a collection of star systems including our own galaxy—and by his educated guess that the earth’s rotation was materially affected by the flow of oceanic tides. As for his ethical philosophy, I am assured that Kant still inhabits beginning courses, but now through his widespread influence on several modern schools of thought. ©

[Stanley]

God hath put no such difference between the Male and Female, as Men would make. Margaret Fell, Women's Speaking Justified, 1666.

Given the more cheerful note struck by nativities, we don’t do deaths here, but an exception must be made in the case of Margaret Fell Fox, for her birth and baptism dates are not known. Born in in 1614 in the Furness district of Lancashire, Margaret Askew married an upwardly-mobile barrister, Thomas Fell, and thus became Mistress Fell of Swarthmoor Hall. Soon the world turned upside down, birthing civil war, revolution, and any number of radical religious movements, one of them derisively called Quaker. Its leader, George Fox, came to Swarthmoor Hall and, according to Margaret, “opened us a book that we had never read in.” Margaret became a Quaker or, as she would have said, a member of the Society of Friends. The ruling Puritans didn’t like the Quakers much, hanging a few, imprisoning others, and fining many. When monarchy returned (in 1660, with Charles II) things weren’t much better. Thomas Fell died in 1658, leaving Margaret truly the Mistress of Swarthmoor, which became a center for Quaker troublemakers during the Restoration. Both George and Margaret (they would marry in 1669) spent a good deal of time in prison or petitioning to get each other out of prison, Margaret doing several separate stints in Lancaster Castle’s dungeon. As Quakers began to benefit from a degree of toleration, Margaret and George did not settle down but continued to lead a movement that—both despite and because of its precepts—could never be fully at peace with the world. George died in 1691, Margaret on April 23, 1702. She’s buried at the Friends’ Meeting House, Urswick, a couple of miles from Swarthmoor Hall.©

[Tripps]

I thought this might lead to the rhyme - 'I do not like thee Doctor Fell' - sadly it wasn't to be.

Of course I've looked it up on Google Doctor Fell

I think that is worth including, and is well up to the scholarly standard of this thread.

[Stanley]

I told Uncle Bob about my 'hobbies' and your correction.....

Life is so unlike theory. Anthony Trollope.

Novelists, even best-selling ones, often need day jobs, whether to keep body and soul together or to maintain themselves in proper style. In the 19th century, Hawthorne and Melville both spent time as customs collectors, while Mark Twain married an heiress (which turned out for him to be a most pleasant occupation and an education rolled into one). But one would be hard-pressed to say that any one of those three made history in their day jobs. Across the pond, Anthony Trollope also bounced around in a variety of jobs, and would make one of them famous. Trollope was born of good family (on April 24, 1815, 200 years ago today), very well educated (at Harrow, Winchester, and Oxford). He also had an immoderately successful mother. But fate laid him lower than he expected and, for a time, Anthony bounced around in a variety of jobs, finally settling down as a postal clerk. It was a job he did not do well in, at first, but as he began to write, and after he married, he settled down to it with a will, became quite happily engaged in moving mail about the country, and moved steadily up the ladder in Queen Victoria’s Royal Mail. He never attained great eminence, but enough seniority and salary to retire at 45 with a decent pension and (by then) quite decent prospects in fiction too. But what is memorable about his day job is that we may credit Anthony Trollope with the introduction into the English postal service of those wonderful red pillar-boxes. Next time you are in London, find a “VR” (“Victoria Regina”) pillar-box and give it a hug. It could be an Anthony Trollope original. ©

[Stanley]

I have done a terrible thing, I have postulated a particle that cannot be detected. Wolfgang Pauli, 1930.

One of my fonder memories is of a Lancaster colleague, a philosopher known for his wit and later to be elected University Orator, explaining why a number of famous intellectuals would never have gained academic tenure. His selection was wide-ranging but centered on Ludwig Wittgenstein, whose slim (75pp)Tractatus came along late and whose publications thereafter were generally confined to Remarks [sic] collected by others. My friend might also have mentioned Wolfgang Pauli, physicist and Nobelist (1945), most of whose discoveries were communicated to friends in letters and conversations. Pauli’s life was oddly similar to Wittgenstein’s in other respects, including his birth into an assimilationist Jewish family and his midlife spiritual crisis (which led him away from Catholicism and into Jungian psychology, deism, and mysticism). Wolfgang Pauli was born in Vienna on April 25, 1900, into a wealthy, practically aristocratic family of scientific bent. Pauli did publish quite early (a paper on relativity when he was only 19), but thereafter he tended to communicate his discoveries and his mind experiments in letters to friends, including Niels Bohr, Lise Meitner, and Werner Heisenberg. Indeed one of his “lesser” discoveries (proposing the existence of the neutrino particle) came in a 1930 chain letter addressed to “Dear radioactive ladies and gentlemen.” Pauli would receive the 1945 Nobel for his 1925 “exclusion principle”, still a fundamental element of quantum theory, but the attention of the Nobel committee to this very quiet scientist had to be drawn by yet another of his private correspondents, Albert Einstein. ©

[Stanley]

Tallulah Bankhead never bored anyone, and I consider that humanitarianism of a very high order. Anita Loos.

When in 1981 Corinne Anita Loos died in New York speakers at her funeral included Lillian Gish and Helen Hayes, and I hope one of them said that Anita was born in the shadow of a volcano (Mt. Shasta, on April 26, 1889). She was explosive. Anita started her writing from material gathered while trolling San Francisco docklands with her alcoholic father. But she became a name by writing scenarios for the silents. Her first netted her $25 ($600 today) but soon she was doing better. By 1915 she had 100 film credits and was hobnobbing with D. W. Griffiths, Lionel Barrymore, and Douglas Fairbanks. Then it was New York, and Paris, a second unsuccessful marriage (she was looking for someone smart). Anita liked intelligent people, being one herself, and counted among her friends H. L. Mencken, Gertrude Stein, and Max Beerbohm. And it was (she later said) her irritation with the sexual success of a dumb blonde (legend says one of Fairbanks’ leading ladies, whom she met on an eastbound Santa Fe sleeper) that led Anita to begin the brief, acerbic sketches that would culminate in her most famous work, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. The thing began as brief bits for Harper’s Bazaar, and by the time it issued as a book (the best-seller of 1925) Loos had a different model for her dumb blonde, a Ziegfield girl called Lillilan Lorraine. Loos went on to further fame and, some say, better writing, especially her memoirs, but in 2014 the Guardian newspaper named Gentlemen Prefer Blondes as one of its 100 best novels (no. 49), a “guilty pleasure . . . that helped to define the jazz age.” So perhaps I had better read it. ©

[Stanley]

When a student asks me whether to major in mathematics or X, I say if you major in mathematics you can switch to X anytime, but not the other way around. Gian-Carlo Rota.

It doesn’t happen quite so much since the days of Russell and Whitehead, but still many philosophers seem drawn to mathematics, and vice-versa. Whether it’s genetic or a result of their quixotic quests for a dependable language I leave to others to judge, but for Gian-Carlo Rota, born in Italy on April 27, 1932, it could have been both. After all, his aunt Rosetta was a renowned mathematician and he was certainly a philosopher-mathematician, indeed the only professor at MIT to hold a joint appointment in math and philosophy. He had a long journey to get there, via South America, but it began with an escape because his father, Giovanni, was excessive in his anti-fascism. So the family had to scarper. Eventually, Gian-Carlo got mathematics degrees from Princeton (summa) and Yale (PhD) and was appointed shortly thereafter at MIT, where he branched out into philosophy. He proved an exceptionally popular professor in both departments, the major problem (apparently) being over-enrollment. He became famous amongst undergraduates for his eccentric reward system, including chocolate bars and pocket knives, and for his fascinating and (often) relevant asides. “What always came through,” said a senior math major on hearing of Rota’s death (in 1999), “was his total faith in students.” Not quite total, perhaps: in 1978 he canceled a probability class midstream because of bad student survey results. But a student petition brought him back to the podium within the week with his can of coke, his stories, and his belief that any good lecture would always “give students something to take home.”©

[Tripps]

I heard mention of Alistair Cooke's 'Letter from America' on R4 today.

I think this thread is a worthy replacement. So many interesting people that I'd never heard of.

Sorry - of whom I'd never heard. See - it's having a good effect.

[Stanley]

He has that effect on you..... I mailed him this morning to point out that it should be 'Scapa' after Scapa Flow and said that my understanding was that it was a naval expression meaning a quick return to safety.....

I'll send him your comment, I agree with you and he will like it!

Done, as I was mailing him today's came in....

My comrades . . . are not here to speak. Because of this, I speak for them. Odette, on receiving the George Cross, in 1946.

Odette Marie Céline Brailly was born in Amiens, France, on April 28, 1912. Her father was a war hero, which probably did not fate her future, for it was a tale of twists and circumstance that made Odette herself a hero, code name Lise, holder of both the George Cross and the Légion d’honneur. She was a sickly child and was laid low for over a year with polio. But she recovered, married an Englishman, Roy Sansom, and in 1931 moved to London where she birthed three girls. Come the next war, Sansom enlisted and Odette and her daughters moved to rural Somerset to escape the blitz. There she misheard a radio appeal for photos of France and ended up a volunteer in the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry, the oddly-named corps of women trained for espionage in continental Europe. She reached southern France via a Free Pole sailboat (!!), fell in love with her British commander, Peter Churchill, and (with him) was arrested at Annecy, in the Alps, in April 1943. She was tortured (“terribly”) in Paris and again at Ravensbrück, but never broke or betrayed any of her fellow agents. Kept alive because her captors thought her one of “those" Churchills, Odette became a popular figure after the war, married Peter Churchill and then, much more happily, another Special Operations Officer, Geoffrey Hallowes. Her courage, and that of other women in the Nursing Yeomanry, (notably Violette Szabo, executed at Ravensbrück in January 1945) is remembered each November 11 by violets laid at the Cenotaph in London. Odette Hallowes died in March 1995. ©

[Tripps]

We have a good word here -

Collins Slang Dictionary gives -
Scapa (1960's) - abbreviation of Scapa Flow (1910) - rhyming slang = to go
They say cf scarper though I've never seen it used in that sense.

Also Scarper (mid 19th C) escape / run off. From Italian / Polari - scappare = to escape.
So scarper and escape come from the same origin.

[Stanley]

Bob agrees with you... I got this mail.....
Please tell David Trippier that his is the best compliment I have received since a French reviewer called my Revolution and Empire “un tour de force.” Maybe better.
I will try to maintain the standard post-retirement, although I don’t know that I will continue to send out birthday notices to Honors College students.
Thanks, Stanley.
Bob

And later....

You are absolutely right. Nearly. According to my sources, which I can send you when I have the time, the word began as cockney rhyming slang (Scapa Flow = go), although Webster says it comes from the italian Scappare and the Wiktionary says it is “Punch talk”, whatever the hell that means. But to tell you the utter truth I learned it from Michael Mullett, who used it often as a synonym for getting the hell out of here.
Cheers, Bob

[Stanley]

Truth is not only stranger than fiction. It is more interesting. William Randolph Hearst.

In 1987 a review of longitudinal studies proved (to its authors’ satisfaction) that various theories concerning the psychological traits of only children were hogwash. Except that there was some truth in the idea that the only child was likely to be abnormally ambitious for success and anxious to receive the rewards of success. So what score shall we give Orson Welles’ most famous film, Citizen Kane (1941)? A creative biopic of the era’s most famed only child (for Kane was William Randolph Hearst) the film gave Kane a number of flaws and suggested (at least) that his life as an only child had much to do with most of them. William Randolph Hearst was indeed the only child, born April 29, 1863, of millionaire George Hearst and his wife Phoebe. Did they really spoil the boy? Perhaps so. They sent him east to school and then to Harvard, where he threw his money around with abandon and occasionally some style, as in sending custom-made chamber pots to his profs. Thrown out of Harvard, Hearst devoted himself to a life of achievement, first in newspapers (pop had won one on a bet) and then in politics. He could spot talent and buy it, and his writers included Mark Twain, Ambrose Bierce, Jack London, and Stephen Crane. He sent Frederic Remington to report visually on the war in Cuba before there was a war. “You supply the pictures and I’ll supply the war,” Hearst is reputed to have said. This only child lived a life of excess and brilliance, doing much to create our modern press (for good and ill), deeply involved in politics—which he took very personally, and in 1951 leaving an estate much larger than the one he inherited. And five sons. ©

[Tripps]

Thanks for that - I'll dine out on that comment for ages.
I'd have thought that a more American expression would be 'take it on the lam'
Here's Mr Donegan's version Whoa Buck and go by the lam......

Further in depth research reveals, and this is without the benefit of any wine.
Lively just means scarper boys. . .

[Stanley]

The image cannot be dispossessed of a primordial freshness, which the idea can never claim. John Crowe Ransom.

Our southern heritage still causes problems, witness the brouhaha over the Confederate Memorial in Forest Park. Part of the problem lies with pronouns. When “we” talk nostalgically about the ‘romance’ of the Old South, “we” must be white. If “we” took a lead from Lincoln’s Second Inaugural and accepted that slavery happened to “us”, “we” would know instinctively why its icons offend. John Crowe Ransom had a similar problem. Although he taught at Kenyon, in Ohio, for many years, making the place a famous literary center, Ransom was rooted deeply in the land of his birth, the South, where he first drew breath on April 30, 1888. As a young poet, philosopher, and critic he was a leader of the Southern Agrarians, whose I’ll Take My Stand (1930) praised the ante-bellum South as a social order—the only social order—capable of raising “us” to genuine consciousness and intelligence. Again, in this picture, who are “we”? This failure to see slavery as the corrupting core of southern agrarianism came to haunt some of the authors of I’ll Take My Stand, especially Robert Penn Warren but also John Crowe Ransom, when one of their “agrarian” colleagues decided that Hitler and Mussolini were just good citizens trying to restore organic community. In truth, we should remember Ransom instead for his witty, off-beat poetry and his miraculous skill and success as a writing mentor. It should be quite enough, today, to remember that among the students of John Crowe Ransom were Cleanth Brooks, Randall Jarrell, Robert Lowell, E. L. Doctorow, Allen Tate, and Robert Penn Warren himself. By their works we shall know him. ©

[Stanley]

Evolution . . . is a general condition to which all theories, all systems, all hypotheses must bow . . . if they are to be thinkable and true. Fr. Teilhard de Chardin, 1941.

The dialogue about nature between science and religion has a long history. Aristotle gave it form in his scorn for divine explanations for (e.g.) the curious features of the sponge, and it went on from there. But it hasn’t been all conflict. To synthesize faith and science was the life’s work of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. Teilhard was born in his family’s chateau on May 1, 1881, the fourth of eleven children. He was drawn to natural history by his father and religion by his mother, and never ceased his pursuit of truth in both spheres. He took degrees in chemistry and literature, was ordained a Jesuit priest in 1911, and spent his first three years in orders working in the national natural history museum in Paris (the next four as a stretcher bearer in World War I). After 1918 it was back to paleontology, this time in China. And this time, his writings got him in trouble with the Church. Before the second war, several of his works had been refused the imprimatur, and his most famous one, Le phénomène humain (1941) had been banned. By 1957, the Vatican ordered all his works—religious and scientific—removed from all Catholic libraries. Meanwhile, the Jesuits—who thought he had something to say—kept on publishing him, and he was inducted into the French Academy of Sciences. Teilhard de Chardin died in New York City in 1955, on Easter Sunday as he had hoped, still a Jesuit and indeed priest in residence at St. Ignatius Loyola, Park Avenue. He would, doubtless, be pleased to know that the last three popes have taken his theological and scientific works off the forbidden list. ©

[Stanley]

It is much safer to be feared than to be loved. Machiavelli, The Prince.

Students often criticize pioneers of modern political thought, like Machavelli and Hobbes, finding them too pessimistic or cynical or authoritarian, or all three. Hobbes’s dim view of life in the state of nature (“nasty, brutish, and short”) grates on our finer feelings. But many of these thinkers lived through troubled times, and when their rulers sought advice it was not necessarily because they wanted to do the right thing. More often, they just wanted to survive, to vanquish their enemies and die in their sleep, and their advisors understood those necessities. Niccolo Machiavelli was born on May 3, 1469, into an Italy where plots, poisonings, and constant warfare gave to politics a particular piquancy, a life or death quality that made men think that the end might well justify the means. Machiavelli’s was a Florentine political family and he may have felt fated to play the game. He did so with some distinction, but when you mess around with the Borgias, the Medici, and Savonarola, you want to be sure you back the right horse. When the Medici restored themselves in Florence (with Spanish troops and papal support) in 1512, Machiavelli was imprisoned and, for about three weeks, subjected to fairly unpleasant tortures. Immediately afterwards, he began writing The Prince, which may help to explain its air of worldly-wisdom and its stress on prudence rather than principle. Experience, Machiavelli thought, was the best teacher in politics, and given his own experiences he deserves praise for working as much virtu as he did into his political philosophy. Let’s give him a break. ©

[Stanley]

I see every day why I came and what I am to stay for. Laura Matilda Towne, diary entry, St. Helena's, May 11, 1862

Our long and bloody Civil War was, in some places, over very quickly, most notably in the Sea Islands of South Carolina, captured by a Union expedition in late 1861. The islands, already host to a distinctive African-American culture (and language), became the site of several social experiments. One of them, the longest-lived, was founded by Laura Matilda Towne and her life-long companion Ellen Murray. Laura Towne was born in Pittsburgh May 3, 1825. Her English mother died soon after, and her New England father took the children back to Boston and then settled in Philadelphia, where Laura trained as a homeopathic doctor (at the pioneering Women’s Medical College) and imbibed abolitionism from the Unitarian minister William Henry Furness. Aged 37, she volunteered for service on St. Helena Island and sailed south with an army of occupation. On St. Helena, she set up a medical clinic where she treated some soldiers but many more freed slaves. Her diary (available on line) suggests an appealing, intelligent character who ably combined a consuming idealism with intense practicality. Soon Ellen Murray joined Laura and the two ladies expanded the clinic into a school, had prefabricated school houses (2) sent from Philadelphia, and settled down to a lifetime’s work at what they called the Penn School. Besides literacy and medical care, Towne and Murray provided a home to a number of children they adopted, engraved their school’s bell with the motto “Proclaim Liberty”, and kept ringing it until 1901, when Laura’s death parted them. The Penn School lives on. ©