I am back in the mood of Rattigan Glumphoboo from “Orlando” by Virginia Woolf where “whenever anything popped violently into her head, she went straight to the nearest telegraph office and wired” it. Take my blog post as a telegraph office and find whatever I am reading or hearing as whatever popped into my head recently. Here’s another one:
“Competition is life’s religion.”
“Illusions are to the soul what atmosphere is to the earth. Roll up that tender air and the plant dies, the color fades. The earth we walk on is a parched cinder. It is marl we tread and fiery cobbles scorch our feet. By the truth we are undone. Life is a dream. ‘Tis waking that kills us. He who robs us of our dreams robs us of our life.”
“. . . if sleep it was, of what nature, we can scarcely refrain from asking, are such sleeps as these? Are they remedial measures – trances in which the most galling memories, events that seem likely to cripple life for ever, are brushed with a dark wing which rubs their harshness off and gilds them, even the ugliest, and basest, with a lustre, an incandescence? Has the finger of death to be laid on the tumult of life from time to time lest it rend us asunder? Are we so made that we have to take death in small doses daily or we could not go on with the business of living? And then what strange powers are these that penetrate our most secret ways and change our most treasured possessions without our willing it? Had Orlando, worn out by the extremity of his suffering, died for a week. And then come to life again? And if so, of what nature is death and of what nature life? Having waited well over half an hour for an answer to these questions, and none coming, let us get on with the story.”
“Nothing, however, can be more arrogant, though nothing is commoner than to assume that of Gods there is only one, and of religions none but the speaker’s.”
— Orlando by Virginia Woolf
“Was that figure of fun at the end of the table with her hair rigged up like a Maypole really the Queen?”
— Orlando by Virginia Woolf
“Anyone moderately familiar with the rigors of composition will not need to be told the story in detail; how he wrote and it seemed good; read and it seemed vile; corrected and tore up; cut out; put in; was in ecstasy; in despair; had his good nights and bad mornings; snatched at ideas and lost them; saw his book plain before him and it vanished; acted his people’s parts as he ate; mouthed them as he walked; now cried; now laughed; vacillated between this style and that; now preferred the heroic and pompous; next the plain and simple; now the vales of Tempe; then the fields of Kent or Cornwall; and could not decide whether he was the divinest genius or the greatest fool in the world.”
“. . . it cannot be denied that the dumbness of animals is a great impediment to the refinements of intercourse*.”
— Orlando by Virginia Woolf
*as in conversation for all who think intercourse is only sexual or the name of a town in Pennsylvania.
When reading, I often come across sayings, adages, well-turned phrases that I might write down in a notebook or forget within 20 minutes. The forgetting I can’t help, but the stuff written down should get better play – as in sharing them.
So I have decided to put them on this blog, maybe on a daily basis. Why not dump them here all at once? Because I like the idea of a “mailbox surprise.” Maybe that comes from living on Rural Route #1 with a mailbox just across the road. Who knew what might show up there after the mail man had driven by, sitting in the middle of his front seat, left hand on the steering wheel and right hand reaching to the mailbox (before mail-delivery trucks with right hand steering)?
Same with daily comics in the newspapers that eked out one piece of the plot daily. Whatever happened to Dick Tracy, Steve Roper, Dondi, Terry and the Pirates and finally, Prince Valiant? Once the prince and Aleta were dropped from my daily newspaper, I stopped reading comics (except for “Shoe.”)
So this will be like Orlando in Virginia Woolf’s book where “whenever anything popped violently into her head, she went straight to the nearest telegraph office and wired” it to her husband. But I won’t drop into a cypher language or sign it “Rattigan Glumphoboo” as she did to keep the telegraph clerk from being any wiser. (That’s a better alias than the ones I have been using.)
The first “anything that popped into my head” came from a Zoom class Kathy and I are taking. Seemed to fit the moment:
“If we are to have another contest in the near future of our national existence, I predict that the dividing line will not be Mason’s and Dixon’s, but between patriotism and intelligence on one side, and superstition, ambition, and ignorance on the other.” Ulysses S. Grant