Kings and Dukes and Earls and Such

"I read considerable to Jim about kings and dukes and earls and such, and how gaudy they dressed, and how much style they put on, and called each other your majesty, and your grace, and your lordship, and so on, 'stead of mister; and Jim's eyes bugged out, and he was interested. He says:

'I didn' know dey was so many un um. I hain't hearn 'bout none un um, skasely, but ole King Sollermun, onless you counts dem kings dat's in a pack er k'yards. How much do a king git?'

'Get?' I says. 'Why, they get a thousand dollars a month if they want it; they can have just as much as they want; everything belongs to them.'

"Ain' dat gay? En what dey got to do, Huck?'

"They don't do nothing! Why, how you talk! They just set around.'"

Mark Twain, Huckleberry Finn (1884).

Painters and Painting

“There are any number of masters in the academy. It is not easy to separate the good from the bad among those who work on the basic sketches. But let color be added. The painter of things no one ever sees, of paradises, of fish in angry seas, raging beasts in foreign lands, devils and demons—the painter abandons himself to his fancies and paints to terrify and astonish. What does it matter if the results seem somewhat remote from real life? It is not so with the things we know, mountains, streams, houses near and like our own. The soft, unspoiled, wooded hills must be painted layer on layer, the details added gently, quietly, to give a sense of affectionate familiarity. And the foreground too, the garden inside the walls, the arrangement of the stones and grasses and waters. It is here that the master has his own power. There are details a lesser painter cannot imitate.”

Murasaki Shikibu, The Tale of Genji (11th Century).

Twain on the Death-Sentinel

“I visited one of the two establishments where the government keeps and watches corpses until the doctors decide that they are permanently dead, and not in a trance state. It was a grisly place, that spacious room. There were thirty-six corpses of adults in sight, stretched on their backs on slightly slanted boards, in three long rows—all of them with wax-white, rigid faces, and all of them wrapped in white shrouds. Along the sides of the room were deep alcoves, like bay-windows; and in each of these lay several marble-visaged babes, utterly hidden and buried under banks of fresh flowers, all but their faces and crossed hands. Around a finger of each of these fifty still forms, both great and small, was a ring; and from the ring a wire led to the ceiling, and thence to a bell in a watch-room yonder, where, day and night, a watchman sits always alert and ready to spring to the aid of any of that pallid company who, waking out of death, shall make a movement—for any, even the slightest, movement will twitch the wire and ring the fearful bell. I imagined myself a death-sentinel drowsing there alone, far in the dragging watches of some wailing, gusty night, and having in a twinkling all my body stricken to quivering jelly by the sudden clamor of that awful summons!”

--Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi (1883).

Stephen Potter on Caddies

“His plan was simple. If he found, at the club-house, that his opponent was rather humbly dressed, he would wear the smart outfit. If the conditions were reversed, out would come the frayed pin-stripe trousers, the stringy clubs and the fair-isle sweater. ‘And I don’t want a caddie,’ he would say. Of course, in his correct clothes, he would automatically order a caddie, calling for ‘Bob’, and mumbling something about ‘Must have Bob. He knows my game. Caddied for me in the Northern Amateur.’”

--Stephen Potter, The Theory and Practice of Gamesmanship or The Art of Winning Games without Actually Cheating. The Complete Upmanship (1970).

Henry Miller on Wall Street

“I said I would take them inside the stock exchange, on the floor itself. I described that mad house in detail, ordering myself slices of Anaconda Copper, Amalgamated Tin, Tel & Tel, anything I could remember of that crazy Wall Street past whether volatile, combustible or analgesic. I ran from one corner of the room to the other, buying and selling like a maniac, standing at the vice consul’s commode and telephoning my broker to flood the market, calling my banker to make a loan of fifty thousand immediately, calling the telegraph jakes to take a string of telegrams, calling the grain and wheat trusters in Chicago to dump a load in the Mississippi, calling the Secretary of the Interior to inquire if he had passed that bill about the Indians, calling my chauffeur to tell him to put a new spare tire on the back behind the rumble seat, calling my shirt-maker to curse him for making the neck too tight on the pink and white shirt and what about my initials. I ran across the seat and gobbled a sandwich at the Exchange Buffet. I said hello to a friend of mine who was going upstairs to his office to blow his brains out."

--Henry Miller, The Colossus of Maroussi (1941).

Thoreau on the Iceman

"Like the water, the Walden ice, 

seen near at hand, has a green tint, 

but at a distance is beautifully blue, 

and you can easily tell it from the white ice of the river, 

or the merely greenish ice of some ponds, a quarter of a mile off. 

Sometimes one of those great cakes slips from the ice-man's sled 

into the village street, and lies there for a week like a great emerald, 

an object of interest to all passers." 

Henry David Thoreau, Walden (1854).

Emperors

"Your father, the divine Marcus Aurelius 

Antoninus had every right to call himself emperor, 

because he cultivated wisdom, despised money, 

and loved what was good. 

But you, Commodus, 

have no such right, for you are the antithesis of your father: 

you love tyranny, vice, and brutality."

Spoken by Appianus after being sentenced to death, 

as recorded in one of the Oxyrhynchus papyri records.

Jerome Carcopino, Daily Life in Ancient Rome (1940).

Shakespeare on the Commodious Barber

It is like a Barbers chaire that fits all buttockes, 

the pin buttocke, the quatch-buttocke,the brawn buttocke, 

or any buttocke." 

--William Shakespeare, All's Well That Ends Well (1601).

Flaubert on Bankers

 Les Banquiers: "All rich. Pirates. Sharks." 

--Gustave Flaubert, Dictionary of Platitudes (1880) 

[Translation by J. I. Rodale (1954).

Thoreau on Getting an Honest Living

"There is little or nothing to be remembered written on the subject of getting an honest living. Neither the New Testament nor Poor Richard speaks to our condition. One would think, from looking at literature, that this question had never disturbed a solitary individual's musings."

--Henry David Thoreau