Category: Lit & Crit

“We are lived by drives we cannot command.” – Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human

“We do not verify the hypotheses of science; instead, if we have any intellectual honour, we do our level best to disconfirm even our own theories. The process is Darwinian: the properly successful scientific theories are the ones that have survived, by a kind of logical natural selection.” – A. D. Nuttall, Shakespeare: The Thinker

“The universe is indefinitely recessive to the understanding. It will not provide the thing that philosophers cannot help pursuing: The Answer.” – A. D. Nuttall, Shakespeare: The Thinker

“No man is called happy till his death, and all the taxes at his wake and funeral paid.” – Ovid, The Metamorphoses, Book III, “Cadmus” (trans. Horace Gregory)

“The approach to nothingness is exciting, but nothingness itself is boring and featureless.” – A. D. Nuttall, Shakespeare: The Thinker

“In Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment the hero or anti-hero, Raskolnikov, has been brooding on the more frightening implications of Utilitarian ethics. Russian Utilitarianism is a more violent affair than its English counterpart: if the greatest happiness of the greatest number is the sole criterion of ethical behaviour, the Ten Commandments no longer hold. It is right to kill if this killing is the only way to prevent two other people from being killed. Even, say, torturing a child to death could be right, if one knew that it was the only to prevent the torturing to death of two other children. Truly independent spirits can rise above biblical morality and, when necessary, spill blood.” – A. D. Nuttall, Shakespeare: The Thinker

“When the Christians were an underground sect, meeting in catacombs in Rome, they could afford to be absolutely merciful because the non-Christian Roman cops would deal with anything really nasty. Then the Emperor Constantine was converted to Christianity and suddenly the cops were Christians.” – A. D. Nuttall, Shakespeare: The Thinker

“If one has a system of immense rewards in heaven for good behaviour in this world, then that good behaviour, once the agent has become aware of the reward, will cease to be innocently disinterested.” – A. D. Nuttall, Shakespeare: The Thinker

“Forbidden books always acquire an attractive immortality of their own, quite apart from whatever merits they contain.” – Horace Gregory, “Introduction,” Ovid: The Metamorphoses

“The nineteenth century, even among its poets, lost contact with The Metamorphoses, or rather, The Metamorphoses showed aspects of mythology as well as human conduct that the age did not care to advertise. An extremely un-Italian Victorian Olympus came into view. It had been introduced by Lord Elgin’s marbles shipped from Greece to London. Pictorially and in sculpture the nymphs and goddesses became ideal English girls, represented in dreamy yet modest poses by Sir Frederic Leighton; they looked freshly bathed, well-fed, and nearly sexless.” – Horace Gregory, “Introduction,” Ovid: The Metamorphoses

“When the Protestants abolished Purgatory they had nothing left beyond the grave but heaven, from which no soul would wish to return, and hell, from which no one could escape.” – A. D. Nuttall, Shakespeare: The Thinker

“Patience is the honest man’s revenge.” – Cyril Tourneur, The Atheist’s Tragedy

“I was cleaning and, meandering about, approached the divan and couldn’t remember whether or not I had dusted it. Since these movements are habitual and unconscious I could not remember and felt that it was impossible to remember – so that if I had dusted it and forgot – that is, had acted unconsciously, then it was the same as if I had not. If some conscious person had been watching, then the fact could be established. If, however, no one was looking, or looking on unconsciously, if the whole complex lives of many people go on unconsciously, then such lives are as if they had never been.” – Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy, quoted by Viktor Shklovsky in “Art as Technique” (trans. unknown)

“Civil war, in which father kills son, brother brother, is the worst thing of all.” – A. D. Nuttall, Shakespeare: The Thinker

“There is an old maxim of school-teachers: ‘Don’t say “Don’t”.’ Don’t say, ‘Don’t draw on the walls,’ to children who, until that moment, had never thought of doing so.” – A. D. Nuttall, Shakespeare: The Thinker

“Resisting the naturalness of death is a fight that can never be won.” – Deborah Thompson, “The Meaning of Meat,” Animal Disorders

“It is important to listen when women are talking. But it is hard to do this when the men make so much noise.” – A. D. Nuttall, Shakespeare: The Thinker

“If one is trapped in a convention of restless badinage so that one is never able to look steadily at anything, the appropriate reality will be perhaps the great negative fact of death; this alone can stop the witticisms.” – A. D. Nuttall, Shakespeare: The Thinker

“Nature is herself the answer to art and needs neither words nor wit to make her fundamental point.” – A. D. Nuttall, Shakespeare: The Thinker

“True power does not need arrogance, a long beard and a barking voice. True power strangles you with silk ribbons, charm, and intelligence.” – Oriana Fallaci (as quoted by Slavoj Žižek in First As Tragedy, Then As Farce)

“See the classically stupid statement of Sir Charles Oman in the first and worst edition of his History of the Art of War in the Middle Ages . . . which is better not quoted here in the hope that it may one day be forgotten.” – R. Allen Brown, footnote 53 to Chapter III, The Normans

“Many men with malaria were hospitalized more than once . . . many suffered from a milder form of malaria or other illness and did not turn in at the hospital at all. It became a rule of thumb in front-line units that unless one had a temperature of more than 103 degrees there would be no light duty or excuse from a patrol mission. The tropics weakened nearly everyone. Food had been in short supply during the early weeks of the [Guadalcanal] campaign, much of the fare had been substandard, and most of the long-time veterans of the fighting suffered some form of malnutrition.” – Lt. Col. Frank O. Hough, USMCR, Maj. Verle E. Ludwig, USMC, and Henry I. Shaw, Jr., “Final Period, 9 December 1942 to 9 February 1943,” Pearl Harbor to Guadalcanal, History of U.S. Marine Corps Operations in World War II, Vol. I

“All underground fuel storage areas on Sand Island [at Midway] were prepared for emergency destruction by demolition. The demolition system worked, too. On 22 May [1942] a sailor threw the wrong switch and blew up a good portion of the aviation gasoline.” – Lt. Col. Frank O. Hough, USMCR, Maj. Verle E. Ludwig, USMC, and Henry I. Shaw, Jr., “Midway Girds for Battle,” Pearl Harbor to Guadalcanal, History of U.S. Marine Corps Operations in World War II, Vol. I

“The [Pan-American] clipper took off for Midway at 12:50 that afternoon [December 8, 1941] to evacuate certain PAA personnel plus all passengers. Mr. H. P. Hevenor, a government official who missed the plane, was marooned on Wake and eventually ended up in Japanese hands. ‘It struck me as a rather drastic lesson in the wisdom of punctuality,’ commented Colonel Devereux [Officer-in-Charge, USMC 1st Defense Battalion Detachment, Wake Island].” – Lt. Col. Frank O. Hough, USMCR, Maj. Verle E. Ludwig, USMC, and Henry I. Shaw, Jr., “The Enemy Strikes,” Pearl Harbor to Guadalcanal, History of U.S. Marine Corps Operations in World War II, Vol. I

“Earthenware bowls are fragile and so easily broken, they are only made of a little clay on which fortune has precariously bestowed some consistency, and the same could be said of mankind.” – José Saramago, The Gospel According to Jesus Christ (trans. Giovanni Pontiero)

“Even grown men revert to being children when they are frightened or upset, they do not like to admit it, poor things, but there is nothing like a good cry to relieve one’s sorrow.” – José Saramago, The Gospel According to Jesus Christ (trans. Giovanni Pontiero)

“The United States had no intention of defending America on its own soil as long as the situation permitted any other choice.” – Lt. Col. Frank O. Hough, USMCR, Maj. Verle E. Ludwig, USMC, and Henry I. Shaw, Jr., “The Marine Corps on the Eve of War,” Pearl Harbor to Guadalcanal, History of U.S. Marine Corps Operations in World War II, Vol. I

“At the outbreak of the war Iceland enjoyed the status of autonomous parliamentary monarchy, sharing the same king with Denmark. When the Nazis overran the latter nation in April 1940, the Icelandic Parliament voted to take over the executive power of the Danish King and to assume control of foreign affairs. The strategic island became, for all practical purposes, a completely independent republic—and a wholly defenseless one without even the pretense of an army or navy. This state of affairs gave rise to considerable concern in London and Washington, more genuine concern than it caused initially among the insular-minded Icelanders. To the British the threat appeared very desperate indeed. Early in May they determined to occupy Iceland, and the need for speed and secrecy fused decision and action. There was no time to stand on ceremony; despite Churchill’s bland assertion that the British occupation of Iceland was effected ‘with the concurrence of its people,’ they had, in fact, not been consulted beforehand. ‘As the attitude likely to be adopted by the Icelandic Government toward such an ‘invasion’ was in some doubt they were not informed of the proposed expedition.’ Indeed the first inkling the natives had that anything out of the ordinary was afoot came when early-rising fishermen discovered a British destroyer nosing up to a jetty in the harbor of the island capital, Reykjavik. At 0620 on 10 May, a reinforced battalion of Royal Marines landed and occupied the town, moving so swiftly that it was able to seize the German Consulate before the hapless Consul could destroy his papers.” – Lt. Col. Frank O. Hough, USMCR, Maj. Verle E. Ludwig, USMC, and Henry I. Shaw, Jr., “Marine Occupation of Iceland,” Pearl Harbor to Guadalcanal, History of U.S. Marine Corps Operations in World War II, Vol. I

“It has been said whoever possesses Iceland holds a pistol firmly pointed at England, America, and Canada.” – Winston Churchill, The Grand Alliance

“We really do not know what happens to life’s sorrows after death, especially those last moments of suffering, it is possible that everything ends with death but we cannot be certain that the memory of suffering does not linger at least for several hours in this body we describe as dead, nor can we rule out the possibility that matter uses putrefaction as a last resort in order to rid itself of suffering.” – José Saramago, The Gospel According to Jesus Christ (trans. Giovanni Pontiero)