79A good man is a picture of god.
80Running errands for Eros is the business of the idle.
81The greatest misery is to be old, poor, and alone.
82The deadliest bite among wild animals is that of the bootlicker; amongst tame, that of the flatterer.
83Choked on the honey of flattery.
84The stomach is our life’s Charybdis.
85The golden Aphrodite that Phryne put up at Delphoi should be inscribed Greek Lechery, Its Monument.
86A pretty whore is poisoned honey.
87If, as they say, I am only an ignorant man trying to be a philosopher, then that may be what a philosopher is.
88People who talk well but do nothing are like musical instruments: the sound is all they have to offer.
89Aren’t you ashamed, I said to the prissy young man, to assume a lower rank in nature than you were given?
90Be careful that your pomade doesn’t cause the rest of you to stink.
91Why do we call house slaves footmen? Well, it’s because they are men and they have feet.
92What lovers really enjoy are their spats and the disapproval of society.
93Beggars get handouts before philosophers because people have some idea of what it’s like to be blind and lame.
94If your cloak was a gift, I appreciate it; if it was a loan, I’m not through with it yet.
95Why praise Diokles for giving me a drachma and not me for deserving it?
96I have seen the victor Dioxippos subdue all contenders at Olympia and be thrown on his back by the glance of a girl.
97To own nothing is the beginning of happiness.
98Every day’s a festival to the upright.
99Why not whip the teacher when the pupil misbehaves?
100I had my lunch in the courtroom because that’s where I was hungry.
101It is a convenience not to fear the dark.
102Discourse on virtue and they pass by in droves, whistle and dance the shimmy, and you’ve got an audience.
103After grace and a prayer for health, the banqueters set to and eat themselves into an apoplexy.
104To a woman who had flopped down before an altar with her butt in the air I remarked in passing that the god was also behind her.
105At Khrysippos’ lecture I saw the blank space coming up on the scroll, and said to the audience: Cheer up, fellows, land is in sight!
106We have complicated every simple gift of the gods.
107Make passes at you, do they? Why, then, don’t you wear clothes that don’t so accurately outline what they’re interested in?
108After a visit to the baths, where do you go to have wash?
109I’ve seen Plato’s cups and table, but not his cupness and tableness.
110If you’ve turned yourself out so handsomely, young man, for men, it’s unfortunate; if for women, it’s unfair.
111A blush is the color of virtue.
112A lecher is a fig tree on a cliff: crows get the figs.
113The road from Sparta to Athens is like the passageway in a house from the men’s rooms to the women’s.
114An obol now, friend, and when the community asks you to contribute for my funeral, you can say that you’ve already given.
115I was once as young and silly as you are now, but I doubt if you will become as old and wise as I am.
116Begging from fat Anaximenes, I argued what an advantage it would be to him to share the makings of that paunch with the poor.
117There is no society without law, no civilization without a city.
118The only real commonwealth is the whole world.
119Practice makes perfect.
120Learn the pleasure of despising pleasure.
121Education disciplines the young, comforts the old, is the wealth of the poor, and civilizes the rich.
122The greatest beauty of human kind is frankness.
123Plato begs too, but like Telemakhos conversing with Athena, with lowered head, so that others may not overhear.
124Give up philosophy because I’m an old man? It’s at the end of a race that you break into a burst of speed.
JOURNALS
Journal I
PROTAGORAS SOLD FIREWOOD. DEMOCRITUS LIKED THE WAY HE bundled it for carrying and hired him to be his secretary. Mind is evident in the patterns it makes. Inner, outer. To discern these patterns is to be a philsopher.
The caterpillar of the coddling moth feeds on the kernels of apples and pears.
Greek time is in the eye, anxious about transitions (beard, loss of boyish beauty). Hebrew time is in the ear (Hear, O Israel!). What the Greek gods say does not make a body of quotations; they give no laws, no wisdom. But what they look like is of great and constant importance. Yahweh, invisible, is utterly different.
The American’s automobile is his body.
Camillus had asked for pure youths and the adjutant without a blink aboutfaced, looking wildly for a warrant officer. Pure youths, said the warrant officer. Clean, said the adjutant, scrubbed. Young means they won’t have had time to sin with any volume. Say recruits who aren’t up to their eyes in debt, fresh of face, calf’s eyes, good stock. Washed hair. Take them to the flamen, who’ll get white tunics on them, and clarify their minds for going into the fanum to bring the figure out, proper.
To sit in the sun and read Columella on how to plant a thorn hedge is a pleasure I had to teach myself. No, I was teaching myself something else, and the thorn hedge came, wisely, to take its place. They’re longer lasting than stone walls and have an ecology all their own. Birds nest in them and snails use them for a world. Hedgehogs, rabbits, snakes, spiders. Brier rose, dog thorn. There are some in England still standing from Roman times.
Being ought to have a ground (the earth under our feet) and a source. It seems to have neither. The Big Bang theory is science fiction. It may be that the expanding universe is an illusion born in physics labs in Paris, Copenhagen, and Berkeley. It is also too eerily like Genesis (being in a millisecond) and other creation myths. It is partly medieval, partly Jules Verne. From a human point of view, it has no philosophical or ethical content. It is, as a vision, a devastation, an apocalypse at the wrong end of time. It is a drama in which matter and energy usurp roles that once belonged to gods and angels. It is without life: brutally mechanical. It is without even the seeds of life, or the likelihood.
Store Valby: earliest record of agriculture in Denmark: naked barley, club wheat, einkorn, emmer wheat, and a seed of Galium.
Gibbon turns an idea in his fingers.
French regularity is kept alive as a spirit by turbulence and variation. Only a felt classicism knows novelty. Novelty in the United States is a wheel spinning in futility: it has no tangential ground to touch down and roll on.
Je ne veux pas mourir idiot. French student demanding that Greek be put back in the curriculum.
The circumcision of gentiles in the United States is a cruel and useless mutilation. Michel Tournier in Le Vent paraclète liken it to removing the eyelids. It is an ironic turn of events. The circumcision of the Old Testament was a slicing away of the merest tip of the foreskin, the akroposthion as the Greeks called it. In the Hellenizing period of the first century c.e. (see Maccabees) the rabbinate changed over to total removal of the prepuce, to make a more decisive symbol. Gentiles began to circumcise fairly recently: a Victorian attempt, one among many, to prevent masturbation. (A. E. Housman was circumcized at thirteen.) It is done nowadays by parents so ignorant that they don’t know it doesn’t need to be done, and doctors, always ready for another buck, recommend it on hygienic principles. It is difficult to think of another such institutionalized gratuitous meanness, the brutal insensitivity of which enjoys universal indifference. A Tiresian conundrum: a male who has never known the sensuality of a foreskin, both for masturbation and for making love, cannot know what he has been so criminally bereft of.
If Jews returned to cutting away the wedding ring’s worth of flesh (as with Michelangelo’s David, who has almost all of
a foreskin, and as with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob) — a nicely revolutionary recovery of archaic truth — perhaps American parents would quit agreeing to the mutilation of their children’s bodies. But as long as Ann Landers et Cie. continue to idiotize the populace with a rancid puritanism, maiming boys will continue.
It is the saurian mind that has prevailed in our time. Apollo has been asleep for most of the century.
Klee’s Twittering Machine is a parody of Goya’s people out along a limb.
What is the difference between learning as a child and as an adult? There’s such a thing as relearning. Nietzsche says that philosophy might take as its task the reconciliation of what a child has to learn and knowledge acquired, for whatever reason, in maturity. What’s happening when children watch TV? Consciousness is an ad hoc response to a webwork of stimuli: intrusions, attractions, claims on one’s attention, hurts, disappointments, insults, fears. The critical mind tries to keep its balance in stoic indifference. But turbulence aerates, renews a sense of balance.
The impotence of Andrew Wyeth is that he asks us to see with his eyes subjects about which he has made a decision and, with the gratuitous meanness of his generation, isn’t going to tell us what it is. There is no drama of seeing, as in Picasso and John Sloan. Wyeth makes us into an adventitious onlooker at something he, and only he, was privileged to see.
What got Kipling a bad name among liberals is his intelligence, humor, and affection. These they cannot tolerate in anybody.
Sartre’s idea of literature, the opposite of Pound’s, is still within the category that includes Pound. The word political has a wholly different meaning in the United States than in France. Our politicians have no interest whatever in changing society or in making life more liberal. How can they, with a people who have to be sat on and with criminal exploitation ready to corrupt any liberal exploration of liberty? There is no reversal possible of American mediocrity, which will worsen until we have total depravity of the idea of freedom. There is no American business: only diddling the consumer. The Congress is as incompetent and irresponsible a squanderer of our money as the most loutish tyrant in history.
History is a matter of attention. Parkman was interested in the awful waste of energy in the (wholly unsuccessful) conversion of the Indian. Because he was so appalled by Catholic fanaticism in Canada, what he wrote is a history of reason in the New World.
Denmark begins at the SAS ticket counter, JFK, behind a contingent from Lake Wobegon whose problem is made more complex by a computer that’s down. Waiting, I solve a problem of my own. The second floor of SAS is, as its sign in Danish says, the other floor. For years I’ve wondered why in the English ordinals there’s the Latin secundus between first and third, the only Mediterranean intrusion into a sequence that’s otherwise archaically North Atlantic. But the Danes count first, another, third, fourth. Our another is one other and the repetition of the one must have crowded so useful a word out of the ordinals, to be replaced with monkish or military Latin.
English is a Romance language the way a porpoise is a fish and a bat is a bird. English is the second, or other, language of Denmark, used among themselves with a fluency that is well along toward making it a dialect. A little babu: “fried chickens” on a menu. We do not (thank goodness) have the first hotel we called in Copenhagen, because “the booking have gone to Easter.”
Danish, like Dutch, is English unmarried to French.
On Swedish TV, a children’s program with a robot who has a spigot for a penis. Another sign that the Danes are a highly moral people who are unembarrassed by the facts of life. Also some comic books and posters you’d go to jail for owning in Kentucky.
Just as Denmark looks familiar, though we’ve not been here before, the Restaurant Cassiopeia on Nyhavn is wholly unthreatening, cozy, strangely familiar. I have the feeling that I’ve been trying all my life to get here. We have a table by an old-fashioned window of many small panes looking out on masts, rain, sixteenth-century buildings. We see that Danish cozy is our sense of cozy. Waitress very young, beautiful, friendly. Fish soup, terrine, veal, kidney. A pear and almond ice drenched in a liqueur. Bonnie Jean, the whiz at arithmetic, notes that our meal costs eighty dollars.
I buy a blue denim cap, very Danish student of last century, and call it my Nietzsche cap, remembering that he ordered a Danish student’s uniform when he learned that Georg Brandes was lecturing on him at the university here. Bonnie Jean counters by buying a Lutheran housewife’s dress, demure, practical, and quite becoming.
The restaurants on Nyhavn are run by children. The cook at The Mary Rose, Ejnar, looks twelve, and the waiters are teenagers.
A profoundly northern feel to the graveyard where Kierkegaard and Hans Christian Andersen lie. Pale sunlight, wet conifers.
Sign in a barber shop: Er taget til Spanien for at bekæmpe Fascismen. Kommer straks. Gone for the day to Spain to fight fascism. Back soon.
At the zoo, which Joyce and Nora once visited in the thirties, a little boy hugging a goat said to me (I was photographing him), “I am cute, am I not?”
“Of course all young Danes are beautiful,” Bonnie Jean says, “they drown the plain ones.” It is apparently against the law to be plain, ill natured, or sober.
The water birds we find in every pond are perhaps grebes. I name them “Bonnie’s coot.” They can run along the surface of water.
A long pedestrian street, a young man seated on a four-wheeled contrivance that several friends are pushing. His virile member is out through his fly (silly and bemused look on his face) and erect. One of the friends carrying a sign: Ja, jeg skal gifte! Oh boy, do I ever need a wife! They’re all gloriously drunk. BJ is a bit disturbed by so much drunkenness: I point out that they’re not drivers. They’re wonderfully on foot. Earlier, two twelve-year-old boys so drunk that they have to walk hugging to keep from falling down.
Music everywhere. Children playing Mozart and Telemann on the pedestrian streets. BJ gives all the change she has to a four-year-old tot who was making a hash of something baroque on her Suzuki fiddle.
The Sweet Pan Steel Drum Band.
Lunch at the train station in Roskilde, far superior to the best food and service to be had in Lexington. Roast pork, red cabbage, wine, potatoes, banana split.
Bonnie Jean, of fellow Americans in Elsinore: “Travel is very narrowing.”
BJ insists that I buy a Danish scout manual, and a pair of important-looking straps, blue, lettered Spejdersport.
BJ does not keep a journal but asks that I put in this one:
Honesty is the best deceiver.
Questions are a way of avoiding information.
Rietveld’s chair at the Louisiana Museet. It is much smaller than I’d thought and looks comfortable.
Years ago I wrote in Tatlin! that the Baltic is pewter and silver in its lakes of glare. It is.
Helsingør. Coffee and pastry shop, center of local social life. Suddenly all very Bergman: an accurately scaled midget across from me, nattily dressed and with a woman who seems to be made up for a Strindberg role, dress about 1880, but obviously not all there. Housewives talk about her behind their hands. Eventually a rough sailor type, red-bearded and in a pea jacket, comes and takes her away. She rolls her hips and eyes as she leaves. The midget continues his coffee. No sign of a circus in town.
A long walk through the deer park at Klampenborg, sharing Granny Smith apples, children orienteering in all directions (a little boy greets us with “Oh, yes! Oh, yes!”). The landscape is a Constable. Immense sense of peace, love, togetherness.
Boy with mother, rich dark hair, pink scarf, nautical jacket, gray canvas trousers, big sneakers. Relation with mother wholly un-American: more like kids falling in love on a first date.
Bonnie invents “holstein cat” for the bishop’s Webster and Thorvaldsen, whom we speak to every day. The bishop of Copenhagen is also bishop of Greenland: part of his parish.
The statue of Kierkegaard in the garden of the National Library is Linco
lnesque, noble, grandiose (seated, with a Bible propped against his chair), writing. The newer, triumphant statue in the circle of theologians around the palace church is of Kierkegaard the dandy, in tight britches, foppish.
Little Jack Horner, who sat in a corner. The Horner is the Danish hjornet, corner.
Where it was, there must you begin to be. There are no depths, only distances. Memory shuffles, scans, forages. Freud’s geological model implies that last year is deeper in memory than last week, which we all know to be untrue. The memories we value are those we have given the qualities of dream and narrative, and which we may have invented.
An American evangelist on Swedish TV reminds me that kinship is one of the most primitive of tyrannies. Our real kin are those we have chosen.
Desire is attention, not gratification of the self. The ego is the enemy of love. Happiness is always a return. It must have been out of itself to be anything at all.
If timespace, then how does time move and space stand still? Time moves through us; we move through space.
County as the satiric unit: Coconino, Bloom, Yoknapatawpha, Rain-tree, Tolkien’s shire, “the provinces.”
Tragedy: house, castle, room.
Romance: sea and open country.
Comedy: city.
The hope of philosophy was to create a tranquillity so stable that the world could not assail it. This stability will always turn out to be a madness or obsession or brutal indifference to the world. Philosophy is rather the self-mastery that frees one enough — of laziness, selfishness, rage, jealousy, and such failures of spirit — to help others, write for others, draw for others, be friends.
The Guy Davenport Reader Page 38