Speaking through Texts:
a local habitation and a name
  

   
2 August 1914

At 2.20 today, 2nd August, the following note was handed to the French and German Ambassadors: 'The British Government would not allow the passage of German ships through the English Channel or the North Sea in order to attack the coasts or shipping of France.'

Be prepared to meet surprise attacks.

Admiralty to
    Commander-in-Chief, Home Fleet;
    Vice-Admirals, 2nd and 3rd Fleet;
    Commander-in-Chief, Home Ports.

Randolph S. Churchill
Winston S. Churchill, 2: Young Statesman 1901-1914
and
W.S.C. Companion Volume 2, Part 3: 1911-1914
  

   
In the terrible years of the Yezhov terror [1937-1938], I spent seventeen months in the prison lines of Leningrad [for news about my arrested son]. Once, someone "recognized" me. Then a woman with bluish lips standing behind me, who, of course, had never heard me called by name before, woke up from the stupor to which everyone had succumbed and whispered in my ear (everyone spoke in whispers there):

"Can you describe this?"

And I answered: "Yes, I can."

Then something that looked like a smile passed over what had once been her face.

Anna Akhmatova
Requiem, "Instead of a Preface"
The Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova
  

  
3 October 1910

To Robert Scott aboard Terra Nova [received at Melbourne]:

Beg leave to inform you Fram proceeding Antarctic.

Amundsen.

Roland Huntford
Scott and Amundsen
   

  
Anyone who reads these essays knows that I am a women's libber, but I also have a love for the English language. I try to circumlocute "man" when I mean "human being" but the flow of sound suffers sometimes when I do. Please accept, in this article, "man" in the general, embracing "woman." (Yes, I know what I said.)

Isaac Asimov
"Look Long Upon a Monkey"
Fantasy and Science Fiction, September 1974
 

  
I have fallen in love with American names,
The sharp names that never get fat,
The snakeskin titles of mining-claims,
The plumed war-bonnet of Medicine Hat,
Tucson and Deadwood and Lost Mule Flat.

Stephen Vincent Benet
"American Names"  (1931)
  

  
This was always the spirit that informed [Winston S. Churchill], in peace and war, and the words came to him after the First World War. Eddie Marsh [Churchill's private secretary] recorded in his memoirs:

He produced one day a lapidary epigram on the spirit proper to a great nation in war and peace: "In war, resolution; in defeat, defiance; in victory, magnanimity; in peace, good-will."

(I wish the tones in which he spoke this could have been "recorded" — the first phrase a rattle of musketry, the second "grating harsh thunder," the third a ray of the sun through storm-clouds; the last, pure benediction.)

Randolph S. Churchill
Winston S. Churchill, 2: Young Statesman 1901-1914
  

  
[In the 1936 film Poppy, W. C. Fields plays McGargle, here running a carnival shell game:]

McGargle is tipped off as the mayor approaches and shifts gears without so much as a pause. "Gambling, my friends, is the root of all evil," he intones, quivering with righteousness. "For years I was a victim of this heartless scourge — gambling — a helpless pawn in the toils of Beelzebub."

The mayor comes forth to offer his hand, and McGargle asks if he has read his book on the evils of wagering.

"No ...," says the mayor, to which McGargle registers mock surprise.

"You haven't? It has a blue cover. Maybe that will recall it to your mind."

James Curtis
W. C. Fields: A Biography
  

  
Dear Mr. Campbell:

I am now preparing for publication as a hard-cover book an Index to the Science-Fiction Magazines. Started in 1935, it covers all of the American science fiction and most of the fantasy magazines from 1926 through 1950. Astounding Science Fiction and its predecessor Astounding Stories are covered back to the first issue in 1930 as are the thirty-nine issues of Unknown Worlds as well as forty-three other titles, over one thousand two hundred and fifty individual magazines in all. ...

In addition, it is desired to include all the information on pseudonyms that can be definitely verified. ... I would like to ask that all authors who have used pen names in the science-fiction or fantasy fields send the information to me at the address below. ...

Since transcription of the final copy from the file cards will begin shortly after the first of the year, the sooner this information is received, the more certain it is of inclusion.

Donald B. Day
letter in "Brass Tacks"
Astounding Science Fiction
January 1952
  

  
For some months a job that I had been assigned required me to listen to propaganda broadcasts beamed at the United States from the fascist powers. Every so often I heard a voice well known to me through a good many years, chanting in a curious parody of solemn high mass hundreds of judgments about this country and its people which the years had made even more familiar than the voice.

It was Ezra Pound, saying the things he had been saying for thirty years. There was nothing novel about them. Mr. Pound ... had himself originated some of these notions, perhaps, but the bulk of them he merely took over whole from what a generation of our literature was saying. I did not need to listen to Ezra Pound for this description of America — I could pick up books in my own library at random and find it nearly everywhere.

The base culture, the inferior people, the decadent civilization, the blindness and depravity and disgusting stench of an evil nation, everything that Mr. Pound was saying about us by short wave was at hand in the works of the superior class.

Bernard DeVoto
The Literary Fallacy  (1944)
 

  
We were six or seven riders, and they thought we might be an hostile ghrazzu [foray]. Alighting in silence, we sat down a little aloof: none of us so much as whispered to his companion by name; for the open desert is full of old debts for blood. At a strange meeting, and yet more at such hours, the nomads are in suspense of mind and mistrust of each other.

When, impatient of their mumming, I would have said Salaam! they prayed me be silent.

After the whisperers within had sufficiently taken knowledge of our peaceable demeanour, one approaching circumspectly, gave us the word of peace, Salaam aleyk, and it was readily answered by us all again, Aleykom es-salaam. After this sacrament of the lips between Beduw, there is no more doubt among them of any evil turn.

Charles M. Doughty
Travels in Arabia Deserta  (1888)
 

  
He avoided with a very acute instinct the monotony that can come from a reiterated comic device and the disaster that comes from crossing the strict line which divides high comedy from awful foolishness. He was sure, wonderfully resourceful, and his style, really based on a lifelong respect for good writing, would have been admirable applied to anything.

Wolcott Gibbs
"Robert Benchley: In Memoriam"  (1945)
More in Sorrow
 

  
Sonnet writing was a courtly and aristocratic performance, and Shakespeare was decidedly not a courtier or an aristocrat. Yet the challenge of this form proved agreeable to him. To be a very public man — an actor onstage, a successful playwright, a celebrated poet; and at the same time to be a very private man — a man who can be trusted with secrets, a writer who keeps his intimate affairs to himself and subtly encodes all references to others: this was the double life Shakespeare had chosen for himself. If his astonishing verbal skills and his compulsive habit of imaginative identification, coupled with deep ambition, drove him to public performance, his family secrets and his wary intelligence — perhaps reinforced by the sight of the severed heads on London Bridge — counseled absolute discretion.

Stephen Greenblatt
Will in the World:
  How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare
  

  
The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all your Piety nor Wit
    Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it.

Omar Khayyam
The Rubaiyat  (circa 1100)
Edward FitzGerald translation
1st ed No. 56 (1859); 2nd ed No. 76 (1868)
  

  
It is good to read a little in the Files;
'Tis a sure and sovereign balm
Unto philosophic calm,
Yea, and philosophic doubt when Life beguiles.

When you know Success is Greatness,
When you marvel at your lateness ...

When your Imp of Blind Desire
Bids you set the Thames afire,
You'll remember men have done so — in the Files.

Rudyard Kipling
"The Files"  (The Sub-editor speaks)  (1903)
  

  
If my [youthful] experience was typical, and I think it was, people turn to science fiction for a blend of two feelings — fantasy, the roller-coaster shock of fantasy — and reality, the instinctive feel of reality — the feeling that this might be true. ...

[Robert A.] Heinlein's identification with his viewpoint character [in Starship Troopers] is so absolute, and his attention to detail so careful, that he shows you one picture, with everything fitting together, and you have to believe it, at least for a moment, just as you have to believe a photograph.

With Heinlein, unique among present-day science fiction writers, you feel that what he writes about might very easily be possible, simply because the man knows so much and writes so carefully. But please notice that you can have this feeling about something that actually is completely impossible. ...

I've quoted ... examples to try to show that the quality I'm talking about can be present in fiction all the way from realism to the purest fantasy. The best stories in Unknown had it, because those writers were able to convince you that the horrors they wrote about could be real, that they weren't just conventional sprites and goblins. ... You can't do it by taking your subject lightly, by kidding it, by being cute, by writing just for kicks or for money. You can't do it if you start out by assuming that what you're writing about is not to be taken seriously. ...

I want to call your attention to Heinlein's declaration, in the Advent: Publishers book, The Science Fiction Novel, that s-f is a branch of realistic fiction. It would be nice if we could try harder to earn that label.

Damon Knight
"Good Science Fiction — Where Is It?"
Guest of Honor Speech,
17th World Science Fiction Convention
Detroit, 6 September 1959

New Frontiers #3, August 1960
  

 
The dawn of literature ... was bathed in the twilight of mysticism and mythology. ... But the earliest literati — priests, prophets, rhapsodes, bards — had less direct means to impress their audiences than their older colleagues, the masked and painted illusion-mongers. They had to 'dramatize' their tales, by techniques which we can only infer from hints.

The dramatization of an epic recital aims, like stage-craft from which it is derived, at creating, to some extent at least, the illusion that the events told are happening now and here. Perhaps the oldest of these techniques is the use of direct speech, to make the audience believe that it is listening not to the narrator but to the characters themselves; ...

There is hardly a novelist who had not wished at times that he were a histrion [stage-player], and could convey by direct voice, grimace, and gesture what his characters look like and feel. But writers have evolved other techniques to create the illusion that their characters are alive, and to make their audience fall in love with a heroine who exists only as printer's ink on paper. The real tears shed over Anna Karenina or Emma Bovary are the ultimate triumph of sympathetic magic.

Arthur Koestler
The Act of Creation  (1964)
 

  
It was subtle of God to learn Greek when he wanted to become an author — and not to learn it better.

Friedrich Nietzsche
Beyond Good and Evil, section 121  (1886)

And it was subtle of Nietzsche to leave it at that, even though the funny part depends upon knowing that God authored the New Testament in Koine or common Greek, not the high classical Greek of Sophocles and Aristophanes, Thucydides and Plato. Nietzsche's little joke suggests that by adopting common Greek for a non-Greek message, a shrewd Asian god took up again the old contest between Persians and Greeks, Asians and Europeans, a contest for the mind of European humanity — and that the Asian god won because he employed the common language, supplanting the high achievement of classical and post-classical Athens with a religion for the mob.

Laurence Lampert
"Nietzsche's Best Jokes", in
Nietzsche's Futures
edited by John Lippitt
  

  
Some ministers found the craze for Omar Khayyam, which swept England and America in the 1870s and lasted well into the 1920s, far more dangerous [than pantheistic mysticism]. Though some erroneously read Khayyam's poems in a Sufi spirit, most recognized them as expressions of a philosophical hedonism and agnostic or even atheological bent of mind; the fact that churchgoing folk were forming clubs and societies around the reading and appreciation of Khayyam's poetry spurred the clergy to action.

Whatever the dangers of alien and non-Christian modes of spirituality may have been, at least, as spiritual modes, they shared the assumption of God, which an increasing number of Westerners, as a result of higher criticism or secular philosophies, alarmingly did not. If Persian poetry appealed to Western audiences, as it clearly did, why not replace the epicurean and despairing Khayyam with Rumi, for whom the universe was theosemic, everything a sign pointing toward God?

Franklin D. Lewis
Rumi:
Past and Present, East and West;
The Life, Teaching, and Poetry of Jalal Al-Din Rumi  (2000)
  

 
If they [recent immigrants to America] look back through this history to trace their connection with those days [of the American Revolution] by blood, they find they have none, they cannot carry themselves back into that glorious epoch and make themselves feel that they are part of us, but when they look through that old Declaration of Independence they find that those old men say that

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,"

and then they feel that that moral sentiment taught in that day evidences their relation to those men, that it is the father of all moral principle in them, and that they have a right to claim it as though they were blood of the blood, and flesh of the flesh of the men who wrote the Declaration, and so they are.

That is the electric cord in that Declaration that links the hearts of patriotic and liberty-loving men together, that will link those patriotic hearts as long as the love of freedom exists in the minds of men throughout the world.

Abraham Lincoln
Speech on the Dred Scott Decision, etc.
Chicago, Illinois; 10 July 1858
Speeches and Writings 1832-1858
 

  
What is striking is that no one in Paris [in 1936-1938] seems to have taken it as even an outlying possibility that Hitler might make decisions without paying much attention to any of his advisers, and that he did not simply seek an international order in which Germany had a larger role, but, in fact, wanted a war.

Nor did anyone around Daladier suggest that Hitler's assessments of France and other nations might be based less on their diplomatic maneuvers and their apparent military capabilities than on his impressions of their leaders and of public opinion.

Some of them must have sampled Mein Kampf. But, like officials in Germany, they did not take the book to be a basis even for speculation about the premises that might govern Hitler's decisions. That was an understandable mistake, but nevertheless a mistake.

Ernest R. May
Strange Victory:
Hitler's Conquest of France  (2000)
  

  
What has kept England on its feet during the past year? In part, no doubt, some vague idea about a better future, but chiefly the atavistic emotion of patriotism, the ingrained feeling of the English-speaking peoples that they are superior to foreigners.

For the last twenty years the main object of English left-wing intellectuals has been to break this feeling down, and if they had succeeded, we might be watching the S.S. men patrolling the London streets at this moment.

George Orwell
"Wells, Hitler and the World State", Horizon, August 1941
Essays
  

  
[American newscast, year 2140]

On the world scene: ...

The results of last week's election in Russia are being challenged by twelve of the fourteen parties represented on the ballot; ...

The Central Diplomatic Council of the Reunited Nations has just announced, for the hundred and seventy-eighth time, that the Arab-Israel dispute has been finally, definitely and satisfactorily settled. ...

Which brings us to the local scene. On my way to the studio this morning, I stopped at City Hall, and found our genial Chief of Police Delaney, "Irish" Delaney to most of us, hard at work with a portable disintegrator, getting rid of record disks and recording tapes of old and long-settled cases. ...

H. Beam Piper & John J. McGuire
Null-ABC, Astounding Science Fiction, February & March 1953
also as Crisis in 2140
  

 
Speaker's Room, Washington, D.C.
28 February, 1890

My dear Mr. Caruth: —

I shall not accept the invitation tendered me by the Blue Grass Club. The reason is very simple. I notice that Jay F. Durham is President. Now Jay F. Durham assured me during the late "disturbances" that if they had me in Kentucky they would kill me. Knowing the said Durham to be a journalist, his declarations to me import absolute verity. I do not wish to be killed, especially in Kentucky where such an event is too common to attract attention. For a good man to die anywhere is of course gain; but I think I can make more by dying later and elsewhere.

Yours truly,
T. B. Reed.

Samuel W. McCall
Thomas Brackett Reed
  

 
[Rome. The Forum.]

Antony:

I come not, friends, to steal away your hearts.

I am no orator as Brutus is,
But, as you know me all, a plain blunt man
That love my friend; and that they know full well
That gave me public leave to speak of him.

For I have neither wit, nor words, nor worth,
Action, nor utterance, nor the power of speech,
To stir men's blood. I only speak right on.

I tell you that which you yourselves do know,
Show you sweet Caesar's wounds, poor poor dumb mouths,
And bid them speak for me.

                                            But were I Brutus,
And Brutus Antony, there were an Antony
Would ruffle up your spirits, and put a tongue
In every wound of Caesar that should move
The stones of Rome to rise and mutiny.

William Shakespeare
Julius Caesar, 3.2.207-221  (circa 1599)
  

  
Governments that rest only on a single idea or on a single, easy-to-define sentiment are perhaps not the best, but they are surely the strongest and the most lasting.

When one examines the Constitution of the United States, the most perfect of all known federal constitutions, one is frightened, on the contrary, by the quantity of diverse knowledge and by the discernment that it supposes in those whom it must rule. The government of the Union rests almost wholly on legal fictions. The Union is an ideal nation that exists so to speak only in minds, and whose extent and bounds intelligence alone discovers.

Alexis de Tocqueville
Democracy in America  (1835-1840)
edited & translated by Mansfield & Winthrop
  

  
The Common Speech, as the language of the Hobbits and their narratives, has inevitably been turned into modern English. ... Hobbits indeed spoke for the most part a rustic dialect, whereas in Gondor and Rohan a more antique language was used, more formal and more terse.

One point in the divergence may here be noted, since, though often important, it has proved impossible to represent. The Westron tongue made in the pronouns of the second person (and often also in those of the third) a distinction, independent of number, between 'familiar' and 'deferential' forms. It was, however, one of the peculiarities of Shire-usage that the deferential forms had gone out of colloquial use. They lingered only among the villagers, especially of the West-farthing, who used them as endearments.

J.R.R. Tolkien
Appendix F. II, "On Translation"
The Lord of the Rings (1954-1955)

Rhetoric or Else:
persuasive speech, or --?