Monster Media 1996 #14/Monster Media No. 14 (April 1996) (Monster Media, Inc.).ISO/netmail/yep13.zip/YX-11.ZIP/QUOTES

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I was the type who looked at discussions of What Is Truth only with a view
toward correcting the manuscript. If you were to quote "I am that I am," for
example, I thought that the fundamental problem was where to put the comma,
inside the quotation marks or outside.

                                       _Foucault's Pendulum_ by Umberto Eco
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"Oh, you're here to look at that Templar thing. Poor man. Listen, Jacopo, I
thought of a good one: Urban Planning for Gypsies"

"Great," Belbo said admiringly. "I have one, too: Aztec Equitation."

"Excellent. But would that go with Potio-section or the Adynata?"

"We'll have to see," Belbo said. He rummaged in his drawer and took out some
sheets of paper. "Potio-section. . ." He looked at me, saw my bewilderment.
"Potio-section, as everybody knows, of course, is the art of slicing soup.
No, no," he said to Diotallevi. "It's not the department, it's a subject,
like Mechanical Avunculogratulation or Pylocatabasis. They all under the
same heading of Tetrapyloctomy."

"What's tetra. . . ?" I asked.

"The art of splitting hairs four ways. This is the department of useless
techniques. Mechanical Avunculogratulation, for example, is how to build
machines for greeting uncles. We're not sure, though, if Pylocatabasis
belongs, since it's the art of being saved by a hair. Somehow that doesn't
seem completely useless."

"All right, gentlemen," I said, "I give up. What are you two talking about?"

"Well, Diotallevi and I are planning a reform in higher education. A School
of Comparative Irrelevance, where useless or impossible courses are given.
The school's main is to turn out scholars capable of endlessly increasing
the number of unnecessary subjects."

                                       _Foucault's Pendulum_ by Umberto Eco
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We were interrupted by a girl with a strawberry birthmark on her noes; she
had some papers in her hand and asked if we had signed the petition for the
imprisoned Argentinean comrades. Belbo signed without reading it. "They're
even worse of than I am," he said to Diotallevi, who was regarding him with
a bemused expression. "He can't sign," Belbo said to the girl. "He belongs
to a small Indian sect that forbids its members to write their own names.
Many of them are in jail because of government persecution." The girl looked
sympathetically at Diotallevi and passed the petition to me.

"And who are they?" I asked.

"What do you mean, who are they? Argentinean comrades."

"But what group do they belong to?"

"The Tacuarus, I think."

"The Tacuarus are fascists," I said. As if I knew one group from the other.

"Fascist pig," the girl hissed at me. She left.

                                       _Foucault's Pendulum_ by Umberto Eco
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"You're innocent, Casaubon. You ran away instead of throwing stones, you got
your degree, you didn't shoot anybody. Yet a few years ago I felt you, too,
were blackmailing me. Nothing personal, just generational cycles. And then
last year, when I saw the Pendulum, I understood everything."

"Everything?"

"Almost everything. You see, Casaubon, even the Pendulum is a false prophet.
You look at it, you think it's the only fixed point in the cosmos. but if
you detach it from the ceiling of the Conservatoire and hang it in a
brothel, it works just the same. And there are other pendulums: there's one
in New York, in the UN building, there's one in the science museum in San
Francisco, and God knows how many others. Wherever you put it, Foucault's
Pendulum swings from a motionless point while the earth rotates beneath it.
Every point of the universe is a fixed point: all you have to do is hang the
Pendulum from it."

"God is everywhere."

"In a sense, yes. That's why the Pendulum disturbs me. It promises the
infinite, but where to put the infinite is left to me. So it isn't enough to
worship the Pendulum; you still have to make a decision, you have to find
the best point for it. And yet. . ."

"And yet?"

"And yet. . .You're not taking me seriously by any chance, are you,
Casaubon? No, I can rest easy; we're not the type to take things seriously.
. . . Well, as I was saying, the feeling you have is that you've spent a
lifetime hanging the Pendulum in many paces, and it's never worked, but
there, in the Conservatoire, it works. . . . Do you think there are special
places in the universe? On the ceiling of this room, for example? No, nobody
would believe that. You need atmosphere. I don't know, maybe we're always
looking for the right place, maybe it's within reach, but we don't recognize
it. Maybe, to recognize it, we have to believe in it. Well, let's go see
Signor Garamond."

"To hang the Pendulum?"

"Ah, human folly! Now we have to be serious. If you are going to be paid,
the boss must see you, touch you, sniff you, and say you'll do. Come, let
the boss touch you; the boss's touch heals scrofula."

                                       _Foucault's Pendulum_ by Umberto Eco
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"Survival techniques are learned only in childhood, unless as an adult you
enlist in the Green Berets."

                             Umberto Eco, _Foucault's Pendulum_, Chapter 15
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But this lump does not absolve me, because I got it through heedlessness,
not though courage. I run my tongue over my lip and what do I do? I write.
But bad literature brings no redemption.

                             Umberto Eco, _Foucault's Pendulum_, Chapter 16
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"My answer: There exists a secret society with branches throughout the
world, and its plot is to spread the rumor that a universal plot exists."

                             Umberto Eco, _Foucault's Pendulum_, Chapter 53
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He could not be pinned down. I didn't know how to define it--hermetic
skepticism? liturgical cynicism?--this higher disbelief that lead to
acknowledge the dignity of all the superstitions he scorned.

                             Umberto Eco, _Foucault's Pendulum_, Chapter 61
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How clear everything becomes when you look from the darkness of a dungeon.

                             Umberto Eco, _Foucault's Pendulum_, Chapter 72
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[from Belbo's rough time-line]
1707    Birth of Claude-Louis de Saint Germain, if he was really born.

                             Umberto Eco, _Foucault's Pendulum_, Chapter 75
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"We'll have to consult Aglie. I doubt that even he knows all these
organizations."

"Want to bet? They're his daily bread. But we can put him to the test. Let's
add a sect that doesn't exist. Founded recently."

I recalled the curious question of De Angelis, whether I had ever heard of
the Tres. And I said: "Tres."

"What's that?" Belbo asked.

"If it's an acrostic, there has to be a subtext," Diotallevi said.
"Otherwise my rabbis would not have been able to use the notarikon. Lets
see... Templi Resurgentes Equites Synarchici. That suit you?"

We liked the name, and put it at the bottom of the list.

"With all these conventicles, inventing one more was no mean trick,"
Diotallevi said in a sudden fit of vanity.

                             Umberto Eco, _Foucault's Pendulum_, Chapter 75
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I believe that you can reach the point where there is no longer any
difference between developing the habit of pretending to believe and
developing the habit of believing.

                             Umberto Eco, _Foucault's Pendulum_, Chapter 87
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I was becoming addicted, Diotallevi was becoming corrupted, Belbo was
becoming converted. But all of us were slowly losing that intellectual light
that allows you always to tell the similar from the identical, the
metaphorical from the real.

                             Umberto Eco, _Foucault's Pendulum_, Chapter 87
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"Jacopo, while I could still read, during these past months, I read
dictionaries, I studied histories of words, to understand what was happening
in my body. I studied like a rabbi. Have you ever reflected that the
linguistic term `metathesis' is similar to the oncological term
`metastasis'? What is the metathesis? Instead of `clasp' one says `claps.'
Instead of `beloved' one says `bevoled.' It's the temurah. The dictionary
says that metathesis means the transposition or interchange, while
metastasis indicates the change and shifting. How stupid dictionaries are!
The root is the same. Either it's the verb metatithemi or the verb
methistemi. Metatithemi means I interpose, I shift, I transfer, I
substitute, I abrogate a law, I change a meaning. And methistemi? It's the
same thing: I move, I transform, I transpose, I switch cliches, I take leave
of my senses. And as we sought secret meanings beyond the letter, we all took
leave of our senses. And so did my cells, obediently, dutifully. That's why
I'm dying, Jacopo, and you know it."

                            Umberto Eco, _Foucault's Pendulum_, Chapter 110
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I carried with me a single image, the hieroglyph traced in the choir by
Belbo's corpse. Was it that symbol? To what other symbol did it correspond?
I couldn't figure it out. I know now it was a law of physics, but this
knowledge only makes the phenomenon more symbolic. Here, now, in Belbo's
country house, among his many notes, I found a letter from someone who,
replying to a question of his, told him how a pendulum works, and how it
would behave if a second weight were hung elsewhere along the length of
it's wire. So belbo--God knows for how long--had been thinking of the
Pendulum as both a Sinai and a Calvary. He hadn't died as the victim of a
Plan of recent manufacture; he had prepared his death much earlier, in his
imagination, unaware that his imagination, more creative than he, was
planning the reality of that death.

                            Umberto Eco, _Foucault's Pendulum_, Chapter 114
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"Whoever out of ingenuity, submission, conversion, calculation, or bad faith
has been initiated into any lodge, college, priory, chapter, or order that
illicitly refers to obedience to the Unknown Superiors or to the Masters of
the World, must this night abjure that initiation and implore total
restoration in spirit and body to the one and true observance, the Tres,
Templi Resurgentes Equites Synarchici, the triune and trinosophic mystical
and most secret order of the Synarchic Knights of Templar Rebirth!"

                            Umberto Eco, _Foucault's Pendulum_, Chapter 113
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Once upon a time there were mass media, and they were wicked, of course, and
there was a guilty party. Then there were the viruous voices that accused
the criminals. And Art (ah, what luck!) offered alternatives, for those who
were not prisoners to the mass media.

Well, it's all over. We have to start again from the beginning, asking one
another what's going on.

 Umberto Eco, _Travels in Hyper Reality_, "The Multiplication of the Media"
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Born as the raising to the nth power of that initial (and rational) waste
that is sports recreation, sports chatter is the glorification of Waste, and
therefore the maximum point of Consumption. On it and in it the consumer
civilization man actually conscumes himself (and every posibility of
thematizing and judging the enforced consumption to which his is invited and
subjected).

                  Umberto Eco, _Travels in Hyper Reality_, "Sports Chatter"
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I wrote a novel because I had a yen to do it. I believe this is sufficient
reason to set out to tell a story.

                    Umberto Eco, _Postscript to the Name of the Rose_, p.13
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This has nothing to do with realism (even if it explains _also_ realism). A
completely real world can be constructed, in which asses fly and princesses
are restored to life by a kiss, but that world, purely possible and
unrealistic, must exist according to structures defined at the outset (we
have to know whether it is a world where a princess can be restored to life
only by the kiss of a prince, or also by that of a witch, and whether the
princess's kiss tranforms only frogs into princes or also, for example,
armadillos)."

                    Umberto Eco, _Postscript to the Name of the Rose_, p.26
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What model reader did I want as i was writing? An accomplice, to be sure,
one who would play my game.

                    Umberto Eco, _Postscript to the Name of the Rose_, p.50
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[Speculating thoughts after an interview with A. A. Milne]

The main point was that Mr. Milne took his writing very seriously, "even
though I was taking it into the nursery," as he put it. There was no
question of tossing off something that was good enough for the kiddies. He
was writing first to please and satisfy himself. After that he wanted to
please his wife. He depended utterly upon doing this. Without her
encouragement, her delight and her laughter he couldn't have gone on. With
it who cared what the critics wrote or how few copies Methuens sold? Then he
hoped to please his boy. This came third, not first, as so many people
supposed.

                    _The Enchanted Places_, by Christopher Milne, Chapter 1
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I am very often asked if I can remember when the stories were first read to
me. Who read them? And where? And what did I think of them? Oddly, I can
remember virtually nothing. One incident only survives.

My mother and I were in the drawing-room at Cotchford. The door opened and
my father came in. "Have you finished it?" "I have." "May we hear it?" My
father settled himself in his chair. "Well," he said, "we've had a story
about the snow and one about the rain, and one about the mist. So I thought
we ought to have one about the wind. And here it is.

"It's called:

                "IN WHICH PIGLET DOES A VERY GRAND THING

"Half way between Pooh's house and Piglet's house was a Thoughtful Spot..."

My mother and I, side by side on the sofa, settled ourselves comfortably,
happily, excitedly, to listen.

                   _The Enchanted Places_, by Christopher Milne, Chapter 10
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[Christopher Robin Milne recalling a childhood experience]

The other early addition to the family was Jessica, a donkey, and no
connection whatever with Eeyore, except that she lived in a field a little
like Eeyore's. It was Nanny's job, helped by Tasker and slightly helped by
me, to catch her and saddle her. Sometimes this was easy, sometimes not. Our
first outing was a cautious trip up the lane where, with luck, nothing too
disastrous could happen. And I can still recall the horrifying moment when
Jessica stopped and her legs began to sag. I was snatched from her back and
Nanny and I watched, appalled, as she crumpled up on the ground, then rolled
on to her side, then on to her back, then kicked up her legs in the air and
let out an ear-splitting bellow, then rolled--still bellowing--from side to
side, then scrambled to her feet and waited for me to remount. But Nanny
said: "I don't think you'd better, dear." And I didn't think I'd better,
either. And we all three walked home.

On subsequent trips we knew what to expect, that was just one of the things
Jessica liked doing, and so, when her legs started sagging, I got off and
waited until it was all over.

                   _The Enchanted Places_, by Christopher Milne, Chapter 11
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[Another childhood experience of Christopher Milne]

The other reporter met me at Cotchford on the path that, running through the
kitchen garden, led from the house to the lane. She was coming down it,
having just arrived and for some reason using what was really the
tradesmen's entrance. I was going up it on my way to find Hannah. She
stopped in the middle of the path so that I couldn't get by, smiled and said
"Good morning." Then she produced a watch that she had been carrying, told
me that she had found it lying on the ground, and asked if it were mine. I
looked at it. It was a cheap, toy watch, the sort of thing that might have
come out of a cracker, now rather dirty and battered. I answered and went on
my way, and she continued down towards the house and towards the interview
she had arranged with my father. [A. A. Milne, author of Winnie-the-Pooh.]

Some weeks later we saw the magazine in which her interview appeared. It was
a longish one, but only the first paragraph was of any interest to me. In it
she described our meeting on the path and the question she had put. And she
gave my answer. And her words seared themselves indelibly into my memory.
Was it my watch? "Yes, it is," she made me reply. "It's a good sort of watch
but it doesn't quite go." I read this paragraph with amazement, indignation
and rage. It was one of those moments, familiar to all of us, when illusion
is shattered. There had been the occasion when, as we walked to school, Anne
had destroyed my belief in Father Christmas. Now came the destruction of my
faith that what people wrote about you was true. From that day on I never
managed to feel quite the same about journalists: they had lost my
confidence. And if now I am less polite, less co-operative towards them than
they might wish, here is where it all started, here with this miserable
woman, who made me quote one of my father's poems ("The Engineer", which, in
any case, is not really about me at all), when what I actually said was:
"No. It probably belongs to our gardener's daughter."

                   _The Enchanted Places_, by Christopher Milne, Chapter 13
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Most of us have small, sad places somewhere in our hearts and my father was
no exception. Sometimes we let our feelings escape in bursts of anger.
Sometimes we make long, dismal faces. My father did neither. He felt deeply
but he kept his feelings to himself. Or rather, being a writer, he let them
escape in his writing. But even here he disguised them, unable even in
fiction to allow himself to take himself too seriously.

                   _The Enchanted Places_, by Christopher Milne, Chapter 19
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[Speaking about A. A. Milne, author of Winnie-the-Pooh]

But if my father could stand up to schoolmasters and if he inherited some of
his own father's gifts as a teacher, he himself could never have become one.
He could teach and loved teaching. He could radiate enthusiasm, but he could
never impose discipline. He could never have taught a dull subject to a dull
boy, never have said: "Do this because I say so." Enthusiasm spread
knowledge sideways, among equals. Discipline forced it downwards from above.
My father's relationships were always between equals, however old or young,
distinguished or undistinguished the other person. Once, when I was quite
little, he came up to the nursery while I was having my lunch. And while he
was talking I paused between mouthfuls, resting my hands on the table, knife
and fork pointing upwards. "You oughtn't really to sit like that," he said,
gently. "Why not?" I asked, surprised. "Well. . ." He hunted around for a
reason he could give. Because it's considered bad manners? Because you
mustn't? Because. . ."Well," he said, looking in the direction my fork was
pointing, "Suppose somebody suddenly fell through the ceiling. They might
land on your fork and that would be very painful." "I see," I said, though I
didn't really. It seemed such an unlikely thing to happen, such a funny
reason for holding your knife and fork flat when you were not using them. .
.But funny reason or not, it seems I have remembered it. In the same sort of
way I learned about the nesting habits of starlings. I had been given a bird
book for Easter (Easter 1934: I still have the book) and with its help I had
made my first discovery. "There's a blackbird's nest in the hole under the
tiles just outside the drawing-room window," I announced proudly. "I've just
seen the blackbird fly in". "I think it's probably really a starling," said
my father. "No, it's a blackbird," I said firmly, hating to be wrong, hating
being corrected. "Well," said my father, realizing how I felt but at the
same time unable to allow an inaccuracy to get away with it, "Perhaps it's a
blackbird visiting a starling." A blackbird visiting a starling. Someone
falling through the ceiling. He could never bear to be dogmatic, never bring
himself to say (in effect): This is so because I say it is, and I am older
than you and must know better. How much easier, how much nicer to escape
into the world of fantasy in which he felt himself so happily at home.

                   _The Enchanted Places_, by Christopher Milne, Chapter 18
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Christopher Robin was at home by this time, because it was afternoon, and he
was so glad to see them that they stayed there until very nearly tea-time,
and then they had a Very Nearly tea, which is one you forget about
afterwards, and hurried on to Pooh Corner, so as to see Eeyore before it was
too late to have a Proper Tea with Owl.

"Hallo, Eeyore," they called out cheerfully.

"Ah!" said Eeyore, "Lost your way?"

"We just came to see you," said Piglet. "And to see how your house was.
Look, Pooh, it's still standing!"

"I know," said Eeyore. "Very odd. Somebody ought to have come down and
pushed it over."

"We wondered whether the wind would blow it down," said Pooh.

"Ah, that's why nobody's bothered, I suppose. I thought perhaps they'd
forgotten."

"Well, we're very glad to see you, Eeyore, and now we're going on to see
Owl."

"That's right. You'll like Owl. He flew past a day or two ago and noticed
me. He didn't actually say anything, mind you, but he knew it was me. Very
friendly of him. Encouraging."

Pooh and Piglet shuffled about a little and said, "Well, good-bye, Eeyore"
as lingeringly as they could, but they had a long way to go, and wanted to
be getting on.

"Good-bye," said Eeyore. "Mind you don't get blown away, little Piglet.
You'd be missed. People would say `Where's little Piglet been blown
to?'--really wanting to know. Well, good-bye. And thank you for happening to
pass me."

                   _The House on Pooh Corner_, by A. A. Milne, chapter viii
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Plainly, such and approach does not exclude other ways of trying to
comprehend the world. Someone committed to it (as I am) can consistently
believe (as I do) that we learn much more of human interest about how people
think and feel and act by reading novels or studying history than from all of
naturalistic psychology, and perhaps always will; similarly, the arts my
offer appreciation of the heavens to which astrophysics cannot aspire.

                                 _Language and Thought_, Noam Chomsky, p.42
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In fact, the belief that neurophysiology is even relevant to the functioning
of the mind is just hypothesis. Who knows if we're looking at the right
aspects of the brain at all. Maybe there are other aspects of the brain that
nobody has even dreamt of looking at yet. That's often happened in the
history of science. When people say that the mental is the
neurophysiological at a higher level, they're being radically unscientific.
We know a lot about the mental from a scientific point of view. We have
explanatory theories that account for a lot of things. The belief that
neurophysiology is implicated in these things _could_ be true, but we have
every little evidence for it. So, it's just a kind of hope; look around and
you see neurons; maybe they're implicated.

                                 _Language and Thought_, Noam Chomsky, p.85
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"How can a man follow the Way or the Great Game when he is eternally
pestered by women? There was that girl at the Akrola by the Ford; and there
was the scullion's wife behind the dovecott--not counting the others--and
now comes this one! When I was a child it was well enough, but now I am a
man and they will not regard me as a man. Walnuts indeed! Ho! Ho! It is
almonds in the Plains!"

                                            _Kim_, Rudyard Kipling, chap.14
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"I have seen something of this world," she said over the trays, "and there
are but two sorts of women in it--those who take the strength out of a man,
and those who put it back. Once I was that one, and now I am this."

                                            _Kim_, Rudyard Kipling, chap.15
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Kitty got up to fetch a table, and, as she passed, her eyes met Levin's. She
felt for him with her whole heart, the more because she was pitying him for
a suffering of which she was herself the cause. "If you can forgive me,
forgive me," said her eyes, "I am so happy."

"I hate them all, and you, and myself," his eyes responded, and he took up
his hat. But he was not destined to escape. just as they were arranging
themselves round the table, and Levin was on the point of retiring, the old
Prince came in, and, after greeting the ladies, addressed Levin.

                             _Anna Karenina_, Leo Tolstoy, pt. I, chap. XIV
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In the early summer of 1846 he moved his family to a cottage in Fordham,
which was then far out in the country. He was ill and Virginia was dying,
so that he was in no condition to do much work. As a result, their meagre
income vanished; when winter game they even lacked money to buy fuel. A
friend who visited the cottage wrote a description of Virginia's plight:

  There was no clothing on the bed. . .but a snow white spread and sheets.
  The weather was cold, and the sick lady had the dreadful chills that
  accompany the hectic fever of consumption. She lay on the straw bed,
  wrapped in her husband's great-coat, with a large tortoise-shell cat on
  her bosom. The wonderful cat seemed conscious of her great usefulness.
  The coat and the cat were the sufferer's only means of warmth. . .

A public appeal for funds was made in the newspapers--an act which Poe, of
course, resented. But Virginia was beyond all human aid. She died on
January 30, 1847, and her death marked the end of the sanest period in her
husband's life. He plunged into the writing of a book-length mystical and
pseudo-scientific work entitled _Eureka_, in which he set forth his
theories of the universe. He intended it as a prose poem, and as such is
should be judged, rather than as a scientific explanation of matters
beyond it's author's ken.

                   _The Portable Poe_, Philip Van Doren Stern, Introduction
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Ye wake in a corner and stay there hoping yer body will disappear, the
thoughts smothering ye; these thoughts; but ye want to remember and face up
to things, just something keeps ye from doing it, why can't ye no do it; the
words filling yer head: then the other words; there's something wrong;
there's something far far wrong; ye're no a good man, ye're just no a good
man. Edging back into awareness, of where ye are: here, slumped in this
corner, with these thoughts filling ye. And oh christ his back was sore;
stiff, and the head pounding. He shivered and hunched up his shoulders, shut
his eyes, rubbed into the corners with his fingertips; seeing all kinds of
spots and lights. Where in the name of fuck. . .

                          _How Late It Was, How Late_, James Kelman, page 1
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"Oh, it's just a rather personal thing."

"Of course, but clearly it is an important personal thing. I should like to
hear about it."

"It is hard to describe."

"Is it so complex, then?"

"I wouldn't say it was complex, but I find it rather embarrassing."

"Why?"

"To someone else it would probably seem to be a kind of game."

"A game you play by yourself?"

"You might call it that, but it misrepresents what I do and the consequences
of what I do."

"Then you must be sure I do not misunderstand. Is this game a kind of
fantasy?"

"No, no; it is very serious."

"All real fantasy is serious. Only faked fantasy is not serious. That is why
it is so wrong to impose faked fantasy on children. . . ."

                             _The Manticore_, Robertson Davies. Pt.1, Ch. 7
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"You played it with great seriousness. And it is not such an uncommon game.
Do you know Ibsen's poem--

                To live it to do battle with trolls
                        in the vaults of the heart and brain.
                To write: that is to sit
                        in judgement over one's self."

                             _The Manticore_, Robertson Davies. Pt.1, Ch. 7
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Myself: But wasn't the decision a right one? Am I not here? What more could
Feeling have achieved than was brought about by Reason?

                             _The Manticore_, Robertson Davies. Pt.2, Ch. 2
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But when mother died, Caroline was twelve, and in that queer time between
childhood and nubile girlhood, when some girls seem to be wise without
experience, and perhaps more clear-headed then they will be again until
after their menopause.

                             _The Manticore_, Robertson Davies. Pt.2, Ch. 4
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He gave me this advice one time: Never marry your childhood sweetheart, he
said; the reasons that make you choose her will all turn into reasons why
you should have rejected her.

                             _The Manticore_, Robertson Davies. Pt.2, Ch. 4
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No need to go into details about what I said to Judy? I am no poet, and I
suppose what I said was very much what everybody always says, and although
I remember her as speaking golden words, I cannot recall precisely anything
she said. If love is to be watched and listened to without embarrassment, it
must be transmuted into art, and I don't know how to do that, and it is not
what I have come to Zürich to learn.

                             _The Manticore_, Robertson Davies. Pt.2, Ch. 6
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The lock needed rather more than spitting on, but Bill had brought some
tools, which surprised and rather shocked us. We got in after a few minutes.
The house was even more fussy inside than the outside had promised. It was a
holiday place, but everything about it suggested elderly people.

"The first move in a job like this," Bill said, "is to see if they've got
any booze."

They had none, and this made them enemies, in Bill's eyes. They must have
hidden it, which was sneaky and deserved punishment. He began to turn out
cupboards and storage places, pulling everything onto the floor. We others
didn't want to seem poor-spirited, so we kicked it around a little. Our lack
of zeal angered the leader.

"You make me want to puke!" he shouted and grabbed a mirror from the wall.
It was round, and had a frame made of that plaster stuff twisted into
flowers that used to be called barbola. He lifted it high above his head,
and smashed it down on the back of a chair. Shattered glass flew everywhere.

"Hey, look out!" shouted Jerry. "You'll kill somebody."

"I'll kill you all," yelled Bill, and swore for three or four minutes,
calling us every dirty name he could think of for being so chicken-hearted.
When people talk about "leadership quality" I often think of Bill Unsworth;
he had it. And like many people who have it, he could make you do things you
didn't want to do by a kind of cunning urgency. We were ashamed before him.
Here he was, a bold adventurer, who had put himself out to include
us--lily-livered wretches--in a daring, dangerous, highly illegal exploit,
and all we could do was worry about being hurt! We plucked up our spirits
and swore and shouted filthy words, and set to work to wreck the house.

Our appetite for destruction grew with feeding. I started gingerly, pulling
some books out of a case, but soon was tearing out pages by the handfuls and
throwing them around. Jerry got a knife and ripped the stuffing out of the
mattresses. He threw feathers from the sofa cushions. McQuilly, driven by
some dark Scottish urge, found a crowbar and reduced wooden things to
splinters. And Bill was like a fury, smashing, overturning, and tearing. But
I noticed he kept back some things and put them in a neat heap on the
dining-room table, which he forbade us to break. They were photographs.

The old people must have had a large family, and there were pictures of
young people and wedding groups and what were clearly grandchildren
everywhere. When at last we had done as much damage as we could, the pile on
the table was a large one.

"Now for the finishing touch," said Bill. "And this is going to be all
mine."

He jumped up on the table, stripped down his trousers, and squatted over the
photographs. Clearly he meant to defecate on them, but such things cannot
always be commanded, and so for several minutes we stood and stared at him
as he grunted and swore and strained and at last managed what he wanted,
right on the family photographs.

How long it took I cannot tell, but they were crucial moments in my life.
For as he struggled, red-faced and pop-eyed, and as he appeared at last with
a great stool dangling from his apelike rump, I regained my senses and said
to myself, not "What am I doing here?" but "Why is he doing that? The
destruction was simply a prelude to  this. It is a dirty animal act of
defiance and protest against--well, against what? He doesn't even know who
these people are. There is no spite in him against individuals who have
injured him. Is he protesting against order, against property, against
privacy? No; there is nothing intellectual, nothing rooted in
principle--even the principle of anarchy--in what he is doing. So far as I
can judged--and I must remember that I am his accomplice in all but this,
his final outrage--he is simply being as evil as his strong will and
deficient imagination will permit. He is possessed, and what possesses him
is Evil."

I was startled out of my reflection by Bill shouting for something with
which to wipe himself.

                             _The Manticore_, Robertson Davies. Pt.2, Ch. 7
---------------------------------------------------------------------------

"There comes a time when one must be strong with rationalists, for they can
reduce anything whatever to dust, if they happen not to like the look of it,
or it threatens their deep-buried negativism. I mean of course rationalists
like you, who take some little provincial world of their own as the whole of
the universe and the seat of all knowledge."

                             _The Manticore_, Robertson Davies. Pt.2, Ch. 8
---------------------------------------------------------------------------

He became an unimaginative woman's creation. Delilah had shorn his locks and
assured him he looked much neater and cooler without them. He gave her his
soul, and she transformed it into a cabbage.

                             _The Manticore_, Robertson Davies. Pt.2, Ch.13
---------------------------------------------------------------------------

If I know this, I ought to be able to escape the stupider kinds of illusion.
The absolute nature of things is independent of my senses (which are all I
have to perceive with), and what I perceive is an image of my own psyche.

                             _The Manticore_, Robertson Davies. Pt.3, Ch. 1
---------------------------------------------------------------------------

What had Pledger-Brown said? "Too bad, Davey; he wanted blood and all we
could offer was guts."

                             _The Manticore_, Robertson Davies. Pt.3, Ch. 1
---------------------------------------------------------------------------

"The only trouble was, I wasn't with a group of my peers. Who are my peers?
[. . .] And there I was with a dismal coven of repentant soaks--a car
salesman who had fallen from the creed of the Kiwanis, an Jewish woman whose
family misunderstood her attempts to put them straight on everything, a
couple of schoolteachers who can't ever have taught anything except Civics,
and some business men whose god was Mammon, and a truck-driver who was
included, I gather, to keep our eyes on the road and our discussions hitched
to reality. Whose reality? Certainly not mine. So the imp of perversity
prompted meto make pretty patterns of our discussions together, and screw
the poor boozers up worse then they'd been screwed up before. For the first
time in years, I was having a really good time."

                                         _The Manticore_, Robertson Davies.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------

"I don't often have the luck to have a dream like this. It is new to me for
a nightmare to lead me to a lobster. It is commonly the other way."

                       _The Man Who Was Thursday_, G.K. Chesterton, Chap. 2
---------------------------------------------------------------------------

'People must believe what they can, and those who believe more must not be
hard upon those who believe less. I doubt if you would have believed it all
yourself if you hadn't seen some of it.'

                   _The Princess and the Goblin_, George MacDonald, Chap.22
---------------------------------------------------------------------------

'Then what _do_ you see?' asked Irene, who perceived at once that for her
not to believe him was at least as bad as for him not to believe her.

                   _The Princess and the Goblin_, George MacDonald, Chap.22
---------------------------------------------------------------------------

Answer me when I call to you,
  O my righteous God.
Give me relief from my distress;
  be merciful to me and hear my prayer.

How long, O men, will you turn my glory into shame?
  How long will you love delusions and seek false gods?
Know that the Lord has set apart the godly for himself;
  the Lord will hear when I call to him.

In your anger do not sin;
  When you are on your beds,
  search your hearts and be silent.

Offer the right sacrifices
  and trust in the Lord.

Many are asking, "Who can show us any good?"
  Let the light of your face shine upon us, O Lord.
You have filled my heart with greater joy
  than when their grain and new wine abound.
I will lie down and sleep in peace
  for you alone, O Lord,
  make me to dwell in safety.

                -David. (Psalm 4)
---------------------------------------------------------------------------

"You see, I do a little in this way myself," he explained; "here is my most
prized piece." He took from his pocket a snuffbox, which looked to be of
eighteenth-century workmanship. Inside the lid was an enamel picture of Leda
and the Swan, and when a knob was pushed to and fro the swan thrust itself
between Leda's legs, which jerked in mechanical ecstasy. A nasty toy, I
thought, but Urky doted on it. "We single gentlemen like to have these
things," he said. "What do you do, Darcourt? Of course we know that Hollier
has his beautiful Maria."

To my astonishment Hollier blushed, but said nothing. His beautiful Maria?
My Miss Theotoky, of New Testament Greek? I didn't like it at all.

                   _The Rebel Angels_, Robertson Davies, The New Aubrey (3)
---------------------------------------------------------------------------

His Lady sad to see his sore constraint,
  Cried out, "Now now Sir knight, shew what ye bee,
  Add faith unto your force, and be not faint:
  Strangle her, else she sure will strangle thee."
  That when he heard, in great perplexitie,
  His gall did grate for griefe and high distaine,
  And knitting all his force got one hand free,
  Wherewith he grypt her gorge with so great paine,
That soone to loose her wicked bands did her constraine.

                          _The Faerie Queene_, Edmond Spencer, Book 1, 1:19
---------------------------------------------------------------------------

The idea that his wedding band was some kind of talisman nauseated him like
the smell of attar.

                        _Lord Foul's Bane_, Stephen R. Donaldson, Chapter 6
---------------------------------------------------------------------------

Something in her expression made Covenant feel that he came from a very poor
world, where no one knew or cared about the healing of stoneware pots.

                        _Lord Foul's Bane_, Stephen R. Donaldson, Chapter 6
---------------------------------------------------------------------------

Melenkurion abatha! Binas mill Bana Nihoram khabaal! Melenkurion abatha!
Abatha Nimoram!

                       _Lord Foul's Bane_, Stephen R. Donaldson, Chapter 10
---------------------------------------------------------------------------

Covenant did not reply at once. He trembled also, and hand to clench himself
before he could say without a tremor, "Why? Why do you trust me?"

The Hirebrand's eyes gleamed as if he were on the verge of tears, but he was
smiling as he said, "You are a man who knows the value of beauty."

                       _Lord Foul's Bane_, Stephen R. Donaldson, Chapter 10
---------------------------------------------------------------------------

Gradually, the night stumbled as if stunned and wandering aimlessly into an
overcast day--limped through the wilderland of transition as though there
were no knowing where the waste of darkness ended and the ashes of light
began. The low clouds seemed full of grief--tense and uneasy with
accumulated woe--and yet affectless, unable to rain, as if the air clenched
itself too hard for tears. And through the dawn, Atiaran and Covenant moved
heavily, unevenly, like pieces of a broken lament.

                       _Lord Foul's Bane_, Stephen R. Donaldson, Chapter 11
---------------------------------------------------------------------------

In perfect unison, all the townspeople vomited gouts of blood onto the
pavement.

                       _Lord Foul's Bane_, Stephen R. Donaldson, Chapter 11
---------------------------------------------------------------------------

But then a bubbling tenor voice said kindly, "Do not fear. It is a dream."
The reassurance spread over him like a blanket. But he could not feel it
with his hands, and the ambulance kept on moving. Needing the blanket, he
clenched at the empty air until his knuckles were white with loneliness.

                       _Lord Foul's Bane_, Stephen R. Donaldson, Chapter 11
---------------------------------------------------------------------------

. . . . While the mighty sound lasted Prothall bowed his head in humility.

But when it was over, he threw back his head and flung his arms wide as if
baring his breast to a denunciation. "Ah, my friends!" he cried.
"Handservants, votaries of the Land--why have we so failed to comprehend
Kevin's Lore? Which of us has in any way advanced the knowledge of our
predecessors? We hold the First Ward in our hands--we read the script, and
in much we understand the words--and yet we do not penetrate the secrets.
Some failure in us, some false inflection, some mistaken action, some base
alloy in our intention, prevents. I do not doubt that our purpose is
pure--it is High Lord Kevin's purpose--and before him Loric's and Damelon's
and Heartthews's--but wiser, for we will never lift our hands against the
Land in mad despair. But what then? Where are we wrong, that we cannot grasp
what is given to us?"

For a moment after his voice faltered and fell, the sanctuary was silent,
and the voice throbbed like weeping, as if in his words the people
recognized themselves, recognized the failure he described as their own.
But then a new voice arose. Saltheart Foamfollower said boldly, "My Lord,
we have not reached our end. True, the work of our lifetime has been to
comprehend and consolidate the gains of our forebearers. But our labour will
open the doors of the future. Our children and their children will gain
because we have not lost heart, for faith and courage are the greatest gift
that we can give to our descendants. And the Land holds mysteries of which
we know nothing--mysteries of hope as well as of peril. Be of good heart,
Rockbrothers. Your faith is precious above all things."

                       _Lord Foul's Bane_, Stephen R. Donaldson, Chapter 13
---------------------------------------------------------------------------

Pacing back and forth now on the spur of his conflicting needs, Covenant
growled, "Baradakas said just about the same thing. By hell! You people
terrify me. When I try to be responsible, you pressure me--and when I
collapse you-- You're not asking the right questions. You don't have the
vaguest notion of what a leper is, and it doesn't even occur to you to
inquire. _That's_ why Foul chose me for this. Because I can't-- Damnation!
Why don't you ask me about where I come from? I've got to tell you. The
world I come from doesn't allow anyone to live except on its own terms.
Those terms--those terms contradict yours."

"What are its terms?" the High Lord asked carefully.

"That your world is a dream."

                       _Lord Foul's Bane_, Stephen R. Donaldson, Chapter 14
---------------------------------------------------------------------------

He lay in darkness, like a sacrifice; he could hear the teeth of his leprosy
devouring his flesh. There was a smell of contempt around him, insisting on
his impotence. But his lips were bowed in a placid smile, a look of
fondness, as if he had come at last to approve his disintegration.

                       _Lord Foul's Bane_, Stephen R. Donaldson, Chapter 16
---------------------------------------------------------------------------

"It was as though the whole world was thrown back six or seven hundred years
without having the organizations those ancient peoples had." He paused,
breathing heavily. "Of course, there were many survivors who understood
small skills. Some of them would repair small engines, but they couldn't
manufacture them. They couldn't refine fuels. Fortunately a good many
doctors who had practiced in small towns and in the country survived. They
had their medical books, but they could no longer get the drugs they needed.
Anyway, medicine survived after a fashion. Then gradually little patterns of
order began to appear and another Bureaucracy came into being."

                            _Voices in Time_, Hugh MacLennan, Part 1, Ch. 2
---------------------------------------------------------------------------

"I met this Welsh girl. Her father had been a miner, but she had education
and sang like an angel. The only job she wanted was to teach small children.
Her name was Valerie." He paused, thinking back. "After we'd lived together
for a week she said, 'Let's go to India'--just like that. We hadn't anything
you could call money but we didn't care. We'd be going to warm climates and
we'd sleep in bedrolls on the ground if there were no youth hostels. Maybe
we'd be able to get a few short-term jobs. We didn't, of course, but we did
get to India. Valerie was so frank and open about everything. 'You won't
mind if I love other boys besides you?' she said. 'And of course you must
love other girls besides me.' Is it like that now?"

Gervais looked at him almost with pity. "No," he said.

"She was so graceful, André. She was really a joyous girl who lived for
every moment. Waking up with her in the mornings was always exciting. Once
in the foothills of the mountains I woke up and she wasn't there and I
nearly went crazy. I ran around in all directions calling her name and all I
heard was my own voice echoed back from the cliffs. Finally I heard her call
to me and guess where I found her. There was a stream pouring down from a
bowl in the rocks where the water was white with foam and there was Valerie
stark naked in the pool. This was the highest mountain range in the world.
The water came down from the high glaciers to the foothills where the
climate was tropical. Pure cold water and blazing sunshine. Is this boring
you?"

André just looked at him.

"This was a lyric," the old man went on. "She had golden hair and blue eyes
and I'll never forget how she laughed. But the strange thing was that I
never really knew her. When we returned to Europe she said good-bye to me
and I found out she could be quite hard. I'd never suspected that. She told
me to think of it as a lovely holiday but now it was over and she was going
to marry someone else. He was an older man with a lot of money. I was
devastated, but I knew I had no right to complain."

                            _Voices in Time_, Hugh MacLennan, Part 1, Ch. 6
---------------------------------------------------------------------------

Like a young animal he sensed the throb of greed in the house on nights like
these, which was not a greed for money but for life itself, the men for the
women and the women for the men, for some of these men were going to be
killed, others had already missed death or had return wounded, and some of
them had already killed other men. He grew accustomed to watching these
strangers with the candid eyes of a lonely, resentful child. He also grew
accustomed to those heavy footsteps, often shambling footsteps, mounting the
stairs to to the second floor where the bathrooms and lavatories were,
mounting even to the top floor where his own room was. Once he heard a
different kind of noise and when the door opened a crack, there was a big
military officer wrestling with a tall, thin woman who had a long, thin nose
and a desperate face. Both of them were panting and the woman was holding
him hard and twisting her hips against his, then the woman pulled away and
whispered in a kind of gasp, "No, Harry--no--we can't do it here." After
staring at each other with heavy breathing, both of them went back down the
stairs without noticing a child's face in the crack of the door.

                            _Voices in Time_, Hugh MacLennan, Part 2, Ch. 1
---------------------------------------------------------------------------

They met in his grandfather's room where both men shook hands silently and
were unnaturally dignified with each other. The old man said it would be
pleasant to drive north through the Adirondacks on a day like this and his
father agreed that it would be very pleasant. The stiff embarrassment of
the two older men with each other was devastating to the little boy. FInally
is grandfather patted his head, wished him luck, and said it was time for
him to leave for the office.

"You may as well stay here, Greg," he added, "till your car is ready."

Timothy's eyes followed the straight back, the high shoulders, and the crisp
white hair out of the door and out of his life--a man, so he was to write
years later, the like of whom he was never to met again, "because he was the
only man I ever knew who could use words like honour, duty, and
responsibility without making me feel like throwing up."

                            _Voices in Time_, Hugh MacLennan, Part 2, Ch. 1
---------------------------------------------------------------------------

"Now, Dr. Anderson, you've been telling us how the world began and how
brilliant it was of all the scientists to be able to find it out." He paused
and deployed his most innocent smile. "But of course there were no
scientists around when the world began." Another pause, "Now I have a
question with which Science--I hope I'm not getting out of my league--may be
more humanly involved." Another pause. "How do you think the world will
end?"

                            _Voices in Time_, Hugh MacLennan, Part 2, Ch. 3
---------------------------------------------------------------------------

He sat down again. He wanted her body, even though there were plenty of
other bodies he could have. Which meant, I suppose, that he wanted her body
to want his. It would have been beneath his intellectual dignity to admit
that he also wanted her soul to like his own soul.

                            _Voices in Time_, Hugh MacLennan, Part 2, Ch. 5
---------------------------------------------------------------------------

...If Paul brought the first generation of Christians the useful skills of a
trained theologian, Origen was the first great philosopher to rethink the
new religion from first principles. As his philosophical enemy, the
anti-Christian Porphyry, summed it up, he 'introduced Greek ideas to foreign
fables'--that is, gave a barbarous eastern religion the intellectual
respectability of a philosophical defense. Origen was also a phenomenon. As
Eusebius put it admiringly, 'even the facts from his cradle are worth
mentioning'. Origen came from Alexandria, the second city of the empire and
then it's intellectual centre; his father's martyrdom left him an orphan at
seventeen with six younger brothers. He was a hard working prodigy, at
eighteen head of the Catechetical School, and already trained as a literary
scholar and teacher. But at this point, probably in 203, he became a
religious fanatic and remained one for the next fifty years. He gave up his
job and sold his books to concentrate on religion. he slept on the floor,
ate no meat, drank no wine, had only one coat and no shoes. He almost
certainly castrated himself, in obedience to the notorious text, Matthew
19:12, 'there are some who have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of
heaven's sake.' Origen's learning was massive and it was of a highly
original kind: he always went back to the sources and thought through the
whole process himself. This he learned Hebrew and, according to Eusebius,
'got into his possession the original writings extant among the Jews in the
actual Hebrew character'. These included the discovery of lost texts; in the
case of the psalms, Origen collected not only the four known texts but three
others unearthed, including 'one he found at Jericho in a jar'. The result
was an enormous tome, the _Hexapla_, which probably existed in only one
manuscript now lost, setting out the seven alternative texts in parallel
columns. He applied the same principles of original research to every aspect
of Christianity and sacred literature. He seems to have worked all day and
though most of the night, and was a compulsive writer. Even the hardy Jerome
later complained: 'Has anyone read everything Origen wrote?' His scriptural
commentaries were so vast that none has been transmitted in full. Some have
been lost, others survive as drastic paraphrases.

The effect of Origen's work was to create a new science, biblical theology,
whereby every sentence in the scriptures was systematically explored for
hidden meanings, different layers of meanings, allegory and so forth. And
from the elements of this vast scriptural erudition he constructed, in his
book, _First Principles_, a Christian philosophy from which it was possible
to interpret every aspect of the world. Hitherto, Christians had either
dismissed philosophy as irrelevant or pagan, or had simply appropriated
Plato and the other writers, categorized them as incipient Christians, and
fitted the Pauline superstructure on to their foundation. Origen waved aside
this tradition, dismissed the Greek philosophers as false and constructed a
new synthesis out of profane and sacred knowledge. Thus he offered the world
the first theory of knowledge conceived entirely from within Christian
assumptions....

                       _A History of Christianity_, Paul Johnston, Part One
---------------------------------------------------------------------------

How could the Christian Church, apparently quite willingly, accommodate this
weird megalomaniac [Constantine] in it's theocratic system? Was there a
conscious bargain? Which side benefited most form this unseemly marriage
between church and state? Or, to put it another way, did the empire
surrender to Christianity, or did Christianity prostitute itself to the
empire? It is characteristic of the complexities of early Christian history
that we cannot give a definite answer to this question.

           _A History of Christianity_, Paul Johnson, Part Two (AD 250-450)
---------------------------------------------------------------------------

Julian recognized that the strength of the orthodox Church rested to a great
extent on the imperial discrimination in its favour. According to Ammianus,
he tried to atomize the Church by ending the system:

  'He ordered the priests of the different Christian sects, and their
  supporters to be admitted to the palace, and politely expressed his wish
  that, their quarrels being over, each might follow his own beliefs without
  hindrance or fear. He thought that freedom to argue their beliefs would
  simply deepen their differences, so that he would never be faced by a
  united common people. He found from experience that no wild beasts are as
  hostile to men, as Christians are to each other.'

           _A History of Christianity_, Paul Johnson, Part Two (AD 250-450)
---------------------------------------------------------------------------

Augustine was struck by the fact, when they first met, that Ambrose read to
himself, a habit unknown to the classical world: 'His eyes scanned the page,
and his mind penetrated its meaning, but his voice and tongue were silent.'
There were other impressive things about Ambrose.

           _A History of Christianity_, Paul Johnson, Part Two (AD 250-450)
---------------------------------------------------------------------------

He [Augustine] admitted: 'I am the sort of man who writes because he has
made progress, and who makes progress by writing.'

           _A History of Christianity_, Paul Johnson, Part Two (AD 250-450)
---------------------------------------------------------------------------

This was all very well: Columbanus's success indicates the appeal of his
mission. But his activities, for the first time, brought the nature of
Celtic monasticism firmly to the attention of the Church authorities--to
western bishops in general, and to the Bishop of Rome in particular. The
Irish monks were not heretical. But they were plainly unorthodox. They did
not look right, to begin with. They had the wrong tonsure. Rome, as was
natural, had 'the tonsure of St Peter', that is, a shaven crown. Easterners
had the tonsure of St Paul, totally shaven; and if they wished to take up an
appointment in the West they had to wait until their rim grew before being
invested. But the Celts looked like nothing on earth: they had their hair
long at the back and, on the shaven front part, a half-circle of hair from
one ear to the other, leaving a band across the forehead.

        _A History of Christianity_, Paul Johnson, Part Three (AD 450-1054)
---------------------------------------------------------------------------

Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own
way.
                                        _Anna Karenina_, Leo Tolstoy, Ch. 1
---------------------------------------------------------------------------

Stepan Arkadyevich was absorbed during the drive in composing the menu of
the dinner.

"You like turbot, don't you?" he said to Levin as they were arriving.

"Eh?" responded Levin. "Turbot? Yes, I'm awfully fond of turbot."

When Levin went into the restaurant with Oblonsky, he could not help
noticing a certain peculiarity of expression, as it were, a restrained
radiance, about the face and whole figure of Stepan Arkadyevich. Oblonsky
took off his overcoat, and with his hat over one ear walked into the dining
room, giving directions to the Tatar waiters, who were clustered about him
in evening coats, and with napkins under their arms. Bowing right and left
to acquaintances who, here as everywhere, greeted him joyously, he went up
to the bar, took a little wineglass of vodka and a snack of fish, and said
to the painted Frenchwoman decked in ribbons, lace and ringlets, behind the
desk, something so amusing that even that Frenchwoman was moved to genuine
laughter. Levin for his part refrained from taking any vodka only because he
found most offensive this Frenchwoman, all made up, it seemed, of false
hair, poudre de riz and vinaigre de toilette. He made haste to move away
from her, as from a dirty place. His whole soul was filled with memories of
Kitty, and there was a smile of triumph and happiness shining in his eyes.

"This way, Your Excellency, please. Your Excellency won't be disturbed
here," said a particularly pertinacious, white-headed old Tatar with immense
hips and coattails gaping widely behind. "Walk in, your Excellency," he said
to Levin- being attentive to his guest as well, by way of showing his
respect to Stepan Arkadyevich.

Instantly flinging a fresh cloth over the round table under the bronze
sconce, though it already had a tablecloth on it, he pushed up velvet chairs
and came to a standstill before Stepan Arkadyevich with a napkin and a bill
of fare in his hands, awaiting his commands.

"If you prefer it, Your Excellency, a private room will be free directly:
Prince Golitsin with a lady. Fresh oysters have come in."

"Ah, oysters!" Stepan Arkadyevich became thoughtful.

"How if we were to change our program, Levin?" he said, keeping his finger
on the bill of fare. And his face expressed serious hesitation. "Are the
oysters good? Mind, now!"

"They're Flensburg, Your Excellency. We've no Ostend."

"Flensburg will do- but are they fresh?"

"Only arrived yesterday."

"Well, then, how if we were to begin with oysters, and so change the whole
program? Eh?"

"It's all the same to me. I should like cabbage soup and porridge better
than anything; but of course there's nothing like that here."

"Porridge a la Russe, Your Honor would like?" said the Tatar, bending down
to Levin, like a nurse speaking to a child.

"No, joking apart, whatever you choose is sure to be good. I've been
skating, and I'm hungry. And don't imagine," he added, detecting a look of
dissatisfaction on Oblonsky's face, "that I shan't appreciate your choice. I
don't object to a good dinner."

"I should hope so! After all, it's one of the pleasures of life," said
Stepan Arkadyevich. "Well, then, my friend, you give us two- or better say
three- dozen oysters, clear soup with vegetables..."

"Printaniere," prompted the Tatar. But Stepan Arkadyevich apparently did not
care to allow him the satisfaction of giving the French names of the dishes.

"With vegetables in it, you know. Then turbot with thick sauce, then...
roast beef; and mind it's good. Yes, and capons, perhaps, and then stewed
fruit."

The Tatar, recollecting that it was Stepan Arkadyevich's way not to call the
dishes by the names in the French bill of fare, did not repeat them after
him, but could not resist rehearsing the whole menu to himself according to
the bill: "Soupe printaniere, turbot sauce Beaumarchais, poulard a
l'estragon, Macedoine de fruits..." and then instantly, as though worked by
springs, laying down one bound bill of fare, he took up another, the list of
wines, and submitted it to Stepan Arkadyevich.

"What shall we drink?"

"What you like, only not too much. Champagne," said Levin.

"What! to start with? You're right though, I dare say. Do you like the white
seal?"

"Cachet blanc," prompted the Tatar.

"Very well, then, give us that brand with the oysters, and then we'll see."

"Yes, sir. And what table wine?"

"You can give us Nuits. Oh, no- better the classic Chablis."

"Yes, sir. And your cheese, Your Excellency?"

"Oh, yes, Parmesan. Or would you like another?"

"No, it's all the same to me," said Levin, unable to suppress a smile.

                                     _Anna Karenina_, Leo Tolstoy, Ch. 9-10
---------------------------------------------------------------------------

These late eclipses in the sun and moon portend
no good to us: though the wisdom of nature can
reason it thus and thus, yet nature finds itself
scourged by the sequent effects: love cools,
friendship falls off, brothers divide: in
cities, mutinies; in countries, discord; in
palaces, treason; and the bond cracked 'twixt son
and father. This villain of mine comes under the
prediction; there's son against father: the king
falls from bias of nature; there's father against
child. We have seen the best of our time:
machinations, hollowness, treachery, and all
ruinous disorders, follow us disquietly to our
graves. Find out this villain, Edmund; it shall
lose thee nothing; do it carefully. And the
noble and true-hearted Kent banished! his
offence, honesty! 'Tis strange.

_King Lear_, William Shakespeare, Act 1, Scene II
---------------------------------------------------------------------------

I am a sick man . . . I am a spiteful man. I am an unpleasant man. I think my
liver is diseased. However, I don't know beans about my disease, and I am
not sure what is bothering me. I don't treat it and never have, though I
respect medicine and doctors. Besides, I am extremely superstitious, let's
say sufficiently so to respect medicine. (I am educated enough not to be
superstitious, but I am.) No, I refuse to treat it out of spite. You
probably will not understand that. Well, but I understand it. Of course, I
can't explain to you just whom I am annoying in this case by my spite. I am
perfectly well aware hat I cannot "get even" with the doctors by not
consulting them. I know better than anyone that I thereby injure only myself
and no one else. But still, if I won't treat it, it is out of spite. My
liver is bad, well then -- let it get even worse!

                    _Notes From Underground_, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Pt.1, ch.1
---------------------------------------------------------------------------

Oh, if I had done nothing simply out of laziness! Heavens, how I would
have respected myself then. I would have respected myself because I would
at least have been capable of being lazy; there would have at least have
been in my one positive quality, as it were, in which I could have
believed in myself. Question: Who is he? Answer: A loafer. After all, it
would have been pleasant to hear that about oneself!

                    _Notes From Underground_, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Pt.1, ch.6
---------------------------------------------------------------------------

"Ha! ha! ha! But after all, if you like, in reality there is not such thing
as choice," you will interrupt with a laugh. "Science has even now succeeded
in analysing man to such an extent that we know already that choice and
what is called freedom of will are nothing other than--"

Wait, gentlemen, I meant to begin with that myself. I admit I was even
frightened. I was just going to shout that after all the devil only knows
what choice depends on, and that perhaps that is a very good thing, but I
remembered the teaching of science--and pulled myself up. And here you have
begun to speak. After all, really, well, if someday they truly discover a
formula for all our desires and caprices--that is, an explanations of what
they depend upon, by what laws they arise, just how they develop, what they
are aiming at in one case or another and so on, and so on, that is, a real
mathematical formula--then, after all, man would most likely at once stop to
feel desire, indeed, he will be most certain to.  For who would want to
choose by rule? Besides, he will at once be transformed from a human being
into an organ stop or something of the sort; for what is a man without
desire, without free will and without choice, if not a stop in an organ?
What do you think? Let us consider the probability--can such a thing happen
or not?

 . . .

With the anthill, the respectable race of ants began and with the anthill
they will probably end, which does the greatest credit to their perseverance
and staidness. But man is a frivolous and incongruous creature, and perhaps,
like the chessplayer, loves only the process of the game, not the end of it.
And who knows (on cannot swear to it), perhaps the only goal on earth to
which mankind is striving lies in this incessant process of attaining, or in
other words, in life itself, and not particularly in the goal which of
course must always be two times two makes four, that is a formula, and after
all, two times two makes four is no longer life, gentlemen, but is the
beginning of death. Anyway, man has always been somehow afraid of this two
times two makes four, and I am afraid of it even now. Granted that man does
nothing but seek that two times two makes four, that he sails the oceans,
sacrifices his life in the quest, but to succeed, really to find it--he is
somehow afraid, I assure you. He feels that as soon as he has found it there
will be nothing for him to look for.

                  _Notes From Underground_, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Pt.1, ch.8,9
---------------------------------------------------------------------------

Though I have said that I envy the normal man to the point of exasperation,
yet I would not care to be in his place as he is now (though I will not stop
envying him. No, no; anyway the underground life is more advantageous!)
There, at any rate, one can--bah! But after all, even now I am lying! I am
lying because I know myself as surely as two times two makes four, that it
is not at all underground that is better, but something different, quite
different, for which I long but which I cannot find! Damn underground!

I will tell you another thing that would be better, and that is, if I myself
believe even an iota of what I have just written. I swear to you, gentlemen,
that I do not really believe one thing, not even one word, of what i have
just written. That is, I believe it, perhaps, but at the same time, I feel
suspect that I am lying myself blue in the face.

"Then why have you written all this?" you will say to me.

"I ought to put you underground for forty years without anything to do and
then come to you and found out what stage you reached! How can a man be left
alone with nothing to do for forty years?"

"Isn't that shameful, isn't that humiliating?" you will say, perhaps,
shaking your heads contemptuously. "You long for life and try to settle the
problems of life by a logical tangle. ANd how tiresome, how insolent your
outbursts are, and at the same time, how scared you are! You talk
nonsense and are pleased with it; you say imprudent things and are constantly
afraid of them and apologizing for them. You declare that you are afraid of
nothing and at the same time try to ingratiate yourself with us. You declare
that you are gnashing your teeth and at the same time you try to be witty so
as to amuse us. You know that your witticisms are not witty, but you are
evidently well satisfied with their literary value. You may perhaps really
have suffered, but you have no respect whatsoever for your own suffering.
You may be truthful in what you have said but you have no modesty; out of
the pettiest vanity you bring your truth to public exposure, to the market
place, to ignominity. You doubtless mean to say something, but hide your
real meaning for fear, because you lack the resolution to say it, and only
have a cowardly impudence. You boast of consciousness, but you are unsure of
your ground, for though your mind works, yet your heart is corrupted by
depravity, and you cannot have a full, genuine consciousness without a pure
heart. And how tiresome you are, how you thrust yourself on people and
grimace! Lies, lies, lies!"

Of course I myself have made up just now all the things you say. That, too,
is from underground. For forty years I have been listening to your words
there through a crack under the floor. I have invented them myself. After
all there was nothing else I could invent. It is no wonder that I have
learned them by heart and that it has taken a literary form.

But can you really be so credulous as to think that I will print all this
and give it to you to read too? And another problem; why do I really call
you "gentlemen", why do I address you as though you really were my readers?
Such declarations as I intend to make are never printed nor given to other
people to read. Anyway, I am not strong-minded enough for that, and I don't
see why I should be. But you see a fancy has occurred to me and I want to
fulfill it at all costs. Let me explain.

                   _Notes From Underground_, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Pt.1, ch.11
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Great stems rose about me, uplifting a thick multitudinous roof above me of
branches, and twigs, and leaves--the bird and insect world uplifted over
mine, with its own landscapes, its own thickets, and paths, and glades, and
dwellings; its own bird-ways and insect-delights. Great boughs crossed my
path; great roots based the tree-columns, and mightily clasped the earth,
strong to lift and strong to uphold. It seemed an old, old forest, perfect in
forest ways and pleasure. And when, in the midst of this ectasy, I remembered
that under some close canopy of leaves, by some giant stem, or in some mossy
cave, or beside some leafy well, sat the lady of marble, whom my songs had
called forth into the outer world, waiting (might it not be?) to meet and
thank her deliverer in a twilight which would veil her confusion, the whole
night became one dream-realm of joy, the central form of which was everywhere
present, although unbeheld. Then, remembering how my songs seemed to have
called her form the marble, piercing through the pearly shroud of alabaster--
"Why," thought I, "should not my voice reach her now, through the ebon night
that inwraps her." My voice burst into song so spontaneously that it seemed
involuntarily:

                "Not a sound
                But, echoing in me,
                Vibrates all around
                With a blind delight,
                Till it breaks on thee,
                Queen of Night!

                "Every tree,
                O'ershadowing with gloom,
                Seems to cover thee
                Secret, dark, love-still'd,
                In a holy room
                Silence-filled.

                "Let no moon
                Creep up the heaven to-night;
                I in darksome noon
                Walking hopefully,
                Seek my shrouded light--
                Grope for thee!

                "Darker grow
                The borders of the dark!
                Through the branches glow,
                From the roof above,
                Star and diamond spark
                Light for love."


                                   _Phantastes_, George MacDonald, chap. VI
---------------------------------------------------------------------------

Preface
\/
The expression "Breakfast of Champions" is a registered trademark of General
Mills, Inc., for use on a breakfast cereal product. The use of the identical
expression as the title for this book is not intended to indicate an
association with or sponsorship by General Mills, nor is it intended to
disparage their fine products.


> The person to whom this book is dedicated, Phoebe Hurty, is no longer among
the living, as they say. She was an Indianapolis widow when I met her late in
the Great Depression. I was sixteen or so. She was forty.

She was rich, but she had gone to work every weekday of her adult life, so
she went on doing that. She wrote a sane and funny advice-to-the-lovelorn
column for the Indianapolis _Times_, a good paper which is now defunct.

Defunct.

She wrote ads for the William H. Block Company, a department store which
still flourishes in a building my father designed. She wrote this ad for an
end-of-the-summer sale on straw hats: "For prices like this, you can run them
through your horse and put them on your roses."


> Phoebe Hurty hired me to write copy for ads about teen aged clothes. I had
to wear the clothes I praised. That was part of the job. And I became friends
with her two sons, who were my age. I was over at their house all the time.

She would talk bawdily to me and her sons, and our girlfriends when we
brought them around. She was funny. She was liberating. She taught us to be
impolite in conversation not only about sexual matters, but about American
history and famous heroes, about the distribution of wealth, about school,
about everything.

I now make my living being impolite. I am clumsy at it. I keep trying to
imitate the impoliteness which was so graceful in Phoebe Hurty. I think now
that grace was easier for her than it is for me because of the mood of the
Great Depression. She believed what so many Americans believed then: that
the nation would be happy and just and rational when prosperity came.

I never hear that word anymore: _Prosperity_. It used to be a synonym for
_Paradise_. And Phoebe Hurty was able to believe that the impoliteness she
recommended would give shape to an American paradise.

Now her sort of impoliteness is in fashion. But nobody believes anymore in a
new American paradise. I sure miss Phoebe Hurty.


> As for the suspicion I express in this book, that human beings are robots,
are machines: It should be noted that people, mostly men, suffering from
the last stages of syphilis, from _locomotor atoxia_, were common spectacles
in downtown Indianapolis when I was a boy.

Those people were infested with carnivorous little corkscrews which could be
seen only with a microscope. The victims' vertebrae were welded together
after the corkscrews got through with the meat between. The syphilitics
seemed tremendously dignified-- erect, eyes straight ahead.

I saw one stand on a curb at the corner of Meridian and Washington Streets
one time, underneath an overhanging clock which my father designed. The
intersection was known locally as "The Crossroads of America."

This syphilitic man was thinking hard there, at the Crossroads of America,
about how to get his legs to step off the curb and carry him across Washington
Street. He shuddered gently, as though he had a small motor which was idling
inside. Here was his problem: his brains, where the instructions to his legs
originated, were being eaten alive by corkscrews. The wires which had to
carry the instructions weren't insulated anymore, or were eaten clear through.
Switches along the way were welded open or shut.

This man looked like an old, old man, although he might have been only thirty
years old. he thought and thought. And then he kicked two times like a chorus
girl.

He certainly looked like a machine to me when I was a boy.


> I tend to think of human beings as huge, rubbery test tubes, too, with
chemical reactions seething inside. When I was a boy, I saw a lot of people
with goiters. So did Dwayne Hoover, the Pontiac Dealer who is the hero of
this book. Those unhappy Earthlings had such swollen thyroid glands that they
seemed to have zucchini squash growing from their throats.

All they had to do in order to have ordinary lives, it turned out, was to
consume less than one-millionth of a ounce of iodine every day.

My own mother wrecked her brains with chemicals, which were supposed to maker
her sleep.

When I get depressed, I take a little pill, and I cheer up again.

And so on.

So it is a big temptation to me, when I create a character for a novel, to
say that he is what he is because of faulty wiring, or because of microscopic
amounts of chemicals which he ate or failed to eat on that particular day.


> What do I myself think of this particular book? I feel lousy about it, but
I always feel lousy about my books. My friend Knox Burger said one time that
a certain cumbersome novel ". . . read as though it had been written by
Philboyd Studge." That's who I think I am when I write what I am seemingly
programmed to write.


> This book is my fiftieth birthday present to myself. I feel as though I am
crossing the spine of a roof-- having ascended one slope.

I am programmed at fifty to perform childishly-- to insult "The Star Spangled
Banner," to scrawl pictures of a Nazi flag and an asshole and a lot of other
things with a felt-tipped pen. To give you an idea of the maturity of my
illustrations for this book, here is my picture of an asshole:

                         \  \ | /  /
                            \\|//
                       ------>X<------
                            //|\\
                         /  / | \  \
                              |

> I think I am trying to clear my head of all the junk in there-- the
assholes, the flags, the underpants. Yes-- there is a picture in this book of
underpants. I'm throwing out characters from my other books, too. I'm not
going to put on any more puppet shows.

I think I am trying to make my head as empty as it was when I was born
onto this damaged planet fifty years ago.

I suspect that this is something most white Americans, and nonwhite Americans
who imitate white Americans, should do. The things other people have put into
_my_ head, at any rate, do not fit together nicely, are often useless and
ugly, are out of proportion with one another, are out of proportion with life
as it really is outside my head.

I have no culture, no humane harmony in my brains. I can't live without
culture anymore.


> So this book is a sidewalk strewn with junk, trash which I throw over my
shoulders as I travel in time back to November eleventh, nineteen hundred and
twenty-two.

I will come to a time in my backwards trip when November eleventh,
accidentally my birthday, was a sacred day called _Armistice Day_. When I was
a boy, and when Dwayne Hoover was a boy, all the people of all the nations
which had fought in the First World War were silent during the eleventh
minute of the eleventh hour of Armistice Day, which was the eleventh day of
the eleventh month.

It was during that minute in nineteen hundred and eighteen, that millions
upon millions of human beings stopped butchering one another. I have talked to
old men who were on battlefields during that minute. They have told me in one
way or another that the sudden silence was the Voice of God. So we still have
among us men who can remember when God spoke clearly to mankind.


> Armistice Day has become Veterans' Day. Armistice Day was sacred. Veterans'
Day is not.

So I will throw Veterans' Day over my shoulder. Armistice Day I will keep. I
don't want to throw away sacred things.

What else is sacred? Oh, _Romeo and Juliet_, for instance.

And all music is.
                                                --PHILBOYD STUDGE. [?1973]

                           _Breakfast of Champions_, Kurt Vonnegut, preface
---------------------------------------------------------------------------

And the peanut butter-eaters on Earth were preparing to conquer the
shazzbutter-eaters on the planet in the book by Kilgore Trout. By this time,
the Earthlings hadn't just demolished West Virginia and Southeast Asia. They
had demolished everything. So they were ready to go pioneering again.

They studied the shazzbutter-eaters by means of electronic snooping, and
determined that they were too numerous and proud and resourceful ever to
allow themselves to be pioneered.

So the Earthlings infiltrated the ad agency which had the shazzbutter
account, and they buggered the statistics in the ads. They made the average
for everything so high that everybody on the planet felt inferior to the
majority in very respect.

Then the Earthling armored space ships came and discovered the planet. Only
token resistance was offered here and there, because the natives felt so
below average. And then the pioneering began.


Trout asked the happy manufacturer's representative what it felt like to
drive a _Galaxie_, which was the name of the car. The driver didn't hear
him, and Trout let it go. It was a dumb play on words, so that Trout was
asking simultaneously was it was like to drive the car and what it was like
to steer something like the Milky Way, which was one hundred thousand
light-years in diameter and ten thousand light-years thick. It revolved once
every two hundred million years. It contained about one hundred billion
stars.

And then Trout saw that a simple fire extinguisher in the _Galaxie_ had this
brand name:
              _      ________________
             > \   ||                \_
             >  |==|| * EXCELSIOR *   _>
             >_/   ||________________/

As far as Trout knew, this word meant _higher_ in a dead language. It was
also a thing a fictitious mountain climber in a famous poem kept yelling as
he disappeared into a blizzard up above. And it was also the trade name for
wood shavings which were used to protect fragile objects inside packages.

"Why would anybody name a fire extinguisher _Excelsior_?" Trout asked the
driver.

The driver shrugged. "Somebody must have liked the _sound_ of it," he said.


Trout looked at the countryside, which was smeared by high velocity. He saw
this sign:
                              \
                              | \
              +---------------+   \
              |  VISIT SACRED       \
              | MIRACLE CAVE         >
              |       162 MI.       /
              +---------------+   /
                              | /
                              /

So he was getting really close to Dwayne Hoover. And, as though The Creator
of the Universe or some other supernatural power were preparing him for the
meeting, Trout felt the urge to thumb through his own book, _Now It Can Be
Told_. This was the book which would soon turn Dwayne into a homicidal
maniac.

The premise of the book was this: Life was an experiment by The Creator of
the Universe, Who wanted to test a new sort of creature He was thinking of
introducing into the Universe. It was a creature with the ability to make up
its own mind. All the other creatures were fully-programmed robots.

The book was in the form of a long letter from The Creator of the Universe
to the experimental creature. The Creator congratulated the creature and
apologized for all the discomfort he had endured. The Creator invited him to
a banquet in his honor in the Empire Room of the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in
New York City, where a black robot named Sammy Davis, Jr., would sing and
dance.
                            _Breakfast of Champions_, Kurt Vonnegut, ch. 18
---------------------------------------------------------------------------

> Traffic on the westbound barrel of the interstate had come to a halt a
mile east of the new Holiday Inn-- because of a fatal accident on Exit 10A.
Drivers and passengers got out of their cars-- to stretch their legs and
find out, if they could, what the trouble was up ahead.

Kilgore Trout was among those who got out. He learned from others that the
new Holiday Inn was within easy walking distance. So he gathered up his
parcels from the front seat of the _Galaxie_. He thanked the driver, whose
name he had forgotten, and he began to trudge.

He also began to assemble in his mind a system of beliefs which would be
appropriate to his narrow mission in Midland City, which was to show the
provincials, who were bent on exalting creativity, a would-be creator who
had failed and failed. He paused in his trudge to examine himself in the
rearview mirror, the rearview _leak_, of a truck locked up in traffic. The
tractor was pulling two trailers instead of one. Here is the message the
owners of the rig saw fit to shriek at human beings wherever it went:
                     ____________  ____________
                 /~||  PEERLESS  ||  PEERLESS  |
                |  |_\           ||            |
               :+-OO++--------OO-++-OO-------OO+

                            _Breakfast of Champions_, Kurt Vonnegut, ch. 18
---------------------------------------------------------------------------

> The girl with the greyhound was an assistant lighting director for a
musical comedy about American history, and she kept her poor greyhound,
who was named _Lancer_, in a one-room apartment fourteen feet wide and
twenty-six feet long, and six flights of stairs above the street level.
His entire life was devoted to unloading his excrement at the proper time and
place. There were two proper places to put it: in the gutter outside the
door seventy-two steps below, with the traffic whizzing by, or in a
roasting pan, his mistress kept in front of the Westinghouse refrigerator.

Lancer had a very small brain, but he must have suspected from time to time,
just as Wayne Hoobler did, that some kind of terrible mistake had been made.


                            _Breakfast of Champions_, Kurt Vonnegut, ch. 18
---------------------------------------------------------------------------

He won all those medals in the Second World War, which was staged by robots
so that Dwayne Hoover could give a free-will reaction to such a holocaust.
The war was such an extravaganza that there was scarcely a robots anywhere who
didn't have a part to play. Harold Newcomb Wilbur got his medals for killing
Japanese, who were yellow robots. They were fueled by rice.

                            _Breakfast of Champions_, Kurt Vonnegut, ch. 19
---------------------------------------------------------------------------

> So was Beatrice Keedsler, but she kept her dismay to herself as she sat at
the piano bar with Karabekian. Karabekian, who wore a sweatshirt imprinted
with the likeness of Beethoven, knew he was surrounded by people who hated
him for getting so much money for doing so little work. He was amused.

Like everybody else in the cocktail lounge, he was softening his brain with
alcohol. This was a substance produced by a tiny creature called yeast.
Yeast organisms ate sugar and excreted alcohol. They killed themselves by
destroying their environment.

> Kilgore Trout once wrote a short story which was a dialogue between two
pieces of yeast. They were discussing the possible purposes of life as they
ate sugar and suffocated in their own excrement. Because of their limited
intelligence, they never came close to guessing that they were making
champagne.

                            _Breakfast of Champions_, Kurt Vonnegut, ch. 19
---------------------------------------------------------------------------

> So trout entered the lobby as an inkless printing press but he was still
the most grotesque human being who had ever come in here.

All around him were what other people called _mirrors_, which he called
_leaks_. The entire wall which separated the lobby from the cocktail lounge
was a _leak_ ten feet high and thirty-feet long. There was another _leak_ on
the cigarette machine and yet another on the candy machine. And when Trout
looked through them to see what was going on in the other universe, he saw a
red-eyed, filthy old creature who was barefoot, who had his pants rolled up
to his knees.

As it happened, the only othe person in the lobby at the time was the
beautiful young desk clerk, Milo Maritimo. Milo's clothing and skin and eyes
were all the colours that olives can be. He was a graduate of the Cornell
Hotel School. He was the homosexual grandson of Guillermo "Little Willy"
Maritimo, a bodyguard of the notorious Chicago gangster, Al Capone.

Trout presented himself to this harmless man, stood before his desk with his
bare feet far apart and his arms outspread. "The Abominable Snowman has
arrived", he said to Milo. "If I'm not as clean as most abominable snowmen
are, it is because I was kidnapped as a child from the slopes of Mount
Everest, and taken as a slave to a bordello in Rio de Janeiro, where I have
been cleaning the unspeakably filthy toilets for the past fifty years. A
visitor to our whipping room there screamed in a transport of agony and
ecstasy that there was to be an arts festival in Midland City. I escaped
down a rope of sheets taken from a reeking hamper. I have come to Midland
City to have myself acknowledged, before I die, as the great artist I
believe myself to be".

Milo Maritimo greeted Trout with luminous adoration. "Mr Trout", he said in
rapture, "I'd know you anywhere. Welcome to midland city. We _need_ you so!"

"How do you know who I am?" said Kilgore Trout, nobody had ever known who he
was before.

"You _had_ to be you," said Milo.

Trout was deflated-- _neutralized_.  He dropped his arms, became child-like
now. "Nobody ever knew who I was before," he said.

                            _Breakfast of Champions_, Kurt Vonnegut, ch. 20
---------------------------------------------------------------------------

Another blast from Rivenrock shivered the air. It snatched Mhoram's head up,
and he faced Covenant with tears streaming down his cheeks. "It is as I have
said," he breathed achingly. "Madness is not the only danger in dreams."

                           _The Illearth War_, Stephen R. Donaldson, ch. 26
---------------------------------------------------------------------------

And I understood then that I was a fool when I told you I would take my turn
in singing the honours of Love, and admitted I was terribly clever in love
affairs, whereas it seems I really had no idea how a eulogy ought to be
made. For I was stupid enough to think that we ought to speak the truth
about each person eulogised, and to make this the foundation, and from these
truths to choose the most beautiful things and arrange them in the most
elegant way; and I was quite proud to think how well I should speak, because
I believed that I knew the truth.
                                                         _Symposium_, Plato
---------------------------------------------------------------------------

So what indeed! The lesson I myself learned over and over again when
teaching at the college and then the prison was the uselessness of
information to most people, except as entertainment. If facts weren't funny
or scary, or couldn't make you rich, the heck with them.

                                         _Hocus Pocus_, Kurt Vonnegut, Ch.9
---------------------------------------------------------------------------

"I agree with you," replied the stranger; "we are unfashioned creatures, but
half made up, if one wiser, better, dearer than ourselves--such a friend
ought to be--do not lend his aid to perfectionate our weak and faulty
natures.  I once had a friend, the most noble of human creatures, and am
entitled, therefore, to judge respecting friendship.  You have hope, and the
world before you, and have no cause for despair.  But I--I have lost
everything, and cannot begin life anew."

                            _Frankenstein_, Mary W Shelley, Aug 13th, 17--.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------

Good sense is, of all things among men, the most equally distributed; for
every one thinks himself so abundantly provided with it, that those even who
are the most difficult to satisfy in everything else, do not usually desire
a larger measure of this quality than they already possess.

                 _Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting the Reason,
                   and Seeking Truth in the Sciences_, Rene Descartes, Pt.1
---------------------------------------------------------------------------

I would rather be wrong, by God, with Plato than be correct with those men.

                                                                     Cicero
---------------------------------------------------------------------------

"Pooh," he said. "Much alike, aren't they, this case and that!"

"There is nothing to hinder their being so," said I, "but even if they are
not alike and if the man thinks they are, do you believe he will any the
less answer what appears to him, whether we forbid him or not?"

                                                _The Republic_, Plato, Bk.1
---------------------------------------------------------------------------

I believe that nothing is more beautiful, profound, sympathetic, reasonable,
brave, and perfect than Christ. With jealous love, I say to myself, not only
that his equal cannot be found, but that it does not exist. And more, if
someone should bring me proof that Christ is outside the truth, then I
should prefer to remain with Christ than with the truth.

                          [Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Letter to Natalya Fonvizina,
                                       soon after his release from Siberia]
---------------------------------------------------------------------------

"Oh what a good time I had in prison!" he exclaimed afterward. It had almost
been like being back in Siberia again. "You really ought to serve a prison
term!" he told Vsevolod Solovyov enthusiastically, when Solovyov visited him
in jail. "But Fyodor Mikhailovich, you surely don't think I ought to go out
and kill someone just to go to prison?" The writer smiled. "No, of course
not. . . . You'd have to do something else. But quite seriously, a spell in
prison would be the best thing that could happen to you." He expressed the
same wish for Vsevolod's brother Vladimir: "A spell in a penitentiary would
make you into a good and true Christian."

           _Fyodor Dostoyevsky: A Writer's Life_, Geir Kjetsaa, Ch.10, pt.2
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As for astronomy, the Greeks did not accept their own or any of the original
mythologies with which they came in contact. The refusal to accept
mythological explanations for natural phenomena forced the Greeks to
disregard the primary evidence of their senses, that is, the evidence of
mere appearances. They reasoned their way out of the dead end imposed by
the impression that up and down were directional absolutes and therefore the
earth was the centre of the universe. By the middle of the fourth century BC
(355) the earth and the other visible planets were recognised to be in
orbital as well as other movement and the sun the fixed centre of the
heavens. A gigantic first step in the direction of the Copernican system
had been made. In the cosmology of Philolaos (which is the first recorded
pre-Copernican version) there are a number of 'Mack Sennett' aspects, such
as the assertion that all forms of life on the moon were fifteen times
larger than those on the earth. This was because the author had determined
the 'moonday' to be fifteen times as long as our day (that is, half a
month).
                                  _Galileo's Children_, George Bailey, Ch.1
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Perhaps the Hungarian humorist Ferencz Karinthy captures the spirit of the
situation best in a tableau about a bored businessman who amuses himself by
looking through high-powered binoculars from his office high in a skyscraper
into neighbouring office rooms. On one occasion he spies a middle-aged
executive chasing a comely secretary around his desk. As it happens the
observers knows the building in which this drama is taking place and can
even make out the name of the occupant from the plaque on his desk. He
consults the telephone directory and gives the culprit, who is still trying
to force his attentions on the secretary, a ring. When the culprit answers
the telephone the observer announces himself as God Almighty and tells him
to stop molesting the young woman in his employ. The culprit, thunderstruck
and unable to account fo the observer's exact knowledge of what has been
going on, fall son his knees in a paroxysm of fear and wonder and begs
forgiveness. The observer roundly berates the culprit who swears he will do
anything to make amends and promises never to sin again. Hereupon the
observer informs the culprit that he can indeed make amends by lending him
100 pengo [dollars]. The answer, of course is a burst of profanity and the
abrupt termination of the call. Karinthy then draws his moral: if you want
to play God don't try to borrow money...

                                  _Galileo's Children_, George Bailey, Ch.4
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America is a country in which the velocity of history is especially great,
in which each succeeding decade wipes it's immediate predecessor out, a
phenomenon that had moved some observers to remark that America has no
history but only an eternal present.

                                  _Galileo's Children_, George Bailey, Ch.8
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Grigorenko was deprived of his rank, his pension and his Party membership
and confined for fifteen months, eight of them in _psychushka_ where he was
diagnosed as suffering from 'sluggish schizophrenia', a conceptual
concoction of the Soviet psychiatrist Andrei V. Snezhnevsky, who has
enlarged the definition of schizophrenia by including the mildest of
neuroses. Snezhnevsky's neuroses manifested themselves in such symptoms as
social withdrawal, confrontations with authorities, philosophical concerns
and the desire to reform society.

                                 _Galileo's Children_, George Bailey, Ch.12
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As Mary delivered what was to be her last lecture about the Galapagos
Islands, she would be stopped mid-sentence for five seconds by a doubt
which, if expressed in words, might have come out something like this:
"Maybe I'm just a crazy lady who had wandered off the street and into this
classroom and started explaining the mysteries of life to these people. And
they believe me, although I am utterly mistaken about simply everything."

She had to wonder, too, about all the supposedly great teachers of the past,
who, although their brains were healthy, had turned out to be as wrong as
Roy about what was really going on.

                                           _Galápagos_, Kurt Vonnegut, ch.9
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Mary Hepburn was meanwhile murdering herself up in her room, lying on her
bed with the polyethylene sheath of her "Jackie dress" swapped around her
head. The sheath was now all steamed up inside, and she hallucinated that
she was a great land tortoise lying on its back in the hot and humid hold of
a sailing ship of long ago. She pawed the air in perfect futility, just as a
land tortoise on its back would have done.

As she had often told her students, sailing ships bound out across the
Pacific used to stop off in the Galápagos Islands to capture defenseless
tortoises, who could live on their backs without food or water for months.
They were so slow and tame and huge and plentiful. The sailors would capsize
them without fear of being bitten or clawed. then they would drag them down
to waiting longboats on the shore, using the animals' own useless suits
of armor for sleds.

They would store them on their backs in the dark paying no further attention
to them until it was time for them to be eaten. the beauty of the tortoises
to the sailors was that they were fresh meat which did not have to be
refrigerated or eaten right away.

                                          _Galápagos_, Kurt Vonnegut, ch.29
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One single equation for the motion of the Moon covers some 250 large-size
pages and represents the major effort of a lifetime--

                                  _Orbiting the Sun_, Fred L. Whipple, ch.2
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With the exception of professional rationalists, today people despair of
true knowledge. If only the significant history of human thought were to be
written, it would have to be he history of its successive regrets and its
impotences.

                                       Abert Camus, _They Myth of Sisyphus_
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Lovers, if Angels could understand them, might utter
strange things in the midnight air. For it seems that everything's
trying to hide us. Look, the trees exist; the houses
we live in still stand where they were. We only
pass everything by like a transposition of air.
And all combines to suppress us, partly as shame,
perhaps, and partly as inexpressible hope.

                          Rainer Maria Rilke, _Duino Elegies_, Second Elegy
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They say he was a shepherd serving the then ruler of Lydia. A great storm
came and an earthquake; and there was a split in the earth, and a chasm
opened in the place where he kept his flocks; he saw it, and wondered, and
went down. There he saw many wonderful things which the story tells, and in
particular a brazen horse, hollow, with windows in the side; he peeped in
and saw a dead body, as it appeared, larger than human, with nothing on but
a golden ring on the hand, which he took off and came out again. It was the
custom among the shepherds to held a monthly meeting, and then report to the
king all about the flocks; this meeting he attended wearing the ring. As he
sat with the others, he happened to turn the collet of the ring round
towards himself to the inside of his hand. As soon as this was done he
became invisible to the company, and they spoke of him as if he had left the
place. He was surprised, and fingered the ring again, turning the collet
outwards, and when he turned it he became visible. Noticing that, he made a
trail of the ring, to see if it had that power; and he found that whenever
he turned the collet inside, he was invisible, when he turned it outside,
visible. After he found this out he managed to be appointed one of the
messengers to the king; when he got there, he seduced the king's wife, and
with her set upon the king, and killed him, and seized the empire. Then if
there could be two such rings, and if the just man put one on and the unjust
the other, no one, as it would be thought, would be so adamantine as to
abide in the practice of justice, no one could endure to hold back from
another's goods and not to touch, when it was in his power to take what he
would even out of the market without fear, and to go into any house and lie
with anyone he wished, and to kill or set free from prison those he might
wish, and to do anything else in the world like a very god. And in doing so
he would do just the same as the other; both would go the same way. Surely
one would call this a strong proof that no one is just willingly but only
under a strong compulsion, believing that it is not a good to him
personally; since wherever each thinks he will be able to do injustice, he
does injustice.

                                 -- Gloucon (_the republic_, Plato, book 2)
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Rumfoord retreated into his magazine again. The magazine opened naturally to
the center spread, which was a color ad for MoonMist Cigarettes. MoonMist
Tobacco, Ltd., had been bought recently by Malachi Constant.

_Pleasure in Depth!_ said the headline of the ad. The picture that went with
it was the picture of the three sirens of Titan. There they were-- the white
girl, the golden girl, and the brown girl.

The fingers of the golden girl were fortuitously spread as they rested on
her left breast, permitting an artist to paint in a MoonMist Cigarette
between two of them. The smoke form her cigarette passed beneath the
nostrils of the brown and white girls, and their space-annihilating
concupiscence seemed centered on mentholated smoke alone.

Rumfoord had known that Constant would try to debase the picture by using it
in commerce. Constant's father had done a similar thing when he found he
could not buy Leonardo's "Mona Lisa" at any price. The old man had punished
Mona Lisa by having her used in an advertising campaign for suppositories.
It was the free-enterprise way of handling beauty that threatened to get the
upper hand.

                                     Kurt Vonnegut, _Sirens of Titan_, Ch.2
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I HAVE been asked to tell you about the back of the north wind. An old Greek
writer mentions a people who lived there, and were so comfortable that they
could not bear it any longer, and drowned themselves. My story is not the
same as his. I do not think Herodotus had got the right account of the
place. I am going to tell you how it fared with a boy who went there.

                    George MacDonald, _At the Back of the North Wind_, Ch.1
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The woods are lovely, dark, and deep,
but I have promises to keep,
and miles to go before I sleep,
and miles to go before I sleep.

                   --Robert Frost
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It was a clear autumn day Sunday in 1876; Vincent van Gogh, twenty-three
years old, left the English boarding school where he was teaching to give a
sermon at a small Methodist church in Richmond, a humble London suburb.
Standing in front of the lectern, he felt like a lost soul emerging from the
dark cave in which he had been buried.

The sermon, which survives among Vincent's collected letters, reiterates
universal ideas and is not an outstanding example of the art of homiletics.
Nevertheless, his words grew out of his tormented life and had an intense
emotional charge. Preaching to the congregation, he was also preaching to
himself-- and of himself. The images he used were the same as those that
were to be given powerful expression in his pictures.

The text chosen for the sermon was Psalm 119:19, 'I am a stranger on the
earth, hide not Thy commandments from me.' The young preacher then went on:
'It is an old faith and it is a good faith, that our life is a pilgrim's
progress-- that we are strangers on the earth, but that though this be so
yet we are not alone for our Father's with us.' The psalm's text is an
affirmation of isolation and loneliness, but they are summarily eliminated;
for the community of the faithful, 'I' becomes 'we', and 'we are not alone'.

The theme of sorrow is woven through the sermon and seen as an inherent
human trait: 'Our nature is sorrowful.' But painful as it may be, sorrow is
a blessing in disguise, a quality to be cultivated: 'sorrow is better than
joy,' he asserts, and 'by the sadness of the countenance the heart is made
better'; hence one is 'sorrowful yet always rejoicing'.

The sermon shows Vincent freely accepting the existence of grief,
loneliness, and death, but through the vehicle of religious faith he is
able to glorify them as prerequisites for joy, acceptance and immortality.
Catalysed by suffering, sorrow leads to joy, loneliness to togetherness,
death to rebirth, darkness to light, and earth to heaven.

                             Albert J. Lubin, _Stranger on the Earth_, ch.1
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A PLAN FOR THE IMPROVEMENT OF ENGLISH SPELLING

For example, in Year 1 that useless letter "c" would be dropped to be
replased either by "k" or "s", and likewise "x" would no longer be part of
the alphabet. The only kase in which "c" would be retained would be the "ch"
formation, which will be dealt with later. Year 2 might reform "w" spelling,
so that "which" and "one" would take the same konsonant, wile Year 3 might
well abolish "y" replasing it with "i" and Iear 4 might fiks the "g/j"
anomali wonse and for all.

Jenerally, then, the improvement would kontinue iear bai iear with Iear 5
doing awai with useless double konsonants, and Iears 6-12 or so modifaiing
vowlz and the rimeining voist and unvoist konsonants. Bai Iear 15 or sou, it
wud fainali bi posibl tu meik ius ov thi ridandant letez "c", "y" and "x" --
bai now jast a memori in the maindz ov ould doderez -- tu riplais "ch",
"sh", and "th" rispektivli.

Fainali, xen, aafte sam 20 iers ov orxogrefkl riform, wi wud hev a lojikl,
kohirnt speling in ius xrewawt xe Ingliy-spiking werld.

                                                                 Mark Twain
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(72.) The more pain I train myself to stand, the more I learn. You are
afraid of pain now, Unk, but you won't learn anything if you don't invite
the pain. And the more you learn, the gladder you will be to stand the pain.

                                 Kurt Vonnegut, _The Sirens of Titan_, Ch.5
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The only controls available to those on board were two push-buttons on the
center post of the cabin-- one labeled _on_ and one labeled _off_. The _on_
button simply started a flight from Mars. The _off_ button connected to
nothing. It was installed at the insistence of the Martian mental-health
experts, who said that human beings were always happier with machinery they
thought they could turn off.

                                 Kurt Vonnegut, _The Sirens of Titan_, Ch.6
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He alienated his friends in the sciences by thanking them extravagantly for
scientific advances he had read about in the recent newspapers and
magazines, by assuring them, with a perfectly straight face, that life was
getting better and better, thanks to scientific thinking.

                        Kurt Vonnegut, _God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater_, ch.2
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"You will last a lot longer, if you don't try to sing."

                        Kurt Vonnegut, _God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater_, ch.2
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"Is this some kind of joke?"

"That's for me to know and you to find out."

"Maybe you think it's funny to put up signs about people who want to commit
suicide."

"Are _you_ about to?"

"And what if I was?"

"I wouldn't tell you the gorgeous reasons _I_ have discovered for going on
living."

"What _would_ you do?"

"I'd ask you to name the rock-bottom price you'd charge to go on living for
just one more week."

                        Kurt Vonnegut, _God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater_, ch.7
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-- Must've been off my head, wandering around the harbour so long. Didn't
even get the nightgowns. Are the kids okay? Damn, I wish I didn't always
have to be home at the right time. At the Day of Judgement, God will say
_Stacy MacAindra, what have you done with your life?_ And I'll say, _Well,
let's see, Sir, I think I loved my kids._ And He'll say, _Are you certain
of that?_ And I'll say, _God, I'm not certain about anything any more._ So
He'll say, _To hell with you, then. We're all positive thinkers up here._
Then again, maybe He wouldn't. Maybe He'd say, _Don't worry, Stacy, I'm not
all that certain, either. Sometimes I wonder if I even exist._ And I'd say,
_I know what you mean, Lord. I have the same trouble with myself._

                               Margaret Laurence, _The Fire-Dwellers_, ch.1
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The Doc. Virginia and Simon had told me that Dr. Dale was my doctor. I have
a fuzzy recollection of walking up to some doctor-looking person and being
totally absorbed by his gold tie clip. I suspected it was the button to end
the world so I didn't touch it. I'm pretty sure it was Dr. Dale. I don't
know who else would be so tasteless as to walk around a mental hospital
wearing the button to end the world.

The first meeting I really remember with the good doctor was when I was
starting to be able to speak English again and making a brave attempt to
regain some of my dignity. Trying to be very sane, I went up to him and
asked if he was my doctor. He said he didn't think so.

"You're Dr. Dale, aren't you?"

"Why, Mark, of course. I didn't recognize you with clothes on." He had a
talent for saying just the right thing.

I often took him as one of God's little jokes on me. When I was in desperate
trouble, what saved me from a fate worse than death? To what do I owe my
life? Was it love, affection, understanding, friends, wisdom? No no no. It
was a man who looks like a poor copy of Walt Disney, drives pink Cadillacs,
wears baby-blue alligator shoes, and appears to have the emotional depth of
a slightly retarded potato.

I was back to being polite, the well-tempered paranoid. I didn't have much
of a choice. If I wasn't polite, they could stick me with those needles or
put me back in that little room or take away my visitor privileges or any
number of other things. Besides, there didn't seem to be any urgency or
anything to be gained by not being polite, the way there had been before. So
i was polite. There was time.

                                 Mark Vonnegut, _The Eden Express_ (pg.169)
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When I should have been producing obscure volumes of verse entitled the
Triumph of Humpty Dumpty or the Nose with the Luminous Dong! Or at best,
like Clare, "weaving fearful vision" . . . A frustrated poet in every man.
Though it is perhaps a good idea under the circumstances to pretend at
least to be proceeding with one's great work on "Secret Knowledge," then
one can always say when it never comes out that the title explains the
deficiency.

                                   Malcolm Lowry, "Under the Volcano", ch.1
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"To say nothing of what you lose, lose, lose, are loosing, man. You fool,
you stupid fool . . . You've even been insulated from the responsibility of
genuine suffering . . . Even the suffering you do endure is largely
unnecessary. Actually spurious. It lacks the very basis you require of it
for its tragic nature. You deceive yourself."

                                   Malcolm Lowry, "Under the Volcano", ch.7
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"Adiós," she added in Spanish, "I have no house only a shadow. But whenever
you are in need of a shadow, my shadow is yours."

"Thank you."

"Sank you."

"Not sank you, Señora Gregorio, thank you."

"Sank you."

                                   Malcolm Lowry, "Under the Volcano", ch.7
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Now the Consul made this Virgin the other who had answered his prayer and as
they stood in silence before her, prayed again. "Nothing is altered and in
spite of God's mercy I am still alone. Though my suffering seems senseless I
am still in agony. There is no explanation of my life." Indeed there was
not, nor was this what he'd meant to convey. "Please let Yvonne have her
dream-- dream?-- of a new life with me-- please let me believe that all that
is not an abominable self-deception," he tried... "Please let me make her
happy, deliver me from this dreadful tyranny of self. I have sunk low. Let
me sink lower still, that I may know the truth. Teach me to love again, to
love life." That wouldn't do either... "Where is love? Let me truly suffer.
Give me back my purity, the knowledge of the Mysteries, that i have betrayed
and lost.-- Let me be truly lonely, that I may honestly pray. Let us be
happy again somewhere, if it's only together, if it's only out of this
terrible world. Destroy the world!" he cried in his heart.

                                  Malcolm Lowry, "Under the Volcano", ch.10
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HAMLET:  I do not well understand that. Will you play upon this pipe?

GUILDENSTERN:  My lord, I cannot.

HAMLET:  I pray you.

GUILDENSTERN:  Believe me, I cannot.

HAMLET:  I do beseech you.

GUILDENSTERN:  I know no touch of it, my lord.

HAMLET:  It is as easy as lying. Govern these ventages with our fingers and
    thumb, give it breath with your mouth, and it will discourse most
    eloquent music. Look you, these are the stops.

GUILDENSTERN:  But these cannot I command to any utterance of harmony. I
    have not the skill.

HAMLET:  Why, look you now, how unworthy a thing you make of me! You would
    play upon me, you would seem to know my stops, you would pluck out the
    heart of my mystery, you would sound me from my lowest note to the top
    of my compass, and there is much music, excellent voice, in this little
    organ, yet cannot you make it speak. 'Sblood, do you think I am easier
    to be played on than a pipe? Call me what instrument you will, though
    you can fret me, you cannot play upon me.

                                      William Shakespeare, _Hamlet_, III.ii
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"The question is," Harry whispered, trying desperately to joke, "whether
it's better to be dead from the neck up or the neck down," and the doctor
smiled, knowing Harry was protecting himself with his sense of irony.

                          Morley Callaghan, _The Many Coloured Coat_, Ch.37
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"But this is terrible!" cried Frodo. "Far worse than the worst that I
imagined from your hints and warnings. O Gandalf, best of friends, what am I
to do? For now I am really afraid. What am I to do? What a pity that Bilbo
did not stab that vile creature, when he had a chance!"

"Pity? It was Pity that stayed his hand. Pity, and Mercy: not to strike
without need. And he has been well rewarded, Frodo. Be sure that he took so
little hurt from the evil, and escaped in the end, because he began his
ownership of the Ring so. With Pity."

"I am sorry," said Frodo. "But I am frightened; and I do not feel any pity
for Gollum."

"You have not seen him," Gandalf broke in.

"No, and I don't want to," said Frodo. "I can't understand you. Do you mean
to say that you, and the Elves, have let him live on after all those
horrible deeds? Now at any rate he is as bad as an Orc, and just an enemy.
He deserves death."

"Deserves it! I daresay he does. Many that live deserve death. And some that
die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal
out death in judgement. For even the very wise cannot see all ends. I have
not much hope that Gollum can be cured before he dies, but there is a
chance of it. And he is bound up with the fate of the Ring. My heart tells
me that he has some part to play yet, for good or ill, before the end; and
when that comes, the pity of Bilbo may rule the fate of many-- yours not the
least. In any case we did not kill him: he is very old and very wretched.
The Wood-elves have him in prison, but they treat him with such kindness as
they can find in their wise hearts."

                          J.R.R. Tolkien, _Lord of the Rings_, Book 1, Ch.2
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"But I have so little of any of these things! You are wise and powerful.
Will you not take the Ring?"

"No!" cried Gandalf, springing to his feet. "With that power I should have
power too great and terrible. And over me the Ring would gain a power still
greater and more deadly." His eyes flashed and his face was lit as by a fire
within. "Do not tempt me! For I do not wish to become like the Dark Lord
himself. Yet the way of the Ring to my heart is by pity, pity for weakness
and the desire of strength to do good. Do not tempt me! I dare not take it,
not even to keep it safe, unused. The wish to wield it would be too great
for my strength. I shall have such need of it. Great perils lie before me."

                          J.R.R. Tolkien, _Lord of the Rings_, Book 1, Ch.2
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"You shall ride my horse," said Glorfindel. "I will shorten the stirrups up
to the saddle-skirts, and you must sit as tight as you can. But you need
not fear: my horse will not let any rider fall that I command him to bear.
His pace is light and smooth; and if danger presses too near, he will bear
you away with a speed that even the black steeds of the enemy cannot rival."

"No, he will not!" said Frodo. "I shall not ride him, if I am to be carried
off to Rivendell or anywhere else, leaving my friends behind in danger."

Glorfindel smiled. "I doubt very much," he said, "if your friends would be
in danger if you were not with them! The pursuit would follow you and leave
us in peace, I think. It is you, Frodo, and that which you bear that brings
us all in peril."

                         J.R.R. Tolkien, _Lord of the Rings_, Book 1, Ch.12
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