George Washington, The Indispensable Man.
"In effect, there were two distinct creative moments in the American Founding, the winning of independence and the invention of nationhood, and Washington was the central figure in both creations."
"There was a consensus at the time, since confirmed for all time, that no one else could have performed these elemental tasks as well, and perhaps that no one could have performed them at all."
Joseph J. Ellis - His Excellency George Washington
Historian Thomas A. Bailey:
Washington was the one truly "indispensable man." With his towering prestige, unfaltering leadership, and sterling character, he was the only figure able to command the confidence necessary to get the new ship of state off on an even keel. He was perhaps the only man in the history of the presidency bigger than the government itself.
H.L. Mencken
The Smart Set/January, 1909
Q.—What is a novel?
A.—A novel is an imaginative, artistic and undialectic composition in prose, not less than 20,000 nor more than 500,000 words in length, and divided into chapters, sections, books or other symmetrical parts, in which certain interesting, significant and probable (though fictitious) human transactions are described both in cause and effect, with particular reference to the influence exerted upon the ideals, opinions, morals, temperament and overt acts of some specified person or persons by the laws, institutions, superstitions, traditions and customs of such portions of the human race and the natural phenomena of such portions of the earth as may come under his, her or their observation or cognizance, and by the ideals, opinions, morals, temperament and overt acts of such person or persons as may come into contact, either momentarily or for longer periods, with him, her or them, either by actual, social or business intercourse, or through the medium of books, newspapers, the church, the theater or some other person or persons.
"Metaphysics is almost always an attempt to prove the incredible by an appeal to the unintelligible."
H. L. Mencken
Also attributed to Mencken:
"A metaphysician is a man who goes into a dark cellar at midnight without a light looking for a black cat that is not there."
Mind benumbing!
The famous Pillars of Creation (in the Eagle Nebula) are enormous compared to our solar system.
Scale comparison
A typical pillar is about 4–5 light-years long. The tip of a pillar (where stars form) is still a fraction of a light-year across—often ~0.1 light-year or more.
Now compare that to our solar system:
The orbit of Neptune: ~0.0005 light-years from the Sun
The outer edge of the Oort Cloud: up to ~1–2 light-years across (very diffuse)
What that means
The main planetary region (out to Neptune or even Pluto) would be microscopic compared to a pillar tip.
Even if you include the entire Oort Cloud, a pillar tip could still contain a large portion—or possibly all—of it, depending on how you define the boundary.
Intuitive picture
If a pillar tip were the size of a mountain, the planetary solar system would be like a grain of sand inside it.
From the pen of Alexis de Tocqueville's 'Democracy in America' (1835-1840):
I seek to trace the novel features under which despotism may appear in the world.
The first thing that strikes the observation is an innumerable multitude of men all equal and alike, incessantly endeavoring to procure the petty and paltry pleasures with which they glut their lives. Each of them, living apart, is as a stranger to the fate of all the rest – his children and his private friends constitute to him the whole of mankind; as for the rest of his fellow-citizens, he is close to them, but he sees them not – he touches them, but he feels them not; he exists but in himself and for himself alone; and if his kindred still remain to him, he may be said at any rate to have lost his country.
Above this race of men stands an immense and tutelary power, which takes upon itself alone to secure their gratifications, and to watch over their fate. That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident, and mild. It would be like the authority of a parent, if, like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks on the contrary to keep them in perpetual childhood: it is well content that the people should rejoice, provided they think of nothing but rejoicing.
For their happiness such a government willingly labors, but it chooses to be the sole agent and the only arbiter of that happiness: it provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry, regulates the descent of property, and subdivides their inheritances – what remains, but to spare them all the care of thinking and all the trouble of living? Thus it every day renders the exercise of the free agency of man less useful and less frequent; it circumscribes the will within a narrower range, and gradually robs a man of all the uses of himself.
After having thus successively taken each member of the community in its powerful grasp, and fashioned them at will, the supreme power then extends its arm over the whole community. It covers the surface of society with a net-work of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided: men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting: such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to be nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.
Democracy extends the sphere of individual freedom, socialism restricts it. Democracy attaches all possible value to each man; socialism makes each man a mere agent, a mere number. Democracy and socialism have nothing in common but one word: equality. But notice the difference: while democracy seeks equality in liberty, socialism seeks equality in restraint and servitude.
Égalité is an expression of envy. It means, in the real heart of every Republican, " No one shall be better off than I am;" and while this is preferred to good government, good government is impossible.
Despotism may govern without faith, but liberty cannot. How is it possible that society should escape destruction if the moral tie is not strengthened in proportion as the political tie is relaxed? And what can be done with a people who are their own masters if they are not submissive to the Deity?
There are at the present time two great nations in the world—allude to the Russians and the Americans— All other nations seem to have nearly reached their national limits, and have only to maintain their power; these alone are proceeding—along a path to which no limit can be perceived.
I have no hesitation in saying that although the American woman never leaves her domestic sphere and is in some respects very dependent within it, nowhere does she enjoy a higher station. And if anyone asks me what I think the chief cause of the extraordinary prosperity and growing power of this nation, I should answer that it is due to the superiority of their women.
If there ever are great revolutions there, they will be caused by the presence of the blacks upon American soil. That is to say, it will not be the equality of social conditions but rather their inequality which may give rise thereto.
There are two things which a democratic people will always find very difficult—to begin a war and to end it.
Every central government worships uniformity: uniformity relieves it from inquiry into an infinity of details.
William Hazlitt:
Man is the only animal that laughs and weeps; for he is the only animal that is struck with the difference between what things are, and what they ought to be.
We are all of us more or less the slaves of opinion.
There is not a more mean, stupid, dastardly, pitiful, selfish, spiteful, envious, ungrateful animal than the Public. It is the greatest of cowards, for it is afraid of itself.
It is well that there is no one without a fault; for he would not have a friend in the world.
The truly proud man knows neither superiors nor inferiors. The first he does not admit of: the last he does not concern himself about.
Indolence is a delightful but distressing state; we must be doing something to be happy.
Prosperity is a great teacher; adversity is a greater. Possession pampers the mind; privation trains and strengthens it.
Without the aid of prejudice and custom, I should not be able to find my way across the room; nor know how to conduct myself in any circumstances, nor what to feel in any relation of life.
Those who aim at faultless regularity will only produce mediocrity, and no one ever approaches perfection except by stealth, and unknown to themselves.
The characteristic of Chaucer is intensity; of Spenser, remoteness; of Milton, elevation; of Shakespeare, every thing.
The art of life is to know how to enjoy a little and to endure much.
[This quote is Samuel Johnson to the core. Johnson: "Human life is everywhere a state in which much is to be endured, and little to be enjoyed."]
William Hazlitt, (April 10 1778 – September 18 1830) was an English writer remembered for his essays and literary criticism. He is sometimes esteemed the greatest English literary critic after Samuel Johnson.
"The life of man in this world is like the life of a fly in a room filled with 100 boys, each armed with a fly-swatter."
H. L. Mencken
Brings to mind:
“As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods; They kill us for their sport.”
William Shakespeare- King Lear, Act IV, Scene VII
Sir William Osler, MD:
"In life’s perspective we seniors are apt to resent that the rising generation should work out its own salvation in ways that are not always our ways, & with thoughts that are not always our thoughts. One thing is in our power, to admix in due proportions with their present somewhat rickety bill of fare the more solid nourishment of the English Bible & Shakespeare."
King Lear contains Shakespeare's longest insult. A real doozy.
Act II, scene II - Kent to Oswald:
Original text:
"A knave, a rascal, an eater of broken meats, a base, proud, shallow, beggarly, three-suited, action-taking, whoreson glass-gazing, superserviceable, finical rogue; one-trunk-inheriting slave; one that wouldst be a bawd in way of good service, and art nothing but the composition of a knave, beggar, coward, pander, and the son and heir of a mongrel bitch, one whom I will beat into clamorous whining if thou deniest the least syllable of thy addition."
Modern text:
You’re a lowlife, a rascal who eats leftover scraps. You’re an ignoble, arrogant, shallow, vulgar, pretentious, conceited, filthy third-rate servant who thinks he’s something special. You’re a cowardly lawyer-loving bastard; a vain, brown-nosing, prissy scoundrel who’d pimp himself out to advance his career; a bag lady. You’re nothing but a lowlife, a beggar, a coward, and a pimp, the son and heir of a mutt bitch. I’ll beat you until you whine and cry if you deny the least bit of this.
Nero Wolfe (Rex Stout) and Dwight Macdonald discussing their contempt for Webster's Third New International Dictionary.
The String Untuned" is a 1962 New Yorker essay by Macdonald; a scathing, prescriptivist critique of Webster's Third New International Dictionary. He argued that its descriptive approach - accepting common usage rather than enforcing strict grammatical rules - abandoned standards & "untuned the string" of English language.
String Untuned? From Shakespeare's Troilus & Cressida:
"Take but degree away, untune that string, / And, hark, what discord follows. Each thing meets
In mere oppugnancy: the bounded waters
Should lift their bosoms higher than the shores,
And make a sop of all this solid globe;
Strength should be lord of imbecility,
And the rude son should strike his father dead;
Force should be right; or rather, right and wrong
(Between whose endless jar justice resides)
Should lose their names, and so should justice too!
Then every thing include itself in power,
Power into will, will into appetite,
And appetite, a universal wolf
(So doubly seconded with will and power)
Must make perforce an universal prey,
And last eat up himself.”
Abraham Lincoln - Autodidact
Abraham Lincoln walked six miles to the farm of John C. Vance to obtain a copy of Samuel Kirkham's book on grammar (photo). He learned about the book from his friend Mentor Graham. The name A. Lincoln was written boldly on the inside of the front cover. Examining the title page you will also note the words, “Ann M. Rutledge is now learning grammar,” written by Lincoln.
Lincoln studied this thoroughly in order to express himself with greater clarity and precision. He had no way of knowing that two of the most memorable speeches ever to be delivered by an American—the Gettysburg Address and the Second Inaugural Address—would one day be shaped by skills he was about to hone on his own. All he knew was that he wanted to become a better public speaker, and that he should sharpen his use of language.
He also studied rhetoric, the art of effective or persuasive speaking or writing, especially the use of figures of speech and other compositional techniques.
Roy P. Basler, in a study of Lincoln's style made the point that Lincoln's literary education was a great deal more thorough than used to be thought. "A careful examination," he says, of the books on elocution and grammar "which Lincoln studied both in and out of school will not impress anyone with Lincoln's poverty of opportunity for the study of grammar and rhetoric. It is safe to say that few children today learn as much through twelve years of formal schooling in these two subjects as one finds in the several textbooks which Lincoln is supposed to have studied."
Edmund Wilson elaborates on the point: "For it is true that the schoolbooks of the early nineteenth century taught not only the mechanics of writing - that is, of grammar and syntax - but also the art of rhetoric - that is, of what used to called 'harmonious numbers' and of dramatic and oratorical effectiveness." Just so.
Wilson cites a passage Lincoln wrote in a private letter dealing with personal matters. It was written in his thirty-third year. "The second [cause of his correspondent's melancholy] is, the absence of all business and conversation of friends, which might divert your mind, and give it occasional rest from that intensity of thought, which will sometimes wear the sweetest idea threadbare and turn it to the bitterness of death."
Wilson breaks this down: "Here, in the final phrases, the balance of vowels and consonants, the assonance and alliteration, the progression from the long 'e's of 'sweetest idea,' over which one would want to linger, to the short and closed vowels of 'bitterness of death,' which chill the lyrical rhythm and bite it off at the end - all this shows a training of the literary ear that is not often taught in modern schools."
I find this amazing. Remember Lincoln's formal education was probably no more than a total six months.
Interesting to note Lincoln mastered the first six books of Euclid's 'Elements' (plane geometry) at age forty.
Abraham Lincoln read Euclid's "Elements of Geometry," 7th edition, 1826.
"Has there ever been another historical crisis of the magnitude of 1861-65 in which so many people were so articulate?"
Edmund Wilson in his Introduction to 'Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the Civil War.'
Wilson continues:
"The elaborate orations of Charles Sumner, modelled on Demosthenes and Cicero; Lincoln's unique addresses, at once directives and elegies; John Brown's letters from prison and his final speech to the court; Grant's hard and pellucid memoirs and John Mosby's almost picaresque ones, together with chronicles and apologetics of innumerable officers of both armies; the brilliant journal of Mary Chesnut, so much more imaginative and revealing than most of the fiction inspired by the war; the autobiographies of the Adams brothers, that cool but attentive commentary by members of an historically self-conscious family - such documents dramatize the war as the poet or the writer of fiction has never been able to do."
In his 1860 biography of candidate Lincoln, journalist William Dean Howells wrote that Mr. Lincoln was “a diligent student of Shakespeare, to know whom is a liberal education.” There's no denying this. Historian William E. Gienapp: "Lincoln’s gift for language was marvelous, even poetic, so much so that he is the only American president other than Thomas Jefferson whose writings can be considered literature.”
