Near the start of Chap­ter 9:

They were in a small vestibule, with doors open­ing to the right and left. The beam­ing Mrs. Bren­nan went to the right, and fol­low­ing her with her eye, [Laura] caught a glimpse of a com­mit­tee room dec­o­rated in the mod­ern style and fur­nished with a long table and many chairs, and beyond it a swing­ing door lead­ing to a kitchen, into which the old lady van­ished. Eng­lish led Laura to the left, and together they walked into a sun­lit, old-fashioned library which might have been trans­ported detail by detail from a cin­ema set­ting for a story of rich Tories in the Amer­i­can Rev­o­lu­tion. It was, in fact, a replica of one of the repli­cas in the Williams­burg restora­tion of colo­nial homes; the wraith of a wraith, its qual­ity of other-worldliness height­ened by its for­lorn set­ting atop a build­ing full of fear­fully New things. A real fire burned in a real stone chim­ney, and a wisp of real smoke even brought a sting to the eyes, due to a really faulty draft.

p 102

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Near the end of Chap­ter 8:

Leach’s face tight­ened into its accus­tomed lines. “I don’t think they’ll strug­gle too hard,” he said through his teeth. “Not with four day­time and one other evening show still on their nets. I’ll talk to Wolver. It’ll be all right.” His man­ner of say­ing this left no doubt that it would be, and indi­cated that his “talk­ing” to the unlucky Wolver would be in the tra­di­tion of per­sua­sion fol­lowed by antique mon­archs with the aid of quaint machines.

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Begin­ning of Chap­ter 8:

In Tal­madge Marquis’s inner office on the seventy-eighth floor of the Empire State Build­ing were fathered four mas­ters of men: Mar­quis him­self, Vil­helm Van Wirt (whom the atten­tive reader will remem­ber as Andrew’s men­tor, the sales man­ager of the Repub­lic Broad­cast­ing Com­pany), and two gen­tle­men named Wal­ter B. Grovill and Thomas Leach, whose joined patronyms formed the name of an adver­tis­ing firm known wher­ever any­body ate the bread of broad­cast­ing. As to these two new fig­ures on our stage, we are deter­mined to leave descrip­tion and pro­ceed with our tale. You must be con­tent, then, to know that Grovill was large, fat, and pale, and ended most of his utter­ances with a con­cil­ia­tory gig­gle, while Leach was small, bitter-visaged, and pale, and inces­santly twisted a col­lege ring around his third fin­ger by flick­ing it with his thumb. Some day, if spared, we may tell the story of these two although it will not be so whole­some and improv­ing a tale as this one, con­tain­ing, as it must, con­sid­er­ably more human error and fewer inter­ludes of inno­cent romance.

p. 91

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The open­ing pas­sage of Chap­ter 7:

There is a school of phi­los­o­phy which holds that there is no such thing in the world as evil, and that what strikes the com­mon sense of mankind as evil is only “the absence of Being where Being should be.” The argu­ment, sim­ple and inge­nious, runs so: no being is per­fect in this uni­verse, except the Supreme Being; all other beings are imper­fect, and are con­stantly striv­ing to become more per­fect; but, in so far as they are imper­fect they lack true Being, and it is this imper­fec­tion which appears to us as Evil. Adher­ents of this doc­trine are quite obdu­rate. I once over­heard a two-hour argu­ment in which one dis­putant was at last crowded to the wall with the instance of a drunken hus­band stran­gling his wife and two babies, and was asked whether he did not con­sider this an instance of evil? “No,” he replied with great calm, “prop­erly under­stood it is merely an absence of Being where Being should be …” and, in the shocked silence which ensued, he con­ceded, “a con­sid­er­able absence.”

Tal­madge Mar­quis was known far and wide to suf­fer from con­sid­er­able absence of Being in this sense. To the unphilo­sophic view of peo­ple engaged in mak­ing soap and pro­duc­ing radio pro­grams, he seemed (such was their lack of insight) to be an entirely evil bully, loud, capri­cious and mean, and as obsti­nately resis­tant to progress as a hun­dred square miles of mud. The saw this large man, with his large, red face, large, bel­low­ing voice, and large indif­fer­ence to rea­son and good man­ners as an epit­ome of bad­ness, not hav­ing the scholas­tic train­ing to rec­og­nize in him an imper­fect Being strug­gling toward per­fec­tion. This griev­ous error was so wide­spread that he was hated by those he employed, feared by those he ben­e­fited, and despised by those who were beyond his power. The pity was that, for all his upward striv­ing, he seemed to acquire no Being what­ever, because in the twenty years since he had inher­ited the Mar­quis com­pany at the death of his father he had only become more per­verse and noisy in the opin­ion of all who knew him, whereas he had started with no small endow­ment of these qualities.

pg 84–85

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“All of the past is but the begin­ning of a begin­ning; all that the human mind has accom­plished is but the dream before the awak­en­ing.” — H.G. Wells

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“Things won are done; joy’s soul lies in the doing.”

–Troilus and Cres­sida, Act 1, Scene 2

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These are the words of Chi­nese Zen mas­ter Lay­man P’ang (c. 740–808 A.D.) as writ­ten in George Leonard’s Mastery:

My daily affairs are quite ordi­nary;
but I’m in total har­mony with them.
I don’t hold on to any­thing, don’t reject any­thing;
nowhere an obsta­cle or con­flict.
Who cares about wealth and honor?
Even the poor­est thing shines.
My mirac­u­lous power and spir­i­tual activ­ity:
draw­ing water and car­ry­ing wood.

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This poem by Wal­lace Stevens recounts the details of a wake for a dead woman. I love the con­sci­en­tious poetry of the poem, the dec­o­ra­tions (“…kitchen cups con­cu­pis­cent curds”), the con­di­tion­als (“let…”),and the dec­la­ra­tions (“The only emperor is…”). Let being be the end of seem­ing. I know no tighter phrase for the enig­matic cage that is a mind with a body.

The Emperor of Ice-Cream

Call the roller of big cig­ars,
The mus­cu­lar one, and bid him whip
In kitchen cups con­cu­pis­cent curds.
Let the wenches daw­dle in such dress
As they are used to wear, and let the boys
Bring flow­ers in last month’s news­pa­pers.
Let be be finale of seem.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

Take from the dresser of deal.
Lack­ing the three glass knobs, that sheet
On which she embroi­dered fan­tails once
And spread it so as to cover her face.
If her horny feet pro­trude, they come
To show how cold she is, and dumb.
Let the lamp affix its beam.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

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In Pol­i­tics and the Eng­lish Lan­guage, George Orwell writes: A scrupu­lous writer, in every sen­tence that he writes, will ask him­self at least four ques­tions, thus: 1. What am I try­ing to say? 2. What words will express it? 3. What image or idiom will make it clearer? 4. Is this image fresh enough to have an effect? And he will prob­a­bly ask him­self two more: 1. Could I put it more shortly? 2. Have I said any­thing that is avoid­ably ugly?

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I’ll let the title of the fol­low­ing pas­sage from The Auto­bi­og­ra­phy of Mark Twain sum­ma­rize it:

Mr Clemens com­ments on the killing of six hun­dred Moros–Men, women, and children–In a crater bowl near Jolo in the Philippines–Our troops com­manded by Gen­eral Wood–Contrasts this “bat­tle with var­i­ous other details our mil­i­tary history…

We will stop talk­ing about my school­mates of sixty years ago, for the present, and return to them later. They strongly inter­est me, and I am not going to leave them alone per­ma­nently. Strong as that inter­est is, it is for the moment pushed out of the way by an inci­dent of to-day, which is still stronger. This inci­dent burst upon the world last Fri­day in an offi­cial cable­gram from the com­man­der of our forces in the Philip­pines to our Gov­ern­ment at Wash­ing­ton. The sub­stance of it was as follows:

A tribe of Moros, dark skinned sav­ages, had for­ti­fied them­selves in the bowl of an extinct crater not many miles from Jolo; and as they were hos­tiles, and bit­ter against us because we have been try­ing for eight years to take their lib­er­ties away from them, their pres­ence in that posi­tion was a men­ace. Our com­man­der, Gen­eral Leonard Wood, ordered a recon­nais­sance. It was found that the Moros num­bered six hun­dred, count­ing women and chil­dren; that their crater bowl was in the sum­mit of a peak or moun­tain twenty-two hun­dred feet above sea level, and very dif­fi­cult of access for Chris­t­ian troops and artillery. Then Gen­eral Wood ordered a sur­prise, and went along him­self to see the order car­ried out. Our troops climbed the heights by devi­ous and dif­fi­cult trails, and even took some artillery with them. The kind of artillery is not spec­i­fied, but in one place it was hoisted up a sharp accliv­ity by tackle a dis­tance of some three hun­dred feet. Arrived at the rim of the crater, the bat­tle began. Our sol­diers num­bered five hun­dred and forty. They were assisted by aux­il­iaries con­sist­ing of a detach­ment of native con­stab­u­lary in our pay–their num­bers not given–and by a naval detach­ment, whose num­bers are not stated. But appar­ently the con­tend­ing par­ties were about equal as to number–six hun­dred men on our side, on the edge of the bowl; six hun­dred men, women and chil­dren in the bot­tom of the bowl. Depth of the bowl, fifty feet.

Gen­eral Wood’s order was “Kill or cap­ture the six hundred.”

The bat­tle began–it is offi­cially called by that name [battle]–our forces fir­ing down into the crater with their artillery and their deadly small arms of pre­ci­sion; the sav­ages furi­ously return­ing the fire, prob­a­bly with brickbats–though this is merely a sur­mise of mine, as the weapons used by the sav­ages are not nom­i­nated in the cable­gram. Hereto­fore the Moros have used knives and clubs mainly also inef­fec­tual trade-muskets when they had any.

The offi­cial report stated that the bat­tle was fought with prodi­gious energy on both sides dur­ing a day and a half, and that it ended with a com­plete vic­tory for the Amer­i­can arms. The com­plete­ness of the vic­tory is estab­lished by this fact: that of the six hun­dred Moros not one was left alive. The bril­liancy of the vic­tory is estab­lished by this other fact, to wit: that of our six hun­dred heroes only fif­teen lost their lives.

Gen­eral Wood was present and look­ing on. His order had been “Kill or cap­ture those sav­ages.” Appar­ently our lit­tle army con­sid­ered that the “or” left them autho­riza­tion to kill or cap­ture accord­ing to taste, and that their taste had remained what it has been for eight years, in our army out there–the taste of Chris­t­ian butchers.

The offi­cial report quite prop­erly extolled and mag­ni­fied the “hero­ism” and “gal­lantry” of our troops; lamented the loss of the fif­teen who per­ished, and elab­o­rated the wounds of thirty-two of our men who suf­fered injury, and even minutely and faith­fully described the nature of the wounds, in the inter­est of future his­to­ri­ans of the United States. It men­tioned that a pri­vate had one of his elbows scraped by a mis­sile, and the private’s name was men­tioned. Another pri­vate had the end of his nose scraped by a mis­sile. His name was also mentioned–by cable, at one dol­lar and fifty cents a word.

Next day’s news con­firmed the pre­vi­ous day’s report and named our fif­teen killed and thirty-two wounded again, and once more described the wounds and gilded them with the right adjectives.

Let us now con­sider two or three details of our mil­i­tary his­tory. In one of the great bat­tles of the Civil War 10 per cent of the forces engaged on the two sides were killed and wounded. At Water­loo, where four hun­dred thou­sand men were present on the two sides, fifty thou­sand fell, killed and wounded, in five hours, leav­ing three hun­dred and fifty thou­sand sound and all right for fur­ther adven­tures. Eight years ago, when the pathetic com­edy called the Cuban war was played, we sum­moned two hun­dred and fifty thou­sand men. We fought a num­ber of showy bat­tles, and when the war was over we had lost two hun­dred and sixty-eight men out of our two hun­dred and fifty thou­sand, in killed and wounded in the field, and just four­teen times as many by the gal­lantry of the army doc­tors in the hos­pi­tals and camps. We did not exter­mi­nate the Spaniards–far from it. In each engage­ment we left an aver­age of 2 per cent of the enemy killed or crip­pled on the field.

Con­trast these things with the great sta­tis­tics which have arrived from that Moro crater! There, with six hun­dred engaged on each side, we lost fif­teen men killed out­right, and we had thirty-two wounded–counting that nose and that elbow. The enemy num­bered six hundred–including women and children–and we abol­ished them utterly, leav­ing not even a baby alive to cry for its dead mother. This is incom­pa­ra­bly the great­est vic­tory that was ever achieved by the Chris­t­ian sol­diers of the United States.

pgs 403–404

More Mark Twain quotes can be found here: http://www.twainquotes.com/

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