Morning Read Porque no cabrÃa
¶ What Lord Chesterfield has to say about courts —
Courts are, unquestionably, the seats of politeness and good-breeding; were they not so, they would be the seats of slaughter and desolation. Those who now smile upon and embrace, would affront and stab each other, if manners did not interpose; but ambition and avarice, the two prevailing passions at courts, found dissimulation more effectual than violence; and dissimulation introduced the habit of politeness, which distinguishes the courtier from the country gentleman. In the former case the strongest body would prevail; in the latter, the strongest mind.
— ought to be said more often about executive suites.
¶ Melville devotes the entirety of a brief chapter to a gloss on Bracton, the Thirteenth-Century legist: De balena vero sufficit, si rex habeat caput, et regina caudam. Whether or not you can understand that sterling principle of English law doesn’t really matter. The mystery is how a book as awful as Moby-Dick attained a reputation for greatness. I can only think that some anxious literary gents, worried about the creeping feminization of culture at the beginning of the Twentieth Century, decided that the canon needed the pong of dirty socks.
¶ Don Quixote translator Edith Grossman tells us that what makes the sword fight between the licentiate and the bachelor (Chapter XIX) so funny is the latter’s adherence to the prescriptions of one of the many elaborate books about fencing that were current in Cervantes’s day. The curious thing is that the book-learner wins the match.
Sancho Panza, who has already wearied of whatever the Second Part has in store for him, upchucks a verbal salad of proverbs.
“God will find the cure,” said Sancho, “for God gives the malady and also the remedy; nobody knows the future: there’s a lot of hours until tomorrow, and in one of them, and even in a moment, the house can fall; I’ve seen it rain at the same time the sun is shining; a man goes to bed healthy and can’t move the next day. And tell me, is there anybody who can boast that he’s driven a nail into Fortune’s wheel? No, of course not, and I wouldn’t dare put the point of a pin between a woman’s yes and no, because it wouldn’t fit.”
¶ A new low is reached in Squillions, as a chapter about the travails of rehearsing and producing Quadrille passes without the slightest description of the plot. Barry Day, who often appears to be addressing his remarks to a tea-shop-ful of Coward queens, is far more interested in documenting the chill that developed between Coward and the Lunts (for whom he wrote Quadrille — I did learn that much). As Coward and the Lunts were far too intelligent and self-controlled to commit indiscretions to paper, the chill must be found between the lines. Since we don’t know anything about the play that they’re squabbling 0ver, the search hardly seems to be worth the effort.