TERMS STARTING WITH
TERMS ANYWHERE
ABC 1. "computer" {Atanasoff-Berry Computer}. 2. "language" An {imperative language} and programming environment from {CWI}, Netherlands. It is interactive, structured, high-level, and easy to learn and use. It is a general-purpose language which you might use instead of {BASIC}, {Pascal} or {AWK}. It is not a systems-programming language but is good for teaching or prototyping. ABC has only five data types that can easily be combined; {strong typing}, yet without declarations; data limited only by memory; refinements to support top-down programming; nesting by indentation. Programs are typically around a quarter the size of the equivalent {Pascal} or {C} program, and more readable. ABC includes a programming environment with {syntax-directed} editing, {suggestions}, {persistent variables} and multiple workspaces and {infinite precision} arithmetic. An example function words to collect the set of all words in a document: HOW TO RETURN words document: PUT {} IN collection FOR line in document: FOR word IN split line: IF word not.in collection: INSERT word IN collection RETURN collection {Interpreter}/{compiler}, version 1.04.01, by Leo Geurts, Lambert Meertens, Steven Pemberton "Steven.Pemberton@cwi.nl". ABC has been ported to {Unix}, {MS-DOS}, {Atari}, {Macintosh}. {(http://cwi.nl/cwi/projects/abc.html)}. {FTP eu.net (ftp://ftp.eu.net/programming/languages/abc)}, {FTP nluug.nl (ftp://ftp.nluug.nl/programming/languages/abc)}, {FTP uunet (ftp://ftp.uu.net/languages/abc)}. Mailing list: "abc-list-request@cwi.nl". E-mail: "abc@cwi.nl". ["The ABC Programmer's Handbook" by Leo Geurts, Lambert Meertens and Steven Pemberton, published by Prentice-Hall (ISBN 0-13-000027-2)]. ["An Alternative Simple Language and Environment for PCs" by Steven Pemberton, IEEE Software, Vol. 4, No. 1, January 1987, pp. 56-64.] (1995-02-09) 2. "language" Argument, Basic value, C?. An {abstract machine} for implementation of {functional languages} and its intermediate code. [P. Koopman, "Functional Programs as Executable Specifications", 1990]. (1995-02-09)
ABC ::: 1. (computer) Atanasoff-Berry Computer.2. (language) An imperative language and programming environment from CWI, Netherlands. It is interactive, structured, high-level, and easy to learn Pascal or AWK. It is not a systems-programming language but is good for teaching or prototyping.ABC has only five data types that can easily be combined; strong typing, yet without declarations; data limited only by memory; refinements to support top-down programming; nesting by indentation. Programs are typically around a quarter the size of the equivalent Pascal or C program, and more readable.ABC includes a programming environment with syntax-directed editing, suggestions, persistent variables and multiple workspaces and infinite precision arithmetic.An example function words to collect the set of all words in a document: HOW TO RETURN words document:PUT {} IN collection ABC has been ported to Unix, MS-DOS, Atari, Macintosh. . , , .Mailing list: .E-mail: .[The ABC Programmer's Handbook by Leo Geurts, Lambert Meertens and Steven Pemberton, published by Prentice-Hall (ISBN 0-13-000027-2)].[An Alternative Simple Language and Environment for PCs by Steven Pemberton, IEEE Software, Vol. 4, No. 1, January 1987, pp. 56-64.] (1995-02-09)2. (language) Argument, Basic value, C?.An abstract machine for implementation of functional languages and its intermediate code.[P. Koopman, Functional Programs as Executable Specifications, 1990]. (1995-02-09)
CamelCase "programming" The practice of concatenating words with either all words capitalised (e.g. "ICantReadThis" - sometimes called "UpperCamelCase" or "PascalCase") or all except the first ("iCantReadThis" - called "lowerCamelCase"). It is used in contexts where space characters are not allowed, such as identifiers in {source code}. Modern best practice separates words in identifiers with {underscore} for readability (like_this_example). CamelCase is probably a historical throw-back to systems that had no underscore or when the length of identifiers was constrained either by the programming language or by the width of computer displays. Unfortunately it has infected many projects, origanisations and programming languages such as {Java} where the uniniated create identifiers like "MemberSubmissionAddressingWSDLParserExtension". (2014-12-02)
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is the spirit of all sounds and of all words, and is hidden within them all, as the spirit in the body. It does not belong to any language, but no language can help belonging to it. This alone is the true name of God, a name that no people and no religion can claim as their own.
OED: The standard abbreviation for The Oxford English Dictionary, which is an historical dictionary, and considered the most authoritative and scholarly dictionary of English. It attempts to record all words in usage in English with citations for when the word in that usage entered the language.
quote :::There are also words, which no language can claim for its own. This is true of the word Ism-i Azam, which means the word of power. No one can claim this word as belonging to his language; it is a word, which belongs to no language... All other words have been derived from it, for Ism-i Azam is the spirit of all words; it is the root of all other words.
recall ::: v. t. --> To call back; to summon to return; as, to recall troops; to recall an ambassador.
To revoke; to annul by a subsequent act; to take back; to withdraw; as, to recall words, or a decree.
To call back to mind; to revive in memory; to recollect; to remember; as, to recall bygone days. ::: n.
KEYS (10k)
1 Sheng yen
1 The Mother
1 Sri Aurobindo
NEW FULL DB (2.4M)
4 William Shakespeare
2 Thomas Hobbes
2 Sheng yen
2 Pico Iyer
2 Paulo Coelho
2 Matthew J Sullivan
2 Lysa TerKeurst
2 Lisa Kleypas
2 Delia Owens
2 Dean Koontz
2 Carol Ann Duffy
2 Aldous Huxley
1:In meditation, silently and serenely, all words are transcended. ~ Sheng yen, #KEYS
2:(From a meditation written on the day after the Mother first saw Sri Aurobindo)
It matters little that there are thousands of beings plunged in the densest ignorance, He whom we saw yesterday is on earth; his presence is enough to prove that a day will come when darkness shall be transformed into light, and Thy reign shall be indeed established upon earth.
O Lord, Divine Builder of this marvel, my heart overflows with joy and gratitude when I think of it, and my hope has no bounds.
My adoration is beyond all words, my reverence is silent. 30 March 1914
~ The Mother,#KEYS
3:But for the knowledge of the Self it is necessary to have the power of a complete intellectual passivity, the power of dismissing all thought, the power of the mind to think not at all which the Gita in one passage enjoins. This is a hard saying for the occidental mind to which thought is the highest thing and which will be apt to mistake the power of the mind not to think, its complete silence for the incapacity of thought. But this power of silence is a capacity and not an incapacity, a power and not a weakness. It is a profound and pregnant stillness. Only when the mind is thus entirely still, like clear, motionless and level water, in a perfect purity and peace of the whole being and the soul transcends thought, can the Self which exceeds and originates all activities and becomings, the Silence from which all words are born, the Absolute of which all relativities are partial reflections manifest itself in the pure essence of our being. In a complete silence only is the Silence heard; in a pure peace only is its Being revealed. Therefore to us the name of That is the Silence and the Peace.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Purified Understanding, 302,#KEYS
*** WISDOM TROVE ***
1:All words are pegs to hang ideas on. ~ henry-ward-beecher, @wisdomtrove 2:Writing cannot express all words, words cannot encompass all ideas. ~ confucius, @wisdomtrove 3:We do not stray out of all words into the ever silent; We do not raise our hands to the void for things beyond hope. ~ rabindranath-tagore, @wisdomtrove 4:In religion all words are dirty words. Anybody who gets eloquent about Buddha, or God, or Christ, ought to have his mouth washed out with carbolic soap. ~ aldous-huxley, @wisdomtrove 5:I have tried (I am not sure how successfully) to write plain tales. I dare not say they are simple; there is not a simple page, a simple word, on earth - for all pages, all words, predicate the universe, whose most notorious attribute is its complexity. ~ jorge-luis-borges, @wisdomtrove *** NEWFULLDB 2.4M ***
1:All words are prejudices. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, #NFDB
2:All words are pegs to hang ideas on. ~ Henry Ward Beecher, #NFDB
3:All words, in every language, are metaphors. ~ Marshall McLuhan, #NFDB
4:All words and sayings gently turn, returning to the self. ~ Bassui Tokusho, #NFDB
5:In meditation, silently and serenely, all words are transcended. ~ Sheng yen, #NFDB
6:We do not stray out of all words into the ever silent; ~ Rabindranath Tagore, #NFDB
7:Write as the wind blows and command all words like an army! ~ Hilaire Belloc, #NFDB
8:In meditation, silently and serenely, all words are transcended. ~ Sheng yen, #NFDB
9:Writing cannot express all words, words cannot encompass all ideas. ~ Confucius, #NFDB
10:Oh that thou hadst like others been all words, And no performance. ~ Philip Massinger, #NFDB
11:Countries, states, cities, corporations and laws are all words on paper. ~ Bryant McGill, #NFDB
12:Lady, you bereft me of all words/
My blood speaks to you in my veins. ~ William Shakespeare,#NFDB
13:All words are masks and the lovelier they are, the more they are meant to conceal. ~ Steven Millhauser, #NFDB
14:Madam, you have bereft me of all words, Only my blood speaks to you in my veins. ~ William Shakespeare, #NFDB
15:Forgive me if I have a kind of allergic reaction to all words that hint of nationalism... ~ Italo Calvino, #NFDB
16:Madam, you have bereft me of all words,
Only my blood speaks to you in my veins, ~ William Shakespeare,#NFDB
17:If silence only conveys the Self, if all words and thoughts are illusions, why do we discuss it? ~ Frederick Lenz, #NFDB
18:Actually, from the Buddhist context all words—and all beings—are verbs, in dynamic activity. ~ Taigen Dan Leighton, #NFDB
19:There is nothing truly serious in life. All words sound hollow when one listens to them carefully. ~ Alexandra David Neel, #NFDB
20:All words at all times, true or false, whispered or shouted, are clues to the workings of the human heart. ~ Kate DiCamillo, #NFDB
21:All words have power, of course, but names are the most potent of all, which is why the gods had so many. ~ Joanne M Harris, #NFDB
22:All words, then, belonging to the inner world of the mind, are of the imagination, are originally poetic words. ~ George MacDonald, #NFDB
23:229. I am writing all this down in blue ink, so as to remember that all words, not just some, are written in water. ~ Maggie Nelson, #NFDB
24:Lady you berfet me of all words,/Only my blood speaks to you in my veins,/ And there is such confusion in my powers. ~ William Shakespeare, #NFDB
25:All words that are important in history have been picked up and used by all kind of characters, for all kinds of reasons. ~ Richard D Wolff, #NFDB
26:one is reminded, at a level deeper than all words, how making a living and making a life sometimes point in opposite directions. ~ Pico Iyer, #NFDB
27:All words are masks, and the lovelier they are, the more they are meant to conceal. —Steven Millhauser, “August Eschenburg ~ Matthew J Sullivan, #NFDB
28:ALL words are made-up: Do you think we find them fully formed on the ocean floor, or mine from them in some remote part of Wales? ~ Kory Stamper, #NFDB
29:Music expresses feeling and thought, without language; it was below and before speech, and it is above and beyond all words. ~ Robert G Ingersoll, #NFDB
30:All words are masks, and the lovelier they are, the more they are meant to conceal. —Steven Millhauser, “August Eschenburg” As ~ Matthew J Sullivan, #NFDB
31:Music expresses feeling and thought, without language; it was below and before speech, and it is above and beyond all words. ~ Robert Green Ingersoll, #NFDB
32:If, of all words of tongue and pen, The saddest are, It might have been,' More sad are these we daily see: 'It is, but hadn't ought to be!' ~ Bret Harte, #NFDB
33:You know There are moments when silence, prolonged and unbroken, More expressive may be than all words ever spoken. ~ Edward Bulwer Lytton 1st Baron Lytton, #NFDB
34:In religion all words are dirty words. Anybody who gets eloquent about Buddha, or God, or Christ, ought to have his mouth washed out with carbolic soap. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
35:Slavery is wrong. If Slavery is right, all words, acts, laws, and Constitutions against it, are themselves wrong, and should be silenced, and swept away. ~ Abraham Lincoln, #NFDB
36:The other project was, a scheme for entirely abolishing all words whatsoever; and this was urged as a great advantage in point of health, as well as brevity. ~ Jonathan Swift, #NFDB
37:Unreasonable," "unrealistic," and "impractical" are all words used to marginalize a person or idea that fails to conform with conventionally expected standards. ~ Chris Guillebeau, #NFDB
38:If you can see silence as the ground of all words and the birth of all words, then you will find that when you speak, your words will be more well-chosen and calm. Francis ~ Richard Rohr, #NFDB
39:We say that the words were smooth, caressing, hard, sharp, and so on: all words that refer to body touching. Indeed we can kill or elate with words as body experiences. ~ Humberto Maturana, #NFDB
40:VASTY (As differentiated from "vast") Has approximately the same meaning as "biggy," "hugey," and "giganticky." Do not let anyone tell you these words are not words; all words are words. ~ Amy Leach, #NFDB
41:Jesus doesn’t participate in the rat race. He’s into the slower rhythms of life, like abiding, delighting, and dwelling — all words that require us to trust Him with our place and our pace. ~ Lysa TerKeurst, #NFDB
42:All words are written in the same ink,
'flower' and 'power,' say, are much the same,
and though I might write 'blood, blood, blood'
all over the page, the paper would not be stained
now would I bleed. ~ Philippe Jaccottet,#NFDB
43:In the treatment of the child the world foreshadows its own future and faith. All words and all thinking lead to the child, - to that vast immortality and wide sweep of infinite possibility which the child represents. ~ W E B Du Bois, #NFDB
44:Jesus doesn’t participate in the rat race. He’s into the slower rhythms of life, like abiding, delighting, and dwelling—all words that require us to trust Him with our place and our pace. Words used to describe us being with Him. ~ Lysa TerKeurst, #NFDB
45:To reconnect consciousness with the unconscious, to make consciousness symbolical is to reconnect words with silence; to let the silence in. If consciousness is all words and no silence, the unconscious remains unconscious.”—N.O. Brown ~ Ram Dass, #NFDB
46:Listening to all words--the silent words of nature, the words of friends and enemies, and the words of scripture--can become an exercise in human yearning and divine response, flowing in and out of one's life like a river current. ~ Kathleen Norris, #NFDB
47:All words are written in the same ink, ‘flower’ and ‘power’, say, are much the same, and though I might write ‘blood, blood, blood’ all over the page the paper would not be stained nor would I bleed. Philippe Jacottet, ‘Chant d’en bas ~ Cornelia Funke, #NFDB
48:Her eyes appeared to regard him out of many thousand years: all emotion she might have felt, all words she might have uttered, would have seemed inadequate beside the adequacy of her silence, ineloquent against the eloquence of her beauty ~ F Scott Fitzgerald, #NFDB
49:Expect trouble as an inevitable part of life and when it comes, hold your head high, look it squarely in the eye and say “I will be bigger than you. You cannot defeat me.” Then repeat to yourself the most comforting of all words , “This too shall pass.” ~ Ann Landers, #NFDB
50:All words have the "taste" of a profession, a genre, a tendency, a party, a particular work, a particular person, a generation, an age group, the day and hour. Each word tastes of the context and contexts in which it has lived its socially charged life. ~ Mikhail Bakhtin, #NFDB
51:Thus, I am here where poets come to drink a dark strong poison with tiny shards of ice, something to loosen my primate tongue and its syllables
of debris. I know all words come from preexisting words and divide until our pronouncements develop selves. ~ Terrance Hayes,#NFDB
52:When we are transported either by Mozart or Glenn Miller, we find ourselves in the presence of the ineffable, for which all words are so inadequate that to attempt to describe it, even with effusive praise and words of perfect beauty, is to engage in blasphemy. ~ Dean Koontz, #NFDB
53:I have tried (I am not sure how successfully) to write plain tales. I dare not say they are simple; there is not a simple page, a simple word, on earth -\-\ for all pages, all words, predicate the universe, whose most notorious attribute is its complexity. ~ Jorge Luis Borges, #NFDB
54:in infinite space and time everything develops, becomes more perfect and more complex, is differentiated",is to say nothing at all. Those are all words with no meaning, for in the infinite is neither complex nor simple, no forward nor backward, or better or worse. ~ Leo Tolstoy, #NFDB
55:The problem is that only thirty to forty per cent of all words can be read directly from the lips. To understand the rest you have to study the face and body language, and use your linguistic instincts and logic to insert the missing words. Thinking is as important as seeing. ~ Jo Nesb, #NFDB
56:There are some who can live without wild things, and some who cannot."
"Oh," she said. "Oh."
.....
"I wasn't aware that words could hold so much. I didn't know a sentence could be so full."
He smiled. "That's a very good sentence. Not all words hold that much. ~ Delia Owens,#NFDB
57:the way dwarfs think about books and words and runes...well, you wouldn't believe it, sir. W--they think the world was written, sir. All words have enormous power. Destroying a book is worse than murder to a deep-downer.
I've rather gathered that, said Blackboard Monitor Vimes. ~ Terry Pratchett,#NFDB
58:But ’tis done—all words are idle—
Words from me are vainer still;
But the thoughts we cannot bridle 55
Force their way without the will.
Fare thee well! thus disunited,
Torn from every nearer tie,
Sear’d in heart, and lone, and blighted,
More than this I scarce can die. ~ Lord Byron,#NFDB
59:The 'New York Honk,' as it was called, was the most fashionable accent an American male could have at that time, namely, the spring of 1963. One achieved it by forcing all words out through the nostrils rather than the mouth. It was at once virile... and utterly affected. Nelson Rockefeller had a New York Honk. ~ Tom Wolfe, #NFDB
60:I would give anything to taste. To taste just dust. Because now that I'm nearly gone, I'm more here than I ever was. Now that I'm nothing but air, all I want is to breathe it. Now that I'm silent forever, haha, it's all words words words with me. Now that I can't just reach out and touch, it's all I want, is to. ~ Ali Smith, #NFDB
61:The law is more easily understood by few than many words. For all words are subject to ambiguity, and therefore multiplication of words in the body of the law is multiplication of ambiguity. Besides, it seems to imply (by too much diligence) that whosoever can evade the words is without the compass of the law. ~ Thomas Hobbes, #NFDB
62:The real subject of On Being Blue is language itself, which he sees as glorious to the exact degree that it is also inadequate, unable to sustain an immediate relation between a word on the one hand and its arbitrary and yet indissoluble referent on the other. All words are figurative; no blue is ever just blue. ~ William H Gass, #NFDB
63:don’t know what it is. They’ll forget that that thing flying through the sky is beyond all words, that it’s an expression of the immensity of life. It’s actually an extraordinary and wondrous thing that flies through the sky. But as soon as we name it, we think we know what it is. We see “bird,” and we almost discount it. ~ Adyashanti, #NFDB
64:God who spoke the world into existence with words is, in fact, the source of meaning of all words. My journey toward that discovery is the story of this book. I thought my love of books was taking me away from God, but as it turns out, book were the backwoods path back to God, bramble-filled and broken, yes, but full of truth and wonder. ~ Karen Swallow Prior, #NFDB
65:Imagine a world without words! Imagine a world without thoughts! Imagine a world without actions! If one day, God should mute all words, thoughts and actions, the world will look so different! If we are privileged to have them, let us try as possible as we can to use them well, for life will be something without words, thought and actions! ~ Ernest Agyemang Yeboah, #NFDB
66:Pfft,” a male said. “I can kiss on a single breath for at least three minutes.” “Yeah? How about you show us?” “Or are you all words and no action?” The heavily built bear spread his arms. “Which lovely lady wants to volunteer to be the object of my lusty affections?” His gaze landed on Silver. “Ms. Mercant? I could show you— Never mind, I like my head on my neck. ~ Nalini Singh, #NFDB
67:Just let the words fly from your lips and your pen. Give them rhythm and depth and height and silliness. Give them filth and form and noble stupidity. Words are free and all words, light and frothy, firm and sculpted as they may be, bear the history of their passage from lip to lip over thousands of years. How they feel to us now tells us whole stories of our ancestors. ~ Stephen Fry, #NFDB
68:Speaking the Lord’s name with reverence must simply be part of our lives as members of the Church... we do not use foul language. We do not curse or defame. We do not use the Lord’s name in vain. It is not difficult to become perfect in avoiding a swearing habit, for if one locks his mouth against all words of cursing,... he is en route to perfection in that matter. ~ Spencer W Kimball, #NFDB
69:Music-good music, great music-is itself magical, it's mysterious inspiration entwined with the mystery of all things. When we are transported either by Mozart or Glenn Miller, we find ourselves in the presence of the ineffable, for which all words are so in adequate that to attempt to describe it, even with effusive praise and words of perfect beauty, is to engage in blasphemy. ~ Dean Koontz, #NFDB
70:The heart's seasons seldom coincide with the calendar. Who among us has not been made desolate beyond all words upon some golden day when the little creatures of the air and meadow were life incarnate, from sheer joy of living? Who among us has not come home, singing, when the streets were almost impassable with snow, or met a friend with a happy, smiling face, in the midst of a pouring rain? ~ Myrtle Reed, #NFDB
71:The Mockingbird
What! Is the mocking bird come?
The Spring, he comes to say,
The Spring is here today.
All sounds, all words he knows.
His feathers preen how he will,
He is the same bird still.
Where flowers most thickly screen,
Difficult to be seen,
His varying notes deride
The topmost boughs between.
If out of time he chide.
Lo! slander at your side!
~ Du Fu,#NFDB
72:True leaders are those who can offer appropriate advice based on their own rich experience, not people who just give orders and are all words and no substance. Leaders are first people of action who lead by personal example. They are not people who merely occupy some status or position. Leaders are people of hard work, not people of tactics and maneuvering. Above all, they are not authoritarians. ~ Daisaku Ikeda, #NFDB
73:Of all words, none more purely distills the futility of human hope, mortal dreams. Did we but know the end is foreordained and soon, who could go on making such tender plans—someday I shall run my fingers through my lover’s hair—when the very next step we take shall pitch us into the sinkhole, there to be crushed to nothingness, smothered in an instant, by a thousand tonnes of earth? “Someday.” Ha! ~ Kai Ashante Wilson, #NFDB
74:As The Preacher in the biblical book of Ecclesiastes puts it: All words wear themselves out;
a man cannot utter it;
the eye is not satisfied with seeing,
nor the ear with hearing. Confronted with this verbal paralysis, what can people do? They sing, they rhapsodize, they invent metaphors; they soar into canticles and doxologies. But ultimately, words fail them and they lapse into silence. Or they speak in tongues. ~ Harvey Cox,#NFDB
75:Slowly, she unraveled each word of the sentence: “‘There are some who can live without wild things, and some who cannot.’” “Oh,” she said. “Oh.” “You can read, Kya. There will never be a time again when you can’t read.” “It ain’t just that.” She spoke almost in a whisper. “I wadn’t aware that words could hold so much. I didn’t know a sentence could be so full.” He smiled. “That’s a very good sentence. Not all words hold that much. ~ Delia Owens, #NFDB
76:... it's all words and only words, and beyond the words there's nothing... a word, which, like all the others, can only be explained by more words, but since the words we use to explain things, successfully or not, will, in turn, have to be explained, our conversation will lead nowhere, the mistaken and the true will alternate, like some kind of curse, and we'll never know what's right and what's wrong. - subhro, the mahout, Pg. 49 ~ Jos Saramago, #NFDB
77:What I missed most when I lost a man I loved was someone who held a record of my life from that time. It was the way we told each other things. Without them I went back to my quiet life, but with them there was a transcript of living. Transcript, of all words, as a way to describe love. But we all want, in some way, to be able to record our life, and for some reasons lovers do that for each other. Of all things. Of all jobs for them to be given. ~ Sara Majka, #NFDB
78:Here's a funny question:
What is your favorite word?
Think about it—maybe it's a word that makes you absolutely happy, or a word that sounds gloriously beautiful, or a word that evokes awe and wonder. Maybe you are reminded of a great time when you hear it, or maybe it represents your life's dream.
So, what is it? What is your favorite word of all words?
Thought about it yet?
Good.
And now, think why. ~ Vera Nazarian,#NFDB
79:I swear to God, Haley!" He fumes, "Stop fucking saying that! You are not some piece of ass! You're the woman I want to fucking marry some day! The woman I want to have kids with, a future! " Stunned into silence, I lose all words, all my anger as they slide down my throat, clogging my airways. "There's your declaration of love."
Drew whistles next to me, I look over and see him smiling broadly at the both us like a child on Christmas, "Awe, the big idiot's kinda romantic. ~ Ellie Messe,#NFDB
80:...when the words pour out of you just right, you understand that these sentences are all part of a river flowing out of your own distant, hidden ranges, and all words become the dissolving snow that feeds your mountain streams forever. The language locks itself in the icy slopes of our own high passes, and it is up to us, the writers, to melt the glaciers within us. When these glaciers break off, we get to call them novels, the changelings of our burning spirits, our life's work. ~ Pat Conroy, #NFDB
81:The phobic has no other object than the abject. But that word, "fear"- a fluid haze an elusive clamminess- no sooner has it cropped up than it shades off like a mirage and permeates all words of the language with nonexistence, with a hallucinatory, ghostly glimmer. Thus, fear having been bracketed, discourse will seem tenable only if it ceaselessly confront that otherness, a burden both repellent and repelled, a deep well of memory that is unapproachable and intimate: the abject. ~ Julia Kristeva, #NFDB
82:Priest At The Serapeum
My dear old father,
who always loved me the same;
my dear old father I lament
who died the day before yesterday, just before dawn.
Jesus Christ, it is my daily effort
to observe the precepts
of Thy most holy church in all my acts,
in all words, in all thoughts.
And all those who renounce Thee
I shun.-- But now I lament;
I bewail, Christ, for my father
although he was -- a horrible thing to say -a priest at the accursed Serapeum.
~ Constantine P. Cavafy,#NFDB
83:So in a sense, when it comes to God, we have nothing to say to others and we must not be ashamed of saying it. Our approach must be a powerless one which employs words as a way of saying that we have been left utterly breathless by a beauty that surpasses all words. This does not mean that we remain silent – far from it. The desire to get beyond language forces us to stretch language to its very limits. As Samuel Beckett once commented, we use words in order to tear through them and glimpse at what lies beneath. ~ Peter Rollins, #NFDB
84:In the beginning was the Word... Whatever this was, the Word, disease or creation, it was still running rampant; it would run on and on, outstrip time and space, outlast the angels, unseat God, unhook the universe. Any word contained all words - for him who had become detached through love or sorrow or whatever the cause. In every word the current ran back to the beginning which was lost and which would never be found again since there was neither beginning nor end but only that which expressed itself in beginning and end. ~ Henry Miller, #NFDB
85:One could start just by taking a few minutes out of every day to sit quietly and do nothing, letting what moves one rise to the surface. One could take a few days out of every season to go on retreat or enjoy a long walk in the wilderness, recalling what lies deeper than the moment or the self. One could even, as Cohen was doing, try to find a life in which stage sets and performances disappear and one is reminded, at a level deeper than all words, how making a living and making a life sometimes point in opposite directions. The ~ Pico Iyer, #NFDB
86:The fruitfulness of our life depends in large measure on our ability to doubt our own words and to question the value of our own work. The man who completely trusts his own estimate of himself is doomed to sterility. All he asks of any act he performs is that it be his act. If it is performed by him, it must be good. All words spoken by him must be infallible. The car he has just bought is the best for its price, for no other reason than that he is the one who has bought it. He seeks no other fruit than this, and therefore he generally gets no other. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
87:(From a meditation written on the day after the Mother first saw Sri Aurobindo)
It matters little that there are thousands of beings plunged in the densest ignorance, He whom we saw yesterday is on earth; his presence is enough to prove that a day will come when darkness shall be transformed into light, and Thy reign shall be indeed established upon earth.
O Lord, Divine Builder of this marvel, my heart overflows with joy and gratitude when I think of it, and my hope has no bounds.
My adoration is beyond all words, my reverence is silent. 30 March 1914
~ The Mother,#NFDB
88:Silently and serenely one forgets all words; Clearly and vividly That appears. When one realizes it, it is vast and without edges; In its Essence, one is clearly aware. Singularly reflecting is this bright awareness, Full of wonder is this pure reflection. Dew and moon, Stars and streams, Snow on pine trees, And clouds hovering on the mountain peaks. In this reflection all intentional efforts vanish. Serenity is the final word of all the teachings; Reflection is the response to all manifestations.
~ Hung-chih Cheng-chueh, Silently and serenely one forgets all words
,#NFDB
89:Nobody needs to go anywhere else. We are all, if we only knew it, already there. If I only knew who in fact I am, I should cease to behave as what I think I am; and if I stopped behaving as what I think I am, I should know who I am. What in fact I am, if only the Manichee I think I am would allow me to know it, is the reconciliation of yes and no lived out in total acceptance and the blessed experience of Not-Two. In religion all words are dirty words. Anybody who gets eloquent about Buddha, or God, or Christ, ought to have his mouth washed out with carbolic soap. ~ Aldous Huxley, #NFDB
90:Rocking Chair
Sad is.
Scared is.
That is all.
The rocking chair I live in rocks like a paper boat. Sometimes I am all words, and no boot.
No muster. No yes. All lag and tired pray,
all miss my hometown. Miss the woods
and the quiet porch and the talking slow.
I caught the snow on my tongue.
Snow angel, I.
My heart a blue lamp.
My mother calling me home.
We cannot be called home enough times in our lives.
Dear lonely,
what is your name?
I will open my front door
and ring it through the streets. ~ Andrea Gibson,#NFDB
91:But once, in the light and warmth of an autumn afternoon, this writer saw on the bench of a public square, in a poor Parisian suburb, an old and poor couple. They were sitting hand in hand, in silence, enjoying the pale light, the last warmth of the season. In silence: all words had been said, all passion exhausted, all storms at peace. The whole life was behind—yet all of it was now present, in this silence, in this light, in this warmth, in this silent unity of hands. Present—and ready for eternity, ripe for joy. This to me remains the vision of marriage, of its heavenly beauty.24 ~ James K A Smith, #NFDB
92:She listens, determined to locate the trapped bird that had called out from within the madness of suffering. But there is only silence now, not even a halting fragment. Ali! Ali! A dervish, having renounced dealings with all words except that one, never utters another, in any circumstance...The sentence enters her mind from a book she had been looking at earlier. Her gaze is drifting across the sky where the moon sits in a great cold ring as she recalls more and more words. Only one thing matters, only one word. If we speak, it is because we have not found that thing, nor shall find it. ~ Nadeem Aslam, #NFDB
93:Here is an eternal truth. Life cannot be divided into compartments in some which God is involved and in others of which he is not involved... The fact is that God does not need to be invited into certain departments of life, and kept out of others. He is everywhere, all through life and in every activity of life. He hears not only the words that are spoken in his name; he hears all words; and there cannot be any such thing as a form of words which evades bringing God into any transaction. We will regard all promises as sacred if we remember that all promises are made in the presence of God. ~ William Barclay, #NFDB
94:And the mist of snow, as he had foreseen, was still on it - a ghost of snow falling in the bright sunlight, softly and steadily floating and turning and pausing, soundlessly meeting the snow that covered, as with a transparent mirage, the bare bright cobbles. He loved it - he stood still and loved it. Its beauty was paralyzing - beyond all words, all experience, all dream. No fairy-story he had ever read could be compared with it - none had ever given him this extraordinary combination of ethereal loveliness with a something else, unnameable, which was just faintly and deliciously terrifying.
("Silent Snow, Secret Snow") ~ Conrad Aiken,#NFDB
95:Go back 2,400 years, and you can hear it from the Athenian orator Demosthenes as he chastises his fellow citizens for responding to Macedonian aggression by “forever debating the question and never making any progress” and issuing “empty decrees.” “All words, apart from action,” Demosthenes warned, “seem vain and idle, especially from Athenian lips: for the greater our reputation for a ready tongue, the greater the distrust it inspires in all men.” We’ve had several years now of watching Obama and his foreign policy team prove this eternal truth as they have feebly and fecklessly responded to crisis after crisis in Ukraine, Syria, and a dozen other venues. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
96:I thought that some of the hymns bespoke the true religion of the place. The people didn't really want to be saints of self-deprivation and hatred of the world. They knew that the world would sooner or later deprive them of all it had given them, but still they liked it. What they came together for was to acknowledge, just by coming, their losses and failures and sorrows, their need for comfort, their faith always needing to be greater, their wish (in spite of all words and acts to the contrary) to love one another and to forgive and be forgiven, their need for one another's help and company and divine gifts, their hope (and experience) of love surpassing death, their gratitude. ~ Wendell Berry, #NFDB
97:His life had been tied to the past. He’d seen himself a point on a moving wavefront, propagating through sterile history—a known past, a projectable future. But she was the breaking of the wave. Suddenly there was a beach, the unpredictable… new life. Past and future stopped at the beach: that was how he’d set it out. But he wanted to believe it too, the same way he loved her, past all words—believe that no matter how bad the time, nothing was fixed, everything could be changed and she could always deny the dark sea at his back, love it away. And (selfishly) that from a somber youth, squarely founded on Death—along for Death’s ride—he might, with her, find his way to life and to joy. ~ Thomas Pynchon, #NFDB
98:Then bring near to you Aaron your brother, and his sons with him, from among the people of Israel, to serve me as priests—Aaron and Aaron’s sons, Nadab and Abihu, Eleazar and Ithamar. And you shall make holy garments for Aaron your brother, for glory and for beauty. You shall speak to all the skillful, whom I have filled with a spirit of skill, that they make Aaron’s garments to consecrate him for my priesthood.” (Exodus 28:1–3, emphasis mine) The war against shame is on. God puts shame in the crosshairs as he gives glory and beauty to his people. Glory, beauty, and consecrate are all words that identify things that are holy. They belong to God, and everything that belongs to him is made beautiful by association. ~ Edward T Welch, #NFDB
99:If you hurt any of your fingers, your whole body will feel its effect. Everything is connected. Infect one part of something, and a reaction will spread and affect the rest. We sit sometimes not knowing why we feel restless or sad, but in truth we are feeling transferred emotions moving through our atmosphere. We pick up on frequencies that come from near and far that affect us unconsciously. Humans are like moving antennas. We are magnetic entities living in an electromagnetic world. The core of the earth is a gigantic crystal that captures and amplifies strong energies in all directions. We all act and react as its transmitters and receivers. Every cause has effect and every effect has cause. All words and actions do matter. ~ Suzy Kassem, #NFDB
100:I blaze with a deep sullen magic, smell lust like a heron on fire; all words I form into castles then storm them with soldiers of air. What I seek is not there for asking. My armies are fit and well trained. This poet will trust her battalions to fashion her words into blades. At dawn I shall ask them for beauty, for proof that their training went well. At night I shall beg their forgiveness as I cut their throats by the hill. My navies advance through the language, destroyers ablaze in high seas. I soften the island for landings. With words, I enlist a dark army. My poems are my war with the world. I blaze with a deep southern magic. The bombardiers taxi at noon. There is screaming and grief in the mansions and the moon is a heron on fire. ~ Pat Conroy, #NFDB
101:From the beginning, of course, I had known that the pure forcefulness of my argument would not penetrate deep enough to effect any change. It almost never does. It’s never worked for me when I’ve been in therapy. Only when one feels an insight in one’s bones does one own it. Only then can one act on it and change. Pop psychologists forever talk about “responsibility assumption,” but it’s all words: it is extraordinarily hard, even terrifying, to own the insight that you and only you construct your own life design. Thus, the problem in therapy is always how to move from an ineffectual intellectual appreciation of a truth about oneself to some emotional experience of it. It is only when therapy enlists deep emotions that it becomes a powerful force for change. And powerlessness was ~ Irvin D Yalom, #NFDB
102:If you hurt any of your fingers, your whole body will feel its effect. Everything is connected. Infect one part of something, and a reaction will spread and affect the rest. We sit sometimes not knowing why we feel restless or sad, but in truth we are feeling transferred emotions moving through our atmosphere. We pick up on frequencies that come from near and far that affect us unconsciously. Humans are like moving antennas. We are magnetic entities living in an electromagnetic world. The core of the earth is a gigantic crystal that captures and amplifies strong energies in all directions. We all act and react as its transmitters and receivers. Every cause has effect and every effect has cause. All words and actions do matter.
We are all connected. When one arm or foot is poisoned, the whole body becomes infected. ~ Suzy Kassem,#NFDB
103:Total Eclipse
Not wanting to write
for fear that anythingthe passion for the page,
the love of carbon ribbons & eraserswill distract me from your face,
from your eyes green
as the flickering base of flames,
& your tarnished copper hair.
My love is thick as rust
& just as hard to scrape off.
It glows like the green roofs of paris:
it shines in the sun like dropped pennies.
I fix on your face
until I am blurred & bleared,
until my eyes cannot focus
& all words become one.
Oh let me write you into my life!
I am afraid of rust & tarnish,
but even more afraid of this gleam.
When my eyes have taken you in,
when my body has eaten
& spat you out,
when my heart remembers to beat
& my fingers remember the penwill I still remember you then,
boyish & slyyet a total eclipse of my sun?
~ Erica Jong,#NFDB
104:Ever since his first ecstasy or vision of Christminster and its possibilities, Jude had meditated much and curiously on the probable sort of process that was involved in turning the expressions of one language into those of another. He concluded that a grammar of the required tongue would contain, primarily, a rule, prescription, or clue of the nature of a secret cipher, which, once known, would enable him, by merely applying it, to change at will all words of his own speech into those of the foreign one. His childish idea was, in fact, a pushing to the extremity of mathematical precision what is everywhere known as Grimm's Law—an aggrandizement of rough rules to ideal completeness. Thus he assumed that the words of the required language were always to be found somewhere latent in the words of the given language by those who had the art to uncover them, such art being furnished by the books aforesaid. ~ Thomas Hardy, #NFDB
105:Spirit in its human manifestation is man’s response to his You. Man speaks in many tongues - tongues of language, of art, of action - but the spirit is one; it is response to the You that appears from the mystery and addresses us from the mystery. Spirit is word. And even as verbal speech may first become word in the brain of man and then become sound in his throat, although both are merely refractions of the true event because in truth language does not reside in man but man stands in language and speaks out of it - so it is with all words, all spirit. Spirit is not in the I but between I and You. It is not like the blood that circulates in you but like the air in which you breathe. Man lives in the spirit when he is able to respond to his You. He is able to do that when he enters into this relation with his whole being. It is solely by virtue of his power to relate that man is able to live in the spirit. ~ Martin Buber, #NFDB
106:All religious expression is symbolism; since we can describe only what we see, and the true objects of religion are The Seen. The earliest instruments of education were symbols; and they and all other religious forms differed and still differ according to external circumstances and imagery, and according to differences of knowledge and mental cultivation. All language is symbolic, so far as it is applied to mental and spiritual phenomena and action. All words have, primarily, a material sense, howsoever they may afterward get, for the ignorant, a spiritual non-sense. To "retract," for example, is to draw back, and when applied to a statement, is symbolic, as much so as a picture of an arm drawn back, to express the same thing, would he. The very word "spirit" means " breath," from the Latin verb spiro, breathe. ~ Albert Pike, Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry (1871), Ch. III : The Master, p. 62, #NFDB
107:Without A Title
So aloof, so meek in your ways,
Now you're fire, you're pure combustion.
Only let me lock up your beauty
Deep, deep down in a poem's dungeon.
See how wholly transformed they are
By the fire in the glowing lampshade;
Edge of wall, edge of window-pane,
Our own figures and our own shadows.
There you sit on cushions, apart,
Legs tucked under you, Turkish fashion.
In the light or in the shadow,
Childlike, always, the way you reason.
Dreaming, now you thread on a string
Beads that lie on your lap in profusion.
Far too sad is your mien, too artless
Is the drift of your conversation.
Yes, love's truly a vulgar word.
I'll invent something else to supplant it,
Just for you, the whole world, all words
I will gladly rename, if you want it.
Can your sorrowful mien convey
All your hidden orebearing richness,
All that radiant seam of your heart?
Why d'you fill your eyes with such sadness?
~ Boris Pasternak,#NFDB
108:Mist In The Valley
These hills, to hurt me more,
That am hurt already enough,—
Having left the sea behind,
Having turned suddenly and left the shore
That I had loved beyond all words, even a song's words, to
convey,
And built me a house on upland acres,
Sweet with the pinxter, bright and rough
With the rusty blackbird long before the winter's done,
But smelling never of bayberry hot in the sun,
Nor ever loud with the pounding of the long white breakers,—
These hills, beneath the October moon,
Sit in the valley white with mist
Like islands in a quiet bay,
Jut out from shore into the mist,
Wooded with poplar dark as pine,
Like points of land into a quiet bay.
(Just in the way
The harbour met the bay)
Stricken too sore for tears,
I stand, remembering the Islands and the sea's lost sound—
Life at its best no longer than the sand-peep's cry,
And I two years, two years,
Tilling an upland ground!
~ Edna St. Vincent Millay,#NFDB
109:But for the knowledge of the Self it is necessary to have the power of a complete intellectual passivity, the power of dismissing all thought, the power of the mind to think not at all which the Gita in one passage enjoins. This is a hard saying for the occidental mind to which thought is the highest thing and which will be apt to mistake the power of the mind not to think, its complete silence for the incapacity of thought. But this power of silence is a capacity and not an incapacity, a power and not a weakness. It is a profound and pregnant stillness. Only when the mind is thus entirely still, like clear, motionless and level water, in a perfect purity and peace of the whole being and the soul transcends thought, can the Self which exceeds and originates all activities and becomings, the Silence from which all words are born, the Absolute of which all relativities are partial reflections manifest itself in the pure essence of our being. In a complete silence only is the Silence heard; in a pure peace only is its Being revealed. Therefore to us the name of That is the Silence and the Peace.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Purified Understanding, 302,#NFDB
110:I don’t know: perhaps it’s a dream, all a dream. (That would surprise me.) I’ll wake, in the silence, and never sleep again. (It will be I?) Or dream (dream again), dream of a silence, a dream silence, full of murmurs (I don’t know, that’s all words), never wake (all words, there’s nothing else).
You must go on, that’s all I know.
They’re going to stop, I know that well: I can feel it. They’re going to abandon me. It will be the silence, for a moment (a good few moments). Or it will be mine? The lasting one, that didn’t last, that still lasts? It will be I?
You must go on.
I can’t go on.
You must go on.
I’ll go on. You must say words, as long as there are any - until they find me, until they say me. (Strange pain, strange sin!) You must go on. Perhaps it’s done already. Perhaps they have said me already. Perhaps they have carried me to the threshold of my story, before the door that opens on my story. (That would surprise me, if it opens.)
It will be I? It will be the silence, where I am? I don’t know, I’ll never know: in the silence you don’t know.
You must go on.
I can’t go on.
I’ll go on. ~ Samuel Beckett,#NFDB
111:In short order, I became America’s foremost “irregardless” apologist. I recorded a short video for Merriam-Webster’s website refuting the notion that “irregardless” wasn’t a word; I took to Twitter and Facebook and booed naysayers who set “irregardless” up as the straw man for the demise of English. I continued to find evidence of the emphatic “irregardless” in all sorts of places—even in the oral arguments of a Supreme Court case. One incredulous e-mail response to my video continued to claim “irregardless” wasn’t a real word. “It’s a made-up word that made it into the dictionary through constant use!” the correspondent said, and I cackled gleefully before responding. Of course “irregardless” is a made-up word that was entered into the dictionary through constant use; that’s pretty much how this racket works. All words are made-up: Do you think we find them fully formed on the ocean floor, or mine for them in some remote part of Wales? I began telling correspondents that “irregardless” was much more complex than people thought, and it deserved a little respectful respite, even if it still was not part of Standard English. My mother was duly horrified. “Oh, Kory,” she tutted. “So much for that college education.” — ~ Kory Stamper, #NFDB
112:Hands cling to hands and eyes linger
on eyes: thus begins the record of our
hearts.
It is the moonlit night of March;
the sweet smell of henna is in the air;
my flute lies on the earth neglected
and your garland of flowers is
unfinished.
This love between you and me is
simple as a song.
Your veil of the saffron colour
makes my eyes drunk.
The jasmine wreath that you wove
me thrills to my heart like praise.
It is a game of giving and with-
holding, revealing and screening again;
some smiles and some little shyness,
and some sweet useless struggles.
This love between you and me is
simple as a song.
No mystery beyond the present;
no striving for the impossible; no
shadow behind the charm; no groping
in the depth of the dark.
This love between you and me is
simple as a song.
We do not stray out of all words
into the ever silent; we do not raise
our hands to the void for things
beyond hope.
It is enough what we give and we
get.
We have not crushed the joy to
the utmost to wring from it the wine
of pain.
This love between you and me is
simple as a song.
~ Rabindranath Tagore, The Gardener XVI - Hands Cling To Eyes
,#NFDB
113:Florence Nightingale
UPON the whitewashed walls
A woman's shadow falls,
A woman walketh o'er the darksome floors.
A soft, angelic smile
Lighteth her face the while,
In passing through the dismal corridors.
And now and then there slips
A word from out her lips,
More sweet and grateful to those listening ears
Than the most plaintive tale
Of the sad nightingale,
Whose name and tenderness this woman bears.
Her presence in the room
Of agony and gloom,
No fretful murmurs, no coarse words profane;
For while she standeth there,
All words are hushed save prayer;
She seems God's angel weeping o'er man's pain.
And some of them arise,
With eager, tearful eyes,
From off their couch to see her passing by.
Some, e'en too weak for this,
Can only stoop and kiss
Her shadow, and fall back content to die.
No monument of stone
Needs this heroic one,—
Her name is graven on each noble heart;
And in all after years
Her praise will be the tears
Which at that name from quivering lids will start.
And those who live not now,
To see the sainted brow,
And the angelic smile before it flits for aye,
They in the future age
75
Will kiss the storied page
Whereon the shadow of her life will lie.
~ Emma Lazarus,#NFDB
114:A Song Before Sailing
Wind of the dead men's feet,
Blow down the empty street
Of this old city by the sea
With news for me!
Blow me beyond the grime
And pestilence of time!
I am too sick at heart to war
With failure any more.
Thy chill is in my bones;
The moonlight on the stones
Is pale, and palpable, and cold;
I am as one grown old.
I call from room to room
Through the deserted gloom;
The echoes are all words I know,
Lost in some long ago.
I prowl from door to door,
And find no comrade more.
The wolfish fear that children feel
Is snuffing at my heel.
I hear the hollow sound
Of a great ship coming round,
The thunder of tackle and the tread
Of sailors overhead.
That stormy-blown hulloo
Has orders for me, too.
I see thee, hand at mouth, and hark,
My captain of the dark.
O wind of the great East,
By whom we are released
From this strange dusty port to sail
Beyond our fellows' hail,
Under the stars that keep
30
The entry of the deep,
Thy somber voice brings up the sea's
Forgotten melodies;
And I have no more need
Of bread, or wine, or creed,
Bound for the colonies of time
Beyond the farthest prime.
Wind of the dead men's feet,
Blow through the empty street;
The last adventurer am I,
Then, world, goodby!
~ Bliss William Carman,#NFDB
115:Happiness Fu. Happiness. The left side means a revelation from heaven and is used in all words with abstract meanings. The right side shows the word for “beans” on the top and “fields” on the bottom; when the beans are harvested, people are happy. All abundance is provided by Tao. If we appreciate that, we will see that we are surrounded by happiness. Like everything else in Tao, happiness comes from within. What minimal support we need from the outside—a bit of food, some shelter—can actually be very simple and plain and is readily available. Nevertheless, people are unhappy because they do not know moderation. “All I need to be happy is to be rich,” many say. But the newspapers are filled with stories of wealthy people who live in deep despair. In fact, the simple phrase, “All I need to be happy is to be rich”—complete with your choice of substitutes for the word rich—is an immediate indication of the source of our unhappiness: there is no end to what we want. Know when enough is enough. Some die from hunger, but many die from overeating. So to be happy, we have to control our desires. The ancients taught two ways to do this. Sometimes they used discipline to curb desire. Sometimes they satisfied their desires. This is the genius of Tao: moderation. We do not need to cleave to the extremism of the ascetic. We do not need to lose ourselves in the indulgence of the hedonist. We follow Tao, the middle path. ~ Ming Dao Deng, #NFDB
116:volumes where it is particularly and professedly delivered; and, by proper attention to the rules of derivation, the orthography was soon adjusted. But to COLLECT the WORDS of our language was a task of greater difficulty: the deficiency of dictionaries was immediately apparent; and when they were exhausted, what was yet wanting must be sought by fortuitous and unguided excursions into books, and gleaned as industry should find, or chance should offer it, in the boundless chaos of a living speech. My search, however, has been either skilful or lucky; for I have much augmented the vocabulary. As my design was a dictionary, common or appellative, I have omitted all words which have relation to proper names; such as Arian, Socinian, Calvinist, Benedictine, Mahometan; but have retained those of a more general nature, as Heathen, Pagan. Of the terms of art I have received such as could be found either in books of science or technical dictionaries; and have often inserted, from philosophical writers, words which are supported perhaps only by a single authority, and which being not admitted into general use, stand yet as candidates or probationers, and must depend for their adoption on the suffrage of futurity. The words which our authours have introduced by their knowledge of foreign languages, or ignorance of their own, by vanity or wantonness, by compliance with fashion or lust of innovation, I have registred as they occurred, though commonly only to censure them, and warn others against the folly of naturalizing useless foreigners to the injury of the natives. I have not rejected any by design, merely because they were unnecessary or exuberant; but have received those which by ~ Samuel Johnson, #NFDB
117:In How Fiction Works, James Wood says,
A great deal of nonsense is written every day about characters in fiction—from the side of those who believe too much in character and from the side of those who believe too little. Those who believe too much have an iron set of prejudices about what characters are: we should get to “know” them; . . . they should “grow” and “develop”; and they should be nice. So they should be pretty much like us.
Wood is correct, in part, but the ongoing question of character likability leaves the impression that what we’re looking for in fiction is an ideal world where people behave in ideal ways. The question suggests that characters should be reflections not of us, but of our better selves.
Wood also says, “There is nothing harder than the creation of fictional character.” I can attest to this difficulty, though with perhaps less hyperbole. I have, indeed, found several other tasks harder over the years. Regardless, characters are hard to create because we need to develop people who are interesting enough to hold a reader’s attention. We need to ensure that they are some measure of credible. We need to make them distinct from ourselves (and, in the best of all words, from those in our lives, unless of course there is a need to settle scores). Somehow they need to be well developed enough to carry a plot, or carry a narrative without a plot, or endure the tribulations we writers tend to throw at them with alacrity. It’s no wonder so many characters are unlikable, given what they have to put up with.
It is a seductive position writers put the reader in when they create an interesting, unlikable character—they make the reader complicit, in ways that are both uncomfortable and intriguing. ~ Roxane Gay,#NFDB
118:In many cases we can do this and avoid the exponential blowup. Suppose you’re leading a platoon in single file through enemy territory in the dead of night, and you want to make sure that all your soldiers are still with you. You could stop and count them yourself, but that wastes too much time. A cleverer solution is to just ask the first soldier behind you: “How many soldiers are behind you?” Each soldier asks the next the same question, until the last one says “None.” The next-to-last soldier can now say “One,” and so on all the way back to the first soldier, with each soldier adding one to the number of soldiers behind him. Now you know how many soldiers are still with you, and you didn’t even have to stop. Siri uses the same idea to compute the probability that you just said, “Call the police” from the sounds it picked up from the microphone. Think of “Call the police” as a platoon of words marching across the page in single file. Police wants to know its probability, but for that it needs to know the probability of the; and the in turn needs to know the probability of call. So call computes its probability and passes it on to the, which does the same and passes the result to police. Now police knows its probability, duly influenced by every word in the sentence, but we never had to construct the full table of eight possibilities (the first word is call or isn’t, the second is the or isn’t, and the third is police or isn’t). In reality, Siri considers all words that could appear in each position, not just whether the first word is call or not and so on, but the algorithm is the same. Perhaps Siri thinks, based on the sounds, that the first word was either call or tell, the second was the or her, and the third was police or please. Individually, perhaps the most likely words are call, the, and please. But that forms the nonsensical sentence “Call the please,” so taking the other words into account, Siri concludes that the sentence is really “Call the police.” It makes the call, and with luck the police get to your house in time to catch the burglar. ~ Pedro Domingos, #NFDB
119:As a result of the work done by all these stratifying force in language, there are no "neutral" words and forms - words and forms that can belong to "no one"; language has been completely taken over, shot through with intentions and accents. For any individual consciousness living in it, language is not an abstract system of normative forms, but rather a concrete heteroglot conception of the world. All words have the "taste" of a profession, a genre, a tendency, a party, a particular work, a particular person, a generation, an age group, the day and hour. Each word tastes of the context and contexts in which it has lived it socially charged life; all words and forms are populated by intentions. Contextual overtones (generic, tendentious, individualistic) are inevitable in the word.
As a living, socio-ideological concrete thing, as heteroglot opinion, language, for the individual consciousness, lies on the borderline between oneself and the other. The word in language is half someone else's. It becomes "one's own" only when the speaker populates it with his own intention, his own accent, when he appropriates the word, adapting it to his own semantic and expressive intention. Prior to this moment of appropriation, the word does not exist in a neutral and impersonal language (it is not, after all, out of a dictionary that the speaker gets his words!), but rather it exists in other people's mouths, in other people's contexts, serving other people's intentions: it is from there that one must take the word, and make it one's own. And not all words for just anyone submit equally easy to this appropriation, to this seizure and transformation into private property: many words stubbornly resist, others remain alien, sound foreign in the mouth of the one who appropriated them and who now speaks them; they cannot be assimilated into his context and fall out of it; it is as if they put themselves in quotation marks against the will of the speaker. Language is not a neutral medium that passes freely and easily into the private property of the speaker's intentions; it is populated - overpopulated - with the intentions of others. Expropriating it, forcing it to submit to one's own intentions and accents, is a difficult and complicated process. ~ Mikhail Bakhtin,#NFDB
120:Wall, Cave, And Pillar Statements, After Asoka
In order to perfect all readers
the statements should he carved
on rock walls, on cave walls,
and on the sides of pillars so
the charm of their instruction can
affect the mountain climbers near
the cliffs, the plainsmen near
the pillars, and the city people near
the caves they go to on vacations.
The statements should, and in a fair
script, spell out the right text and gloss
of the Philosopher’s jocular remark. Text:
“Honesty is the best policy.” Gloss:
“He means not ‘best’ but ‘policy,’
(this is the joke of it) whereas in fact
Honesty is Honesty, Best
is Best, and Policy is Policy,
the three terms being not
related, but here loosely allied.
What is more important is that ‘is’
is, but the rocklike truth of the text
resides in the ‘the’. The ‘the’ is The.
By this means the amusing sage
has raised or caused to be raised
the triple standard in stone:
the single is too simple for life,
the double is mere degrading hypocrisy,
but the third combines the first two
in a possible way, and contributes
something unsayable of its own:
this is the pit, nut, seed, or stone
of the fruit when the fruit has been
digested:
It is good to do good for the wrong
reason, better to do good for the good
reason, and best of all to do good
good: i.e. when the doer and doee
and whatever passes between them
28
are beyond all words like ‘grace’
or ‘anagogic insight,’ or definitions like
‘particular instance of a hoped-at-law,’
and which the rocks alone can convey.
This is the real reason for the rock walls,
the cave walls and pillars, and not the base
desires for permanence and display
that the teacher’s conceit suggests.”
That is the end of the statements, but,
in order to go on a way after the end
so as to make up for having begun
after the beginning, and thus to come around
to it in order to include the whole thing,
add: “In some places the poignant slogan,
‘Morality is a bad joke like everything else,’
may be written or not, granted that space
exists for the vulgar remarks, the dates,
initials and hearts of lovers, and all
other graffiti of the prisoners of this world.”
~ Alan Dugan,#NFDB
121:Issib wasn't thrilled to see him. I'm busy and don't need interruptions."
"This is the household library," said Nafai. "This is where we always come to do research."
"See? You're interrupting already."
"Look, I didn't say anything, I just came in here, and you started picking at me the second I walked in the door."
"I was hoping you'd walk back out."
"I can't. Mother sent me here." Nafai walked over behind Issib, who was floating comfortably in the air in front of his computer display. It was layered thirty pages deep, but each page had only a few words on it, so he could see almost everything at once. Like a game of solitaire, in which Issib was simply moving fragments from place to place.
The fragments were all words in weird languages. The ones Nafai recognized were very old.
"What language is that?" Nafai asked pointing, to one.
Issib signed. "I'm so glad you're not interrupting me."
"What is it, some ancient form of Vijati?"
"Very good. It's Slucajan, which came from Obilazati, the original form of Vijati. It's dead now."
"I read Vijati, you know."
"I don't."
"Oh, so you're specializing in ancient, obscure languages that nobody speaks anymore, including you?"
"I'm not learning these languages, I'm researching lost words."
"If the whole language is dead, then all the words are lost."
"Words that used to have meanings, but that died out or survived only in idiomatic expressions. Like 'dancing bear.' What's a bear, do you know?"
"I don't know. I always thought it was some kind of graceful bird."
"Wrong. It's an ancient mammal. Known only on Earth, I think, and not brought here. Or it died out soon. It was bigger than a man, very powerful. A predator."
"And it danced?"
"The expression used to mean something absurdly clumsy. Like a dog walking on its hind legs."
"And now it means the opposite. That's weird. How could it change?"
"Because there aren't any bears. THe meaning used to be obvious, because everybody knew a bear and how clumsy it would look, dancing. But when the bears were gone, the meaning could go anywhere. Now we use it for a person who's extremely deft in getting out of an embarrassing social situation. It's the only case that we use the word bear anymore. And you see a lot of people misspelling it, too."
"Great stuff. You doing a linguistics project?"
"No."
"What's this for, then?"
"Me."
"Just collection old idioms?"
"Lost words."
"Like bear? The word isn't lost, Issya. It's the bears that are gone."
"Very good, Nyef. You get full credit for the assignment. Go away now. ~ Orson Scott Card,#NFDB
122:I
SWEAR by what the sages spoke
Round the Mareotic Lake
That the Witch of Atlas knew,
Spoke and set the cocks a-crow.
Swear by those horsemen, by those women
Complexion and form prove superhuman,
That pale, long-visaged company
That air in immortality
Completeness of their passions won;
Now they ride the wintry dawn
Where Ben Bulben sets the scene.
Here s the gist of what they mean.
II
Many times man lives and dies
Between his two eternities,
That of race and that of soul,
And ancient Ireland knew it all.
Whether man die in his bed
Or the rifle knocks him dead,
A brief parting from those dear
Is the worst man has to fear.
Though grave-diggers' toil is long,
Sharp their spades, their muscles strong.
They but thrust their buried men
Back in the human mind again.
III
You that Mitchel's prayer have heard,
"Send war in our time, O Lord!'
Know that when all words are said
And a man is fighting mad,
Something drops from eyes long blind,
He completes his partial mind,
For an instant stands at ease,
Laughs aloud, his heart at peace.
Even the wisest man grows tense
With some sort of violence
Before he can accomplish fate,
Know his work or choose his mate.
IV
Poet and sculptor, do the work,
Nor let the modish painter shirk
What his great forefathers did.
Bring the soul of man to God,
Make him fill the cradles right.
Measurement began our might:
Forms a stark Egyptian thought,
Forms that gentler phidias wrought.
Michael Angelo left a proof
On the Sistine Chapel roof,
Where but half-awakened Adam
Can disturb globe-trotting Madam
Till her bowels are in heat,
proof that there's a purpose set
Before the secret working mind:
Profane perfection of mankind.
Quattrocento put in paint
On backgrounds for a God or Saint
Gardens where a soul's at ease;
Where everything that meets the eye,
Flowers and grass and cloudless sky,
Resemble forms that are or seem
When sleepers wake and yet still dream.
And when it's vanished still declare,
With only bed and bedstead there,
That heavens had opened.
Gyres run on;
When that greater dream had gone
Calvert and Wilson, Blake and Claude,
Prepared a rest for the people of God,
Palmer's phrase, but after that
Confusion fell upon our thought.
V
Irish poets, earn your trade,
Sing whatever is well made,
Scorn the sort now growing up
All out of shape from toe to top,
Their unremembering hearts and heads
Base-born products of base beds.
Sing the peasantry, and then
Hard-riding country gentlemen,
The holiness of monks, and after
Porter-drinkers' randy laughter;
Sing the lords and ladies gay
That were beaten into the clay
Through seven heroic centuries;
Cast your mind on other days
That we in coming days may be
Still the indomitable Irishry.
VI
Under bare Ben Bulben's head
In Drumcliff churchyard Yeats is laid.
An ancestor was rector there
Long years ago, a church stands near,
By the road an ancient cross.
No marble, no conventional phrase;
On limestone quarried near the spot
By his command these words are cut:
Cast a cold eye
On life, on death.
Horseman, pass by!
~ William Butler Yeats, Under Ben Bulben
,#NFDB
123:Aunt Dorothy's Lecture
Come, go and practise—get your work—
Do something, Nelly, pray.
I hate to see you moon about
In this uncertain way!
Why do you look so vacant, child?
I fear you must be ill.
Surely you are not thinking of
That Captain Cameron still?
Ah, yes—I fear'd so! You may blush;
I blush for you, my dear;
And it is scarce a week ago
Since Gerald brought him here—
The day he fell in the hunting-field,
And his pretty horse was lamed.
O child—and with your bringing up!
You ought to be ashamed.
Last night I saw you watching him,
And you danced with him thrice;
You turn'd quite red when he spoke to you—
Such manners are not nice.
You, Nelly Gray, should not be seen
(I don't wish to be harsh)
Running wild, like the servant-girls,
For a red coat and moustache.
Not that he isn't a gentleman
From spur to shako-brim—
I know good blood when I see it—yes,
I will say that for him.
He does not swagger, nor lisp, nor flirt—
Has none of those vulgar ways;
And he does not talk like a stable-boy,
As the fashion is nowadays.
In fact, I admire him very much—
My dear, you need not fret—
I do; he's very different from
The rest of Gerald's set.
71
He's very handsome, certainly—
I don't mind saying so.
He reminds me a bit of your uncle, when
I met him long ago.
He had a silky, long moustache
Of just that golden shade;
And broad Greek brows, with a tint of bronze,
That Indian suns had made.
He was a soldier, too, you know—
As big and strong and tall:
He'd just come home when I saw him first
At Lady Talbot's ball.
I remember when we were introduced;
By stealth I look'd him o'er—
Such haughty, indolent, gentle eyes,
I never saw before!
I felt so strange when he look'd at me;
I cannot tell you why—
But I seem'd to feel he was mine, to keep
And love, till I should die.
'Twas very odd—in a moment, too,
Before I knew his name!
But, Nelly—O how the world was changed
And brighten'd, when he came!
I was so restless all that night;—
I did not want to see,
I felt where he moved about the room
While he was away from me.
I was jealous—I could not help it,
Although I struggled hard—
Of the other girls, whose favour'd names
Were written on his card;
They were so rich, and I was poor;
They were so grandly dress'd,
And I so dowdy; and yet, and yet,
I thought he liked me best.
The last long hour he danced with them,
And oh I miss'd him so!
And then I heard our carriage call'd,
72
And I knew that I must go.
A big lump rose up in my throat
That I could hardly bear;
But, passing through the vestibule,
I saw him standing there.
I knew not where he came from,
But I felt no surprise
When he look'd down from his stately height
With his grave and quiet eyes,
And held his hand for a mute good-night
That said all words could say;—
Ah, love! he made me happy then
For ever and for aye.
Well, well,—but this is nonsense;
How I am running on!—
His golden hair grew thin and grey,
And now he's dead and gone.
There, go and dress for dinner, child;
It's getting late, you see;
And—perhaps I'll ask young Cameron
If he'll come in to tea.
~ Ada Cambridge,#NFDB
124:Hot Afternoons Have Been In Montana
Quiet and green was the grass of the field,
The sky was whole in brightness,
And O, a bird was flying, high, there in the sky,
So gently, so carelessly and fairly.
Here, once, Indians shouted in battle,
And moaned after it.
Here were cries, yells, night, and the moon over these men,
And the men making the cries and yells; it was
Hundreds of years ago, when monks were in Europe,
Monks in cool, black monasteries, thinking of God, studying Virgil;
Monks were in Europe, a land having an ocean, miles of water, between
It and this land, America, possessing Montana.
(New York, Vermont, New Mexico, America has too.)
Indians, Indians went through Montana,
Thinking, feeling, trying pleasurably to live.
This land, shone on by the sun now, green, quiet now,
Was under their feet, this time; we live now and it is hundreds
of years after.
Montana, thou art, and I say thou art, as once monks said of God,
And thought, too: Thou art.
Thou hast Kansas on thy side;
Kansas is is in the newspapers, talked of by men;
Idaho thou hast, and far away, Singapore, Alabama, Brazil.
That bird over this green, under that sun, God, how sweet and
graceful it is!
Could we ever do that? Machines that fly are clumsy and ugly;
Birds go into the air so softly, so fairly; see its curves; Earth!
In Montana, men eat and have bodies paining them
Because they eat.
Kansas, with Montana, in America, has, too, men pained by
their eating;
So has England, with Westminster Abbey, where poets lie,
dead now;
O, what their poetry can do; what poetry can do.
There is the brain of man, a soft, puzzling, weak affair;
Lord, the perfect green of this meadow.
Look at the pure heat and light of that big sun,
And the cleanness of the sky.
Night comes, night has come.
11
Was not Montana here in the Middle Ages, when old Rome
was at its oldest, when
Aristotle wrote,
In Greece, Greece by the Aegean, with the Mediterranean near?
Indians killed each other here,
With the moon over them.
Indians killed each other near Cape Cod, near Boston, in
Louisiana, too.
It was before white men came from England, to see them; the
white men were seen by them.
Snows have been here, in Montana, while the Indians have been.
Girls are in Helena, mines are in Helena,
Men work in them painfully and long for the bodies of girls;
And long for much more that is in the world, in thee, Earth.
Men work, suffer, are little, ugly, too.
O, mountains are in Montana,
The Rocky Mountains are in California, Utah, Colorado, Montana.
Indians were here, too, by rivers, in these mountains, lived in
mountains.
Europe has its Paris, and men live there; Stendhal, Rabelais,
Gautier, Hume were there.
God, what is it man can do?
There are millions of men in the world, and each is one man,
Each is one man by himself, taking care of himself all the time,
and changing other men and being changed by them;
The quiet of this afternoon is strange, haunting, awful;
Hear that buzzing in the hot grass, coming from live things;
and those crows' cries from somewhere;
There is a sluggish, sad brook near here, too.
The bird is gone now, so graceful, fair as it was,
And the sky has nothing but the brightness of air in it.
The clean color of air.
The sun makes it be afternoon here;
In Paris and Sumatra, it is night;
Dark Malays are in lands by the Indian Ocean,
An ocean there is we call the Indian;
Men went to these Malays near the Indian Ocean, in the
eighteenth century, in frigates and ships-of-the-line;
And men living here are Indians, too.
O, the cry of the Indian in battle, hundreds of years ago, in woods,
in plains, in mountains;
War might have been seen once in this meadow, now in green,
12
now hot;
Hundreds of years ago it might have been seen, and tens of years,
and a thousand.
There was love among Indians; there is love in Paris, Moscow,
London, and New York.
Men have been in war, ever,
And men have thought, and written books, about war, love, and
mind.
Mist comes in this earth,
And there have been sad, empty, pained, longing souls going
through mist.
O, the green in mist that is to be seen in the world.
And time goes on, the world is moving, all of it, so time goes on
in this world.
It is now a hot, quiet afternoon in Montana,
Montana with the Rocky Mountains;
Virginia with the Allegany Mountains:
(Indians ambushed Braddock in the Allegany Mountains; the
woods, once quiet, once dark,
Sounded sharply and deeply with cries, moans, and shots;
Washington was there;
Washington Irving wrote of Washington, so did Frenchmen
who knew Voltaire;
In 1755, Braddock was ambushed and died, and then, in Paris
men and women wrote of philosophy who were elegant,
witty and thought spirit was of matter; say Diderot,
Helvetius, and Madame du Deffand; Samuel Johnson was
in London then; Pitt was in England; men lived in Montana,
Honolulu, Argentina and near the Cape of Good Hope;
O, life of man, O, Earth; Earth, again and again!)
And there have been hot afternoons, all through time, history,
as men say;
Hot afternoons have been in Montana.
There have been hot afternoons, and quiet, soft, lovely twilights;
Gray, Collins, Milton wrote of these;
There have been hot afternoons in quiet English churchyards,
and hot afternoons in America, in Montana; and green
everywhere and bright sky; there are deserts in Africa,
America, and Australia;
Clear air is healthful; men go to Colorado, near Wyoming,
near Montana in the mountains, sick men go to the
mountains where Indians once lived, fought and killed
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each other.
O, the love of bodies, O, the pains of bodies on hot, quiet
afternoons, everywhere in the world.
Men work in factories on hot afternoons, now in Montana,
and now in New Hampshire; walk the streets of Boston
on hot afternoons;
Novels stupid and forgot, have been written in afternoons;
Matinées of witty comedies in London and New York are in
afternoons;
Indians roamed here, in this green field, on quiet, hot afternoons,
in years now followed by hundreds of years.
Hot afternoons are real; afternoons are; places, things, thoughts,
feelings are; poetry is;
The world is waiting to be known; Earth, what it has in it!
The past is in it;
All words, feelings, movements, words, bodies, clothes, girls,
trees, stones, things of beauty, books, desires are in it;
and all are to be known;
Afternoons have to do with the whole world;
And the beauty of mind, feeling knowingly the world!
The world of girls' beautiful faces, bodies and clothes, quiet
afternoons, graceful birds, great words, tearful music,
mind-joying poetry, beautiful livings, loved things, known
things: a to-be-used and known and pleasure-to-be giving
world.
~ Eli Siegel,#NFDB
125:Interim
The room is full of you!—As I came in
And closed the door behind me, all at once
A something in the air, intangible,
Yet stiff with meaning, struck my senses sick!—
Sharp, unfamiliar odors have destroyed
Each other room's dear personality.
The heavy scent of damp, funereal flowers,—
The very essence, hush-distilled, of Death—
Has strangled that habitual breath of home
Whose expiration leaves all houses dead;
And wheresoe'er I look is hideous change.
Save here. Here 'twas as if a weed-choked gate
Had opened at my touch, and I had stepped
Into some long-forgot, enchanted, strange,
Sweet garden of a thousand years ago
And suddenly thought, "I have been here before!"
You are not here. I know that you are gone,
And will not ever enter here again.
And yet it seems to me, if I should speak,
Your silent step must wake across the hall;
If I should turn my head, that your sweet eyes
Would kiss me from the door.—So short a time
To teach my life its transposition to
This difficult and unaccustomed key!—
The room is as you left it; your last touch—
A thoughtless pressure, knowing not itself
As saintly—hallows now each simple thing;
Hallows and glorifies, and glows between
The dust's grey fingers like a shielded light.
There is your book, just as you laid it down,
Face to the table,—I cannot believe
That you are gone!—Just then it seemed to me
You must be here. I almost laughed to think
How like reality the dream had been;
Yet knew before I laughed, and so was still.
That book, outspread, just as you laid it down!
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Perhaps you thought, "I wonder what comes next,
And whether this or this will be the end";
So rose, and left it, thinking to return.
Perhaps that chair, when you arose and passed
Out of the room, rocked silently a while
Ere it again was still. When you were gone
Forever from the room, perhaps that chair,
Stirred by your movement, rocked a little while,
Silently, to and fro...
And here are the last words your fingers wrote,
Scrawled in broad characters across a page
In this brown book I gave you. Here your hand,
Guiding your rapid pen, moved up and down.
Here with a looping knot you crossed a "t,"
And here another like it, just beyond
These two eccentric "e's." You were so small,
And wrote so brave a hand!
How strange it seems
That of all words these are the words you chose!
And yet a simple choice; you did not know
You would not write again. If you had known—
But then, it does not matter,—and indeed
If you had known there was so little time
You would have dropped your pen and come to me
And this page would be empty, and some phrase
Other than this would hold my wonder now.
Yet, since you could not know, and it befell
That these are the last words your fingers wrote,
There is a dignity some might not see
In this, "I picked the first sweet-pea to-day."
To-day! Was there an opening bud beside it
You left until to-morrow?—O my love,
The things that withered,—and you came not back
That day you filled this circle of my arms
That now is empty. (O my empty life!)
That day—that day you picked the first sweet-pea,—
And brought it in to show me! I recall
With terrible distinctness how the smell
Of your cool gardens drifted in with you.
I know, you held it up for me to see
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And flushed because I looked not at the flower,
But at your face; and when behind my look
You saw such unmistakable intent
You laughed and brushed your flower against my lips.
(You were the fairest thing God ever made,
I think.) And then your hands above my heart
Drew down its stem into a fastening,
And while your head was bent I kissed your hair.
I wonder if you knew. (Beloved hands!
Somehow I cannot seem to see them still.
Somehow I cannot seem to see the dust
In your bright hair.) What is the need of Heaven
When earth can be so sweet?—If only God
Had let us love,—and show the world the way!
Strange cancellings must ink th' eternal books
When love-crossed-out will bring the answer right!
That first sweet-pea! I wonder where it is.
It seems to me I laid it down somewhere,
And yet,—I am not sure. I am not sure,
Even, if it was white or pink; for then
'Twas much like any other flower to me
Save that it was the first. I did not know
Then, that it was the last. If I had known—
But then, it does not matter. Strange how few,
After all's said and done, the things that are
Of moment.
Few indeed! When I can make
Of ten small words a rope to hang the world!
"I had you and I have you now no more."
There, there it dangles,—where's the little truth
That can for long keep footing under that
When its slack syllables tighten to a thought?
Here, let me write it down! I wish to see
Just how a thing like that will look on paper!
"I had you and I have you now no more."
O little words, how can you run so straight
Across the page, beneath the weight you bear?
How can you fall apart, whom such a theme
Has bound together, and hereafter aid
In trivial expression, that have been
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So hideously dignified?—Would God
That tearing you apart would tear the thread
I strung you on! Would God—O God, my mind
Stretches asunder on this merciless rack
Of imagery! O, let me sleep a while!
Would I could sleep, and wake to find me back
In that sweet summer afternoon with you.
Summer? Tis summer still by the calendar!
How easily could God, if He so willed,
Set back the world a little turn or two!
Correct its griefs, and bring its joys again!
We were so wholly one I had not thought
That we could die apart. I had not thought
That I could move,—and you be stiff and still!
That I could speak,—and you perforce be dumb!
I think our heart-strings were, like warp and woof
In some firm fabric, woven in and out;
Your golden filaments in fair design
Across my duller fibre. And to-day
The shining strip is rent; the exquisite
Fine pattern is destroyed; part of your heart
Aches in my breast; part of my heart lies chilled
In the damp earth with you. I have been tom
In two, and suffer for the rest of me.
What is my life to me? And what am I
To life,—a ship whose star has guttered out?
A Fear that in the deep night starts awake
Perpetually, to find its senses strained
Against the taut strings of the quivering air,
Awaiting the return of some dread chord?
Dark, Dark, is all I find for metaphor;
All else were contrast,—save that contrast's wall
Is down, and all opposed things flow together
Into a vast monotony, where night
And day, and frost and thaw, and death and life,
Are synonyms. What now—what now to me
Are all the jabbering birds and foolish flowers
That clutter up the world? You were my song!
Now, let discord scream! You were my flower!
Now let the world grow weeds! For I shall not
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Plant things above your grave—(the common balm
Of the conventional woe for its own wound!)
Amid sensations rendered negative
By your elimination stands to-day,
Certain, unmixed, the element of grief;
I sorrow; and I shall not mock my truth
With travesties of suffering, nor seek
To effigy its incorporeal bulk
In little wry-faced images of woe.
I cannot call you back; and I desire
No utterance of my immaterial voice.
I cannot even turn my face this way
Or that, and say, "My face is turned to you";
I know not where you are, I do not know
If Heaven hold you or if earth transmute,
Body and soul, you into earth again;
But this I know:—not for one second's space
Shall I insult my sight with visionings
Such as the credulous crowd so eager-eyed
Beholds, self-conjured, in the empty air.
Let the world wail! Let drip its easy tears!
My sorrow shall be dumb!
What do I say?
God! God!—God pity me! Am I gone mad
That I should spit upon a rosary?
Am I become so shrunken? Would to God
I too might feel that frenzied faith whose touch
Makes temporal the most enduring grief;
Though it must walk a while, as is its wont,
With wild lamenting! Would I too might weep
Where weeps the world and hangs its piteous wreaths
For its new dead! Not Truth, but Faith, it is
That keeps the world alive. If all at once
Faith were to slacken,—that unconscious faith
Which must, I know, yet be the corner-stone
Of all believing,—birds now flying fearless
Across would drop in terror to the earth;
Fishes would drown; and the all-governing reins
Would tangle in the frantic hands of God
And the worlds gallop headlong to destruction!
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O God, I see it now, and my sick brain
Staggers and swoons! How often over me
Flashes this breathlessness of sudden sight
In which I see the universe unrolled
Before me like a scroll and read thereon
Chaos and Doom, where helpless planets whirl
Dizzily round and round and round and round,
Like tops across a table, gathering speed
With every spin, to waver on the edge
One instant—looking over—and the next
To shudder and lurch forward out of sight—
Ah, I am worn out—I am wearied out—
It is too much—I am but flesh and blood,
And I must sleep. Though you were dead again,
I am but flesh and blood and I must sleep.
~ Edna St. Vincent Millay,#NFDB
126:Epochs
'The epochs of our life are not in the facts, but in the
silent thought by the wayside as we walk.'-Emerson
I. Youth.
Sweet empty sky of June without a stain,
Faint, gray-blue dewy mists on far-off hills,
Warm, yellow sunlight flooding mead and plain,
That each dark copse and hollow overfills;
The rippling laugh of unseen, rain-fed rills,
Weeds delicate-flowered, white and pink and gold,
A murmur and a singing manifold.
The gray, austere old earth renews her youth
With dew-lines, sunshine, gossamer, and haze.
How still she lies and dreams, and veils the truth,
While all is fresh as in the early days!
What simple things be these the soul to raise
To bounding joy, and make young pulses beat,
With nameless pleasure finding life so sweet.
On such a golden morning forth there floats,
Between the soft earth and the softer sky,
In the warm air adust with glistening motes,
The mystic winged and flickering butterfly,
A human soul, that hovers giddily
Among the gardens of earth's paradise,
Nor dreams of fairer fields or loftier skies.
II. Regret.
Thin summer rain on grass and bush and hedge,
Reddening the road and deepening the green
On wide, blurred lawn, and in close-tangled sedge;
Veiling in gray the landscape stretched between
These low broad meadows and the pale hills seen
But dimly on the far horizon's edge.
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In these transparent-clouded, gentle skies,
Wherethrough the moist beams of the soft June sun
Might any moment break, no sorrow lies,
No note of grief in swollen brooks that run,
No hint of woe in this subdued, calm tone
Of all the prospect unto dreamy eyes.
Only a tender, unnamed half-regret
For the lost beauty of the gracious morn;
A yearning aspiration, fainter yet,
For brighter suns in joyous days unborn,
Now while brief showers ruffle grass and corn,
And all the earth lies shadowed, grave, and wet;
Space for the happy soul to pause again
From pure content of all unbroken bliss,
To dream the future void of grief and pain,
And muse upon the past, in reveries
More sweet for knowledge that the present is
Not all complete, with mist and clouds and rain.
III. Longing.
Look westward o'er the steaming rain-washed slopes,
Now satisfied with sunshine, and behold
Those lustrous clouds, as glorious as our hopes,
Softened with feathery fleece of downy gold,
In all fantastic, huddled shapes uprolled,
Floating like dreams, and melting silently,
In the blue upper regions of pure sky.
The eye is filled with beauty, and the heart
Rejoiced with sense of life and peace renewed;
And yet at such an hour as this, upstart
Vague myriad longing, restless, unsubdued,
And causeless tears from melancholy mood,
Strange discontent with earth's and nature's best,
Desires and yearnings that may find no rest.
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IV. Storm.
Serene was morning with clear, winnowed air,
But threatening soon the low, blue mass of cloud
Rose in the west, with mutterings faint and rare
At first, but waxing frequent and more loud.
Thick sultry mists the distant hill-tops shroud;
The sunshine dies; athwart black skies of lead
Flash noiselessly thin threads of lightning red.
Breathless the earth seems waiting some wild blow,
Dreaded, but far too close to ward or shun.
Scared birds aloft fly aimless, and below
Naught stirs in fields whence light and life are gone,
Save floating leaves, with wisps of straw and down,
Upon the heavy air; 'neath blue-black skies,
Livid and yellow the green landscape lies.
And all the while the dreadful thunder breaks,
Within the hollow circle of the hills,
With gathering might, that angry echoes wakes,
And earth and heaven with unused clamor fills.
O'erhead still flame those strange electric thrills.
A moment more,-behold! yon bolt struck home,
And over ruined fields the storm hath come!
V. Surprise.
When the stunned soul can first lift tired eyes
On her changed world of ruin, waste and wrack,
Ah, what a pang of aching sharp surprise
Brings all sweet memories of the lost past back,
With wild self-pitying grief of one betrayed,
Duped in a land of dreams where Truth is dead!
Are these the heavens that she deemed were kind?
Is this the world that yesterday was fair?
What painted images of folk half-blind
Be these who pass her by, as vague as air?
What go they seeking? there is naught to find.
Let them come nigh and hearken her despair.
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A mocking lie is all she once believed,
And where her heart throbbed, is a cold dead stone.
This is a doom we never preconceived,
Yet now she cannot fancy it undone.
Part of herself, part of the whole hard scheme,
All else is but the shadow of a dream.
VI. Grief.
There is a hungry longing in the soul,
A craving sense of emptiness and pain,
She may not satisfy nor yet control,
For all the teeming world looks void and vain.
No compensation in eternal spheres,
She knows the loneliness of all her years.
There is no comfort looking forth nor back,
The present gives the lie to all her past.
Will cruel time restore what she doth lack?
Why was no shadow of this doom forecast?
Ah! she hath played with many a keen-edged thing;
Naught is too small and soft to turn and sting.
In the unnatural glory of the hour,
Exalted over time, and death, and fate,
No earthly task appears beyond her power,
No possible endurance seemeth great.
She knows her misery and her majesty,
And recks not if she be to live or die.
VII. Acceptance.
Yea, she hath looked Truth grimly face to face,
And drained unto the lees the proffered cup.
This silence is not patience, nor the grace
Of recognition, meekly offered up,
But mere acceptance fraught with keenest pain,
Seeing that all her struggles must be vain.
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Her future clear and terrible outlies,This burden to be borne through all her days,
This crown of thorns pressed down above her eyes,
This weight of trouble she may never raise.
No reconcilement doth she ask nor wait;
Knowing such things are, she endures her fate.
No brave endeavor of the broken will
To cling to such poor stays as will abide
(Although the waves be wild and angry still)
After the lapsing of the swollen tide.
No fear of further loss, no hope of gain,
Naught but the apathy of weary pain.
VIII. Loneliness.
All stupor of surprise hath passed away;
She sees, with clearer vision than before,
A world far off of light and laughter gay,
Herself alone and lonely evermore.
Folk come and go, and reach her in no wise,
Mere flitting phantoms to her heavy eyes.
All outward things, that once seemed part of her,
Fall from her, like the leaves in autumn shed.
She feels as one embalmed in spice and myrrh,
With the heart eaten out, a long time dead;
Unchanged without, the features and the form;
Within, devoured by the thin red worm.
By her own prowess she must stand or fall,
This grief is to be conquered day by day.
Who could befriend her? who could make this small,
Or her strength great? she meets it as she may.
A weary struggle and a constant pain,
She dreams not they may ever cease nor wane.
IX. Sympathy.
It comes not in such wise as she had deemed,
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Else might she still have clung to her despair.
More tender, grateful than she could have dreamed,
Fond hands passed pitying over brows and hair,
And gentle words borne softly through the air,
Calming her weary sense and wildered mind,
By welcome, dear communion with her kind.
Ah! she forswore all words as empty lies;
What speech could help, encourage, or repair?
Yet when she meets these grave, indulgent eyes,
Fulfilled with pity, simplest words are fair,
Caressing, meaningless, that do not dare
To compensate or mend, but merely soothe
With hopeful visions after bitter Truth.
One who through conquered trouble had grown wise,
To read the grief unspoken, unexpressed,
The misery of the blank and heavy eyes,Or through youth's infinite compassion guessed
The heavy burden,-such a one brought rest,
And bade her lay aside her doubts and fears,
While the hard pain dissolved in blessed tears.
X. Patience.
The passion of despair is quelled at last;
The cruel sense of undeserved wrong,
The wild self-pity, these are also past;
She knows not what may come, but she is strong;
She feels she hath not aught to lose nor gain,
Her patience is the essence of all pain.
As one who sits beside a lapsing stream,
She sees the flow of changeless day by day,
Too sick and tired to think, too sad to dream,
Nor cares how soon the waters slip away,
Nor where they lead; at the wise God's decree,
She will depart or bide indifferently.
There is deeper pathos in the mild
And settled sorrow of the quiet eyes,
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Than in the tumults of the anguish wild,
That made her curse all things beneath the skies;
No question, no reproaches, no complaint,
Hers is the holy calm of some meek saint.
XI. Hope.
Her languid pulses thrill with sudden hope,
That will not be forgot nor cast aside,
And life in statelier vistas seems to ope,
Illimitably lofty, long, and wide.
What doth she know? She is subdued and mild,
Quiet and docile 'as a weaned child.'
If grief came in such unimagined wise,
How may joy dawn? In what undreamed-of hour,
May the light break with splendor of surprise,
Disclosing all the mercy and the power?
A baseless hope, yet vivid, keen, and bright,
As the wild lightning in the starless night.
She knows not whence it came, nor where it passed,
But it revealed, in one brief flash of flame,
A heaven so high, a world so rich and vast,
That, full of meek contrition and mute shame,
In patient silence hopefully withdrawn,
She bows her head, and bides the certain dawn.
XII. Compensation.
'T is not alone that black and yawning void
That makes her heart ache with this hungry pain,
But the glad sense of life hath been destroyed,
The lost delight may never come again.
Yet myriad serious blessings with grave grace
Arise on every side to fill their place.
For much abides in her so lonely life,The dear companionship of her own kind,
Love where least looked for, quiet after strife,
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Whispers of promise upon every wind,
A quickened insight, in awakened eyes,
For the new meaning of the earth and skies.
The nameless charm about all things hath died,
Subtle as aureole round a shadow's head,
Cast on the dewy grass at morning-tide;
Yet though the glory and the joy be fled,
'T is much her own endurance to have weighed,
And wrestled with God's angels, unafraid.
XIII. Faith.
She feels outwearied, as though o'er her head
A storm of mighty billows broke and passed.
Whose hand upheld her? Who her footsteps led
To this green haven of sweet rest at last?
What strength was hers, unreckoned and unknown?
What love sustained when she was most alone?
Unutterably pathetic her desire,
To reach, with groping arms outstretched in prayer,
Something to cling to, to uplift her higher
From this low world of coward fear and care,
Above disaster, that her will may be
At one with God's, accepting his decree.
Though by no reasons she be justified,
Yet strangely brave in Evil's very face,
She deems this want must needs be satisfied,
Though here all slips from out her weak embrace.
And in blind ecstasy of perfect faith,
With her own dream her prayer she answereth.
XIV. Work.
Yet life is not a vision nor a prayer,
But stubborn work; she may not shun her task.
After the first compassion, none will spare
Her portion and her work achieved, to ask.
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She pleads for respite,-she will come ere long
When, resting by the roadside, she is strong.
Nay, for the hurrying throng of passers-by
Will crush her with their onward-rolling stream.
Much must be done before the brief light die;
She may not loiter, rapt in the vain dream.
With unused trembling hands, and faltering feet,
She staggers forth, her lot assigned to meet.
But when she fills her days with duties done,
Strange vigor comes, she is restored to health.
New aims, new interests rise with each new sun,
And life still holds for her unbounded wealth.
All that seemed hard and toilsome now proves small,
And naught may daunt her,-she hath strength for all.
XV. Victory.
How strange, in some brief interval of rest,
Backward to look on her far-stretching past.
To see how much is conquered and repressed,
How much is gained in victory at last!
The shadow is not lifted,-but her faith,
Strong from life's miracles, now turns toward death.
Though much be dark where once rare splendor shone,
Yet the new light has touched high peaks unguessed
In her gold, mist-bathed dawn, and one by one
New outlooks loom from many a mountain crest.
She breathes a loftier, purer atmosphere,
And life's entangled paths grow straight and clear.
Nor will Death prove an all-unwelcome guest;
The struggle has been toilsome to this end,
Sleep will be sweet, and after labor rest,
And all will be atoned with him to friend.
Much must be reconciled, much justified,
And yet she feels she will be satisfied.
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XVI. Peace.
The calm outgoing of a long, rich day,
Checkered with storm and sunshine, gloom and light,
Now passing in pure, cloudless skies away,
Withdrawing into silence of blank night.
Thick shadows settle on the landscape bright,
Like the weird cloud of death that falls apace
On the still features of the passive face.
Soothing and gentle as a mother's kiss,
The touch that stopped the beating of the heart.
A look so blissfully serene as this,
Not all the joy of living could impart.
With dauntless faith and courage therewithal,
The Master found her ready at his call.
On such a golden evening forth there floats,
Between the grave earth and the glowing sky
In the clear air, unvexed with hazy motes,
The mystic-winged and flickering butterfly,
A human soul, that drifts at liberty,
Ah! who can tell to what strange paradise,
To what undreamed-of fields and lofty skies.!
~ Emma Lazarus,#NFDB
127: THE
(on:
THE SEVEN SEALS
YES AND AMEN SONG)
1
If I am a soothsayer and full of that soothsaying spirit
which wanders on a high ridge between two seas, wandering like a heavy cloud between past and future, an
enemy of all sultry plains and all that is weary and can
neither die nor live-in its dark bosom prepared for
lightning and the redemptive flash, pregnant with lightning bolts that say Yes and laugh Yes, soothsaying
lightning bolts-blessed is he who is thus pregnant!
And verily, long must he hang on the mountains like a
dark cloud who shall one day kindle the light of the
future: Oh, how should I not lust after eternity and
after the nuptial ring of rings, the ring of recurrence?
Never yet have I found the woman from whom I
wanted children, unless it be this woman whom I love:
for I love you, 0 eternity.
For I love you, 0 eternity!
2
If ever my wrath burst tombs, moved boundary
stones, and rolled old tablets, broken, into steep depths;
if ever my mockery blew moldy words into the wind,
and I came as a broom to the cross-marked spiders and
as a sweeping gust to old musty tomb chambers; if ever
I sat jubilating where old gods lie buried, world-blessing, world-loving, beside the monuments of old worldslanders-for I love even churches and tombs of gods,
once the sky gazes through their broken roofs with its
229
pure eyes, and like grass and red poppies, I love to sit
on broken churches: Oh, how should I not lust after
eternity and after the nuptial ring of rings, the ring of
recurrence?
Never yet have I found the woman from whom I
wanted children, unless it be this woman whom I love:
for I love you, 0 eternity.
For I love you, 0 eternity!
3
If ever one breath came to me of the creative breath
and of that heavenly need that constrains even accidents
to dance star-dances; if I ever laughed the laughter of
creative lightning which is followed obediently but
grumblingly by the long thunder of the deed; if I ever
played dice with gods at the gods' table, the earth, till
the earth quaked and burst and snorted up floods of
fire-for the earth is a table for gods and trembles with
creative new words and gods' throws: Oh, how should
I not lust after eternity and after the nuptial ring of
rings, the ring of recurrence?
Never yet have I found the woman from whom I
wanted children, unless it be this woman whom I love:
for I love you, 0 eternity.
For I love you, 0 eternity!
4
If ever I drank full drafts from that foaming spice and blend-mug in which all things are well blended; if
my hand ever poured the farthest to the nearest, and
fire to spirit, and joy to pain, and the most wicked to
the most gracious; if I myself am a grain of that redeeming salt which makes all things blend well in the
blend-mug-for there is a salt that unites good with
evil; and even the greatest evil is worthy of being used
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as spice for the last foaming over: Oh, how should I
not lust after eternity and after the nuptial ring of rings,
the ring or recurrence?
Never yet have I found the woman from whom I
wanted children, unless it be this woman whom I love:
for I love you, 0 eternity.
For I love you, 0 eternity!
5
If I am fond of the sea and of all that is of the sea's
kind, and fondest when it angrily contradicts me; if that
delight in searching which drives the sails toward the
undiscovered is in me, if a seafarer's delight is in my
delight; if ever my jubilation cried, "The coast has
vanished, now the last chain has fallen from me; the
boundless roars around me, far out glisten space and
time; be of good cheer, old heart!" Oh, how should I
not lust after eternity and after the nuptial ring of rings,
the ring of recurrence?
Never yet have I found the woman from whom I
wanted children, unless it be this woman whom I love:
for I love you, 0 eternity.
For I love you, 0 eternity!
6
If my virtue is a dancer's virtue and I have often
jumped with both feet into golden-emerald delight; if
my sarcasm is a laughing sarcasm, at home under rose
slopes and hedges of lilies-for in laughter all that is
evil comes together, but is pronounced -holy and absolved by its own bliss; and if this is my alpha and
omega, that all that is heavy and grave should become
light; all that is body, dancer; all that is spirit, bird and verily, that is my alpha and omega: Oh, how should
231
I not lust after eternity and after the nuptial ring of
rings, the fing of recurrence?
Never yet have I found the woman from whom I
wanted children, unless it be this woman whom I love:
for I love you, 0 eternity.
For I love you, 0 eternity
7
If ever I spread tranquil skies over myself and soared
on my own wings into my own skies; if I swam playfully in the deep light-distances, and the bird-wisdom
of my freedom came-but bird-wisdom speaks thus:
"Behold, there is no above, no below Throw yourself
around, out, back, you who are lightly Sing! Speak no
morel Are not all words made for the grave and heavy?
Are not all words lies to those who are light? Single
Speak no morel" Oh, how should I not lust after eternity and after the nuptial ring of rings, the ring of recurrence?
Never yet have I found the woman from whom I
wanted children, unless it be this woman whom I love:
for I love you, 0 eternity.
For I love you, 0 eternity
Thus Spoke Zarathustra:
Fourth and Last Part
Alas, where in the world has there been more
folly than among the pitying? And what in the
world has caused more suffering than the folly of
the pitying? Woe to all who love without having
a height that is above their pityl
232
Thus spoke the devil to me once: "God too has
his hell: that is his love of man." And most recently I heard him say this: "God is dead; God
died of his pity for man." (Zarathustra, II, p. go)
TRANSLATOR'S NOTES
Part Four was originally intended as an intermezzo, not
as the end of the book. The very appearance of a collection
of sayings is abandoned: Part Four forms a whole, and
as such represents a new stylistic experiment-as well as
a number of widely different stylistic experiments, held
together by a unity of plot and a pervasive sense of
humor.
1.
The Honey Sacrifice: Prologue. The "queer fish" are not
long in coming: the first of them appears in the next chapter.
2. The Cry of Distress: Beginning of the story that continues to the end of the book. The soothsayer of Part Two
reappears, and Zarathustra leaves in search of the higher
man. Now that he has overcome his nausea, his final
trial is: pity.
3. Conversation with the Kings: The first of seven encounters in each of which Zarathustra meets men who have
accepted some part of his teaching without, however,
embodying the type he envisages. Their revolting and tiresome flatteries might be charged to their general inadequacy. But Zarathustra's own personality, as it emerges
in chapter after chapter, poses a more serious problem. At
least in part, this is clearly due to the author's deliberate
malice: he does not want to be a "new idol": "I do not
want to be a saint, rather even a buffoon. Perhaps I am a
buffoon. And nevertheless, or rather not nevertheless-for
there has never been anybody more mendacious than
saints-truth speaks out of me" (Ecce Homo). Earlier in
the same work he says of Shakespeare: "What must a
man have suffered to have found it that necessary to be
a buffoon!" In these pages Nietzsche would resemble the
233
dramatist rather than the hagiographer, and a Shakespearean fool rather than the founder of a new cult.
4. The Leech: Encounter with "the conscientious in spirit."
5. The Magician: In the magician some of Nietzsche's
own features blend with some of Wagner's as conceived
by Nietzsche. The poem appears again in a manuscript of
a888, which bears the title "Dionysus Dithyrambs" and
the motto: "These are the songs of Zarathustra which he
sang to himself to endure his ultimate loneliness." In this
later context, the poem is entitled "Ariadne's Lament,"
and a new conclusion has been added by Nietzsche:
(Lightning.
beauty.)
Dionysus becomes
DIONYSUS:
visible in emerald
Be clever, Ariadnel
You have small ears, you have my ears:
Put a clever word into them
Must one not first hate each other
if one is to love each other?
I am your labyrinth.
The song is not reducible to a single level of meaning. The
outcry is (1) Nietzsche's own; and the unnamable, terrible
thought near the beginning is surely that of the eternal
recurrence; it is (2) projected onto Wagner, who is here
imagined as feeling desperately forsaken after Nietzsche
left him (note especially the penultimate stanza); it is
(3) wishfully projected onto Cosima Wagner-Nietzsche's
Ariadne (see my Nietzsche, i, 11)-who is here imagined as desiring and possessed by Nietzsche-Dionysus.
Part Four is all but made up of similar projections. All the
characters are caricatures of Nietzsche. And like the magician, he too would lie if he said: "'I did all this only as a
game.' There was seriousness in it too."
6. Retired: Encounter with the last pope. Reflections on
the death and inadequacies of God.
7. The Ugliest Man: The murderer of God. The sentence
beginning "Has not all success . . ." reads in German:
234
War nicht aller Erfolg fisher bei den Gut-Verfolgten? Und
wer gut verfolgt, lernt leicht folgen:-ist er doch einmalhinterherl
8. The Voluntary Beggar: A sermon on a mount-about
cows.
9. The Shadow: An allusion to Nietzsche's earlier work,
The Wanderer and His Shadow (188o).
10. At Noon: A charming intermezzo.
:i. The Welcome: Zarathustra rejects his guests, though
together they form a kind of higher man compared to their
contemporaries. He repudiates these men of great longing
and nausea as well as all those who enjoy his diatribes and
denunciations and desire recognition and consideration
for being out of tune with their time. What Nietzsche
envisages is the creator for whom all negation is merely
incidental to his great affirmation: joyous spirits, "laughing
lions."
12. The Last Supper: One of the persistent themes of Part
Four reaches its culmination in this chapter: Nietzsche not
only satirizes the Gospels, and all hagiography generally,
but he also makes fun of and laughs at himself.
13. On the Higher Man: A summary comparable to "On
Old and New Tablets" in Part Three. Section 5 epitomizes
Nietzsche's praise of "evir"-too briefly to be clear apart
from the rest of his work-and the conclusion should be
noted. The opening paragraph of section 7 takes up the
same theme: Nietzsche opposes sublimation to both license
and what he elsewhere calls "castratism." A fine epigram
is mounted in the center of section 9. The mellow moderation of the last lines of section 15 is not usually associated
with Nietzsche. And the chapter ends with a praise of
laughter.
14. The Song of Melancholy: In the 3888 manuscript of
the "Dionysus Dithyrambs" this is the first poem and it
bears the title "Only Fooll Only Poetl" The two introductory sections of this chapter help to dissociate Nietzsche
from the poem, while the subsquent references to this song
show that he considered it far more depressing than it
235
appears in its context. Though his solitude sometimes
flattered him, "On every parable you ride to every truth"
("The Return Home"), he also knew moments when he
said to himself, "I am ashamed that I must still be a poet"
("On Old and New Tablets"). Although Zarathustra's
buffooneries are certainly intended as such by the author,
the thought that he might be "only" a fool, "only" a poet
"climbing around on mendacious word bridges," made
Nietzsche feel more than despondent. Soon it led him to
abandon further attempts to ride on parables in favor of
some of the most supple prose in German literature.
15. On Science: Only the origin of science is considered.
The attempt to account for it in terms of fear goes back to
the period of The Dawn (188i), in which Nietzsche tried
to see how far he could reduce different phenomena to
fear and power. Zarathustra suggests that courage is crucial
-that is, the will to power over fear.
i6. Among Daughters of the Wilderness: Zarathustra, about
to slip out of his cave for the second time because he cannot stand the bad smell of the "higher men," is called
back by his shadow, who has nowhere among men smelled
better air-except once. In the following song Nietzsche's
buffoonery reaches its climax. But though it can and should
be read as thoroughly delightful nonsense, it is not entirely
void of personal significance. Wilste means "desert" or
"wilderness," and wdist can also mean wild and dissolute;
and the "flimsy little fan-, flutter-, and tinsel-skirts" seem
to have been suggested by the brothel to which a porter
in Cologne once took the young Nietzsche, who had asked
to be shown to a hotel. (He ran away, shocked; cf. my
Nietzsche, 3, I.) Certainly the poem is full of sexual
fantasies. But the double meaning of "date" is not present
in the original.
17. The Awakening: The titles of this and the following
chapter might well be reversed; for it is this chapter that
culminates in the ass festival, Nietzsche's version of the
Black Mass. But "the awakening' here does not refer to the
moment when an angry Moses holds his people accountable
236
for their worship of the golden calf, but to the moment
when "they have learned to laugh at themselves." In this
art, incidentally, none of the great philosophers excelled
the author of Part Four of Zarathustra.
i8. The Ass Festival: Five of the participants try to justify
themselves. The pope satirizes Catholicism (Luther was
last made fun of at the end of the song in Chapter i6),
while the conscientious in spirit develops a new theology
-and suggests that Zarathustra himself is pretty close to
being an ass.
19. The Drunken Song: Nietzsche's great hymn to joy invites comparison with Schiller's-minus Beethoven's music.
That they use different German words is the smallest difference. Schiller writes:
Suffer bravely, myriadsl
Suffer for the better world
Up above the firmament
A great God will give rewards.
Nietzsche wants the eternity of this life with all its agonies
-and seeing that it flees, its eternal recurrence. As it is expressed in sections 9, io, and 3i, the conception of the
eternal recurrence is certainly meaningful; but its formulation as a doctrine depended on Nietzsche's mistaken belief
that science compels us to accept the hypothesis of the
eternal recurrence of the same events at gigantic intervals.
(See "On the Vision and the Riddle" and "The Convalescent," both in Part Three, and, for a detailed discussion,
my Nietzsche, 11, II.)
20. The Sign: In "The Welcome," Zarathustra repudiated
the "higher men" in favor of "laughing lions." Now a lion
turns up and laughs, literally. And in place of the single
dove in the New Testament, traditionally understood as a
symbol of the Holy Ghost, we are presented with a whole
flock. Both the lion and the doves were mentioned before
("On Old and New Tablets," section 3) as the signs for
which Zarathustra must wait, and now afford Nietzsche an
237
opportunity to preserve his curious blend of myth, irony,
and hymn to the very end.
~ Friedrich Nietzsche, THE SEVEN SEALS OR THE YES AND AMEN SONG
,#NFDB
128:A TRAGEDY IN TWO ACTS
Translated from the Original Doric
'Choose Reform or Civil War,
When through thy streets, instead of hare with dogs,
A Consort-Queen shall hunt a King with hogs,
Riding on the IONIAN MINOTAUR.'
DRAMATIS PERSONAE
Tyrant Swellfoot, King of Thebes.
Iona Taurina, his Queen.
Mammon, Arch-Priest of Famine.
Purganax Wizard, Minister of Swellfoot.
Dakry Wizard, Minister of Swellfoot.
Laoctonos Wizard, Minister of Swellfoot.
The Gadfly.
The Leech.
The Rat.
Moses, the Sow-gelder.
Solomon, the Porkman.
Zephaniah, Pig-butcher.
The Minotaur.
Chorus of the Swinish Multitude.
Guards, Attendants, Priests, etc., etc.
SCENE.--THEBES
ACT I.
Scene I.-- A magnificent Temple, built of thigh-bones and death's-heads, and tiled with scalps. Over the Altar the statue of Famine, veiled; a number of Boars, Sows, and Sucking-Pigs, crowned with thistle, shamrock, and oak, sitting on the steps, and clinging round the Altar of the Temple.
Enter Swellfoot, in his Royal robes, without perceiving the Pigs.
Swellfoot.
Thou supreme Goddess! by whose power divine
These graceful limbs are clothed in proud array [He contemplates himself with satisfaction.
Of gold and purple, and this kingly paunch
Swells like a sail before a favouring breeze,
And these most sacred nether promontories
Lie satisfied with layers of fat; and these
Boeotian cheeks, like Egypt's pyramid,
(Nor with less toil were their foundations laid)[1],
Sustain the cone of my untroubled brain,
That point, the emblem of a pointless nothing!
Thou to whom Kings and laurelled Emperors,
Radical-butchers, Paper-money-millers,
Bishops and Deacons, and the entire army
Of those fat martyrs to the persecution
Of stifling turtle-soup, and brandy-devils,
Offer their secret vows! Thou plenteous Ceres
Of their Eleusis, hail!
The Swine.
Eigh! eigh! eigh! eigh!
Swellfoot.
Ha! what are ye,
Who, crowned with leaves devoted to the Furies,
Cling round this sacred shrine?
Swine.
Aigh! aigh! aigh!
Swellfoot.
What! ye that are
The very beasts that, offered at her altar
With blood and groans, salt-cake, and fat, and inwards,
Ever propitiate her reluctant will
When taxes are withheld?
Swine.
Ugh! ugh! ugh!
Swellfoot.
What! ye who grub
With filthy snouts my red potatoes up
In Allan's rushy bog? Who eat the oats
Up, from my cavalry in the Hebrides?
Who swill the hog-wash soup my cooks digest
From bones, and rags, and scraps of shoe-leather,
Which should be given to cleaner Pigs than you?
The Swine.Semichorus I.
The same, alas! the same;
Though only now the name
Of Pig remains to me.
Semichorus II.
If 'twere your kingly will
Us wretched Swine to kill,
What should we yield to thee?
Swellfoot.
Why, skin and bones, and some few hairs for mortar.
Chorus of Swine.
I have heard your Laureate sing,
That pity was a royal thing;
Under your mighty ancestors, we Pigs
Were bless'd as nightingales on myrtle sprigs,
Or grasshoppers that live on noonday dew,
And sung, old annals tell, as sweetly too;
But now our sties are fallen in, we catch
The murrain and the mange, the scab and itch;
Sometimes your royal dogs tear down our thatch,
And then we seek the shelter of a ditch;
Hog-wash or grains, or ruta-baga, none
Has yet been ours since your reign begun.
First Sow.
My Pigs, 'tis in vain to tug.
Second Sow.
I could almost eat my litter.
First Pig.
I suck, but no milk will come from the dug.
Second Pig.
Our skin and our bones would be bitter.
The Boars.
We fight for this rag of greasy rug,
Though a trough of wash would be fitter.
Semichorus.
Happier Swine were they than we,
Drowned in the Gadarean sea
I wish that pity would drive out the devils,
Which in your royal bosom hold their revels,
And sink us in the waves of thy compassion!
Alas! the Pigs are an unhappy nation!
Now if your Majesty would have our bristles
To bind your mortar with, or fill our colons
With rich blood, or make brawn out of our gristles,
In policyask else your royal Solons
You ought to give us hog-wash and clean straw,
And sties well thatched; besides it is the law!
Swellfoot.
This is sedition, and rank blasphemy!
Ho! there, my guards!
Enter a Guard.
Guard.
Your sacred Majesty.
Swellfoot.
Call in the Jews, Solomon the court porkman,
Moses the sow-gelder, and Zephaniah
The hog-butcher.
Guard.
They are in waiting, Sire.
Enter Solomon, Moses, and Zephaniah.
Swellfoot.
Out with your knife, old Moses, and spay those Sows [The Pigs run about in consternation.
That load the earth with Pigs; cut close and deep.
Moral restraint I see has no effect,
Nor prostitution, nor our own example,
Starvation, typhus-fever, war, nor prison
This was the art which the arch-priest of Famine
Hinted at in his charge to the Theban clergy
Cut close and deep, good Moses.
Moses.
Let your Majesty
Keep the Boars quiet, else
Swellfoot.
Zephaniah, cut
That fat Hog's throat, the brute seems overfed;
Seditious hunks! to whine for want of grains.
Zephaniah.
Your sacred Majesty, he has the dropsy;
We shall find pints of hydatids in's liver,
He has not half an inch of wholesome fat
Upon his carious ribs
Swellfoot.
'Tis all the same,
He'll serve instead of riot money, when
Our murmuring troops bivouac in Thebes' streets;
And January winds, after a day
Of butchering, will make them relish carrion.
Now, Solomon, I'll sell you in a lump
The whole kit of them.
Solomon.
Why, your Majesty,
I could not give
Swellfoot.
Kill them out of the way,
That shall be price enough, and let me hear
Their everlasting grunts and whines no more!
[Exeunt, driving in the Swine.
Enter Mammon, the Arch-Priest; and Purganax, Chief of the Council of Wizards.
Purganax.
The future looks as black as death, a cloud,
Dark as the frown of Hell, hangs over it
The troops grow mutinousthe revenue fails
There's something rotten in usfor the level
Of the State slopes, its very bases topple,
The boldest turn their backs upon themselves!
Mammon.
Why what's the matter, my dear fellow, now?
Do the troops mutiny?decimate some regiments;
Does money fail?come to my mintcoin paper,
Till gold be at a discount, and ashamed
To show his bilious face, go purge himself,
In emulation of her vestal whiteness.
Purganax.
Oh, would that this were all! The oracle!!
Mammon.
Why it was I who spoke that oracle,
And whether I was dead drunk or inspired,
I cannot well remember; nor, in truth,
The oracle itself!
Purganax.
The words went thus:
'Boeotia, choose reform or civil war!
When through the streets, instead of hare with dogs,
A Consort Queen shall hunt a King with Hogs,
Riding on the Ionian Minotaur.'
Mammon.
Now if the oracle had ne'er foretold
This sad alternative, it must arrive,
Or not, and so it must now that it has;
And whether I was urged by grace divine
Or Lesbian liquor to declare these words,
Which must, as all words must, be false or true,
It matters not: for the same Power made all,
Oracle, wine, and me and youor none
'Tis the same thing. If you knew as much
Of oracles as I do
Purganax.
You arch-priests
Believe in nothing; if you were to dream
Of a particular number in the Lottery,
You would not buy the ticket?
Mammon.
Yet our tickets
Are seldom blanks. But what steps have you taken?
For prophecies, when once they get abroad,
Like liars who tell the truth to serve their ends,
Or hypocrites who, from assuming virtue,
Do the same actions that the virtuous do,
Contrive their own fulfilment. This Iona
Wellyou know what the chaste Pasiphae did,
Wife to that most religious King of Crete,
And still how popular the tale is here;
And these dull Swine of Thebes boast their descent
From the free Minotaur. You know they still
Call themselves Bulls, though thus degenerate,
And everything relating to a Bull
Is popular and respectable in Thebes.
Their arms are seven Bulls in a field gules;
They think their strength consists in eating beef,
Now there were danger in the precedent
If Queen Iona
Purganax.
I have taken good care
That shall not be. I struck the crust o' the earth
With this enchanted rod, and Hell lay bare!
And from a cavern full of ugly shapes
I chose a Leech, a Gadfly, and a Rat.
The Gadfly was the same which Juno sent
To agitate Io[2], and which Ezekiel[3] mentions
That the Lord whistled for out of the mountains
Of utmost Aethiopia, to torment
Mesopotamian Babylon. The beast
Has a loud trumpet like the scarabee,
His crookd tail is barbed with many stings,
Each able to make a thousand wounds, and each
Immedicable; from his convex eyes
He sees fair things in many hideous shapes,
And trumpets all his falsehood to the world.
Like other beetles he is fed on dung
He has eleven feet with which he crawls,
Trailing a blistering slime, and this foul beast
Has tracked Iona from the Theban limits,
From isle to isle, from city unto city,
Urging her flight from the far Chersonese
To fabulous Solyma, and the Aetnean Isle,
Ortygia, Melite, and Calypso's Rock,
And the swart tribes of Garamant and Fez,
Aeolia and Elysium, and thy shores,
Parthenope, which now, alas! are free!
And through the fortunate Saturnian land,
Into the darkness of the West.
Mammon.
But if
This Gadfly should drive Iona hither?
Purganax.
Gods! what an if! but there is my gray Rat:
So thin with want, he can crawl in and out
Of any narrow chink and filthy hole,
And he shall creep into her dressing-room,
And
Mammon.
My dear friend, where are your wits? as if
She does not always toast a piece of cheese
And bait the trap? and rats, when lean enough
To crawl through such chinks
Purganax.
But my Leecha leech
Fit to suck blood, with lubricous round rings,
Capaciously expatiative, which make
His little body like a red balloon,
As full of blood as that of hydrogen,
Sucked from men's hearts; insatiably he sucks
And clings and pullsa horse-leech, whose deep maw
The plethoric King Swellfoot could not fill,
And who, till full, will cling for ever.
Mammon.
This
For Queen Iona would suffice, and less;
But 'tis the Swinish multitude I fear,
And in that fear I have
Purganax.
Done what?
Mammon.
Disinherited
My eldest son Chrysaor, because he
Attended public meetings, and would always
Stand prating there of commerce, public faith,
Economy, and unadulterate coin,
And other topics, ultra-radical;
And have entailed my estate, called the Fool's Paradise,
And funds in fairy-money, bonds, and bills,
Upon my accomplished daughter Banknotina,
And married her to the gallows[4].
Purganax.
A good match!
Mammon.
A high connexion, Purganax. The bridegroom
Is of a very ancient family,
Of Hounslow Heath, Tyburn, and the New Drop,
And has great influence in both Houses;oh!
He makes the fondest husband; nay, too fond,
New-married people should not kiss in public;
But the poor souls love one another so!
And then my little grandchildren, the gibbets,
Promising children as you ever saw,
The young playing at hanging, the elder learning
How to hold radicals. They are well taught too,
For every gibbet says its catechism
And reads a select chapter in the Bible
Before it goes to play.
[A most tremendous humming is heard.
Purganax.
Ha! what do I hear?
Enter the Gadfly.
Mammon.
Your Gadfly, as it seems, is tired of gadding.
Gadfly.
Hum! hum! hum!
From the lakes of the Alps, and the cold gray scalps
Of the mountains, I come!
Hum! hum! hum!
From Morocco and Fez, and the high palaces
Of golden Byzantium;
From the temples divine of old Palestine,
From Athens and Rome,
With a ha! and a hum!
I come! I come!
All inn-doors and windows
Were open to me:
I saw all that sin does,
Which lamps hardly see
That burn in the night by the curtained bed,
The impudent lamps! for they blushed not red,
Dinging and singing,
From slumber I rung her,
Loud as the clank of an ironmonger;
Hum! hum! hum!
Far, far, far!
With the trump of my lips, and the sting at my hips,
I drove herafar!
Far, far, far!
From city to city, abandoned of pity,
A ship without needle or star;
Homeless she passed, like a cloud on the blast,
Seeking peace, finding war;
She is here in her car,
From afar, and afar;
Hum! hum!
I have stung her and wrung her,
The venom is working;
And if you had hung her
With canting and quirking,
She could not be deader than she will be soon;
I have driven her close to you, under the moon,
Night and day, hum! hum! ha!
I have hummed her and drummed her
From place to place, till at last I have dumbed her,
Hum! hum! hum!
Enter the Leech and the Rat.
Leech.
I will suck
Blood or muck!
The disease of the state is a plethory,
Who so fit to reduce it as I?
Rat.
I'll slily seize and
Let blood from her weasand,
Creeping through crevice, and chink, and cranny,
With my snaky tail, and my sides so scranny.
Purganax.
Aroint ye! thou unprofitable worm! [To the Leech.
And thou, dull beetle, get thee back to hell! [To the Gadfly.
To sting the ghosts of Babylonian kings,
And the ox-headed Io
Swine
(within).
Ugh, ugh, ugh!
Hail! Iona the divine,
We will be no longer Swine,
But Bulls with horns and dewlaps.
Rat.
For,
You know, my lord, the Minotaur
Purganax
(fiercely).
Be silent! get to hell! or I will call
The cat out of the kitchen. Well, Lord Mammon,
This is a pretty business.
[Exit the Rat.
Mammon.
I will go
And spell some scheme to make it ugly then.
[Exit.
Enter Swellfoot.
Swellfoot.
She is returned! Taurina is in Thebes,
When Swellfoot wishes that she were in hell!
Oh, Hymen, clothed in yellow jealousy,
And waving o'er the couch of wedded kings
The torch of Discord with its fiery hair;
This is thy work, thou patron saint of queens!
Swellfoot is wived! though parted by the sea,
The very name of wife had conjugal rights;
Her cursd image ate, drank, slept with me,
And in the arms of Adiposa oft
Her memory has received a husband's
[A loud tumult, and cries of 'Iona for ever!No Swellfoot!'!
Hark!
How the Swine cry Iona Taurina;
I suffer the real presence; Purganax,
Off with her head!
Purganax.
But I must first impanel
A jury of the Pigs.
Swellfoot.
Pack them then.
Purganax.
Or fattening some few in two separate sties,
And giving them clean straw, tying some bits
Of ribbon round their legsgiving their Sows
Some tawdry lace, and bits of lustre glass,
And their young Boars white and red rags, and tails
Of cows, and jay feathers, and sticking cauliflowers
Between the ears of the old ones; and when
They are persuaded, that by the inherent virtue
Of these things, they are all imperial Pigs,
Good Lord! they'd rip each other's bellies up,
Not to say, help us in destroying her.
Swellfoot.
This plan might be tried too;where's General
Laoctonos?
Enter Laoctonos and Dakry.
It is my royal pleasure
That you, Lord General, bring the head and body,
If separate it would please me better, hither
Of Queen Iona.
Laoctonos.
That pleasure I well knew,
And made a charge with those battalions bold,
Called, from their dress and grin, the royal apes,
Upon the Swine, who in a hollow square
Enclosed her, and received the first attack
Like so many rhinoceroses, and then
Retreating in good order, with bare tusks
And wrinkled snouts presented to the foe,
Bore her in triumph to the public sty.
What is still worse, some Sows upon the ground
Have given the ape-guards apples, nuts, and gin,
And they all whisk their tails aloft, and cry,
'Long live Iona! down with Swellfoot!'
Purganax.
Hark!
The Swine
(without).
Long live Iona! down with Swellfoot!
Dakry.
I
Went to the garret of the swineherd's tower,
Which overlooks the sty, and made a long
Harangue (all words) to the assembled Swine,
Of delicacy, mercy, judgement, law,
Morals, and precedents, and purity,
Adultery, destitution, and divorce,
Piety, faith, and state necessity,
And how I loved the Queen!and then I wept
With the pathos of my own eloquence,
And every tear turned to a mill-stone, which
Brained many a gaping Pig, and there was made
A slough of blood and brains upon the place,
Greased with the pounded bacon; round and round
The mill-stones rolled, ploughing the pavement up,
And hurling Sucking-Pigs into the air,
With dust and stones.
Enter Mammon.
Mammon.
I wonder that gray wizards
Like you should be so beardless in their schemes;
It had been but a point of policy
To keep Iona and the Swine apart.
Divide and rule! but ye have made a junction
Between two parties who will govern you
But for my art.Behold this BAG! it is
The poison BAG of that Green Spider huge,
On which our spies skulked in ovation through
The streets of Thebes, when they were paved with dead:
A bane so much the deadlier fills it now
As calumny is worse than death,for here
The Gadfly's venom, fifty times distilled,
Is mingled with the vomit of the Leech,
In due proportion, and black ratsbane, which
That very Rat, who, like the Pontic tyrant,
Nurtures himself on poison, dare not touch;
All is sealed up with the broad seal of Fraud,
Who is the Devil's Lord High Chancellor,
And over it the Primate of all Hell
Murmured this pious baptism:'Be thou called
The GREEN BAG; and this power and grace be thine:
That thy contents, on whomsoever poured,
Turn innocence to guilt, and gentlest looks
To savage, foul, and fierce deformity.
Let all baptized by thy infernal dew
Be called adulterer, drunkard, liar, wretch!
No name left out which orthodoxy loves,
Court Journal or legitimate Review!
Be they called tyrant, beast, fool, glutton, lover
Of other wives and husbands than their own
The heaviest sin on this side of the Alps!
Wither they to a ghastly caricature
Of what was human!let not man or beast
Behold their face with unaverted eyes!
Or hear their names with ears that tingle not
With blood of indignation, rage, and shame!'
This is a perilous liquor;good my Lords. [Swellfoot approaches to touch the GREEN BAG.
Beware! for God's sake, beware!if you should break
The seal, and touch the fatal liquor
Purganax.
There,
Give it to me. I have been used to handle
All sorts of poisons. His dread Majesty
Only desires to see the colour of it.
Mammon.
Now, with a little common sense, my Lords,
Only undoing all that has been done
(Yet so as it may seem we but confirm it),
Our victory is assured. We must entice
Her Majesty from the sty, and make the Pigs
Believe that the contents of the GREEN BAG
Are the true test of guilt or innocence.
And that, if she be guilty, 'twill transform her
To manifest deformity like guilt.
If innocent, she will become transfigured
Into an angel, such as they say she is;
And they will see her flying through the air,
So bright that she will dim the noonday sun;
Showering down blessings in the shape of comfits.
This, trust a priest, is just the sort of thing
Swine will believe. I'll wager you will see them
Climbing upon the thatch of their low sties,
With pieces of smoked glass, to watch her sail
Among the clouds, and some will hold the flaps
Of one another's ears between their teeth,
To catch the coming hail of comfits in.
You, Purganax, who have the gift o' the gab,
Make them a solemn speech to this effect:
I go to put in readiness the feast
Kept to the honour of our goddess Famine,
Where, for more glory, let the ceremony
Take place of the uglification of the Queen.
Dakry
(to Swellfoot).
I, as the keeper of your sacred conscience,
Humbly remind your Majesty that the care
Of your high office, as Man-milliner
To red Bellona, should not be deferred.
Purganax.
All part, in happier plight to meet again.
[Exeunt.
END OF THE FIRST ACT.
ACT II
Scene I.
The Public Sty. The Boars in full Assembly.
Enter Purganax.
Purganax.
Grant me your patience, Gentlemen and Boars,
Ye, by whose patience under public burthens
The glorious constitution of these sties
Subsists, and shall subsist. The Lean-Pig rates
Grow with the growing populace of Swine,
The taxes, that true source of Piggishness
(How can I find a more appropriate term
To include religion, morals, peace, and plenty,
And all that fit Boeotia as a nation
To teach the other nations how to live?),
Increase with Piggishness itself; and still
Does the revenue, that great spring of all
The patronage, and pensions, and by-payments,
Which free-born Pigs regard with jealous eyes,
Diminish, till at length, by glorious steps,
All the land's produce will be merged in taxes,
And the revenue will amount tonothing!
The failure of a foreign market for
Sausages, bristles, and blood-puddings,
And such home manufactures, is but partial;
And, that the population of the Pigs,
Instead of hog-wash, has been fed on straw
And water, is a fact which isyou know
That isit is a state-necessity
Temporary, of course. Those impious Pigs,
Who, by frequent squeaks, have dared impugn
The settled Swellfoot system, or to make
Irreverent mockery of the genuflexions
Inculcated by the arch-priest, have been whipped
Into a loyal and an orthodox whine.
Things being in this happy state, the Queen
Iona
[A loud cry from the Pigs.
She is innocent! most innocent!
Purganax.
That is the very thing that I was saying,
Gentlemen Swine; the Queen Iona being
Most innocent, no doubt, returns to Thebes,
And the lean Sows and Boars collect about her,
Wishing to make her think that we believe
(I mean those more substantial Pigs, who swill
Rich hog-wash, while the others mouth damp straw)
That she is guilty; thus, the Lean-Pig faction
Seeks to obtain that hog-wash, which has been
Your immemorial right, and which I will
Maintain you in to the last drop of
A Boar
(interrupting him).
What
Does any one accuse her of?
Purganax.
Why, no one
Makes any positive accusation;but
There were hints dropped, and so the privy wizards
Conceived that it became them to advise
His Majesty to investigate their truth;
Not for his own sake; he could be content
To let his wife play any pranks she pleased,
If, by that sufferance, he could please the Pigs;
But then he fears the morals of the Swine,
The Sows especially, and what effect
It might produce upon the purity and
Religion of the rising generation
Of Sucking-Pigs, if it could be suspected
That Queen Iona
[A pause.
First Boar.
Well, go on; we long
To hear what she can possibly have done.
Purganax.
Why, it is hinted, that a certain Bull
Thus much is known:the milk-white Bulls that feed
Beside Clitumnus and the crystal lakes
Of the Cisalpine mountains, in fresh dews
Of lotus-grass and blossoming asphodel
Sleeking their silken hair, and with sweet breath
Loading the morning winds until they faint
With living fragrance, are so beautiful!
Well, I say nothing;but Europa rode
On such a one from Asia into Crete,
And the enamoured sea grew calm beneath
His gliding beauty. And Pasiphae,
Iona's grandmother,but she is innocent!
And that both you and I, and all assert.
First Boar.
Most innocent!
Purganax.
Behold this BAG; a bag
Second Boar.
Oh! no GREEN BAGS!! Jealousy's eyes are green,
Scorpions are green, and water-snakes, and efts,
And verdigris, and
Purganax.
Honourable Swine,
In Piggish souls can prepossessions reign?
Allow me to remind you, grass is green
All flesh is grass;no bacon but is flesh
Ye are but bacon. This divining BAG
(Which is not green, but only bacon colour)
Is filled with liquor, which if sprinkled o'er
A woman guilty ofwe all know what
Makes her so hideous, till she finds one blind
She never can commit the like again.
If innocent, she will turn into an angel,
And rain down blessings in the shape of comfits
As she flies up to heaven. Now, my proposal
Is to convert her sacred Majesty
Into an angel (as I am sure we shall do),
By pouring on her head this mystic water.[Showing the Bag.
I know that she is innocent; I wish
Only to prove her so to all the world.
First Boar.
Excellent, just, and noble Purganax.
Second Boar.
How glorious it will be to see her Majesty
Flying above our heads, her petticoats
Streaming likelikelike
Third Boar.
Anything.
Purganax.
Oh no!
But like a standard of an admiral's ship,
Or like the banner of a conquering host,
Or like a cloud dyed in the dying day,
Unravelled on the blast from a white mountain;
Or like a meteor, or a war-steed's mane,
Or waterfall from a dizzy precipice
Scattered upon the wind.
First Boar.
Or a cow's tail.
Second Boar.
Or anything, as the learned Boar observed.
Purganax.
Gentlemen Boars, I move a resolution,
That her most sacred Majesty should be
Invited to attend the feast of Famine,
And to receive upon her chaste white body
Dews of Apotheosis from this BAG.
[A great confusion is heard of the Pigs out of Doors, which communicates itself to those within. During the first Strophe, the doors of the Sty are staved in, and a number of exceedingly leanPigs and Sows and Boars rush in.
Semichorus I.
No! Yes!
Semichorus II.
Yes! No!
Semichorus I.
A law!
Semichorus II.
A flaw!
Semichorus I.
Porkers, we shall lose our wash,
Or must share it with the Lean-Pigs!
First Boar.
Order! order! be not rash!
Was there ever such a scene, Pigs!
An old Sow
(rushing in).
I never saw so fine a dash
Since I first began to wean Pigs.
Second Boar
(solemnly).
The Queen will be an angel time enough.
I vote, in form of an amendment, that
Purganax rub a little of that stuff
Upon his face.
Purganax
(his heart is seen to beat through his waistcoat).
Gods! What would ye be at?
Semichorus I.
Purganax has plainly shown a
Cloven foot and jackdaw feather.
Semichorus II.
I vote Swellfoot and Iona
Try the magic test together;
Whenever royal spouses bicker,
Both should try the magic liquor.
An old Boar
(aside).
A miserable state is that of Pigs,
For if their drivers would tear caps and wigs,
The Swine must bite each other's ear therefore.
An old Sow
(aside).
A wretched lot Jove has assigned to Swine,
Squabbling makes Pig-herds hungry, and they dine
On bacon, and whip Sucking-Pigs the more.
Chorus.
Hog-wash has been ta'en away:
If the Bull-Queen is divested,
We shall be in every way
Hunted, stripped, exposed, molested;
Let us do whate'er we may,
That she shall not be arrested.
Queen, we entrench you with walls of brawn,
And palisades of tusks, sharp as a bayonet:
Place your most sacred person here. We pawn
Our lives that none a finger dare to lay on it.
Those who wrong you, wrong us;
Those who hate you, hate us;
Those who sting you, sting us;
Those who bait you, bait us;
The oracle is now about to be
Fulfilled by circumvolving destiny;
Which says: 'Thebes, choose reform or civil war,
When through your streets, instead of hare with dogs,
A Consort Queen shall hunt a King with Hogs,
Riding upon the IONIAN MINOTAUR.'
Enter Iona Taurina.
Iona Taurina
(coming forward).
Gentlemen Swine, and gentle Lady-Pigs,
The tender heart of every Boar acquits
Their Queen, of any act incongruous
With native Piggishness, and she, reposing
With confidence upon the grunting nation,
Has thrown herself, her cause, her life, her all,
Her innocence, into their Hoggish arms;
Nor has the expectation been deceived
Of finding shelter there. Yet know, great Boars,
(For such whoever lives among you finds you,
And so do I), the innocent are proud!
I have accepted your protection only
In compliment of your kind love and care,
Not for necessity. The innocent
Are safest there where trials and dangers wait;
Innocent Queens o'er white-hot ploughshares tread
Unsinged, and ladies, Erin's laureate sings it[5],
Decked with rare gems, and beauty rarer still,
Walked from Killarney to the Giant's Causeway,
Through rebels, smugglers, troops of yeomanry,
White-boys and Orange-boys, and constables,
Tithe-proctors, and excise people, uninjured!
Thus I!
Lord Purganax, I do commit myself
Into your custody, and am prepared
To stand the test, whatever it may be!
Purganax.
This magnanimity in your sacred Majesty
Must please the Pigs. You cannot fail of being
A heavenly angel. Smoke your bits of glass,
Ye loyal Swine, or her transfiguration
Will blind your wondering eyes.
An old Boar
(aside).
Take care, my Lord,
They do not smoke you first.
Purganax.
At the approaching feast
Of Famine, let the expiation be.
Swine.
Content! content!
Iona Taurina
(aside).
I, most content of all,
Know that my foes even thus prepare their fall!
[Exeunt omnes.
Scene II.
The interior of the Temple of Famine. The statue of the Goddess, a skeleton clothed in parti-coloured rags, seated upon a heap of skulls and loaves intermingled. A number of exceedingly fat Priests in black garments arrayed on each side, with marrow-bones and cleavers in their hands. [Solomon, the Court Porkman.] A flourish of trumpets.
Enter Mammon as arch-priest, Swellfoot, Dakry, Purganax, Laoctonos, followed by Iona Taurina guarded. On the other side enter the Swine.
Chorus of Priests, accompanied by the Court Porkman on marrow-bones and cleavers.
Goddess bare, and gaunt, and pale,
Empress of the world, all hail!
What though Cretans old called thee
City-crested Cybele?
We call thee Famine!
Goddess of fasts and feasts, starving and cramming!
Through thee, for emperors, kings, and priests and lords,
Who rule by viziers, sceptres, bank-notes, words,
The earth pours forth its plenteous fruits,
Corn, wool, linen, flesh, and roots
Those who consume these fruits through thee grow fat,
Those who produce these fruits through thee grow lean,
Whatever change takes place, oh, stick to that!
And let things be as they have ever been;
At least while we remain thy priests,
And proclaim thy fasts and feasts.
Through thee the sacred Swellfoot dynasty
Is based upon a rock amid that sea
Whose waves are Swineso let it ever be!
[Swellfoot, etc., seat themselves at a table magnificently covered at the upper end of the Temple. Attendants pass over the stage with hog-wash in pails. A number of Pigs, exceedingly lean, follow them licking up the wash.
Mammon.
I fear your sacred Majesty has lost
The appetite which you were used to have.
Allow me now to recommend this dish
A simple kickshaw by your Persian cook,
Such as is served at the great King's second table.
The price and pains which its ingredients cost
Might have maintained some dozen families
A winter or twonot moreso plain a dish
Could scarcely disagree.
Swellfoot.
After the trial,
And these fastidious Pigs are gone, perhaps
I may recover my lost appetite,
I feel the gout flying about my stomach
Give me a glass of Maraschino punch.
Purganax
(filling his glass, and standing up).
The glorious Constitution of the Pigs!
All.
A toast! a toast! stand up, and three times three!
Dakry.
No heel-tapsdarken daylights!
Laoctonos.
Claret, somehow,
Puts me in mind of blood, and blood of claret!
Swellfoot.
Laoctonos is fishing for a compliment,
But 'tis his due. Yes, you have drunk more wine,
And shed more blood, than any man in Thebes. [To Purganax.
For God's sake stop the grunting of those Pigs!
Purganax.
We dare not, Sire, 'tis Famine's privilege.
Chorus of Swine.
Hail to thee, hail to thee, Famine!
Thy throne is on blood, and thy robe is of rags;
Thou devil which livest on damning;
Saint of new churches, and cant, and GREEN BAGS,
Till in pity and terror thou risest,
Confounding the schemes of the wisest;
When thou liftest thy skeleton form,
When the loaves and the skulls roll about,
We will greet theethe voice of a storm
Would be lost in our terrible shout!
Then hail to thee, hail to thee, Famine!
Hail to thee, Empress of Earth!
When thou risest, dividing possessions;
When thou risest, uprooting oppressions,
In the pride of thy ghastly mirth;
Over palaces, temples, and graves,
We will rush as thy minister-slaves,
Trampling behind in thy train,
Till all be made level again!
Mammon.
I hear a crackling of the giant bones
Of the dread image, and in the black pits
Which once were eyes, I see two livid flames.
These prodigies are oracular, and show
The presence of the unseen Deity.
Mighty events are hastening to their doom!
Swellfoot.
I only hear the lean and mutinous Swine
Grunting about the temple.
Dakry.
In a crisis
Of such exceeding delicacy, I think
We ought to put her Majesty, the Queen,
Upon her trial without delay.
Mammon.
THE BAG
Is here.
Purganax.
I have rehearsed the entire scene
With an ox-bladder and some ditchwater,
On Lady P-; it cannot fail. (Taking up the Bag.)
Your Majesty [To Swellfoot.
In such a filthy business had better
Stand on one side, lest it should sprinkle you.
A spot or two on me would do no harm,
Nay, it might hide the blood, which the sad Genius
Of the Green Isle has fixed, as by a spell,
Upon my browwhich would stain all its seas,
But which those seas could never wash away!
Iona Taurina.
My Lord, I am readynay, I am impatient
To undergo the test.
[A graceful figure in a semi-transparent veil passes unnoticed through the Temple; the word LIBERTY is seen through the veil, as if it were written in fire upon its forehead. Its words are almost drowned in the furious grunting of the Pigs, and the business of the trial. She kneels on the steps of the Altar, and speaks in tones at first faint and low, but which ever become louder and louder.
Mighty Empress! Death's white wife!
Ghastly mother-in-law of Life!
By the God who made thee such,
By the magic of thy touch,
By the starving and the cramming
Of fasts and feasts! by thy dread self, O Famine!
I charge thee! when thou wake the multitude,
Thou lead them not upon the paths of blood.
The earth did never mean her foison
For those who crown life's cup with poison
Of fanatic rage and meaningless revenge
But for those radiant spirits, who are still
The standard-bearers in the van of Change.
Be they th'appointed stewards, to fill
The lap of Pain, and Toil, and Age!
Remit, O Queen! thy accustomed rage!
Be what thou art not! In voice faint and low
Freedom calls Famine,her eternal foe,
To brief alliance, hollow truce.Rise now!
[Whilst the Veiled Figure has been chanting this strophe, Mammon, Dakry, Laoctonos, and Swellfoot, have surrounded Iona Taurina, who, with her hands folded on her breast, and her eyes lifted to Heaven, stands, as with saint-like resignation, to wait the issue of the business, in perfect confidence of her innocence.
[Purganax, after unsealing the Green Bag, is gravely about to pour the liquor upon her head, when suddenly the whole expression of her figure and countenance changes; she snatches it from his hand with a loud laugh of triumph, and empties it over Swellfoot and his whole Court, who are instantly changed into a number of filthy and ugly animals, and rush out of the Temple. The image of Famine then arises with a tremendous sound, the Pigs begin scrambling for the loaves, and are tripped up by the skulls; all those who eat the loaves are turned into Bulls, and arrange themselves quietly behind the altar. The image of Famine sinks through a chasm in the earth, and a Minotaur rises.
Minotaur.
I am the Ionian Minotaur, the mightiest
Of all Europa's taurine progeny
I am the old traditional Man-Bull;
And from my ancestors having been Ionian,
I am called Ion, which, by interpretation,
Is John; in plain Theban, that is to say,
My name's John Bull; I am a famous hunter,
And can leap any gate in all Boeotia,
Even the palings of the royal park,
Or double ditch about the new enclosures;
And if your Majesty will deign to mount me,
At least till you have hunted down your game,
I will not throw you.
Iona Taurina.
(During this speech she has been putting on boots and spurs, and a hunting-cap, buckishly cocked on one side, and tucking up her hair, she leaps nimbly on his back.)
Hoa! hoa! tallyho! tallyho! ho! ho!
Come, let us hunt these ugly badgers down,
These stinking foxes, these devouring otters,
These hares, these wolves, these anything but men.
Hey, for a whipper-in! my loyal Pigs,
Now let your noses be as keen as beagles',
Your steps as swift as greyhounds', and your cries
More dulcet and symphonious than the bells
Of village-towers, on sunshine holiday;
Wake all the dewy woods with jangling music.
Give them no law (are they not beasts of blood?)
But such as they gave you. Tallyho! ho!
Through forest, furze, and bog, and den, and desert,
Pursue the ugly beasts! tallyho! ho!
Full Chorus of Iona and the Swine.
Tallyho! tallyho!
Through rain, hail, and snow,
Through brake, gorse, and briar,
Through fen, flood, and mire,
We go! we go!
Tallyho! tallyho!
Through pond, ditch, and slough,
Wind them, and find them,
Like the Devil behind them,
Tallyho! tallyho!
[Exeunt, in full cry; Iona driving on the Swine, with the empty Green Bag.
THE END
'Begun at the Baths of San Giuliano, near Pisa, August 24, 1819; published anonymously by J. Johnston, Cheapside (imprint C. F. Seyfang,) 1820. On a threat of prosecution the publisher surrendered the whole impression, seven copies -- the total number sold -- excepted. Oedipus does not appear in the first edition of the Poetical Works, 1839, but it was included by Mrs. Shelley in the second edition of that year.' ~ Percy Bysshe Shelley, Oedipus Tyrannus or Swellfoot The Tyrant
,#NFDB
129:DRAMATIS PERSON
Count Francesco Cenci.
Giacomo, his Son.
Bernardo, his Son.
Cardinal Camillo.
Orsino, a Prelate.
Savella, the Pope's Legate.
Olimpio, Assassin.
Marzio, Assassin.
Andrea, Servant to Cenci.
Nobles, Judges, Guards, Servants.
Lucretia, Wife of Cenci, and Step-mother of his children.
Beatrice, his Daughter.
The Scene lies principally in Rome, but changes during the Fourth Act to Petrella, a castle among the Apulian Apennines.
Time. During the Pontificate of Clement VIII.
ACT I
Scene I.
An Apartment in the Cenci Palace.
Enter Count Cenci, and Cardinal Camillo.
Camillo.
That matter of the murder is hushed up
If you consent to yield his Holiness
Your fief that lies beyond the Pincian gate.
It needed all my interest in the conclave
To bend him to this point: he said that you
Bought perilous impunity with your gold;
That crimes like yours if once or twice compounded
Enriched the Church, and respited from hell
An erring soul which might repent and live:
But that the glory and the interest
Of the high throne he fills, little consist
With making it a daily mart of guilt
As manifold and hideous as the deeds
Which you scarce hide from men's revolted eyes.
Cenci.
The third of my possessionslet it go!
Ay, I once heard the nephew of the Pope
Had sent his architect to view the ground,
Meaning to build a villa on my vines
The next time I compounded with his uncle:
I little thought he should outwit me so!
Henceforth no witnessnot the lampshall see
That which the vassal threatened to divulge
Whose throat is choked with dust for his reward.
The deed he saw could not have rated higher
Than his most worthless life:it angers me!
Respited me from Hell!So may the Devil
Respite their souls from Heaven. No doubt Pope Clement,
And his most charitable nephews, pray
That the Apostle Peter and the Saints
Will grant for their sake that I long enjoy
Strength, wealth, and pride, and lust, and length of days
Wherein to act the deeds which are the stewards
Of their revenue.But much yet remains
To which they show no title.
Camillo.
Oh, Count Cenci!
So much that thou mightst honourably live
And reconcile thyself with thine own heart
And with thy God, and with the offended world.
How hideously look deeds of lust and blood
Through those snow white and venerable hairs!
Your children should be sitting round you now,
But that you fear to read upon their looks
The shame and misery you have written there.
Where is your wife? Where is your gentle daughter?
Methinks her sweet looks, which make all things else
Beauteous and glad, might kill the fiend within you.
Why is she barred from all society
But her own strange and uncomplaining wrongs?
Talk with me, Count,you know I mean you well
I stood beside your dark and fiery youth
Watching its bold and bad career, as men
Watch meteors, but it vanished notI marked
Your desperate and remorseless manhood; now
Do I behold you in dishonoured age
Charged with a thousand unrepented crimes.
Yet I have ever hoped you would amend,
And in that hope have saved your life three times.
Cenci.
For which Aldobrandino owes you now
My fief beyond the Pincian.Cardinal,
One thing, I pray you, recollect henceforth,
And so we shall converse with less restraint.
A man you knew spoke of my wife and daughter
He was accustomed to frequent my house;
So the next day his wife and daughter came
And asked if I had seen him; and I smiled:
I think they never saw him any more.
Camillo.
Thou execrable man, beware!
Cenci.
Of thee?
Nay this is idle:We should know each other.
As to my character for what men call crime
Seeing I please my senses as I list,
And vindicate that right with force or guile,
It is a public matter, and I care not
If I discuss it with you. I may speak
Alike to you and my own conscious heart
For you give out that you have half reformed me,
Therefore strong vanity will keep you silent
If fear should not; both will, I do not doubt.
All men delight in sensual luxury,
All men enjoy revenge; and most exult
Over the tortures they can never feel
Flattering their secret peace with others' pain.
But I delight in nothing else. I love
The sight of agony, and the sense of joy,
When this shall be another's, and that mine.
And I have no remorse and little fear,
Which are, I think, the checks of other men.
This mood has grown upon me, until now
Any design my captious fancy makes
The picture of its wish, and it forms none
But such as men like you would start to know,
Is as my natural food and rest debarred
Until it be accomplished.
Camillo.
Art thou not
Most miserable?
Cenci.
Why, miserable?
No.I am what your theologians call
Hardened;which they must be in impudence,
So to revile a man's peculiar taste.
True, I was happier than I am, while yet
Manhood remained to act the thing I thought;
While lust was sweeter than revenge; and now
Invention palls:Ay, we must all grow old
And but that there yet remains a deed to act
Whose horror might make sharp an appetite
Duller than mineI'd doI know not what.
When I was young I thought of nothing else
But pleasure; and I fed on honey sweets:
Men, by St. Thomas! cannot live like bees,
And I grew tired:yet, till I killed a foe,
And heard his groans, and heard his children's groans,
Knew I not what delight was else on earth,
Which now delights me little. I the rather
Look on such pangs as terror ill conceals,
The dry fixed eyeball; the pale quivering lip,
Which tell me that the spirit weeps within
Tears bitterer than the bloody sweat of Christ.
I rarely kill the body, which preserves,
Like a strong prison, the soul within my power,
Wherein I feed it with the breath of fear
For hourly pain.
Camillo.
Hell's most abandoned fiend
Did never, in the drunkenness of guilt,
Speak to his heart as now you speak to me;
I thank my God that I believe you not.
Enter Andrea.
Andrea.
My Lord, a gentleman from Salamanca
Would speak with you.
Cenci.
Bid him attend me in
The grand saloon.
[Exit Andrea.
Camillo.
Farewell; and I will pray
Almighty God that thy false, impious words
Tempt not his spirit to abandon thee.
[Exit Camillo.
Cenci.
The third of my possessions! I must use
Close husbandry, or gold, the old man's sword,
Falls from my withered hand. But yesterday
There came an order from the Pope to make
Fourfold provision for my cursd sons;
Whom I had sent from Rome to Salamanca,
Hoping some accident might cut them off;
And meaning if I could to starve them there.
I pray thee, God, send some quick death upon them!
Bernardo and my wife could not be worse
If dead and damned:then, as to Beatrice [Looking around him suspiciously.
I think they cannot hear me at that door;
What if they should? And yet I need not speak
Though the heart triumphs with itself in words.
O, thou most silent air, that shalt not hear
What now I think! Thou, pavement, which I tread
Towards her chamber,let your echoes talk
Of my imperious step scorning surprise,
But not of my intent!Andrea!
[Enter Andrea.
Andrea.
My lord?
Cenci.
Bid Beatrice attend me in her chamber
This evening:no, at midnight and alone.
[Exeunt.
Scene II.
A Garden of the Cenci Palace. EnterBeatrice and Orsino, as in conversation.
Beatrice.
Pervert not truth,
Orsino. You remember where we held
That conversation;nay, we see the spot
Even from this cypress;two long years are past
Since, on an April midnight, underneath
The moonlight ruins of mount Palatine,
I did confess to you my secret mind.
Orsino.
You said you loved me then.
Beatrice.
You are a Priest,
Speak to me not of love.
Orsino.
I may obtain
The dispensation of the Pope to marry.
Because I am a Priest do you believe
Your image, as the hunter some struck deer,
Follows me not whether I wake or sleep?
Beatrice.
As I have said, speak to me not of love;
Had you a dispensation I have not;
Nor will I leave this home of misery
Whilst my poor Bernard, and that gentle lady
To whom I owe life, and these virtuous thoughts,
Must suffer what I still have strength to share.
Alas, Orsino! All the love that once
I felt for you, is turned to bitter pain.
Ours was a youthful contract, which you first
Broke, by assuming vows no Pope will loose.
And thus I love you still, but holily,
Even as a sister or a spirit might;
And so I swear a cold fidelity.
And it is well perhaps we shall not marry.
You have a sly, equivocating vein
That suits me not.Ah, wretched that I am!
Where shall I turn? Even now you look on me
As you were not my friend, and as if you
Discovered that I thought so, with false smiles
Making my true suspicion seem your wrong.
Ah, no! forgive me; sorrow makes me seem
Sterner than else my nature might have been;
I have a weight of melancholy thoughts,
And they forbode,but what can they forbode
Worse than I now endure?
Orsino.
All will be well.
Is the petition yet prepared? You know
My zeal for all you wish, sweet Beatrice;
Doubt not but I will use my utmost skill
So that the Pope attend to your complaint.
Beatrice.
Your zeal for all I wish;Ah me, you are cold!
Your utmost skill . . . speak but one word . . . (aside)
Alas!
Weak and deserted creature that I am,
Here I stand bickering with my only friend! [To Orsino.
This night my father gives a sumptuous feast,
Orsino; he has heard some happy news
From Salamanca, from my brothers there,
And with this outward show of love he mocks
His inward hate. 'Tis bold hypocrisy,
For he would gladlier celebrate their deaths,
Which I have heard him pray for on his knees:
Great God! that such a father should be mine!
But there is mighty preparation made,
And all our kin, the Cenci, will be there,
And all the chief nobility of Rome.
And he has bidden me and my pale Mother
Attire ourselves in festival array.
Poor lady! She expects some happy change
In his dark spirit from this act; I none.
At supper I will give you the petition:
Till whenfarewell.
Orsino.
Farewell.
(Exit Beatrice.)
I know the Pope
Will ne'er absolve me from my priestly vow
But by absolving me from the revenue
Of many a wealthy see; and, Beatrice,
I think to win thee at an easier rate.
Nor shall he read her eloquent petition:
He might bestow her on some poor relation
Of his sixth cousin, as he did her sister,
And I should be debarred from all access.
Then as to what she suffers from her father,
In all this there is much exaggeration:
Old men are testy and will have their way;
A man may stab his enemy, or his vassal,
And live a free life as to wine or women,
And with a peevish temper may return
To a dull home, and rate his wife and children;
Daughters and wives call this foul tyranny.
I shall be well content if on my conscience
There rest no heavier sin than what they suffer
From the devices of my lovea net
From which she shall escape not. Yet I fear
Her subtle mind, her awe-inspiring gaze,
Whose beams anatomize me nerve by nerve
And lay me bare, and make me blush to see
My hidden thoughts.Ah, no! A friendless girl
Who clings to me, as to her only hope:
I were a fool, not less than if a panther
Were panic-stricken by the antelope's eye,
If she escape me.
[Exit.
Scene III.
A Magnificent Hall in the Cenci Palace. A Banquet. Enter Cenci, Lucretia, Beatrice, Orsino, Camillo, Nobles.
Cenci.
Welcome, my friends and kinsmen; welcome ye,
Princes and Cardinals, pillars of the church,
Whose presence honours our festivity.
I have too long lived like an anchorite,
And in my absence from your merry meetings
An evil word is gone abroad of me;
But I do hope that you, my noble friends,
When you have shared the entertainment here,
And heard the pious cause for which 'tis given,
And we have pledged a health or two together,
Will think me flesh and blood as well as you;
Sinful indeed, for Adam made all so,
But tender-hearted, meek and pitiful.
First Guest.
In truth, my Lord, you seem too light of heart,
Too sprightly and companionable a man,
To act the deeds that rumour pins on you. (To his Companion.)
I never saw such blithe and open cheer
In any eye!
Second Guest.
Some most desired event,
In which we all demand a common joy,
Has brought us hither; let us hear it, Count.
Cenci.
It is indeed a most desired event.
If, when a parent from a parent's heart
Lifts from this earth to the great Father of all
A prayer, both when he lays him down to sleep,
And when he rises up from dreaming it;
One supplication, one desire, one hope,
That he would grant a wish for his two sons,
Even all that he demands in their regard
And suddenly beyond his dearest hope
It is accomplished, he should then rejoice,
And call his friends and kinsmen to a feast,
And task their love to grace his merriment,
Then honour me thus farfor I am he.
Beatrice
(to Lucretia).
Great God! How horrible! Some dreadful ill
Must have befallen my brothers.
Lucretia.
Fear not, Child,
He speaks too frankly.
Beatrice.
Ah! My blood runs cold.
I fear that wicked laughter round his eye,
Which wrinkles up the skin even to the hair.
Cenci.
Here are the letters brought from Salamanca;
Beatrice, read them to your mother. God!
I thank thee! In one night didst thou perform,
By ways inscrutable, the thing I sought.
My disobedient and rebellious sons
Are dead!Why, dead!What means this change of cheer?
You hear me not, I tell you they are dead;
And they will need no food or raiment more:
The tapers that did light them the dark way
Are their last cost. The Pope, I think, will not
Expect I should maintain them in their coffins.
Rejoice with memy heart is wondrous glad.
[Lucretia sinks, half fainting; Beatrice supports her.
Beatrice.
It is not true!Dear lady, pray look up.
Had it been true, there is a God in Heaven,
He would not live to boast of such a boon.
Unnatural man, thou knowest that it is false.
Cenci.
Ay, as the word of God; whom here I call
To witness that I speak the sober truth;
And whose most favouring Providence was shown
Even in the manner of their deaths. For Rocco
Was kneeling at the mass, with sixteen others,
When the church fell and crushed him to a mummy,
The rest escaped unhurt. Cristofano
Was stabbed in error by a jealous man,
Whilst she he loved was sleeping with his rival;
All in the self-same hour of the same night;
Which shows that Heaven has special care of me.
I beg those friends who love me, that they mark
The day a feast upon their calendars.
It was the twenty-seventh of December:
Ay, read the letters if you doubt my oath.
[The Assembly appears confused; several of the guests rise.
First Guest.
Oh, horrible! I will depart
Second Guest.
And I.
Third Guest.
No, stay!
I do believe it is some jest; though faith!
'Tis mocking us somewhat too solemnly.
I think his son has married the Infanta,
Or found a mine of gold in El Dorado;
'Tis but to season some such news; stay, stay!
I see 'tis only raillery by his smile.
Cenci
(filling a bowl of wine, and lifting it up).
Oh, thou bright wine whose purple splendour leaps
And bubbles gaily in this golden bowl
Under the lamplight, as my spirits do,
To hear the death of my accursd sons!
Could I believe thou wert their mingled blood,
Then would I taste thee like a sacrament,
And pledge with thee the mighty Devil in Hell,
Who, if a father's curses, as men say,
Climb with swift wings after their children's souls,
And drag them from the very throne of Heaven,
Now triumphs in my triumph!But thou art
Superfluous; I have drunken deep of joy,
And I will taste no other wine to-night.
Here, Andrea! Bear the bowl around.
A Guest
(rising).
Thou wretch!
Will none among this noble company
Check the abandoned villain?
Camillo.
For God's sake
Let me dismiss the guests! You are insane,
Some ill will come of this.
Second Guest.
Seize, silence him!
First Guest.
I will!
Third Guest.
And I!
Cenci
(addressing those who rise with a threatening gesture).
Who moves? Who speaks?
(turning to the Company)
'tis nothing
Enjoy yourselves.Beware! For my revenge
Is as the sealed commission of a king
That kills, and none dare name the murderer.
[The Banquet is broken up; several of the Guests are departing.
Beatrice.
I do entreat you, go not, noble guests;
What, although tyranny and impious hate
Stand sheltered by a father's hoary hair?
What, if 'tis he who clothed us in these limbs
Who tortures them, and triumphs? What, if we,
The desolate and the dead, were his own flesh,
His children and his wife, whom he is bound
To love and shelter? Shall we therefore find
No refuge in this merciless wide world?
O think what deep wrongs must have blotted out
First love, then reverence in a child's prone mind,
Till it thus vanquish shame and fear! O think!
I have borne much, and kissed the sacred hand
Which crushed us to the earth, and thought its stroke
Was perhaps some paternal chastisement!
Have excused much, doubted; and when no doubt
Remained, have sought by patience, love, and tears
To soften him, and when this could not be
I have knelt down through the long sleepless nights
And lifted up to God, the Father of all,
Passionate prayers: and when these were not heard
I have still borne,until I meet you here,
Princes and kinsmen, at this hideous feast
Given at my brothers' deaths. Two yet remain,
His wife remains and I, whom if ye save not,
Ye may soon share such merriment again
As fathers make over their children's graves.
O Prince Colonna, thou art our near kinsman,
Cardinal, thou art the Pope's chamberlain,
Camillo, thou art chief justiciary,
Take us away!
Cenci.
(He has been conversing with Camillo during the first part of Beatrice's speech; he hears the conclusion, and now advances.)
I hope my good friends here
Will think of their own daughtersor perhaps
Of their own throatsbefore they lend an ear
To this wild girl.
Beatrice
(not noticing the words of Cenci).
Dare no one look on me?
None answer? Can one tyrant overbear
The sense of many best and wisest men?
Or is it that I sue not in some form
Of scrupulous law, that ye deny my suit?
O God! That I were buried with my brothers!
And that the flowers of this departed spring
Were fading on my grave! And that my father
Were celebrating now one feast for all!
Camillo.
A bitter wish for one so young and gentle;
Can we do nothing?
Colonna.
Nothing that I see.
Count Cenci were a dangerous enemy:
Yet I would second any one.
A Cardinal.
And I.
Cenci.
Retire to your chamber, insolent girl!
Beatrice.
Retire thou, impious man! Ay, hide thyself
Where never eye can look upon thee more!
Wouldst thou have honour and obedience
Who art a torturer? Father, never dream
Though thou mayst overbear this company,
But ill must come of ill.Frown not on me!
Haste, hide thyself, lest with avenging looks
My brothers' ghosts should hunt thee from thy seat!
Cover thy face from every living eye,
And start if thou but hear a human step:
Seek out some dark and silent corner, there,
Bow thy white head before offended God,
And we will kneel around, and fervently
Pray that he pity both ourselves and thee.
Cenci.
My friends, I do lament this insane girl
Has spoilt the mirth of our festivity.
Good night, farewell; I will not make you longer
Spectators of our dull domestic quarrels.
Another time.
[Exeunt all but Cenci and Beatrice.
My brain is swimming round;
Give me a bowl of wine!
[To Beatrice.
Thou painted viper!
Beast that thou art! Fair and yet terrible!
I know a charm shall make thee meek and tame,
Now get thee from my sight!
[Exit Beatrice.
Here, Andrea,
Fill up this goblet with Greek wine. I said
I would not drink this evening; but I must;
For, strange to say, I feel my spirits fail
With thinking what I have decreed to do. [Drinking the wine.
Be thou the resolution of quick youth
Within my veins, and manhood's purpose stern,
And age's firm, cold, subtle villainy;
As if thou wert indeed my children's blood
Which I did thirst to drink! The charm works well;
It must be done; it shall be done, I swear!
[Exit.
END OF THE FIRST ACT.
ACT II
Scene I.
An Apartment in the Cenci Palace. Enter Lucretia and Bernardo.
Lucretia.
Weep not, my gentle boy; he struck but me
Who have borne deeper wrongs. In truth, if he
Had killed me, he had done a kinder deed.
O God, Almighty, do Thou look upon us,
We have no other friend but only Thee!
Yet weep not; though I love you as my own,
I am not your true mother.
Bernardo.
O more, more,
Than ever mother was to any child,
That have you been to me! Had he not been
My father, do you think that I should weep!
Lucretia.
Alas! Poor boy, what else couldst thou have done?
Enter Beatrice.
Beatrice
(in a hurried voice).
Did he pass this way? Have you seen him, brother?
Ah, no! that is his step upon the stairs;
'Tis nearer now; his hand is on the door;
Mother, if I to thee have ever been
A duteous child, now save me! Thou, great God,
Whose image upon earth a father is,
Dost Thou indeed abandon me? He comes;
The door is opening now; I see his face;
He frowns on others, but he smiles on me,
Even as he did after the feast last night. Enter a Servant.
Almighty God, how merciful Thou art!
'Tis but Orsino's servant.Well, what news?
Servant.
My master bids me say, the Holy Father
Has sent back your petition thus unopened. [Giving a paper.
And he demands at what hour 'twere secure
To visit you again?
Lucretia.
At the Ave Mary.[Exit Servant.
So, daughter, our last hope has failed; Ah me!
How pale you look; you tremble, and you stand
Wrapped in some fixed and fearful meditation,
As if one thought were over strong for you:
Your eyes have a chill glare; O, dearest child!
Are you gone mad? If not, pray speak to me.
Beatrice.
You see I am not mad: I speak to you.
Lucretia.
You talked of something that your father did
After that dreadful feast? Could it be worse
Than when he smiled, and cried, 'My sons are dead!'
And every one looked in his neighbour's face
To see if others were as white as he?
At the first word he spoke I felt the blood
Rush to my heart, and fell into a trance;
And when it passed I sat all weak and wild;
Whilst you alone stood up, and with strong words
Checked his unnatural pride; and I could see
The devil was rebuked that lives in him.
Until this hour thus have you ever stood
Between us and your father's moody wrath
Like a protecting presence: your firm mind
Has been our only refuge and defence:
What can have thus subdued it? What can now
Have given you that cold melancholy look,
Succeeding to your unaccustomed fear?
Beatrice.
What is it that you say? I was just thinking
'Twere better not to struggle any more.
Men, like my father, have been dark and bloody,
Yet neverOh! Before worse comes of it
'Twere wise to die: it ends in that at last.
Lucretia.
Oh, talk not so, dear child! Tell me at once
What did your father do or say to you?
He stayed not after that accursd feast
One moment in your chamber.Speak to me.
Bernardo.
Oh, sister, sister, prithee, speak to us!
Beatrice
(speaking very slowly with a forced calmness).
It was one word, Mother, one little word;
One look, one smile. (Wildly.)
Oh! He has trampled me
Under his feet, and made the blood stream down
My pallid cheeks. And he has given us all
Ditch-water, and the fever-stricken flesh
Of buffaloes, and bade us eat or starve,
And we have eaten.He has made me look
On my beloved Bernardo, when the rust
Of heavy chains has gangrened his sweet limbs,
And I have never yet despairedbut now!
What could I say?
[Recovering herself.
Ah, no! 'tis nothing new.
The sufferings we all share have made me wild:
He only struck and cursed me as he passed;
He said, he looked, he did;nothing at all
Beyond his wont, yet it disordered me.
Alas! I am forgetful of my duty,
I should preserve my senses for your sake.
Lucretia.
Nay, Beatrice; have courage, my sweet girl,
If any one despairs it should be I
Who loved him once, and now must live with him
Till God in pity call for him or me.
For you may, like your sister, find some husband,
And smile, years hence, with children round your knees;
Whilst I, then dead, and all this hideous coil
Shall be remembered only as a dream.
Beatrice.
Talk not to me, dear lady, of a husband.
Did you not nurse me when my mother died?
Did you not shield me and that dearest boy?
And had we any other friend but you
In infancy, with gentle words and looks,
To win our father not to murder us?
And shall I now desert you? May the ghost
Of my dead Mother plead against my soul
If I abandon her who filled the place
She left, with more, even, than a mother's love!
Bernardo.
And I am of my sister's mind. Indeed
I would not leave you in this wretchedness,
Even though the Pope should make me free to live
In some blithe place, like others of my age,
With sports, and delicate food, and the fresh air.
Oh, never think that I will leave you, Mother!
Lucretia.
My dear, dear children!
Enter Cenci, suddenly.
Cenci.
What, Beatrice here!
Come hither!
[She shrinks back, and covers her face.
Nay, hide not your face, 'tis fair;
Look up! Why, yesternight you dared to look
With disobedient insolence upon me,
Bending a stern and an inquiring brow
On what I meant; whilst I then sought to hide
That which I came to tell youbut in vain.
Beatrice
(wildly, staggering towards the door).
O that the earth would gape! Hide me, O God!
Cenci.
Then it was I whose inarticulate words
Fell from my lips, and who with tottering steps
Fled from your presence, as you now from mine.
Stay, I command youfrom this day and hour
Never again, I think, with fearless eye,
And brow superior, and unaltered cheek,
And that lip made for tenderness or scorn,
Shalt thou strike dumb the meanest of mankind;
Me least of all. Now get thee to thy chamber!
Thou too, loathed image of thy cursd mother, [To Bernardo.
Thy milky, meek face makes me sick with hate! [Exeunt Beatrice and Bernardo.
(Aside.)
So much has passed between us as must make
Me bold, her fearful.'Tis an awful thing
To touch such mischief as I now conceive:
So men sit shivering on the dewy bank,
And try the chill stream with their feet; once in . . .
How the delighted spirit pants for joy!
Lucretia
(advancing timidly towards him).
O husband! Pray forgive poor Beatrice.
She meant not any ill.
Cenci.
Nor you perhaps?
Nor that young imp, whom you have taught by rote
Parricide with his alphabet? Nor Giacomo?
Nor those two most unnatural sons, who stirred
Enmity up against me with the Pope?
Whom in one night merciful God cut off:
Innocent lambs! They thought not any ill.
You were not here conspiring? You said nothing
Of how I might be dungeoned as a madman;
Or be condemned to death for some offence,
And you would be the witnesses?This failing,
How just it were to hire assassins, or
Put sudden poison in my evening drink?
Or smother me when overcome by wine?
Seeing we had no other judge but God,
And He had sentenced me, and there were none
But you to be the executioners
Of His decree enregistered in Heaven?
Oh, no! You said not this?
Lucretia.
So help me God,
I never thought the things you charge me with!
Cenci.
If you dare speak that wicked lie again
I'll kill you. What! It was not by your counsel
That Beatrice disturbed the feast last night?
You did not hope to stir some enemies
Against me, and escape, and laugh to scorn
What every nerve of you now trembles at?
You judged that men were bolder than they are;
Few dare to stand between their grave and me.
Lucretia.
Look not so dreadfully! By my salvation
I knew not aught that Beatrice designed;
Nor do I think she designed any thing
Until she heard you talk of her dead brothers.
Cenci.
Blaspheming liar! You are damned for this!
But I will take you where you may persuade
The stones you tread on to deliver you:
For men shall there be none but those who dare
All thingsnot question that which I command.
On Wednesday next I shall set out: you know
That savage rock, the Castle of Petrella:
'Tis safely walled, and moated round about:
Its dungeons underground, and its thick towers
Never told tales; though they have heard and seen
What might make dumb things speak.Why do you linger?
Make speediest preparation for the journey! [Exit Lucretia.
The all-beholding sun yet shines; I hear
A busy stir of men about the streets;
I see the bright sky through the window panes:
It is a garish, broad, and peering day;
Loud, light, suspicious, full of eyes and ears,
And every little corner, nook, and hole
Is penetrated with the insolent light.
Come darkness! Yet, what is the day to me?
And wherefore should I wish for night, who do
A deed which shall confound both night and day?
'Tis she shall grope through a bewildering mist
Of horror: if there be a sun in heaven
She shall not dare to look upon its beams;
Nor feel its warmth. Let her then wish for night;
The act I think shall soon extinguish all
For me: I bear a darker deadlier gloom
Than the earth's shade, or interlunar air,
Or constellations quenched in murkiest cloud,
In which I walk secure and unbeheld
Towards my purpose.Would that it were done!
[Exit.
Scene II.
A Chamber in the Vatican. Enter Camillo and Giacomo, in conversation.
Camillo.
There is an obsolete and doubtful law
By which you might obtain a bare provision
Of food and clothing
Giacomo.
Nothing more? Alas!
Bare must be the provision which strict law
Awards, and agd, sullen avarice pays.
Why did my father not apprentice me
To some mechanic trade? I should have then
Been trained in no highborn necessities
Which I could meet not by my daily toil.
The eldest son of a rich nobleman
Is heir to all his incapacities;
He has wide wants, and narrow powers. If you,
Cardinal Camillo, were reduced at once
From thrice-driven beds of down, and delicate food,
An hundred servants, and six palaces,
To that which nature doth indeed require?
Camillo.
Nay, there is reason in your plea; 'twere hard.
Giacomo.
'Tis hard for a firm man to bear: but I
Have a dear wife, a lady of high birth,
Whose dowry in ill hour I lent my father
Without a bond or witness to the deed:
And children, who inherit her fine senses,
The fairest creatures in this breathing world;
And she and they reproach me not. Cardinal,
Do you not think the Pope would interpose
And stretch authority beyond the law?
Camillo.
Though your peculiar case is hard, I know
The Pope will not divert the course of law.
After that impious feast the other night
I spoke with him, and urged him then to check
Your father's cruel hand; he frowned and said,
'Children are disobedient, and they sting
Their fathers' hearts to madness and despair,
Requiting years of care with contumely.
I pity the Count Cenci from my heart;
His outraged love perhaps awakened hate,
And thus he is exasperated to ill.
In the great war between the old and young
I, who have white hairs and a tottering body,
Will keep at least blameless neutrality.' Enter Orsino.
You, my good Lord Orsino, heard those words.
Orsino.
What words?
Giacomo.
Alas, repeat them not again!
There then is no redress for me, at least
None but that which I may achieve myself,
Since I am driven to the brink.But, say,
My innocent sister and my only brother
Are dying underneath my father's eye.
The memorable torturers of this land,
Galeaz Visconti, Borgia, Ezzelin,
Never inflicted on the meanest slave
What these endure; shall they have no protection?
Camillo.
Why, if they would petition to the Pope
I see not how he could refuse ityet
He holds it of most dangerous example
In aught to weaken the paternal power,
Being, as 'twere, the shadow of his own.
I pray you now excuse me. I have business
That will not bear delay.
[Exit Camillo.
Giacomo.
But you, Orsino,
Have the petition: wherefore not present it?
Orsino.
I have presented it, and backed it with
My earnest prayers, and urgent interest;
It was returned unanswered. I doubt not
But that the strange and execrable deeds
Alleged in itin truth they might well baffle
Any beliefhave turned the Pope's displeasure
Upon the accusers from the criminal:
So I should guess from what Camillo said.
Giacomo.
My friend, that palace-walking devil Gold
Has whispered silence to his Holiness:
And we are left, as scorpions ringed with fire.
What should we do but strike ourselves to death?
For he who is our murderous persecutor
Is shielded by a father's holy name,
Or I would
[Stops abruptly.
Orsino.
What? Fear not to speak your thought.
Words are but holy as the deeds they cover:
A priest who has forsworn the God he serves;
A judge who makes Truth weep at his decree;
A friend who should weave counsel, as I now,
But as the mantle of some selfish guile;
A father who is all a tyrant seems,
Were the profaner for his sacred name.
Giacomo.
Ask me not what I think; the unwilling brain
Feigns often what it would not; and we trust
Imagination with such phantasies
As the tongue dares not fashion into words,
Which have no words, their horror makes them dim
To the mind's eye.My heart denies itself
To think what you demand.
Orsino.
But a friend's bosom
Is as the inmost cave of our own mind
Where we sit shut from the wide gaze of day,
And from the all-communicating air.
You look what I suspected
Giacomo.
Spare me now!
I am as one lost in a midnight wood,
Who dares not ask some harmless passenger
The path across the wilderness, lest he,
As my thoughts are, should bea murderer.
I know you are my friend, and all I dare
Speak to my soul that will I trust with thee.
But now my heart is heavy, and would take
Lone counsel from a night of sleepless care.
Pardon me, that I say farewellfarewell!
I would that to my own suspected self
I could address a word so full of peace.
Orsino.
Farewell!Be your thoughts better or more bold. [Exit Giacomo.
I had disposed the Cardinal Camillo
To feed his hope with cold encouragement:
It fortunately serves my close designs
That 'tis a trick of this same family
To analyse their own and other minds.
Such self-anatomy shall teach the will
Dangerous secrets: for it tempts our powers,
Knowing what must be thought, and may be done,
Into the depth of darkest purposes:
So Cenci fell into the pit; even I,
Since Beatrice unveiled me to myself,
And made me shrink from what I cannot shun,
Show a poor figure to my own esteem,
To which I grow half reconciled. I'll do
As little mischief as I can; that thought
Shall fee the accuser conscience.
(After a pause.)
Now what harm
If Cenci should be murdered?Yet, if murdered,
Wherefore by me? And what if I could take
The profit, yet omit the sin and peril
In such an action? Of all earthly things
I fear a man whose blows outspeed his words;
And such is Cenci: and while Cenci lives
His daughter's dowry were a secret grave
If a priest wins her.Oh, fair Beatrice!
Would that I loved thee not, or loving thee
Could but despise danger and gold and all
That frowns between my wish and its effect,
Or smiles beyond it! There is no escape . . .
Her bright form kneels beside me at the altar,
And follows me to the resort of men,
And fills my slumber with tumultuous dreams,
So when I wake my blood seems liquid fire;
And if I strike my damp and dizzy head
My hot palm scorches it: her very name,
But spoken by a stranger, makes my heart
Sicken and pant; and thus unprofitably
I clasp the phantom of unfelt delights
Till weak imagination half possesses
The self-created shadow. Yet much longer
Will I not nurse this life of feverous hours:
From the unravelled hopes of Giacomo
I must work out my own dear purposes.
I see, as from a tower, the end of all:
Her father dead; her brother bound to me
By a dark secret, surer than the grave;
Her mother scared and unexpostulating
From the dread manner of her wish achieved:
And she!Once more take courage, my faint heart;
What dares a friendless maiden matched with thee?
I have such foresight as assures success:
Some unbeheld divinity doth ever,
When dread events are near, stir up men's minds
To black suggestions; and he prospers best,
Not who becomes the instrument of ill,
But who can flatter the dark spirit, that makes
Its empire and its prey of other hearts
Till it become his slave . . . as I will do.
[Exit.
END OF THE SECOND ACT.
ACT III
Scene I.
An Apartment in the Cenci Palace. Lucretia, to her enter Beatrice.
Beatrice.
(She enters staggering, and speaks wildly.)
Reach me that handkerchief!My brain is hurt;
My eyes are full of blood; just wipe them for me . . .
I see but indistinctly . . .
Lucretia.
My sweet child,
You have no wound; 'tis only a cold dew
That starts from your dear brow . . . Alas! Alas!
What has befallen?
Beatrice.
How comes this hair undone?
Its wandering strings must be what blind me so,
And yet I tied it fast.O, horrible!
The pavement sinks under my feet! The walls
Spin round! I see a woman weeping there,
And standing calm and motionless, whilst I
Slide giddily as the world reels. . . . My God!
The beautiful blue heaven is flecked with blood!
The sunshine on the floor is black! The air
Is changed to vapours such as the dead breathe
In charnel pits! Pah! I am choked! There creeps
A clinging, black, contaminating mist
About me . . . 'tis substantial, heavy, thick,
I cannot pluck it from me, for it glues
My fingers and my limbs to one another,
And eats into my sinews, and dissolves
My flesh to a pollution, poisoning
The subtle, pure, and inmost spirit of life!
My God! I never knew what the mad felt
Before; for I am mad beyond all doubt!
(More wildly.)
No, I am dead! These putrefying limbs
Shut round and sepulchre the panting soul
Which would burst forth into the wandering air! (A pause.)
What hideous thought was that I had even now?
'Tis gone; and yet its burthen remains here
O'er these dull eyes . . . upon this weary heart!
O, world! O, life! O, day! O, misery!
Lucretia.
What ails thee, my poor child? She answers not:
Her spirit apprehends the sense of pain,
But not its cause; suffering has dried away
The source from which it sprung . . .
Beatrice
(franticly).
Like Parricide . . .
Misery has killed its father: yet its father
Never like mine . . . O, God! What thing am I?
Lucretia.
My dearest child, what has your father done?
Beatrice
(doubtfully).
Who art thou, questioner? I have no father.
(Aside.)
She is the madhouse nurse who tends on me,
It is a piteous office.
[To Lucretia, in a slow, subdued voice.
Do you know
I thought I was that wretched Beatrice
Men speak of, whom her father sometimes hales
From hall to hall by the entangled hair;
At others, pens up naked in damp cells
Where scaly reptiles crawl, and starves her there,
Till she will eat strange flesh. This woful story
So did I overact in my sick dreams,
That I imagined . . . no, it cannot be!
Horrible things have been in this wide world,
Prodigious mixtures, and confusions strange
Of good and ill; and worse have been conceived
Than ever there was found a heart to do.
But never fancy imaged such a deed
As . . .
[Pauses, suddenly recollecting herself.
Who art thou? Swear to me, ere I die
With fearful expectation, that indeed
Thou art not what thou seemest . . . Mother!
Lucretia.
Oh!
My sweet child, know you . . .
Beatrice.
Yet speak it not:
For then if this be truth, that other too
Must be a truth, a firm enduring truth,
Linked with each lasting circumstance of life,
Never to change, never to pass away.
Why so it is. This is the Cenci Palace;
Thou art Lucretia; I am Beatrice.
I have talked some wild words, but will no more.
Mother, come near me: from this point of time,
I am . . .
[Her voice dies away faintly.
Lucretia.
Alas! What has befallen thee, child?
What has thy father done?
Beatrice.
What have I done?
Am I not innocent? Is it my crime
That one with white hair, and imperious brow,
Who tortured me from my forgotten years,
As parents only dare, should call himself
My father, yet should be!Oh, what am I?
What name, what place, what memory shall be mine?
What retrospects, outliving even despair?
Lucretia.
He is a violent tyrant, surely, child:
We know that death alone can make us free;
His death or ours. But what can he have done
Of deadlier outrage or worse injury?
Thou art unlike thyself; thine eyes shoot forth
A wandering and strange spirit. Speak to me,
Unlock those pallid hands whose fingers twine
With one another.
Beatrice.
'Tis the restless life
Tortured within them. If I try to speak
I shall go mad. Ay, something must be done;
What, yet I know not . . . something which shall make
The thing that I have suffered but a shadow
In the dread lightning which avenges it;
Brief, rapid, irreversible, destroying
The consequence of what it cannot cure.
Some such thing is to be endured or done:
When I know what, I shall be still and calm,
And never anything will move me more.
But now!O blood, which art my father's blood,
Circling through these contaminated veins,
If thou, poured forth on the polluted earth,
Could wash away the crime, and punishment
By which I suffer . . . no, that cannot be!
Many might doubt there were a God above
Who sees and permits evil, and so die:
That faith no agony shall obscure in me.
Lucretia.
It must indeed have been some bitter wrong;
Yet what, I dare not guess. Oh, my lost child,
Hide not in proud impenetrable grief
Thy sufferings from my fear.
Beatrice.
I hide them not.
What are the words which you would have me speak?
I, who can feign no image in my mind
Of that which has transformed me: I, whose thought
Is like a ghost shrouded and folded up
In its own formless horror: of all words,
That minister to mortal intercourse,
Which wouldst thou hear? For there is none to tell
My misery: if another ever knew
Aught like to it, she died as I will die,
And left it, as I must, without a name.
Death! Death! Our law and our religion call thee
A punishment and a reward . . . Oh, which
Have I deserved?
Lucretia.
The peace of innocence;
Till in your season you be called to heaven.
Whate'er you may have suffered, you have done
No evil. Death must be the punishment
Of crime, or the reward of trampling down
The thorns which God has strewed upon the path
Which leads to immortality.
Beatrice.
Ay; death . . .
The punishment of crime. I pray thee, God,
Let me not be bewildered while I judge.
If I must live day after day, and keep
These limbs, the unworthy temple of Thy spirit,
As a foul den from which what Thou abhorrest
May mock Thee, unavenged . . . it shall not be!
Self-murder . . . no, that might be no escape,
For Thy decree yawns like a Hell between
Our will and it:O! In this mortal world
There is no vindication and no law
Which can adjudge and execute the doom
Of that through which I suffer.
Enter Orsino.
(She approaches him solemnly.)
Welcome, Friend!
I have to tell you that, since last we met,
I have endured a wrong so great and strange,
That neither life nor death can give me rest.
Ask me not what it is, for there are deeds
Which have no form, sufferings which have no tongue.
Orsino.
And what is he who has thus injured you?
Beatrice.
The man they call my father: a dread name.
Orsino.
It cannot be . . .
Beatrice.
What it can be, or not,
Forbear to think. It is, and it has been;
Advise me how it shall not be again.
I thought to die; but a religious awe
Restrains me, and the dread lest death itself
Might be no refuge from the consciousness
Of what is yet unexpiated. Oh, speak!
Orsino.
Accuse him of the deed, and let the law
Avenge thee.
Beatrice.
Oh, ice-hearted counsellor!
If I could find a word that might make known
The crime of my destroyer; and that done,
My tongue should like a knife tear out the secret
Which cankers my heart's core; ay, lay all bare
So that my unpolluted fame should be
With vilest gossips a stale mouthd story;
A mock, a byword, an astonishment:
If this were done, which never shall be done,
Think of the offender's gold, his dreaded hate,
And the strange horror of the accuser's tale,
Baffling belief, and overpowering speech;
Scarce whispered, unimaginable, wrapped
In hideous hints . . . Oh, most assured redress!
Orsino.
You will endure it then?
Beatrice.
Endure?Orsino,
It seems your counsel is small profit.
[Turns from him, and speaks half to herself.
Ay,
All must be suddenly resolved and done.
What is this undistinguishable mist
Of thoughts, which rise, like shadow after shadow,
Darkening each other?
Orsino.
Should the offender live?
Triumph in his misdeed? and make, by use,
His crime, whate'er it is, dreadful no doubt,
Thine element; until thou mayst become
Utterly lost; subdued even to the hue
Of that which thou permittest?
Beatrice
(to herself).
Mighty death!
Thou double-visaged shadow? Only judge!
Rightfullest arbiter!
[She retires absorbed in thought.
Lucretia.
If the lightning
Of God has e'er descended to avenge . . .
Orsino.
Blaspheme not! His high Providence commits
Its glory on this earth, and their own wrongs
Into the hands of men; if they neglect
To punish crime . . .
Lucretia.
But if one, like this wretch,
Should mock, with gold, opinion, law, and power?
If there be no appeal to that which makes
The guiltiest tremble? If because our wrongs,
For that they are unnatural, strange, and monstrous,
Exceed all measure of belief? O God!
If, for the very reasons which should make
Redress most swift and sure, our injurer triumphs?
And we, the victims, bear worse punishment
Than that appointed for their torturer?
Orsino.
Think not
But that there is redress where there is wrong,
So we be bold enough to seize it.
Lucretia.
How?
If there were any way to make all sure,
I know not . . . but I think it might be good
To . . .
Orsino.
Why, his late outrage to Beatrice;
For it is such, as I but faintly guess,
As makes remorse dishonour, and leaves her
Only one duty, how she may avenge:
You, but one refuge from ills ill endured;
Me, but one counsel . . .
Lucretia.
For we cannot hope
That aid, or retribution, or resource
Will arise thence, where every other one
Might find them with less need.
[Beatrice advances.
Orsino.
Then . . .
Beatrice.
Peace, Orsino!
And, honoured Lady, while I speak, I pray,
That you put off, as garments overworn,
Forbearance and respect, remorse and fear,
And all the fit restraints of daily life,
Which have been borne from childhood, but which now
Would be a mockery to my holier plea.
As I have said, I have endured a wrong,
Which, though it be expressionless, is such
As asks atonement; both for what is past,
And lest I be reserved, day after day,
To load with crimes an overburthened soul,
And be . . . what ye can dream not. I have prayed
To God, and I have talked with my own heart,
And have unravelled my entangled will,
And have at length determined what is right.
Art thou my friend, Orsino? False or true?
Pledge thy salvation ere I speak.
Orsino.
I swear
To dedicate my cunning, and my strength,
My silence, and whatever else is mine,
To thy commands.
Lucretia.
You think we should devise
His death?
Beatrice.
And execute what is devised,
And suddenly. We must be brief and bold.
Orsino.
And yet most cautious.
Lucretia.
For the jealous laws
Would punish us with death and infamy
For that which it became themselves to do.
Beatrice.
Be cautious as ye may, but prompt. Orsino,
What are the means?
Orsino.
I know two dull, fierce outlaws,
Who think man's spirit as a worm's, and they
Would trample out, for any slight caprice,
The meanest or the noblest life. This mood
Is marketable here in Rome. They sell
What we now want.
Lucretia.
To-morrow before dawn,
Cenci will take us to that lonely rock,
Petrella, in the Apulian Apennines.
If he arrive there . . .
Beatrice.
He must not arrive.
Orsino.
Will it be dark before you reach the tower?
Lucretia.
The sun will scarce be set.
Beatrice.
But I remember
Two miles on this side of the fort, the road
Crosses a deep ravine; 'tis rough and narrow,
And winds with short turns down the precipice;
And in its depth there is a mighty rock,
Which has, from unimaginable years,
Sustained itself with terror and with toil
Over a gulf, and with the agony
With which it clings seems slowly coming down;
Even as a wretched soul hour after hour,
Clings to the mass of life; yet clinging, leans;
And leaning, makes more dark the dread abyss
In which it fears to fall: beneath this crag
Huge as despair, as if in weariness,
The melancholy mountain yawns . . . below,
You hear but see not an impetuous torrent
Raging among the caverns, and a bridge
Crosses the chasm; and high above there grow,
With intersecting trunks, from crag to crag,
Cedars, and yews, and pines; whose tangled hair
Is matted in one solid roof of shade
By the dark ivy's twine. At noonday here
'Tis twilight, and at sunset blackest night.
Orsino.
Before you reach that bridge make some excuse
For spurring on your mules, or loitering
Until . . .
Beatrice.
What sound is that?
Lucretia.
Hark! No, it cannot be a servant's step
It must be Cenci, unexpectedly
Returned . . . Make some excuse for being here.
Beatrice.
(To Orsino, as she goes out.)
That step we hear approach must never pass
The bridge of which we spoke.
[Exeunt Lucretia and Beatrice.
Orsino.
What shall I do?
Cenci must find me here, and I must bear
The imperious inquisition of his looks
As to what brought me hither: let me mask
Mine own in some inane and vacant smile. Enter Giacomo, in a hurried manner.
How! Have you ventured hither? Know you then
That Cenci is from home?
Giacomo.
I sought him here;
And now must wait till he returns.
Orsino.
Great God!
Weigh you the danger of this rashness?
Giacomo.
Ay!
Does my destroyer know his danger? We
Are now no more, as once, parent and child,
But man to man; the oppressor to the oppressed;
The slanderer to the slandered; foe to foe:
He has cast Nature off, which was his shield,
And Nature casts him off, who is her shame;
And I spurn both. Is it a father's throat
Which I will shake, and say, I ask not gold;
I ask not happy years; nor memories
Of tranquil childhood; nor home-sheltered love;
Though all these hast thou torn from me, and more;
But only my fair fame; only one hoard
Of peace, which I thought hidden from thy hate,
Under the penury heaped on me by thee,
Or I will . . . God can understand and pardon,
Why should I speak with man?
Orsino.
Be calm, dear friend.
Giacomo.
Well, I will calmly tell you what he did.
This old Francesco Cenci, as you know,
Borrowed the dowry of my wife from me,
And then denied the loan; and left me so
In poverty, the which I sought to mend
By holding a poor office in the state.
It had been promised to me, and already
I bought new clothing for my raggd babes,
And my wife smiled; and my heart knew repose.
When Cenci's intercession, as I found,
Conferred this office on a wretch, whom thus
He paid for vilest service. I returned
With this ill news, and we sate sad together
Solacing our despondency with tears
Of such affection and unbroken faith
As temper life's worst bitterness; when he,
As he is wont, came to upbraid and curse,
Mocking our poverty, and telling us
Such was God's scourge for disobedient sons.
And then, that I might strike him dumb with shame,
I spoke of my wife's dowry; but he coined
A brief yet specious tale, how I had wasted
The sum in secret riot; and he saw
My wife was touched, and he went smiling forth.
And when I knew the impression he had made,
And felt my wife insult with silent scorn
My ardent truth, and look averse and cold,
I went forth too: but soon returned again;
Yet not so soon but that my wife had taught
My children her harsh thoughts, and they all cried,
'Give us clothes, father! Give us better food!
What you in one night squander were enough
For months!' I looked, and saw that home was hell.
And to that hell will I return no more
Until mine enemy has rendered up
Atonement, or, as he gave life to me
I will, reversing Nature's law . . .
Orsino.
Trust me,
The compensation which thou seekest here
Will be denied.
Giacomo.
Then . . . Are you not my friend?
Did you not hint at the alternative,
Upon the brink of which you see I stand,
The other day when we conversed together?
My wrongs were then less. That word parricide,
Although I am resolved, haunts me like fear.
Orsino.
It must be fear itself, for the bare word
Is hollow mockery. Mark, how wisest God
Draws to one point the threads of a just doom,
So sanctifying it: what you devise
Is, as it were, accomplished.
Giacomo.
Is he dead?
Orsino.
His grave is ready. Know that since we met
Cenci has done an outrage to his daughter.
Giacomo.
What outrage?
Orsino.
That she speaks not, but you may
Conceive such half conjectures as I do,
From her fixed paleness, and the lofty grief
Of her stern brow bent on the idle air,
And her severe unmodulated voice,
Drowning both tenderness and dread; and last
From this; that whilst her step-mother and I,
Bewildered in our horror, talked together
With obscure hints; both self-misunderstood
And darkly guessing, stumbling, in our talk,
Over the truth, and yet to its revenge,
She interrupted us, and with a look
Which told before she spoke it, he must die: . . .
Giacomo.
It is enough. My doubts are well appeased;
There is a higher reason for the act
Than mine; there is a holier judge than me,
A more unblamed avenger. Beatrice,
Who in the gentleness of thy sweet youth
Hast never trodden on a worm, or bruised
A living flower, but thou hast pitied it
With needless tears! Fair sister, thou in whom
Men wondered how such loveliness and wisdom
Did not destroy each other! Is there made
Ravage of thee? O, heart, I ask no more
Justification! Shall I wait, Orsino,
Till he return, and stab him at the door?
Orsino.
Not so; some accident might interpose
To rescue him from what is now most sure;
And you are unprovided where to fly,
How to excuse or to conceal. Nay, listen:
All is contrived; success is so assured
That . . .
Enter Beatrice.
Beatrice.
'Tis my brother's voice! You know me not?
Giacomo.
My sister, my lost sister!
Beatrice.
Lost indeed!
I see Orsino has talked with you, and
That you conjecture things too horrible
To speak, yet far less than the truth. Now, stay not,
He might return: yet kiss me; I shall know
That then thou hast consented to his death.
Farewell, farewell! Let piety to God,
Brotherly love, justice and clemency,
And all things that make tender hardest hearts
Make thine hard, brother. Answer not . . . farewell.
[Exeunt severally.
Scene II.
A mean Apartment in Giacomo's House. Giacomo alone.
Giacomo.
'Tis midnight, and Orsino comes not yet. [Thunder, and the sound of a storm.
What! can the everlasting elements
Feel with a worm like man? If so, the shaft
Of mercy-wingd lightning would not fall
On stones and trees. My wife and children sleep:
They are now living in unmeaning dreams:
But I must wake, still doubting if that deed
Be just which is most necessary. O,
Thou unreplenished lamp! whose narrow fire
Is shaken by the wind, and on whose edge
Devouring darkness hovers! Thou small flame,
Which, as a dying pulse rises and falls,
Still flickerest up and down, how very soon,
Did I not feed thee, wouldst thou fail and be
As thou hadst never been! So wastes and sinks
Even now, perhaps, the life that kindled mine:
But that no power can fill with vital oil
That broken lamp of flesh. Ha! 'tis the blood
Which fed these veins that ebbs till all is cold:
It is the form that moulded mine that sinks
Into the white and yellow spasms of death:
It is the soul by which mine was arrayed
In God's immortal likeness which now stands
Naked before Heaven's judgement seat!
[A bell strikes.
One! Two!
The hours crawl on; and when my hairs are white,
My son will then perhaps be waiting thus,
Tortured between just hate and vain remorse;
Chiding the tardy messenger of news
Like those which I expect. I almost wish
He be not dead, although my wrongs are great;
Yet . . . 'tis Orsino's step . . .
Enter Orsino.
Speak!
Orsino.
I am come
To say he has escaped.
Giacomo.
Escaped!
Orsino.
And safe
Within Petrella. He passed by the spot
Appointed for the deed an hour too soon.
Giacomo.
Are we the fools of such contingencies?
And do we waste in blind misgivings thus
The hours when we should act? Then wind and thunder,
Which seemed to howl his knell, is the loud laughter
With which Heaven mocks our weakness! I henceforth
Will ne'er repent of aught designed or done
But my repentance.
Orsino.
See, the lamp is out.
Giacomo.
If no remorse is ours when the dim air
Has drank this innocent flame, why should we quail
When Cenci's life, that light by which ill spirits
See the worst deeds they prompt, shall sink for ever?
No, I am hardened.
Orsino.
Why, what need of this?
Who feared the pale intrusion of remorse
In a just deed? Although our first plan failed,
Doubt not but he will soon be laid to rest.
But light the lamp; let us not talk i' the dark.
Giacomo
(lighting the lamp).
And yet once quenched I cannot thus relume
My father's life: do you not think his ghost
Might plead that argument with God?
Orsino.
Once gone
You cannot now recall your sister's peace;
Your own extinguished years of youth and hope;
Nor your wife's bitter words; nor all the taunts
Which, from the prosperous, weak misfortune takes;
Nor your dead mother; nor . . .
Giacomo.
O, speak no more!
I am resolved, although this very hand
Must quench the life that animated it.
Orsino.
There is no need of that. Listen: you know
Olimpio, the castellan of Petrella
In old Colonna's time; him whom your father
Degraded from his post? And Marzio,
That desperate wretch, whom he deprived last year
Of a reward of blood, well earned and due?
Giacomo.
I knew Olimpio; and they say he hated
Old Cenci so, that in his silent rage
His lips grew white only to see him pass.
Of Marzio I know nothing.
Orsino.
Marzio's hate
Matches Olimpio's. I have sent these men,
But in your name, and as at your request,
To talk with Beatrice and Lucretia.
Giacomo.
Only to talk?
Orsino.
The moments which even now
Pass onward to to-morrow's midnight hour
May memorize their flight with death: ere then
They must have talked, and may perhaps have done,
And made an end . . .
Giacomo.
Listen! What sound is that?
Orsino.
The house-dog moans, and the beams crack: nought else.
Giacomo.
It is my wife complaining in her sleep:
I doubt not she is saying bitter things
Of me; and all my children round her dreaming
That I deny them sustenance.
Orsino.
Whilst he
Who truly took it from them, and who fills
Their hungry rest with bitterness, now sleeps
Lapped in bad pleasures, and triumphantly
Mocks thee in visions of successful hate
Too like the truth of day.
Giacomo.
If e'er he wakes
Again, I will not trust to hireling hands . . .
Orsino.
Why, that were well. I must be gone; good-night.
When next we meetmay all be done!
Giacomo.
And all
Forgotten: Oh, that I had never been!
[Exeunt.
END OF THE THIRD ACT.
ACT IV
Scene I.
An Apartment in the Castle of Petrella. Enter Cenci.
Cenci.
She comes not; yet I left her even now
Vanquished and faint. She knows the penalty
Of her delay: yet what if threats are vain?
Am I not now within Petrella's moat?
Or fear I still the eyes and ears of Rome?
Might I not drag her by the golden hair?
Stamp on her? Keep her sleepless till her brain
Be overworn? Tame her with chains and famine?
Less would suffice. Yet so to leave undone
What I most seek! No, 'tis her stubborn will
Which by its own consent shall stoop as low
As that which drags it down.
Enter Lucretia.
Thou loathd wretch!
Hide thee from my abhorrence: fly, begone!
Yet stay! Bid Beatrice come hither.
Lucretia.
Oh,
Husband! I pray for thine own wretched sake
Heed what thou dost. A man who walks like thee
Through crimes, and through the danger of his crimes,
Each hour may stumble o'er a sudden grave.
And thou art old; thy hairs are hoary gray;
As thou wouldst save thyself from death and hell,
Pity thy daughter; give her to some friend
In marriage: so that she may tempt thee not
To hatred, or worse thoughts, if worse there be.
Cenci.
What! like her sister who has found a home
To mock my hate from with prosperity?
Strange ruin shall destroy both her and thee
And all that yet remain. My death may be
Rapid, her destiny outspeeds it. Go,
Bid her come hither, and before my mood
Be changed, lest I should drag her by the hair.
Lucretia.
She sent me to thee, husband. At thy presence
She fell, as thou dost know, into a trance;
And in that trance she heard a voice which said,
'Cenci must die! Let him confess himself!
Even now the accusing Angel waits to hear
If God, to punish his enormous crimes,
Harden his dying heart!'
Cenci.
Whysuch things are . . .
No doubt divine revealings may be made.
'Tis plain I have been favoured from above,
For when I cursed my sons they died.Ay . . . so . . .
As to the right or wrong, that's talk . . . repentance . . .
Repentance is an easy moment's work
And more depends on God than me. Well . . . well . . .
I must give up the greater point, which was
To poison and corrupt her soul.
[A pause; Lucretia approaches anxiously, and then shrinks back as he speaks.
One, two;
Ay . . . Rocco and Cristofano my curse
Strangled: and Giacomo, I think, will find
Life a worse Hell than that beyond the grave:
Beatrice shall, if there be skill in hate,
Die in despair, blaspheming: to Bernardo,
He is so innocent, I will bequeath
The memory of these deeds, and make his youth
The sepulchre of hope, where evil thoughts
Shall grow like weeds on a neglected tomb.
When all is done, out in the wide Campagna,
I will pile up my silver and my gold;
My costly robes, paintings and tapestries;
My parchments and all records of my wealth,
And make a bonfire in my joy, and leave
Of my possessions nothing but my name;
Which shall be an inheritance to strip
Its wearer bare as infamy. That done,
My soul, which is a scourge, will I resign
Into the hands of him who wielded it;
Be it for its own punishment or theirs,
He will not ask it of me till the lash
Be broken in its last and deepest wound;
Until its hate be all inflicted. Yet,
Lest death outspeed my purpose, let me make
Short work and sure . . .
[Going.
Lucretia.
(Stops him.)
Oh, stay! It was a feint:
She had no vision, and she heard no voice.
I said it but to awe thee.
Cenci.
That is well.
Vile palterer with the sacred truth of God,
Be thy soul choked with that blaspheming lie!
For Beatrice worse terrors are in store
To bend her to my will.
Lucretia.
Oh! to what will?
What cruel sufferings more than she has known
Canst thou inflict?
Cenci.
Andrea! Go call my daughter,
And if she comes not tell her that I come.
What sufferings? I will drag her, step by step,
Through infamies unheard of among men:
She shall stand shelterless in the broad noon
Of public scorn, for acts blazoned abroad,
One among which shall be . . . What? Canst thou guess?
She shall become (for what she most abhors
Shall have a fascination to entrap
Her loathing will) to her own conscious self
All she appears to others; and when dead,
As she shall die unshrived and unforgiven,
A rebel to her father and her God,
Her corpse shall be abandoned to the hounds;
Her name shall be the terror of the earth;
Her spirit shall approach the throne of God
Plague-spotted with my curses. I will make
Body and soul a monstrous lump of ruin.
Enter Andrea.
Andrea.
The Lady Beatrice . . .
Cenci.
Speak, pale slave! What
Said she?
Andrea.
My Lord, 'twas what she looked; she said:
'Go tell my father that I see the gulf
Of Hell between us two, which he may pass,
I will not.'
[Exit Andrea.
Cenci.
Go thou quick, Lucretia,
Tell her to come; yet let her understand
Her coming is consent: and say, moreover,
That if she come not I will curse her.
[Exit Lucretia.
Ha!
With what but with a father's curse doth God
Panic-strike armd victory, and make pale
Cities in their prosperity? The world's Father
Must grant a parent's prayer against his child,
Be he who asks even what men call me.
Will not the deaths of her rebellious brothers
Awe her before I speak? For I on them
Did imprecate quick ruin, and it came. Enter Lucretia.
Well; what? Speak, wretch!
Lucretia.
She said, 'I cannot come;
Go tell my father that I see a torrent
Of his own blood raging between us.'
Cenci
(kneeling).
God!
Hear me! If this most specious mass of flesh,
Which Thou hast made my daughter; this my blood,
This particle of my divided being;
Or rather, this my bane and my disease,
Whose sight infects and poisons me; this devil
Which sprung from me as from a hell, was meant
To aught good use; if her bright loveliness
Was kindled to illumine this dark world;
If nursed by Thy selectest dew of love
Such virtues blossom in her as should make
The peace of life, I pray Thee for my sake,
As Thou the common God and Father art
Of her, and me, and all; reverse that doom!
Earth, in the name of God, let her food be
Poison, until she be encrusted round
With leprous stains! Heaven, rain upon her head
The blistering drops of the Maremma's dew,
Till she be speckled like a toad; parch up
Those love-enkindled lips, warp those fine limbs
To loathd lameness! All-beholding sun,
Strike in thine envy those life-darting eyes
With thine own blinding beams!
Lucretia.
Peace! Peace!
For thine own sake unsay those dreadful words.
When high God grants He punishes such prayers.
Cenci
(leaping up, and throwing his right hand towards Heaven).
He does His will, I mine! This in addition,
That if she have a child . . .
Lucretia.
Horrible thought!
Cenci.
That if she ever have a child; and thou,
Quick Nature! I adjure thee by thy God,
That thou be fruitful in her, and increase
And multiply, fulfilling his command,
And my deep imprecation! May it be
A hideous likeness of herself, that as
From a distorting mirror, she may see
Her image mixed with what she most abhors,
Smiling upon her from her nursing breast.
And that the child may from its infancy
Grow, day by day, more wicked and deformed,
Turning her mother's love to misery:
And that both she and it may live until
It shall repay her care and pain with hate,
Or what may else be more unnatural.
So he may hunt her through the clamorous scoffs
Of the loud world to a dishonoured grave.
Shall I revoke this curse? Go, bid her come,
Before my words are chronicled in Heaven. [Exit Lucretia.
I do not feel as if I were a man,
But like a fiend appointed to chastise
The offences of some unremembered world.
My blood is running up and down my veins;
A fearful pleasure makes it prick and tingle:
I feel a giddy sickness of strange awe;
My heart is beating with an expectation
Of horrid joy.
Enter Lucretia.
What? Speak!
Lucretia.
She bids thee curse;
And if thy curses, as they cannot do,
Could kill her soul . . .
Cenci.
She would not come. 'Tis well,
I can do both: first take what I demand,
And then extort concession. To thy chamber!
Fly ere I spurn thee: and beware this night
That thou cross not my footsteps. It were safer
To come between the tiger and his prey.[Exit Lucretia.
It must be late; mine eyes grow weary dim
With unaccustomed heaviness of sleep.
Conscience! Oh, thou most insolent of lies!
They say that sleep, that healing dew of Heaven,
Steeps not in balm the foldings of the brain
Which thinks thee an impostor. I will go
First to belie thee with an hour of rest,
Which will be deep and calm, I feel: and then . . .
O, multitudinous Hell, the fiends will shake.
Thine arches with the laughter of their joy!
There shall be lamentation heard in Heaven
As o'er an angel fallen; and upon Earth
All good shall droop and sicken, and ill things
Shall with a spirit of unnatural life
Stir and be quickened . . . even as I am now.
[Exit.
Scene II.
Before the Castle of Petrella. Enter Beatrice andLucretia above on the Ramparts.
Beatrice.
They come not yet.
Lucretia.
'Tis scarce midnight.
Beatrice.
How slow
Behind the course of thought, even sick with speed,
Lags leaden-footed time!
Lucretia.
The minutes pass . . .
If he should wake before the deed is done?
Beatrice.
O, mother! He must never wake again.
What thou hast said persuades me that our act
Will but dislodge a spirit of deep hell
Out of a human form.
Lucretia.
'Tis true he spoke
Of death and judgement with strange confidence
For one so wicked; as a man believing
In God, yet recking not of good or ill.
And yet to die without confession! . . .
Beatrice.
Oh!
Believe that Heaven is merciful and just,
And will not add our dread necessity
To the amount of his offences.
Enter Olimpio and Marzio, below.
Lucretia.
See,
They come.
Beatrice.
All mortal things must hasten thus
To their dark end. Let us go down.
[Exeunt Lucretia and Beatrice from above.
Olimpio.
How feel you to this work?
Marzio.
As one who thinks
A thousand crowns excellent market price
For an old murderer's life. Your cheeks are pale.
Olimpio.
It is the white reflection of your own,
Which you call pale.
Marzio.
Is that their natural hue?
Olimpio.
Or 'tis my hate and the deferred desire
To wreak it, which extinguishes their blood.
Marzio.
You are inclined then to this business?
Olimpio.
Ay.
If one should bribe me with a thousand crowns
To kill a serpent which had stung my child,
I could not be more willing.
Enter Beatrice and Lucretia, below.
Noble ladies!
Beatrice.
Are ye resolved?
Olimpio.
Is he asleep?
Marzio.
Is all
Quiet?
Lucretia.
I mixed an opiate with his drink:
He sleeps so soundly . . .
Beatrice.
That his death will be
But as a change of sin-chastising dreams,
A dark continuance of the Hell within him,
Which God extinguish! But ye are resolved?
Ye know it is a high and holy deed?
Olimpio.
We are resolved.
Marzio.
As to the how this act
Be warranted, it rests with you.
Beatrice.
Well, follow!
Olimpio.
Hush! Hark! What noise is that?
Marzio.
Ha! some one comes!
Beatrice.
Ye conscience-stricken cravens, rock to rest
Your baby hearts. It is the iron gate,
Which ye left open, swinging to the wind,
That enters whistling as in scorn. Come, follow!
And be your steps like mine, light, quick and bold.
[Exeunt.
Scene III.
An Apartment in the Castle. Enter Beatrice and Lucretia.
Lucretia.
They are about it now.
Beatrice.
Nay, it is done.
Lucretia.
I have not heard him groan.
Beatrice.
He will not groan.
Lucretia.
What sound is that?
Beatrice.
List! 'tis the tread of feet
About his bed.
Lucretia.
My God!
If he be now a cold stiff corpse . . .
Beatrice.
O, fear not
What may be done, but what is left undone:
The act seals all.
Enter Olimpio and Marzio.
Is it accomplished?
Marzio.
What?
Olimpio.
Did you not call?
Beatrice.
When?
Olimpio.
Now.
Beatrice.
I ask if all is over?
Olimpio.
We dare not kill an old and sleeping man;
His thin gray hair, his stern and reverend brow,
His veind hands crossed on his heaving breast,
And the calm innocent sleep in which he lay,
Quelled me. Indeed, indeed, I cannot do it.
Marzio.
But I was bolder; for I chid Olimpio,
And bade him bear his wrongs to his own grave
And leave me the reward. And now my knife
Touched the loose wrinkled throat, when the old man
Stirred in his sleep, and said, 'God! hear, O, hear,
A father's curse! What, art Thou not our Father?'
And then he laughed. I knew it was the ghost
Of my dead father speaking through his lips,
And could not kill him.
Beatrice.
Miserable slaves!
Where, if ye dare not kill a sleeping man,
Found ye the boldness to return to me
With such a deed undone? Base palterers!
Cowards and traitors! Why, the very conscience
Which ye would sell for gold and for revenge
Is an equivocation: it sleeps over
A thousand daily acts disgracing men;
And when a deed where mercy insults Heaven . . .
Why do I talk?
[Snatching a dagger from one of them and raising it.
Hadst thou a tongue to say,
'She murdered her own father!'I must do it!
But never dream ye shall outlive him long!
Olimpio.
Stop, for God's sake!
Marzio.
I will go back and kill him.
Olimpio.
Give me the weapon. we must do thy will.
Beatrice.
Take it! Depart! Return!
[Exeunt Olimpio and Marzio.
How pale thou art!
We do but that which 'twere a deadly crime
To leave undone.
Lucretia.
Would it were done!
Beatrice.
Even whilst
That doubt is passing through your mind, the world
Is conscious of a change. Darkness and Hell
Have swallowed up the vapour they sent forth
To blacken the sweet light of life. My breath
Comes, methinks, lighter, and the jellied blood
Runs freely through my veins. Hark!
Enter Olimpio and Marzio.
He is . . .
Olimpio.
Dead!
Marzio.
We strangled him that there might be no blood;
And then we threw his heavy corpse i' the garden
Under the balcony; 'twill seem it fell.
Beatrice
(giving them a bag of coin).
Here, take this gold, and hasten to your homes.
And, Marzio, because thou wast only awed
By that which made me tremble, wear thou this! [Clothes him in a rich mantle.
It was the mantle which my grandfather
Wore in his high prosperity, and men
Envied his state: so may they envy thine.
Thou wert a weapon in the hand of God
To a just use. Live long and thrive! And, mark,
If thou hast crimes, repent: this deed is none.
[A horn is sounded.
Lucretia.
Hark, 'tis the castle horn; my God! it sounds
Like the last trump.
Beatrice
Some tedious guest is coming.
Lucretia.
The drawbridge is let down; there is a tramp
Of horses in the court; fly, hide yourselves!
[Exeunt Olimpio and Marzio.
Beatrice.
Let us retire to counterfeit deep rest;
I scarcely need to counterfeit it now:
The spirit which doth reign within these limbs
Seems strangely undisturbed. I could even sleep
Fearless and calm: all ill is surely past.
[Exeunt.
Scene IV.
Another Apartment in the Castle. Enter on one side the Legate Savella, introduced by a Servant, and on the other Lucretia and Bernardo.
Savella.
Lady, my duty to his Holiness
Be my excuse that thus unseasonably
I break upon your rest. I must speak with
Count Cenci; doth he sleep?
Lucretia
(in a hurried and confused manner).
I think he sleeps;
Yet wake him not, I pray, spare me awhile,
He is a wicked and a wrathful man;
Should he be roused out of his sleep to-night,
Which is, I know, a hell of angry dreams,
It were not well; indeed it were not well.
Wait till day break . . . (aside)
O, I am deadly sick!
Savella.
I grieve thus to distress you, but the Count
Must answer charges of the gravest import,
And suddenly; such my commission is.
Lucretia
(with increased agitation).
I dare not rouse him: I know none who dare . . .
'Twere perilous; . . . you might as safely waken
A serpent; or a corpse in which some fiend
Were laid to sleep.
Savella.
Lady, my moments here
Are counted. I must rouse him from his sleep,
Since none else dare.
Lucretia
(aside).
O, terror! O, despair!
(To Bernardo.)
Bernardo, conduct you the Lord Legate to
Your father's chamber.
[Exeunt Savella and Bernardo.
Enter Beatrice.
Beatrice.
'Tis a messenger
Come to arrest the culprit who now stands
Before the throne of unappealable God.
Both Earth and Heaven, consenting arbiters,
Acquit our deed.
Lucretia.
Oh, agony of fear!
Would that he yet might live! Even now I heard
The Legate's followers whisper as they passed
They had a warrant for his instant death.
All was prepared by unforbidden means
Which we must pay so dearly, having done.
Even now they search the tower, and find the body;
Now they suspect the truth; now they consult
Before they come to tax us with the fact;
O, horrible, 'tis all discovered!
Beatrice.
Mother,
What is done wisely, is done well. Be bold
As thou art just. 'Tis like a truant child
To fear that others know what thou hast done,
Even from thine own strong consciousness, and thus
Write on unsteady eyes and altered cheeks
All thou wouldst hide. Be faithful to thyself,
And fear no other witness but thy fear.
For if, as cannot be, some circumstance
Should rise in accusation, we can blind
Suspicion with such cheap astonishment,
Or overbear it with such guiltless pride,
As murderers cannot feign. The deed is done,
And what may follow now regards not me.
I am as universal as the light;
Free as the earth-surrounding air; as firm
As the world's centre. Consequence, to me,
Is as the wind which strikes the solid rock
But shakes it not.
[A cry within and tumult.
Voices.
Murder! Murder! Murder!
Enter Bernardo and Savella.
Savella
(to his followers).
Go search the castle round; sound the alarm;
Look to the gates that none escape!
Beatrice.
What now?
Bernardo.
I know not what to say . . . my father's dead.
Beatrice.
How; dead! he only sleeps; you mistake, brother.
His sleep is very calm, very like death;
'Tis wonderful how well a tyrant sleeps.
He is not dead?
Bernardo.
Dead; murdered.
Lucretia
(with extreme agitation).
Oh no, no
He is not murdered though he may be dead;
I have alone the keys of those apartments.
Savella.
Ha! Is it so?
Beatrice.
My Lord, I pray excuse us;
We will retire; my mother is not well:
She seems quite overcome with this strange horror.
[Exeunt Lucretia and Beatrice.
Savella.
Can you suspect who may have murdered him?
Bernardo.
I know not what to think.
Savella.
Can you name any
Who had an interest in his death?
Bernardo.
Alas!
I can name none who had not, and those most
Who most lament that such a deed is done;
My mother, and my sister, and myself.
Savella.
'Tis strange! There were clear marks of violence.
I found the old man's body in the moonlight
Hanging beneath the window of his chamber,
Among the branches of a pine: he could not
Have fallen there, for all his limbs lay heaped
And effortless; 'tis true there was no blood . . .
Favour me, Sir; it much imports your house
That all should be made clear; to tell the ladies
That I request their presence.
[Exit Bernardo.
Enter Guards bringing in Marzio.
Guard.
We have one.
Officer.
My Lord, we found this ruffian and another
Lurking among the rocks; there is no doubt
But that they are the murderers of Count Cenci:
Each had a bag of coin; this fellow wore
A gold-inwoven robe, which shining bright
Under the dark rocks to the glimmering moon
Betrayed them to our notice: the other fell
Desperately fighting.
Savella.
What does he confess?
Officer.
He keeps firm silence; but these lines found on him
May speak.
Savella.
Their language is at least sincere.
[Reads.
'To the Lady Beatrice.
'That the atonement of what my nature sickens to conjecture may soon arrive, I send thee, at thy brother's desire, those who will speak and do more than I dare write. . .
'Thy devoted servant, Orsino.'
Enter Lucretia, Beatrice, and Bernardo.
Knowest thou this writing, Lady?
Beatrice.
No.
Savella.
Nor thou?
Lucretia.
(Her conduct throughout the scene is marked by extreme agitation.)
Where was it found? What is it? It should be
Orsino's hand! It speaks of that strange horror
Which never yet found utterance, but which made
Between that hapless child and her dead father
A gulf of obscure hatred.
Savella.
Is it so?
Is it true, Lady, that thy father did
Such outrages as to awaken in thee
Unfilial hate?
Beatrice.
Not hate, 'twas more than hate:
This is most true, yet wherefore question me?
Savella.
There is a deed demanding question done;
Thou hast a secret which will answer not.
Beatrice.
What sayest? My Lord, your words are bold and rash.
Savella.
I do arrest all present in the name
Of the Pope's Holiness. You must to Rome.
Lucretia.
O, not to Rome! Indeed we are not guilty.
Beatrice.
Guilty! Who dares talk of guilt? My Lord,
I am more innocent of parricide
Than is a child born fatherless . . . Dear mother,
Your gentleness and patience are no shield
For this keen-judging world, this two-edged lie,
Which seems, but is not. What! will human laws,
Rather will ye who are their ministers,
Bar all access to retribution first,
And then, when Heaven doth interpose to do
What ye neglect, arming familiar things
To the redress of an unwonted crime,
Make ye the victims who demanded it
Culprits? 'Tis ye are culprits! That poor wretch
Who stands so pale, and trembling, and amazed,
If it be true he murdered Cenci, was
A sword in the right hand of justest God.
Wherefore should I have wielded it? Unless
The crimes which mortal tongue dare never name
God therefore scruples to avenge.
Savella.
You own
That you desired his death?
Beatrice.
It would have been
A crime no less than his, if for one moment
That fierce desire had faded in my heart.
'Tis true I did believe, and hope, and pray,
Ay, I even knew . . . for God is wise and just,
That some strange sudden death hung over him.
'Tis true that this did happen, and most true
There was no other rest for me on earth,
No other hope in Heaven . . . now what of this?
Savella.
Strange thoughts beget strange deeds; and here are both:
I judge thee not.
Beatrice.
And yet, if you arrest me,
You are the judge and executioner
Of that which is the life of life: the breath
Of accusation kills an innocent name,
And leaves for lame acquittal the poor life
Which is a mask without it. 'Tis most false
That I am guilty of foul parricide;
Although I must rejoice, for justest cause,
That other hands have sent my father's soul
To ask the mercy he denied to me.
Now leave us free; stain not a noble house
With vague surmises of rejected crime;
Add to our sufferings and your own neglect
No heavier sum: let them have been enough:
Leave us the wreck we have.
Savella.
I dare not, Lady.
I pray that you prepare yourselves for Rome:
There the Pope's further pleasure will be known.
Lucretia.
O, not to Rome! O, take us not to Rome!
Beatrice.
Why not to Rome, dear mother? There as here
Our innocence is as an armd heel
To trample accusation. God is there
As here, and with His shadow ever clothes
The innocent, the injured and the weak;
And such are we. Cheer up, dear Lady, lean
On me; collect your wandering thoughts. My Lord,
As soon as you have taken some refreshment,
And had all such examinations made
Upon the spot, as may be necessary
To the full understanding of this matter,
We shall be ready. Mother; will you come?
Lucretia.
Ha! they will bind us to the rack, and wrest
Self-accusation from our agony!
Will Giacomo be there? Orsino? Marzio?
All present; all confronted; all demanding
Each from the other's countenance the thing
Which is in every heart! O, misery!
[She faints, and is borne out.
Savella.
She faints: an ill appearance this.
Beatrice.
My Lord,
She knows not yet the uses of the world.
She fears that power is as a beast which grasps
And loosens not: a snake whose look transmutes
All things to guilt which is its nutriment.
She cannot know how well the supine slaves
Of blind authority read the truth of things
When written on a brow of guilelessness:
She sees not yet triumphant Innocence
Stand at the judgement-seat of mortal man,
A judge and an accuser of the wrong
Which drags it there. Prepare yourself, my Lord;
Our suite will join yours in the court below.
[Exeunt.
END OF THE FOURTH ACT.
ACT V
Scene I.
An Apartment in Orsino's Palace. Enter Orsino and Giacomo.
Giacomo.
Do evil deeds thus quickly come to end?
O, that the vain remorse which must chastise
Crimes done, had but as loud a voice to warn
As its keen sting is mortal to avenge!
O, that the hour when present had cast off
The mantle of its mystery, and shown
The ghastly form with which it now returns
When its scared game is roused, cheering the hounds
Of conscience to their prey! Alas! Alas!
It was a wicked thought, a piteous deed,
To kill an old and hoary-headed father.
Orsino.
It has turned out unluckily, in truth.
Giacomo.
To violate the sacred doors of sleep;
To cheat kind Nature of the placid death
Which she prepares for overwearied age;
To drag from Heaven an unrepentant soul
Which might have quenched in reconciling prayers
A life of burning crimes . . .
Orsino.
You cannot say
I urged you to the deed.
Giacomo.
O, had I never
Found in thy smooth and ready countenance
The mirror of my darkest thoughts; hadst thou
Never with hints and questions made me look
Upon the monster of my thought, until
It grew familiar to desire . . .
Orsino.
'Tis thus
Men cast the blame of their unprosperous acts
Upon the abettors of their own resolve;
Or anything but their weak, guilty selves.
And yet, confess the truth, it is the peril
In which you stand that gives you this pale sickness
Of penitence; confess 'tis fear disguised
From its own shame that takes the mantle now
Of thin remorse. What if we yet were safe?
Giacomo.
How can that be? Already Beatrice,
Lucretia and the murderer are in prison.
I doubt not officers are, whilst we speak,
Sent to arrest us.
Orsino.
I have all prepared
For instant flight. We can escape even now,
So we take fleet occasion by the hair.
Giacomo.
Rather expire in tortures, as I may.
What! will you cast by self-accusing flight
Assured conviction upon Beatrice?
She, who alone in this unnatural work,
Stands like God's angel ministered upon
By fiends; avenging such a nameless wrong
As turns black parricide to piety;
Whilst we for basest ends . . . I fear, Orsino,
While I consider all your words and looks,
Comparing them with your proposal now,
That you must be a villain. For what end
Could you engage in such a perilous crime,
Training me on with hints, and signs, and smiles,
Even to this gulf? Thou art no liar? No,
Thou art a lie! Traitor and murderer!
Coward and slave! But, no, defend thyself; [Drawing.
Let the sword speak what the indignant tongue
Disdains to brand thee with.
Orsino.
Put up your weapon.
Is it the desperation of your fear
Makes you thus rash and sudden with a friend,
Now ruined for your sake? If honest anger
Have moved you, know, that what I just proposed
Was but to try you. As for me, I think,
Thankless affection led me to this point,
From which, if my firm temper could repent,
I cannot now recede. Even whilst we speak
The ministers of justice wait below:
They grant me these brief moments. Now if you
Have any word of melancholy comfort
To speak to your pale wife, 'twere best to pass
Out at the postern, and avoid them so.
Giacomo.
O, generous friend! How canst thou pardon me?
Would that my life could purchase thine!
Orsino.
That wish
Now comes a day too late. Haste; fare thee well!
Hear'st thou not steps along the corridor? [Exit Giacomo.
I'm sorry for it; but the guards are waiting
At his own gate, and such was my contrivance
That I might rid me both of him and them.
I thought to act a solemn comedy
Upon the painted scene of this new world,
And to attain my own peculiar ends
By some such plot of mingled good and ill
As others weave; but there arose a Power
Which grasped and snapped the threads of my device
And turned it to a net of ruin . . . Ha! [A shout is heard.
Is that my name I hear proclaimed abroad?
But I will pass, wrapped in a vile disguise;
Rags on my back, and a false innocence
Upon my face, through the misdeeming crowd
Which judges by what seems. 'Tis easy then
For a new name and for a country new,
And a new life, fashioned on old desires,
To change the honours of abandoned Rome.
And these must be the masks of that within,
Which must remain unaltered . . . Oh, I fear
That what is past will never let me rest!
Why, when none else is conscious, but myself,
Of my misdeeds, should my own heart's contempt
Trouble me? Have I not the power to fly
My own reproaches? Shall I be the slave
Of . . . what? A word? which those of this false world
Employ against each other, not themselves;
As men wear daggers not for self-offence.
But if I am mistaken, where shall I
Find the disguise to hide me from myself,
As now I skulk from every other eye?
[Exit.
Scene II.
A Hall of Justice. Camillo, Judges, &c., are discovered seated; Marzio is led in.
First Judge.
Accused, do you persist in your denial?
I ask you, are you innocent, or guilty?
I demand who were the participators
In your offence? Speak truth and the whole truth.
Marzio.
My God! I did not kill him; I know nothing;
Olimpio sold the robe to me from which
You would infer my guilt.
Second Judge.
Away with him!
First Judge.
Dare you, with lips yet white from the rack's kiss
Speak false? Is it so soft a questioner,
That you would bandy lover's talk with it
Till it wind out your life and soul? Away!
Marzio.
Spare me! O, spare! I will confess.
First Judge.
Then speak.
Marzio.
I strangled him in his sleep.
First Judge.
Who urged you to it?
Marzio.
His own son Giacomo, and the young prelate
Orsino sent me to Petrella; there
The ladies Beatrice and Lucretia
Tempted me with a thousand crowns, and I
And my companion forthwith murdered him.
Now let me die.
First Judge.
This sounds as bad as truth. Guards, there,
Lead forth the prisoner!
Enter Lucretia, Beatrice, and Giacomo, guarded.
Look upon this man;
When did you see him last?
Beatrice.
We never saw him.
Marzio.
You know me too well, Lady Beatrice.
Beatrice.
I know thee! How? where? when?
Marzio.
You know 'twas I
Whom you did urge with menaces and bribes
To kill your father. When the thing was done
You clothed me in a robe of woven gold
And bade me thrive: how I have thriven, you see.
You, my Lord Giacomo, Lady Lucretia,
You know that what I speak is true.
[Beatrice advances towards him; he covers his face, and shrinks back.
Oh, dart
The terrible resentment of those eyes
On the dead earth! Turn them away from me!
They wound: 'twas torture forced the truth. My Lords,
Having said this let me be led to death.
Beatrice.
Poor wretch, I pity thee: yet stay awhile.
Camillo.
Guards, lead him not away.
Beatrice.
Cardinal Camillo,
You have a good repute for gentleness
And wisdom: can it be that you sit here
To countenance a wicked farce like this?
When some obscure and trembling slave is dragged
From sufferings which might shake the sternest heart
And bade to answer, not as he believes,
But as those may suspect or do desire
Whose questions thence suggest their own reply:
And that in peril of such hideous torments
As merciful God spares even the damned. Speak now
The thing you surely know, which is that you,
If your fine frame were stretched upon that wheel,
And you were told: 'Confess that you did poison
Your little nephew; that fair blue-eyed child
Who was the lodestar of your life:'and though
All see, since his most swift and piteous death,
That day and night, and heaven and earth, and time,
And all the things hoped for or done therein
Are changed to you, through your exceeding grief,
Yet you would say, 'I confess anything:'
And beg from your tormentors, like that slave,
The refuge of dishonourable death.
I pray thee, Cardinal, that thou assert
My innocence.
Camillo.
(much moved).
What shall we think, my Lords?
Shame on these tears! I thought the heart was frozen
Which is their fountain. I would pledge my soul
That she is guiltless.
Judge.
Yet she must be tortured.
Camillo.
I would as soon have tortured mine own nephew
(If he now lived he would be just her age;
His hair, too, was her colour, and his eyes
Like hers in shape, but blue and not so deep)
As that most perfect image of God's love
That ever came sorrowing upon the earth.
She is as pure as speechless infancy!
Judge.
Well, be her purity on your head, my Lord,
If you forbid the rack. His Holiness
Enjoined us to pursue this monstrous crime
By the severest forms of law; nay even
To stretch a point against the criminals.
The prisoners stand accused of parricide
Upon such evidence as justifies
Torture.
Beatrice.
What evidence? This man's?
Judge.
Even so.
Beatrice
(to Marzio).
Come near. And who art thou thus chosen forth
Out of the multitude of living men
To kill the innocent?
Marzio.
I am Marzio,
Thy father's vassal.
Beatrice.
Fix thine eyes on mine;
Answer to what I ask.
[Turning to the Judges.
I prithee mark
His countenance: unlike bold calumny
Which sometimes dares not speak the thing it looks,
He dares not look the thing he speaks, but bends
His gaze on the blind earth.
(To Marzio.)
What! wilt thou say
That I did murder my own father?
Marzio.
Oh!
Spare me! My brain swims round . . . I cannot speak . . .
It was that horrid torture forced the truth.
Take me away! Let her not look on me!
I am a guilty miserable wretch;
I have said all I know; now, let me die!
Beatrice.
My Lords, if by my nature I had been
So stern, as to have planned the crime alleged,
Which your suspicions dictate to this slave,
And the rack makes him utter, do you think
I should have left this two-edged instrument
Of my misdeed; this man, this bloody knife
With my own name engraven on the heft,
Lying unsheathed amid a world of foes,
For my own death? That with such horrible need
For deepest silence, I should have neglected
So trivial a precaution, as the making
His tomb the keeper of a secret written
On a thief's memory? What is his poor life?
What are a thousand lives? A parricide
Had trampled them like dust; and, see, he lives! (Turning to Marzio.)
And thou . . .
Marzio.
Oh, spare me! Speak to me no more!
That stern yet piteous look, those solemn tones,
Wound worse than torture.
(To the Judges.
I have told it all;
For pity's sake lead me away to death.
Camillo.
Guards, lead him nearer the Lady Beatrice,
He shrinks from her regard like autumn's leaf
From the keen breath of the serenest north.
Beatrice.
O thou who tremblest on the giddy verge
Of life and death, pause ere thou answerest me;
So mayst thou answer God with less dismay:
What evil have we done thee? I, alas!
Have lived but on this earth a few sad years,
And so my lot was ordered, that a father
First turned the moments of awakening life
To drops, each poisoning youth's sweet hope; and then
Stabbed with one blow my everlasting soul;
And my untainted fame; and even that peace
Which sleeps within the core of the heart's heart;
But the wound was not mortal; so my hate
Became the only worship I could lift
To our great father, who in pity and love,
Armed thee, as thou dost say, to cut him off;
And thus his wrong becomes my accusation;
And art thou the accuser? If thou hopest
Mercy in heaven, show justice upon earth:
Worse than a bloody hand is a hard heart.
If thou hast done murders, made thy life's path
Over the trampled laws of God and man,
Rush not before thy Judge, and say: 'My maker,
I have done this and more; for there was one
Who was most pure and innocent on earth;
And because she endured what never any
Guilty or innocent endured before:
Because her wrongs could not be told, not thought;
Because thy hand at length did rescue her;
I with my words killed her and all her kin.'
Think, I adjure you, what it is to slay
The reverence living in the minds of men
Towards our ancient house, and stainless fame!
Think what it is to strangle infant pity,
Cradled in the belief of guileless looks,
Till it become a crime to suffer. Think
What 'tis to blot with infamy and blood
All that which shows like innocence, and is,
Hear me, great God! I swear, most innocent,
So that the world lose all discrimination
Between the sly, fierce, wild regard of guilt,
And that which now compels thee to reply
To what I ask: Am I, or am I not
A parricide?
Marzio.
Thou art not!
Judge.
What is this?
Marzio.
I here declare those whom I did accuse
Are innocent. 'Tis I alone am guilty.
Judge.
Drag him away to torments; let them be
Subtle and long drawn out, to tear the folds
Of the heart's inmost cell. Unbind him not
Till he confess.
Marzio.
Torture me as ye will:
A keener pang has wrung a higher truth
From my last breath. She is most innocent!
Bloodhounds, not men, glut yourselves well with me;
I will not give you that fine piece of nature
To rend and ruin.
[Exit Marzio, guarded.
Camillo.
What say ye now, my Lords?
Judge.
Let tortures strain the truth till it be white
As snow thrice sifted by the frozen wind.
Camillo.
Yet stained with blood.
Judge
(to Beatrice).
Know you this paper, Lady?
Beatrice.
Entrap me not with questions. Who stands here
As my accuser? Ha! wilt thou be he,
Who art my judge? Accuser, witness, judge,
What, all in one? Here is Orsino's name;
Where is Orsino? Let his eye meet mine.
What means this scrawl? Alas! ye know not what,
And therefore on the chance that it may be
Some evil, will ye kill us?
Enter an Officer.
Officer.
Marzio's dead.
Judge.
What did he say?
Officer.
Nothing. As soon as we
Had bound him on the wheel, he smiled on us,
As one who baffles a deep adversary;
And holding his breath, died.
Judge.
There remains nothing
But to apply the question to those prisoners,
Who yet remain stubborn.
Camillo.
I overrule
Further proceedings, and in the behalf
Of these most innocent and noble persons
Will use my interest with the Holy Father.
Judge.
Let the Pope's pleasure then be done. Meanwhile
Conduct these culprits each to separate cells;
And be the engines ready: for this night
If the Pope's resolution be as grave,
Pious, and just as once, I'll wring the truth
Out of those nerves and sinews, groan by groan.
[Exeunt.
Scene III.
The Cell of a Prison. Beatrice is discovered asleep on a couch. Enter Bernardo.
Bernardo.
How gently slumber rests upon her face,
Like the last thoughts of some day sweetly spent
Closing in night and dreams, and so prolonged.
After such torments as she bore last night,
How light and soft her breathing comes. Ay me!
Methinks that I shall never sleep again.
But I must shake the heavenly dew of rest
From this sweet folded flower, thus . . . wake! awake!
What, sister, canst thou sleep?
Beatrice
(awaking).
I was just dreaming
That we were all in Paradise. Thou knowest
This cell seems like a kind of Paradise
After our father's presence.
Bernardo.
Dear, dear sister,
Would that thy dream were not a dream! O God!
How shall I tell?
Beatrice.
What wouldst thou tell, sweet brother?
Bernardo.
Look not so calm and happy, or even whilst
I stand considering what I have to say
My heart will break.
Beatrice.
See now, thou mak'st me weep:
How very friendless thou wouldst be, dear child,
If I were dead. Say what thou hast to say.
Bernardo.
They have confessed; they could endure no more
The tortures . . .
Beatrice.
Ha! What was there to confess?
They must have told some weak and wicked lie
To flatter their tormentors. Have they said
That they were guilty? O white innocence,
That thou shouldst wear the mask of guilt to hide
Thine awful and serenest countenance
From those who know thee not!
Enter Judge with Lucretia and Giacomo, guarded.
Ignoble hearts!
For some brief spasms of pain, which are at least
As mortal as the limbs through which they pass,
Are centuries of high splendour laid in dust?
And that eternal honour which should live
Sunlike, above the reek of mortal fame,
Changed to a mockery and a byword? What!
Will you give up these bodies to be dragged
At horses' heels, so that our hair should sweep
The footsteps of the vain and senseless crowd,
Who, that they may make our calamity
Their worship and their spectacle, will leave
The churches and the theatres as void
As their own hearts? Shall the light multitude
Fling, at their choice, curses or faded pity,
Sad funeral flowers to deck a living corpse,
Upon us as we pass to pass away,
And leave . . . what memory of our having been?
Infamy, blood, terror, despair? O thou,
Who wert a mother to the parentless,
Kill not thy child! Let not her wrongs kill thee!
Brother, lie down with me upon the rack,
And let us each be silent as a corpse;
It soon will be as soft as any grave.
'Tis but the falsehood it can wring from fear
Makes the rack cruel.
Giacomo.
They will tear the truth
Even from thee at last, those cruel pains:
For pity's sake say thou art guilty now.
Lucretia.
Oh, speak the truth! Let us all quickly die;
And after death, God is our judge, not they;
He will have mercy on us.
Bernardo.
If indeed
It can be true, say so, dear sister mine;
And then the Pope will surely pardon you,
And all be well.
Judge.
Confess, or I will warp
Your limbs with such keen tortures . . .
Beatrice.
Tortures! Turn
The rack henceforth into a spinning-wheel!
Torture your dog, that he may tell when last
He lapped the blood his master shed . . . not me!
My pangs are of the mind, and of the heart,
And of the soul; ay, of the inmost soul,
Which weeps within tears as of burning gall
To see, in this ill world where none are true,
My kindred false to their deserted selves.
And with considering all the wretched life
Which I have lived, and its now wretched end,
And the small justice shown by Heaven and Earth
To me or mine; and what a tyrant thou art,
And what slaves these; and what a world we make,
The oppressor and the oppressed . . . such pangs compel
My answer. What is it thou wouldst with me?
Judge.
Art thou not guilty of thy father's death?
Beatrice.
Or wilt thou rather tax high-judging God
That He permitted such an act as that
Which I have suffered, and which He beheld;
Made it unutterable, and took from it
All refuge, all revenge, all consequence,
But that which thou hast called my father's death?
Which is or is not what men call a crime,
Which either I have done, or have not done;
Say what ye will. I shall deny no more.
If ye desire it thus, thus let it be,
And so an end of all. Now do your will;
No other pains shall force another word.
Judge.
She is convicted, but has not confessed.
Be it enough. Until their final sentence
Let none have converse with them. You, young Lord,
Linger not here!
Beatrice.
Oh, tear him not away!
Judge.
Guards, do your duty.
Bernardo
(embracing Beatrice).
Oh! would ye divide
Body from soul?
Officer.
That is the headsman's business.
[Exeunt all but Lucretia, Beatrice, and Giacomo.
Giacomo.
Have I confessed? Is it all over now?
No hope! No refuge! O weak, wicked tongue
Which hast destroyed me, would that thou hadst been
Cut out and thrown to dogs first! To have killed
My father first, and then betrayed my sister;
Ay, thee! the one thing innocent and pure
In this black guilty world, to that which I
So well deserve! My wife! my little ones!
Destitute, helpless, and I . . . Father! God!
Canst Thou forgive even the unforgiving,
When their full hearts break thus, thus! . . .
[Covers his face and weeps.
Lucretia.
O my child!
To what a dreadful end are we all come!
Why did I yield? Why did I not sustain
Those torments? Oh, that I were all dissolved
Into these fast and unavailing tears,
Which flow and feel not!
Beatrice.
What 'twas weak to do,
'Tis weaker to lament, once being done;
Take cheer! The God who knew my wrong, and made
Our speedy act the angel of His wrath,
Seems, and but seems, to have abandoned us.
Let us not think that we shall die for this.
Brother, sit near me; give me your firm hand,
You had a manly heart. Bear up! Bear up!
O dearest Lady, put your gentle head
Upon my lap, and try to sleep awhile:
Your eyes look pale, hollow and overworn,
With heaviness of watching and slow grief.
Come, I will sing you some low, sleepy tune,
Not cheerful, nor yet sad; some dull old thing,
Some outworn and unused monotony,
Such as our country gossips sing and spin,
Till they almost forget they live: lie down!
So, that will do. Have I forgot the words?
Faith! They are sadder than I thought they were.
SONG
False friend, wilt thou smile or weep
When my life is laid asleep?
Little cares for a smile or a tear,
The clay-cold corpse upon the bier!
Farewell! Heigho!
What is this whispers low?
There is a snake in thy smile, my dear;
And bitter poison within thy tear.
Sweet sleep, were death like to thee,
Or if thou couldst mortal be,
I would close these eyes of pain;
When to wake? Never again.
O World! Farewell!
Listen to the passing bell!
It says, thou and I must part,
With a light and a heavy heart.
[The scene closes.
Scene IV.
A Hall of the Prison. Enter Camillo and Bernardo.
Camillo.
The Pope is stern; not to be moved or bent.
He looked as calm and keen as is the engine
Which tortures and which kills, exempt itself
From aught that it inflicts; a marble form,
A rite, a law, a custom: not a man.
He frowned, as if to frown had been the trick
Of his machinery, on the advocates
Presenting the defences, which he tore
And threw behind, muttering with hoarse, harsh voice:
'Which among ye defended their old father
Killed in his sleep?' Then to another: 'Thou
Dost this in virtue of thy place; 'tis well.'
He turned to me then, looking deprecation,
And said these three words, coldly: 'They must die.'
Bernardo.
And yet you left him not?
Camillo.
I urged him still;
Pleading, as I could guess, the devilish wrong
Which prompted your unnatural parent's death.
And he replied: 'Paolo Santa Croce
Murdered his mother yester evening,
And he is fled. Parricide grows so rife
That soon, for some just cause no doubt, the young
Will strangle us all, dozing in our chairs.
Authority, and power, and hoary hair
Are grown crimes capital. You are my nephew,
You come to ask their pardon; stay a moment;
Here is their sentence; never see me more
Till, to the letter, it be all fulfilled.'
Bernardo.
O God, not so! I did believe indeed
That all you said was but sad preparation
For happy news. Oh, there are words and looks
To bend the sternest purpose! Once I knew them,
Now I forget them at my dearest need.
What think you if I seek him out, and bathe
His feet and robe with hot and bitter tears?
Importune him with prayers, vexing his brain
With my perpetual cries, until in rage
He strike me with his pastoral cross, and trample
Upon my prostrate head, so that my blood
May stain the senseless dust on which he treads,
And remorse waken mercy? I will do it!
Oh, wait till I return!
[Rushes out.
Camillo.
Alas! poor boy!
A wreck-devoted seaman thus might pray
To the deaf sea.
Enter Lucretia, Beatrice, and Giacomo, guarded.
Beatrice.
I hardly dare to fear
That thou bring'st other news than a just pardon.
Camillo.
May God in heaven be less inexorable
To the Pope's prayers, than he has been to mine.
Here is the sentence and the warrant.
Beatrice
(wildly).
O
My God! Can it be possible I have
To die so suddenly? So young to go
Under the obscure, cold, rotting, wormy ground!
To be nailed down into a narrow place;
To see no more sweet sunshine; hear no more
Blithe voice of living thing; muse not again
Upon familiar thoughts, sad, yet thus lost
How fearful! to be nothing! Or to be . . .
What? Oh, where am I? Let me not go mad!
Sweet Heaven, forgive weak thoughts! If there should be
No God, no Heaven, no Earth in the void world;
The wide, gray, lampless, deep, unpeopled world!
If all things then should be . . . my father's spirit,
His eye, his voice, his touch surrounding me;
The atmosphere and breath of my dead life!
If sometimes, as a shape more like himself,
Even the form which tortured me on earth,
Masked in gray hairs and wrinkles, he should come
And wind me in his hellish arms, and fix
His eyes on mine, and drag me down, down, down!
For was he not alone omnipotent
On Earth, and ever present? Even though dead,
Does not his spirit live in all that breathe,
And work for me and mine still the same ruin,
Scorn, pain, despair? Who ever yet returned
To teach the laws of Death's untrodden realm?
Unjust perhaps as those which drive us now,
Oh, whither, whither?
Lucretia.
Trust in God's sweet love,
The tender promises of Christ: ere night,
Think, we shall be in Paradise.
Beatrice.
'Tis past!
Whatever comes my heart shall sink no more.
And yet, I know not why, your words strike chill:
How tedious, false and cold seem all things. I
Have met with much injustice in this world;
No difference has been made by God or man,
Or any power moulding my wretched lot,
'Twixt good or evil, as regarded me.
I am cut off from the only world I know,
From light, and life, and love, in youth's sweet prime.
You do well telling me to trust in God,
I hope I do trust in Him. In whom else
Can any trust? And yet my heart is cold.
[During the latter speeches Giacomo has retired conversing with Camillo, who now goes out; Giacomo advances.
Giacomo.
Know you not, Mother . . . Sister, know you not?
Bernardo even now is gone to implore
The Pope to grant our pardon.
Lucretia.
Child, perhaps
It will be granted. We may all then live
To make these woes a tale for distant years:
Oh, what a thought! It gushes to my heart
Like the warm blood.
Beatrice.
Yet both will soon be cold.
Oh, trample out that thought! Worse than despair,
Worse than the bitterness of death, is hope:
It is the only ill which can find place
Upon the giddy, sharp and narrow hour
Tottering beneath us. Plead with the swift frost
That it should spare the eldest flower of spring:
Plead with awakening earthquake, o'er whose couch
Even now a city stands, strong, fair, and free;
Now stench and blackness yawn, like death. Oh, plead
With famine, or wind-walking Pestilence,
Blind lightning, or the deaf sea, not with man!
Cruel, cold, formal man; righteous in words,
In deeds a Cain. No, Mother, we must die:
Since such is the reward of innocent lives;
Such the alleviation of worst wrongs.
And whilst our murderers live, and hard, cold men,
Smiling and slow, walk through a world of tears
To death as to life's sleep; 'twere just the grave
Were some strange joy for us. Come, obscure Death,
And wind me in thine all-embracing arms!
Like a fond mother hide me in thy bosom,
And rock me to the sleep from which none wake.
Live ye, who live, subject to one another
As we were once, who now . . .
Bernardo rushes in.
Bernardo.
Oh, horrible!
That tears, that looks, that hope poured forth in prayer,
Even till the heart is vacant and despairs,
Should all be vain! The ministers of death
Are waiting round the doors. I thought I saw
Blood on the face of one . . . What if 'twere fancy?
Soon the heart's blood of all I love on earth
Will sprinkle him, and he will wipe it off
As if 'twere only rain. O life! O world!
Cover me! let me be no more! To see
That perfect mirror of pure innocence
Wherein I gazed, and grew happy and good,
Shivered to dust! To see thee, Beatrice,
Who made all lovely thou didst look upon . . .
Thee, light of life . . . dead, dark! while I say, sister,
To hear I have no sister; and thou, Mother,
Whose love was as a bond to all our loves . . .
Dead! The sweet bond broken!
Enter Camillo and Guards.
They come! Let me
Kiss those warm lips before their crimson leaves
Are blighted . . . white . . . cold. Say farewell, before
Death chokes that gentle voice! Oh, let me hear
You speak!
Beatrice.
Farewell, my tender brother. Think
Of our sad fate with gentleness, as now:
And let mild, pitying thoughts lighten for thee
Thy sorrow's load. Err not in harsh despair,
But tears and patience. One thing more, my child:
For thine own sake be constant to the love
Thou bearest us; and to the faith that I,
Though wrapped in a strange cloud of crime and shame,
Lived ever holy and unstained. And though
Ill tongues shall wound me, and our common name
Be as a mark stamped on thine innocent brow
For men to point at as they pass, do thou
Forbear, and never think a thought unkind
Of those, who perhaps love thee in their graves.
So mayest thou die as I do; fear and pain
Being subdued. Farewell! Farewell! Farewell!
Bernardo.
I cannot say, farewell!
Camillo.
Oh, Lady Beatrice!
Beatrice.
Give yourself no unnecessary pain,
My dear Lord Cardinal. Here, Mother, tie
My girdle for me, and bind up this hair
In any simple knot; ay, that does well.
And yours I see is coming down. How often
Have we done this for one another; now
We shall not do it any more. My Lord,
We are quite ready. Well, 'tis very well.
THE END
Composed at Rome and near Leghorn (Villa Valsovano), May - August 8, 1819; published 1820 (spring) by C. & J. Ollier, London. This edition of 250 copies was printed in Italy 'because,' writes Shelley to Peacock, Sept. 21, 1819, 'it costs, with all duties and freightage, about half what it would cost in London.'
~ Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Cenci - A Tragedy In Five Acts
,#NFDB
26 Integral Yoga
7 Poetry
4 Philosophy
2 Yoga
2 Occultism
2 Mysticism
2 Fiction
1 Baha i Faith
1 Alchemy
24 The Mother
18 Satprem
8 Sri Aurobindo
2 Percy Bysshe Shelley
4 Agenda Vol 12
2 The Synthesis Of Yoga
2 The Secret Doctrine
2 Shelley - Poems
2 Liber ABA
2 Agenda Vol 13
2 Agenda Vol 11
2 Agenda Vol 08
0 1960-11-15, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
It was no longer this (that is, life as it is on earth) becoming conscious of That (the eternal soul, this portion of the Supreme as Sri Aurobindo said); it was the eternal soul seeing life in its own way but without separation, without any separation, not like something looking from above that feels itself to be different How strange it is! Its not something else, its NOT something else, its not even a distortion, not even Its losing its illusory quality as described in the old spiritualities thats not what it is! In my experience, there was there was clearly an emotion I cant describe it, there are no words. It wasnt a feeling, it was something like an emotion, a vibration of such TOTAL closeness and at the same time of compassion, a compassion of love. (Oh, words are so pitiful! ) One was this outer thing, which was the total negation of the other and AT THE SAME TIME the other, without the least separation between them. It WAS the other. So what was born in one was born in the other as well, in this eternal light. A sweetness of identity, precisely, an identity that was necessarily such total understanding with such perfect love but love says it poorly, all words are poor! Its not that; its something else! Its something that cannot be expressed.
I lived that this morning, upstairs.
0 1961-04-18, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Now I know that its not necessary at allnot at all. Simply the aspiration must be constantly like this (gesture of a rising flame). Aspiration that is, knowing what you want, wanting it. But it cannot be given a definite form; Sri Aurobindo has used certain words, we use other words, others use still other words, and all this means nothing they are simply words. But there is something beyond all words, and that for me, the simplest thing (the simplest to express) is, The Supremes Will.
And its The Supremes Will FOR THE EARTHwhich is quite a special thing. I am in a universal consciousness at the moment and the earth seems to me to be a very tiny thing, like this (Mother sketches a tiny ball in the air) in the process of being transformed. But this is from the standpoint of the Work, its another matter.
0 1963-02-19, #Agenda Vol 04, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
And it teaches me English without books! Now, whenever I have to write a letter, all the words come by themselves: the CONTENT of the word (just as I told you for moment and instant), now it works the same way with all words! Yesterday I wrote something in English for a doctor here (Mother looks for a paper): The world progresses so rapidly that we must be ready at any moment to over pass what we knew in order to know better. And you know, I never think: it just comes, either the sound or the written word (it depends on the case: now Ill see the written words, now Ill hear the sound). For instance, the word advance came first, and with it came quick, quickly, repeatedly [the world advances so quickly]. Then came progress, and quickly was out of the picture; and suddenly rapidly came forward. So I understood how it worked, how it works for all words! I understood: progress (the idea or inner meaning of progress) calls for rapidly; and advance calls for quickly. Putting it like this sounds like splitting hairs, but when I saw it, it was positively irrefutable! The word was alive, its content was alive, and along with it was its friend, the word that went with it; and the word that wasnt its friend was not to be seen, it wasnt in the mood! Oh, it was so funny! For that alone it is worth the trouble.
I have made some experiments with French too. I wrote something: Pour chacun, le plus important est de savoir si on appartient au passe qui se perpetue, au present qui sepuise, lavenir qui veut natre. [The most important point for everyone is to know whether he belongs to the past perpetuating itself, to the present exhausting itself, or to the future trying to be born.] I gave it to Zhe didnt understand. So I told him, It doesnt mean our past, our present or our future. I wrote this when I was in that state [the experience Mother told at the beginning of this conversation], and it was in connection with a very sweet old lady who has just left her body. This is what I said to her. Everybody had been expecting her departure for more than a month or two, but I said, You will see, she is going to last; she will last for at least another month or two. Because she knows how to live within, outside her body, and the body lives on out of habit, without jerks and jolts. That was her condition, and it could last a very long time. They had announced she would leave within two days, but I said, Its not true. I know her well, in the sense that she had come out of her body and there was a link with me. And I said to her, What do you care! (though she wasnt at all worried, she was staying peacefully with me), The whole point is to know whether one belongs to the past perpetuating itself, to the present exhausting itself, or to the future trying to be born. Sometimes what WE call the past is right here, its the future trying to be born; sometimes what WE call the present is something in advance, something that came ahead of time; but sometimes also its something that came late, that is still part of all that is to disappear I saw it all: people, things, circumstances, everything through that perception, the vibration that would go on transforming itself, the vibration that would exhaust itself and disappear, the vibration that, though manifested for a long time, would be entitled to continue, to persist that changes all notions! It was so interesting! So I wrote it down as it waswithout any explanations (you dont feel much like explaining in such a case, the thing is so self-evident!). Poor Z, he stared at meall at sea! So I told him, Dont try to understand. I am not speaking of the past, present and future as we know them, its something else. (Mother laughs)
0 1964-03-25, #Agenda Vol 05, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Thats exactly what cannot be said! When you have the vision and consciousness of the Truth-Order, of that which is DIRECT, the direct expression of the Truth, you immediately feel something inexpressible, because all words belong to the other sphere; all images, all comparisons, all expressions belong to the other sphere.
I had precisely that great difficulty (it was on February 29): all the time while I was living in that consciousness of the DIRECT manifestation of the Truth, I tried to formulate what I was feeling, what I was seeingit was impossible. There were no words. And immediately, merely formulating things made me instantly fall back into the other consciousness.
--
Unfortunately, as I said at the beginning, all words belong to the world of appearances.
(silence)
0 1965-08-14, #Agenda Vol 06, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
When someone reads me a letter, you understand, I make contact, I catch a few words, and then its all settled. And the decision comes or doesnt come from here it comes. And once I have announced the decision, its settled. But they all go on reading the letter! I say, Good Lord! Whats the use? Its all words and sentences.
For him, things have to follow their full course, point by point, and he adds to it!
0 1966-08-31, #Agenda Vol 07, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
There was so clear an explanationobvious, tangibleshowing how it happens all the timeall the time, all the time, everywhere. And unless one experiences it, theres no way one can even understand the difference; all words are approximations. But just when it is true (Mother smiles blissfully) And then, one doesnt know if it lasted or if it doesnt last: all that has disappeared. And it doesnt abolish anything, thats the most wonderful part! Everything is there, nothing is abolished. Its only a phenomenon of consciousness. Because at such a time, everything that is becomes true, so I mean it abolishes nothing of the Manifestation; you dont even feel that Falsehood is abolished: it doesnt exist, it isnt. Everything can remain exactly as it is; it becomes only a question of choice. Everything becomes a question of choice: you choose this way, choose that way. And in a splendor of joy, of beauty, of harmony, a plenitude of luminous consciousness in which there is no darkness anymore: it no longer exists. And it truly is, so to say, the choice between life and death, consciousness and unconsciousness (unconsciousness isnt what we call unconsciousness, the unconsciousness of the stone, its not that). One doesnt know what consciousness is until one has experienced that.
If it could be translated into words, it would be so pretty (thats when I understand poets!). That ineffable Presence seems to be saying, You see, I was always there, and you didnt know it. And its lived at the very heart of the cells: You see, you know that I was always there, but you didnt know it. And then (Mother smiles on in a contemplation) Its a tiny nothingwhich changes everything.
0 1967-04-03, #Agenda Vol 08, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
I have had this experience. Ive had it in an almost constant way. And in the most conscious part of the being (that which is one with the heights), the expression of this experience, lets say, All is from all eternity or All is the expression of the supreme Vision (I am not using the word will, Ill say why in a moment), there was the sense of a limitation. I dont know how to express it, but thats how it was (it goes without saying that all words are approximations). Always, each time the experience was there, it was there with the sense that to put it crudely I might express it with the phrase, Thats not it!
So the other day (the day before I saw you), it came at the time of my experiences, that is, very early morning (the time of my lived experiences), and it was like that, with that same sense of inadequacy. Then I entered a certain state in which that remained quite luminous and clear, but at the same timeat the same time, simultaneously there came the perception (how can I put it?) of the original Vibration, as it were, in all the splendour of its all-powerful Light, and the two things that and Thatwere simultaneously translated on the level of expression, without opposition, both together like this (Mother clasps her two hands, interlacing her fingers), tightly joined, in an identical Light: every instantevery instantits like a pulsation of that Force (it is: creative Force-Light-Power, contained in the global Vibration of Love); with every pulsation, a complete re-creation.1
0 1967-06-14, #Agenda Vol 08, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
If, for this wear and tear, this deterioration (which comes from the Inconscient and is the result of the RESISTANCE of the Inconscient), if for this we can substitute the aspiration for progress and transformation (not with words the vibration) That experience has been given to me several times. For example, suppose there is something which goes wrong, there is a pain somewhere, something disorganized that no longer works properly; if there is the vision and conception in the faith (faith and consecration to the Supreme) that its deliberate, that the Supreme has allowed it to be (how can I express it? all words are meaningless), has allowed or willed it, or wanted it to be, because to Him it seems the best way to transform the thing, to have it make the necessary progress, if the cells that are somewhat disorganized and sick, as they say, are able to feel this then straight away it takes a marvellous turn for the betterimmediately, in five minutes, ten minutes. I could give concrete, precise examples, with all the details. So that means bringing the two extremes into contact, we could say. And if that can become the normal life of the elements which make up this outer form, then there is no reason why No, there is no need to die, no need whatsoever. There comes a point when death loses all meaning.
And one learns in the smallest detail, in the little cell or the faint sensation (and when it comes down to feelings, there is something which is the embryo of thoughtoh, then), the taste for drama. Ah, then everything is explained.
0 1968-12-28, #Agenda Vol 09, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
And in that consciousness, the strange thing is the importance of one minute, which to our consciousness is nothing there it has an importance. In one minute, something general can be done. Naturally, all words are stupid, but thats how it is. One minute.
In one minute To such a point that the body perceives that one minute like this (Mother slightly rotates two fingers) is a victory; and one minute like that (Mother rotates her two fingers the other way) is a catastrophe. And not only for itself (for itself, its on a small scale and concentrated, its not the same thing), but its general.
0 1969-02-22, #Agenda Vol 10, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
I dont remember when it was, but I remember that I wrote it after I had the experience that the immobility of the Inconscient, of the beginning of the creation, is (I cant say a projection), is a sort of inanimate or inconscient symbol of Eternity, of Immobility (its not immobility, words are worthless, its between immobility and stability). Here I wrote peace, but peace is a poor word, its not that, its infinitely more than peace; its the something (even the word eternal gives a limited sense, all words are impossible), the something thats the Origin of everything and the start of the evolution of the manifestation to rejoin the Origin (Mother draws a curve joining the one to the other).
I remember I had this experience I dont know, I thought I had had this experience at the Playground, but in 65 I no longer used to go there.
0 1970-02-04, #Agenda Vol 11, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
all words are an approximationan approximation.
***
0 1970-02-21, #Agenda Vol 11, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Its so all words are very small.
Extraordinary! (Laughing) Its really been given a gift!
0 1971-08-14, #Agenda Vol 12, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
all words seem childish to it.
(silence)
0 1971-09-22, #Agenda Vol 12, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
But (words are stupid), but I could say that the Divine intervention is becoming increasingly visible (words are stupid, its not that; but its all we can say, all words are stupid).
What do you have to say?
0 1971-10-16, #Agenda Vol 12, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
all words are false, but you could say: You alone exist. You know, what the cells feel: You alone exist. Like that. But all that becomes hardwords harden the experience. Its a kind of plasticity or suppleness, very trusting): what You want, what You want.
(silence)
0 1971-12-18, #Agenda Vol 12, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
all words miss the mark, thats never quite it.
(silence)
0 1972-10-07, #Agenda Vol 13, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
But all words belittle they belittle ridiculously.
Id like to stop talking.
0 1972-11-02, #Agenda Vol 13, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
My feeling is that all words, even when they sound very wise, are just stupidities. Thats all. It would be far better never to say anything (Mother puts her hand over her mouth). It makes things so small, so, so small.
***
1.01 - Asana, #Liber ABA, #Aleister Crowley, #Philosophy
The word Asana means "posture; but, as with all words which have caused debate, its exact meaning has altered, and it is used in several distinct senses by various authors. The greatest authority on "Yoga"
footnote: Yoga is the general name for that form of meditation which aims at the uniting of subject and object, for "yog" is the root from which are derived the Latin word "Jugum" and the English word "Yoke."
1.01 - Sri Aurobindo, #Words Of The Mother I, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
My adoration is beyond all words, my reverence is silent.
30 March 1914
1.02 - THE NATURE OF THE GROUND, #The Perennial Philosophy, #Aldous Huxley, #Philosophy
The purpose of all words is to illustrate the meaning of an object. When they are heard, they should enable the hearer to understand this meaning, and this according to the four categories of substance, of activity, of quality and of relationship. For example cow and horse belong to the category of substance. He cooks or he prays belongs to the category of activity. White and black belong to the category of quality. Having money or possessing cows belongs to the category of relationship. Now there is no class of substance to which the Brahman belongs, no common genus. It cannot therefore be denoted by words which, like being in the ordinary sense, signify a category of things. Nor can it be denoted by quality, for it is without qualities; nor yet by activity because it is without activityat rest, without parts or activity, according to the Scriptures. Neither can it be denoted by relationship, for it is without a second and is not the object of anything but its own self. Therefore it cannot be defined by word or idea; as the Scripture says, it is the One before whom words recoil.
Shankara
1.07 - The Mantra - OM - Word and Wisdom, #Bhakti-Yoga, #Swami Vivekananda, #Hinduism
In the universe, Brahm or Hiranyagarbha or the cosmic Mahat first manifested himself as name, and then as form, i.e. as this universe. All this expressed sensible universe is the form, behind which stands the eternal inexpressible Sphota, the manifester as Logos or Word. This eternal Sphota, the essential eternal material of all ideas or names is the power through which the Lord creates the universe, nay, the Lord first becomes conditioned as the Sphota, and then evolves Himself out as the yet more concrete sensible universe. This Sphota has one word as its only possible symbol, and this is the (Om). And as by no possible means of analysis can we separate the word from the idea this Om and the eternal Sphota are inseparable; and therefore, it is out of this holiest of all holy words, the mother of all names and forms, the eternal Om, that the whole universe may be supposed to have been created. But it may be said that, although thought and word are inseparable, yet as there may be various word-symbols for the same thought, it is not necessary that this particular word Om should be the word representative of the thought, out of which the universe has become manifested. To this objection we reply that this Om is the only possible symbol which covers the whole ground, and there is none other like it. The Sphota is the material of all words, yet it is not any definite word in its fully formed state.
That is to say, if all the peculiarities which distinguish one word from another be removed, then what remains will be the Sphota; therefore this Sphota is called the Nda-Brahma. the Sound-Brahman.
11.01 - The Eternal Day The Souls Choice and the Supreme Consummation, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
And the Ineffable from whom all words come.
Then with a smile august as noonday heavens
1.22 - Tabooed Words, #The Golden Bough, #James George Frazer, #Occultism
night, because all words that resembled the names of the dead were
abolished by proclamation and others coined in their place. The mint
1.3.4.01 - The Beginning and the End, #Essays Divine And Human, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
As all words come out of the Silence, so all forms come out of the Infinite.
When the word goes back into the silence is it extinct for ever or does it dwell in the eternal harmony? When a soul goes back to God is it blotted out from existence or does it know and enjoy that into which it enters?
1914 03 30p, #Prayers And Meditations, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
My adoration is beyond all words, my reverence is silent.
***
1951-03-17 - The universe- eternally new, same - Pralaya Traditions - Light and thought - new consciousness, forces - The expanding universe - inexpressible experiences - Ashram surcharged with Light - new force - vibrating atmospheres, #Questions And Answers 1950-1951, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
These are images, arent they? You can conceive of a universe becoming bigger and bigger, but then what is it that will contain this universe? What would there be beyond this universe? Immediately our small human mind conceives of something quite empty and a universe occupying more and more place in this void, which means that there would be a space in this void, which is an absurdity. In fact, one should say, It is as though, because that is not really what happens, it is only a way of expressing it. To catch hold of a notion even a little bit accurate, one must pass from the material to the psychological explanation, and even if you arrive at the psychological, you are still very far from the truth, which is neither psychological nor spatial, but something else which evidently finds it difficult to express itself in our terms. It is a well-known experience: each time one goes into a consciousness beyond our consciousness (I cannot say spatial), our terrestrial consciousness (not even positively terrestrial, but rather individual), each time one has an experience which transcends the individual consciousness, that is to say, transcends the consciousness of the part to enter a consciousness of the Whole, when one wants to translate this experience, one finds all words empty of sense, because language has been formed to translate human experience for the human mind. We have all the necessary words, even with many shades and niceties, to express human experience, since language has been made for that, but what language will you use to explain what is outside all language? It is extremely difficult. So you say, It is like this, it is like that, and while you are speaking you realise that the experience is being so completely distorted that at times you are understood to mean entirely the opposite.
For this reason science is full of paradoxes.
1955-10-26 - The Divine and the universal Teacher - The power of the Word - The Creative Word, the mantra - Sound, music in other worlds - The domains of pure form, colour and ideas, #Questions And Answers 1955, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
And fundamentally it is the same thing from the point of view of ideas. If one enters into contact with the domain of pure ideas beyond words, all words are such limitations, restrictions it becomes a kind of caricature. The intensity of life contained in the idea is untranslatable. One can receive it if one is capable of entering consciously this domain. One can transmit it to a certain extent if one is master of its vibrations and can let them pass and emanate from him. But all that one says or all that one writes is truly a caricature.
Is that enough?
1958-09-24 - Living the truth - Words and experience, #Questions And Answers 1957-1958, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
To understand these things there is only experienceto live this truth, not to feel it in the way the ordinary senses do but to realise within oneself the truth, the concrete existence of both states, simultaneously, existing together even while they are opposite conditions. all words can lead only to confusion; only experience gives the tangible reality of the thing: the simultaneous existence of the Absolute and the relativities, of Oneness and multiplicity, not as two states following each other and one resulting from the other, but as a state which can be perceived in two opposite ways depending on the position one takes in relation to the Reality.
Words in themselves falsify the experience. To speak in words one must take not a step backwards but a step downwards, and the essential truth escapes. One must use them simply as a more or less accessible path to reach the thing itself which cannot be formulated. And from this point of view no formulation is better than any other; the best of all is the one that helps each one to remember, that is, the way in which the intervention of the Grace has crystallised in the thought.
1964 03 25, #On Thoughts And Aphorisms, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
This is precisely what one cannot say! When you have the vision and the consciousness of the Order of Truth, of what is direct, the direct expression of the Truth, you immediately have an impression of something inexpressible, because all words belong to the other domain; all images, all comparisons, all expressions belong to the other domain.
This is precisely the great difficulty I hadit was on the 29th of February. During the whole time that I lived in this consciousness of the direct manifestation of the Truth, I tried to formulate what I was feeling, what I was seeingit was impossible. There were no words. And immediately, simply the formulation would cause an instantaneous fall back into the other consciousness.
--
Unfortunately, as I said at the beginning, all words belong to the world of appearances.
(Silence)
1.hccc - Silently and serenely one forgets all words, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
object:1.hccc - Silently and serenely one forgets all words
author class:Hung-chih Cheng-chueh
--
Original Language Chinese Silently and serenely one forgets all words; Clearly and vividly That appears. When one realizes it, it is vast and without edges; In its Essence, one is clearly aware. Singularly reflecting is this bright awareness, Full of wonder is this pure reflection. Dew and moon, Stars and streams, Snow on pine trees, And clouds hovering on the mountain peaks. In this reflection all intentional efforts vanish. Serenity is the final word of all the teachings; Reflection is the response to all manifestations.
1.pbs - Oedipus Tyrannus or Swellfoot The Tyrant, #Shelley - Poems, #Percy Bysshe Shelley, #Fiction
Which must, as all words must, be false or true,
It matters not: for the same Power made all,
1.pbs - The Cenci - A Tragedy In Five Acts, #Shelley - Poems, #Percy Bysshe Shelley, #Fiction
In its own formless horror: of all words,
That minister to mortal intercourse,
1.rt - The Gardener XVI - Hands Cling To Eyes, #Tagore - Poems, #Rabindranath Tagore, #Poetry
We do not stray out of all words
into the ever silent; we do not raise
1.wby - Under Ben Bulben, #Yeats - Poems, #William Butler Yeats, #Poetry
Know that when all words are said
And a man is fighting mad,
1.whitman - Voices, #Whitman - Poems, #unset, #Zen
slumbering, forever ready, in all words.
2.01 - Mandala One, #Vedic and Philological Studies, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
(1) Indra, cleaver of the ocean, all words increase; most rapturous of the blissful; master of being and lord of stable strengths.
(2) In thy friendship, who art stable and strong, we have no fear, O Indra lord of the various light, towards thee we move forward the conqueror unconquered.
2.02 - The Ishavasyopanishad with a commentary in English, #Isha Upanishad, #unset, #Zen
and rise above the Sun to Brahmalok. But these are all words &
dreams, since Hell & Patal & Earth & Paradise & Heaven are
2.03 - The Purified Understanding, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
But for the knowledge of the Self it is necessary to have the power of a complete intellectual passivity, the power of dismissing all thought, the power of the mind to think not at all which the Gita in one passage enjoins. This is a hard saying for the occidental mind to which thought is the highest thing and which will be apt to mistake the power of the mind not to think, its complete silence for the incapacity of thought. But this power of silence is a capacity and not an incapacity, a power and not a weakness. It is a profound and pregnant stillness. Only when the mind is thus entirely still, like clear, motionless and level water, in a perfect purity and peace of the whole being and the soul transcends thought, can the Self which exceeds and originates all activities and becomings, the Silence from which all words are born, the Absolute of which all relativities are partial reflections manifest itself in the pure essence of our being. In a complete silence only is the Silence heard; in a pure peace only is its Being revealed. Therefore to us the name of That is the Silence and the Peace.
author class:Sri Aurobindo
2.14 - On Movements, #Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo, #unset, #Zen
Sri Aurobindo: Generally, people who have no brains would be carried away by the high-sounding 'fiery' language; they do not want thought. Such language would always carry away empty-headed fools. Some people have a knack of using high-sounding words; once I listened to Surendra Nath Banerji for half an hour and I found no thought there it was all words.
Disciple: But they, the words, carry the audience all right!
2.24 - THE MASTERS LOVE FOR HIS DEVOTEES, #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism
The Speaker behind the tongue, Himself beyond all words:
He is the Life of life, the Ultimate, the Adorable!
30.08 - Poetry and Mantra, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 07, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Seer as poet and poet as poet are different, because of their difference in speech. Vaikhari vak is the word that stands in its own value and glory, maintains its own separate dignity and greatness, giving free scope to the inherent power of sound, voice and articulation. Hence the inner Being, the true Being of delight, does not always relish even the sweet noise - as Hamlet speaks out: it is all words, words, words - or as Jayadeva declares:
Mukharam adhiram tyaja majiram
3.16 - THE SEVEN SEALS OR THE YES AND AMEN SONG, #Thus Spoke Zarathustra, #Friedrich Nietzsche, #Philosophy
morel Are not all words made for the grave and heavy?
Are not all words lies to those who are light? Single
Speak no morel" Oh, how should I not lust after eternity and after the nuptial ring of rings, the ring of recurrence?
3 - Commentaries and Annotated Translations, #Hymns to the Mystic Fire, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
developed by the addition of other consonants. all words were
formed from these roots, simple words by the addition again of
4.41 - Chapter One, #Liber ABA, #Aleister Crowley, #Philosophy
I,49: Abrogate are all rituals, all ordeals, all words and signs. Ra-Hoor-Khuit hath taken his seat in the East at the Equinox of the Gods; and let Asar be with Isa, who also are one. But they are not of me. Let Asar be the adorant, Isa the sufferer; Hoor in his secret name and splendour is the Lord initiating.
I,50: There is a word to say about the Hierophantic task. Behold! there are three ordeals in one, and it may be given in three ways. The gross must pass through fire; let the fine be tried in intellect, and the lofty chosen ones in the highest. Thus ye have star & star, system & system; let not one know well the other!
--
all words are sacred and all prophets true; save only that they understand a little; solve the first half of the equation, leave the second unattacked. But thou hast all in the clear light, and some, though not all, in the dark.
I,57: Invoke me under my stars! Love is the law, love under will. Nor let the fools mistake love; for there are love and love. There is the dove, and there is the serpent. Choose ye well! He, my prophet, hath chosen, knowing the law of the fortress, and the great mystery of the House of God. All these old letters of my Book are aright; but * is not the Star. This also is secret: my prophet shall reveal it to the wise.
BOOK II. -- PART III. ADDENDA. SCIENCE AND THE SECRET DOCTRINE CONTRASTED, #The Secret Doctrine, #H P Blavatsky, #Theosophy
(1) all words are roots and merely placed in juxtaposition (Radical languages).
(2) One root defines the other, and becomes merely a determinative element (Agglutinative).
BOOK I. -- PART I. COSMIC EVOLUTION, #The Secret Doctrine, #H P Blavatsky, #Theosophy
Samana ('at the navel in the form of sound, as the material cause of all words,' says Arjuna Misra). So
Speech formerly spoke. Hence the mind is distinguished by reason of its being immovable, and the
Prayers and Meditations by Baha u llah text, #Prayers and Meditations by Baha u llah, #unset, #Zen
I implore Thee, O my God, by Thy Most Great Name, to enrapture the nations through the potency of the Word which Thou didst ordain to be the king of all words, the Word whereby the goodly pearls of Thy hidden wisdom were uncovered, and the gem-like mysteries which were wrapped up within Thee were unraveled. Deprive them not, by Thy grace and bounty, of the things Thou didst desire for them, and suffer them not to be far removed from the shores of the ocean of Thy presence.
Every existence, whether seen or unseen, O my Lord, testifieth that Thy mercy hath surpassed all created things, and Thy loving-kindness embraced the entire creation. Look upon them, I entreat Thee, with the eyes of Thy mercy. Thou art the Ever-Forgiving, the Most Compassionate. Do with them as beseemeth Thy glory, and Thy majesty, and Thy greatness, and Thy bounteousness and Thy grace. Deal not with them according to the limitations imposed upon them, or the manifold vicissitudes of their earthly life.
Sophist, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
This method of opposites has supplied new instruments of thought for the solution of metaphysical problems, and has thrown down many of the walls within which the human mind was confined. Formerly when philosophers arrived at the infinite and absolute, they seemed to be lost in a region beyond human comprehension. But Hegel has shown that the absolute and infinite are no more true than the relative and finite, and that they must alike be negatived before we arrive at a true absolute or a true infinite. The conceptions of the infinite and absolute as ordinarily understood are tiresome because they are unmeaning, but there is no peculiar sanctity or mystery in them. We might as well make an infinitesimal series of fractions or a perpetually recurring decimal the object of our worship. They are the widest and also the thinnest of human ideas, or, in the language of logicians, they have the greatest extension and the least comprehension. Of all words they may be truly said to be the most inflated with a false meaning. They have been handed down from one philosopher to another until they have acquired a religious character. They seem also to derive a sacredness from their association with the Divine Being. Yet they are the poorest of the predicates under which we describe himsignifying no more than this, that he is not finite, that he is not relative, and tending to obscure his higher attri butes of wisdom, goodness, truth.
The system of Hegel frees the mind from the dominion of abstract ideas. We acknowledge his originality, and some of us delight to wander in the mazes of thought which he has opened to us. For Hegel has found admirers in England and Scotl and when his popularity in Germany has departed, and he, like the philosophers whom he criticizes, is of the past. No other thinker has ever dissected the human mind with equal patience and minuteness. He has lightened the burden of thought because he has shown us that the chains which we wear are of our own forging. To be able to place ourselves not only above the opinions of men but above their modes of thinking, is a great height of philosophy. This dearly obtained freedom, however, we are not disposed to part with, or to allow him to build up in a new form the 'beggarly elements' of scholastic logic which he has thrown down. So far as they are aids to reflection and expression, forms of thought are useful, but no further:we may easily have too many of them.
The Dwellings of the Philosophers, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
Greek, all words containing the dipthong [*** 273-1] (er) must be taken into consideration.
[*** 273-2] (er) has remained, in phonetic Cabala, the sound expression dedicated to the
The Gold Bug, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
"Let us assume 8, then, as e. Now, of all words in the language, 'the' is the most usual; let us see, therefore, whether they are not repetitions of any three characters in the same order of collocation, the last of them being 8. If we discover repetitions of such letters, so arranged, they will most probably represent the word 'the.' On inspection, we find no less than seven such arrangements, the characters being ;48. We may, therefore, assume that the semicolon represents t, that 4 represents h, and that 8 represents e --the last being now well confirmed. Thus a great step has been taken.
"But, having established a single word, we are enabled to establish a vastly important point; that is to say, several commencements and terminations of other words. Let us refer, for example, to the last instance but one, in which the combination ;48 occurs --not far from the end of the cipher. We know that the semicolon immediately ensuing is the commencement of a word, and, of the six characters succeeding this 'the,' we are cognizant of no less than five. Let us set these characters down, thus, by the letters we know them to represent, leaving a space for the unknown--
Verses of Vemana, #is Book, #unset, #Zen
There are seven living beings. The eighth (maya) is not living--all the mighty are in anxiety. If thou look into thy thought all words vary. (raving foolery).
481
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