Absolutist surveillance, anyone?

  

   ... unless a statesman
   feels some sense of re-
   vulsion when he has to
   choose to commit a nec-
   essary evil, he is far
   more likely to commit
   an evil when it is not
   necessary.

Noel Annan could capture the Wodehousian enchantedness of Comrade Stalin perhaps better than the master, himself, given the latter's absorption in record-keeping. In the surreal ditziness of the doddering ornithologist, Saxby senior, there were flashes of unanswerable penetration, resembling Stalin's on hearing that his spy, Kim Philby, was being a huge success in Spain, even as Franco was advancing. That isn't logical, Stalin objected. It's rather the way one feels to be given excuses of endearing innocence for a President, on the strength of his liking for Topolobampo, who's amassing a dossier on the entire world. Nice taco, Comrade?

 It's enough to engender the ennui
 on which repression always relies,
 to be greeted with the identical
 intimidations one voted against, 
 all one's life, as the culture's
 descent into the paranoia of the
 Cold War climaxed in the incred-
 iblest confection of invisible e-
 mergencies, in every corner of a
 soccer child's locker room. Al-
 ways there was the complaisantly
 clever "reformer," who'd promise
 relief from domestic injustice in
 broad daylight, who'd dare us to
 risk our lives and our hopes with
 worse. Now we admit, this isn't
 logical, and with the clear-eyed,
 crazy ornithologist, we observe, 
 there's no such bogey in the sky.

 It's where we go to breathe.
    

   

Noel Annan
Dean of the Cold War
The New York Review of Books©
ibid.

P.G. Wodehouse
Cocktail Time
op. cit.

Constructive apronstrings

Rare as they
may be, they
can throttle
the silly to
a standstill.

    At Groton he bucked
    the spartan regime
    of its headmaster.
    Endicott Peabody
    told his mother to
    take him away since
    he would never make
    a Groton boy out of
    him. His mother re-
    plied she had not
    sent Dean there to
    be made into a Grot-
    on boy but to be ed-
    ucated, and she sug-
    gested Peabody should
    start doing so.

Noel Annan
Provost of King's College
Vice-Chancellor of University College

Dean of the Cold War
  A review of
  James Chace, Acheson:
  The Secretary of State
  who Created the American
  World
The New York Review of Books
November 19, 1998©

Come to year's end

momentarily.

 The duties of living

 wear a face visibly,

 and yet when it goes

 the other way, a vis-

 age is companionship

 I find, sight unseen. 

Derek

beggars would ride

Saturday commute xcviii: foraging abroad

   I was in great health and 

   and spirits, and fully ab-

   le to enter into the ideas

   of the brave, rude men whom 

   I found in all quarters.

                          

      It was just being

      for a little while

      one of the prisca

      gens mortalium,

      who ran about in

      the woods eating

      acorns and drink-

      ing water.                         

James Boswell

The Yale Editions of

  the Private Papers

  of James Boswell

Frank Brady and

  Frederick A. Pottle, editors

Boswell on the Grand Tour

  Italy, Corsica, and France

  1765 - 1766

McGraw-Hill, 1955©

Horace

Epodes

 ii, 2

ibid.

Hamish Quigley

Max Motta

Suppose it were Friday lxxxix: Daybreak

 

  The displaced persons  

  are willing to go any-

  where on earth except 

  home.

It is a portrait not of Marian Evans the woman but of George Eliot the artist, and one is not surprised to learn that Lewes rejected it. The face is sad, the eyes are cold and weary, the expression superior, the mouth is sensual and cruel: not the cruelty of a torturer, but the cruelty of a judge. Why should it not be? No charge of hypocrisy laid at her door could compare with the double-dealing of the society which condemned her .. Human beings, particularly when they are artists, are too valuable, too disparate, too contradictory to be left in the hands of the critics or the psychoanalysts. Their poignancy rests in the peculiar force with which each spurns the ideal.

Janet Flanner

Genêt

The New Yorker©

October 30, 1948

Modris Eksteins

Walking Since Daybreak

  A Story of Eastern Europe,

  World War II, and the Heart

  of our Century

Houghton Mifflin, 1999©

Noel Annan

Heroine

  A review of

  George Eliot

  Gordon Haight, 1968

The New York Review©

January 2, 1969

Hat frisbee memories

    Clean shirt wishes on

    the day they invented

    delight.

Not leaving without her

   Why is Tatiana, then, more guilty?
   Is it because in dear simplicity
   she does not know deceit
   and in her chosen dream believes?
   Is it because she loves without art,
   obedient to the bent of feeling?
   Because she is so trustful,
   because by heaven is endowed
   with a restless imagination,
   intelligence, and live will,
   and headstrongness,
   and a flaming and tender heart?
   Can it be that you won't forgive her
   the thoughtlessness of passions?

























Aleksandr Pushkin
Eugene Onegin
  A Novel in Verse
  Chapter three, xxiv
Vladimir Nabokov
   translation
Bollingen Series LXXII
Princeton University Press, 1975©

"Then there are these accidents to consider .."

To learn hunger, if

well fed, would give

us Flaubert, I think.

Not a bad idea. But

it also gives us what

claims to be called,

taste. How to hunger,

as if unfed, gives us

Horace.

Horace

was one generation re-

moved from slavery, by

his father's manumis-

sion; and spent a wary 

life in the munificent 

patronage of Maecenas.

It gives a different

view of taste; not to

say, another taste to 

everything. We see a

clean white shirt and

accept it as a custom.

Horace saw white and

knew his hunger. At

Nasiedienus' feast,

the tapestries all

fell with black vol-

canic dust. Off we ran, 

taking our revenge on 

him by tasting nothing

whatever.

  

Horace

Satires and Epistles

  Satires II, viii

John Davie, translation

op. cit.

The clean shirt cycle