Mysterious Things

And freely available, albeit in pdf format.  Charles du Fresne du Cange's Glossarium Mediae et Infimae Latinitatis is one of those resources I'd give... well, at least a little finger and perhaps a tooth or two to own: it simply never occurred to me that it might be online, ha. Am delighted, delighted... although am aware that I can easily find sufficient reason to waste time wandering through the centuries; stopped subscribing to the Oxford English Dictionary online for that very reason: but this is free; ha, there is a non sequitur for the ages.  The first word, following the phrases beginning with 'a':

AAGIATUS, egressus annos alienae tutelae, Gall. Majeur, en age. Franciae Reges regno maturi sunt anno aetatis l4. ex Edicto anni 1375. Oeteri ex jure civili Majores declarantur anno setatis  25°. Normanni 20°. Chronicon MS. Regum Francorum ex Musaeo D. de Cangey, ad Carolum V: Dominus dux Andegavensis frater suus antiquior incepit regnum regere, quod rexit usque ad secundam Octooris postquam Carolus fiilius dicti Regis fuit Aagiatus; id est Major renunciatus,
Gall, declaré Majeur....

(The word, aagiatus, means a man who has reached the legal age of maturity, his years of majority.) The text is driving the spell-checker out of its digital mind, ha. It will prove fairly clumsy to actually use, alas.

Jason the Commenter (not a particular friend of Holy Religion, alas) is posting on them seriatim and these have been happily diverting.

The splendid Dr Gilleland at Laudator Temporis Acti has published a post written by Eric Thomson about Chateaubriand and his trees. (Dr Gilleland is interested in trees, fascinated by their life in art, and is researching the history of arboricide; I believe he may be working on a book.)  LTA is one of the few blogs that I never miss reading.

Our René wrote a series of poems he published under the title Tableaux de la Nature, the first of which is La Forêt.

Forêt silencieuse, aimable solitude,
Que j'aime à parcourir votre ombrage ignoré !
Dans vos sombres détours, en rêvant égaré,
J'éprouve un sentiment libre d'inquiétude !
Prestiges de mon cœur ! je crois voir s'exhaler
Des arbres, des gazons une douce tristesse :
Cette onde que j'entends murmure avec mollesse,
Et dans le fond des bois semble encor m'appeler.
Oh ! que ne puis-je, heureux, passer ma vie entière
Ici, loin des humains !... Au bruit de ces ruisseaux,
Sur un tapis de fleurs, sur l'herbe printanière,
Qu'ignoré je sommeille à l'ombre des ormeaux !
Tout parle, tout me plaît sous ces voûtes tranquilles ;
Ces genêts, ornements d'un sauvage réduit,
Ce chèvrefeuille atteint d'un vent léger qui fuit,
Balancent tour à tour leurs guirlandes mobiles.
Forêts, dans vos abris gardez mes vœux offerts !
A quel amant jamais serez-vous aussi chères ?
D'autres vous rediront des amours étrangères ;
Moi de vos charmes seuls j'entretiens les déserts.

He writes in the preface (quoting from himself, in his avertissement to the 1829 Oeuvres complètes):

... For a long time, before descending to prose, I had made verses. M. de Fontanes [in Wikipedia here--MP] observed my renunciation of the Muses with a certain regret: myself, I left them only so that I could more quickly say the truths that I believed needed saying....

(The preface is in fact a short discussion of a writer's quandary when he is gifted with the genius of both poetry and prose.)  I think that the wiser choice was taken.  'On your shadowed paths, in dreaming lost,/ I own liberty at last unbound!'; it is a pleasant enough poem, after all.

Put me off, too, and so I didn't finish watching: but Father Finigan assures us that it "gets better" and so it does.  In my case, it was the "arm-waving".  Whenever do we hear and see orators in these barbarian days? reading a speech from behind a podium with the Teleprompter in front of one doesn't count. Were the circumstances of my life different, I would watch... what is it? C-Span? to follow the speeches in the House or Senate, in the hope of hearing, sometime, convincing or at least well-crafted rhetoric. Very occasionally the preacher at Mass expresses this art but more often than not it's as if he is out rambling whilst improvising lines to a play he hopes he can finish at some point before retirement but is resigned to never seeing staged... none the less I thank God for the orthodoxy of the clerics at my parish!

Who help make the world a beautiful place to live in (many thanks, Dave Stevens, for introducing me to his work); I suspect he would irritate the heck out of me if I had to spend much time in his company but who knows. He has written a fascinating series of posts at the Times's Opinionator about anosognosia (in the first of which is a nice example of his 'worldview' rendering him incapable of seeing clearly-- Donald Rumsfeld made an insightful point about 'known' and 'unknown unknowns' back in the day but of course in Mr Morris's book he is a warmongering quasi-fascist straight out of the Index of Evil in what's-his-name's, requiescat in pace, People's History...).

Now that Dr Gilleland at Laudator Temporis Acti has declared his opinion.  Neurotic fear of clowns is... I don't have the Greek characters here so you must go there.  Although I can have them; a project for the weekend, however, not for a Friday before work.

At Laudator Temporis Acti earlier; Thomas Babington Macaulay. "Where will your Emersons be then? But Herodotus will still be read with delight." Let us hope so.

Ac maiore se theatro dignum putat". (Institutio Oratoria I.2)  Yes, yes, Quintilian's praeceptor is not Mrs Goodbody in the local classroom but the comparison is thought provoking in at least a couple of ways.  'The best teachers like a large audience and believe themselves deserving of one', although the Loeb translator, Professor Donald Russell, is more conscientious than I am and translates accurately, "all good teachers like a large class and think they deserve a bigger stage".   Quintilian in chapter two is discussing the relative merits of 'home-schooling' versus 'public schools' and is well worth a read.

'On tape', i.e. on the iPod.  I dozed through most of Galba's reign and awoke to find him being 'unwounded in the breast' moments prior to his decapitation.

Following up on a post of Professor Pullum's (which I did not see) and has a bit of an experiment up at Language Log.  I can distinguish two of the four examples but am not going to give away my answers, lest any of my esteemed readers be unduly influenced. 

At Aden; its authenticity seems proved. Long, long, long ago I worshipped Rimbaud, tsk, or my private image of the poet (surely I knew even then he was not... let us say, one of the world's great benefactors), or something; even made a song out of Chanson de la plus haute tour, the tune of which I can still half-recover.

Oisive jeunesse
A tout asservie,
Par délicatesse
J'ai perdu ma vie.
Ah ! Que le temps vienne
Où les coeurs s'éprennent.

Je me suis dit : laisse,
Et qu'on ne te voie:
Et sans la promesse
De plus hautes joies.
Que rien ne t'arrête,
Auguste retraite.

J'ai tant fait patience
Qu'à jamais j'oublie;
Craintes et souffrances
Aux cieux sont parties.
Et la soif malsaine
Obscurcit mes veines.

Ainsi la prairie
A l'oubli livrée,
Grandie, et fleurie
D'encens et d'ivraies
Au bourdon farouche
De cent sales mouches.

Ah ! Mille veuvages
De la si pauvre âme
Qui n'a que l'image
De la Notre-Dame!
Est-ce que l'on prie
La Vierge Marie?

Oisive jeunesse
A tout asservie,
Par délicatesse
J'ai perdu ma vie.
Ah ! Que le temps vienne
Où les coeurs s'éprennent!

Update on Saturday, May 8, 2010 at 19:28 by Marc

M Lefrère, Rimbaud's biographer, and MM Desse and Caussé, discoverers of the 'new' photograph and subjects of the La Croix piece, have a tribune in Le Monde for tomorrow. 

Withstands even the third cup of coffee.  Downhill like a wheel on a slope, indeed. 

Georges Simenon's Inspector Maigret is having to consider his interviews with a married couple, each spouse coming individually and privately to him. The husband has consulted a psychiatrist.  Maigret is looking through a book on mental disorders that he has taken home with him.

***

... Neuroses ... In Adler's opinion, the starting-point of neurosis is an alarming feeling of inferiority and insecurity ... A defensive reaction against this feeling leads the patient to identify himself with an imaginary ideal ...

He repeated under his breath, thus causing his wife to raise her head: '... imaginary ideal...'.

Physical syndrome ... Neurasthenics are well known to specialists of every sort ... Without any appreciable organic lesion, they feel ill and above all worry about possible complications; they undergo innumerable consultations and examinations ... Mental syndrome... The feeling of incapacity is dominant ... Physically, the patient feels dull-witted, full of aches and pains, exhausted by the slightest effort ...

Like Maigret that very morning.  Even now, he felt dull-witted, not full of aches and pains perhaps, but....  He turned the pages, in a grumpy mood....

... Never do they consider themselves blameworthy or at fault ... Their pride is characteristic ... Even when they are not very intelligent, they often dominate their family by means of their authoritarianism and their arrogant dogmatism ...

Did that apply best to Xavier Marton, or to his wife?  And couldn't it serve to describe a quarter of the population of Paris?

Revenge psychosis ... Persecuted persecutors ....

Xavier Marton?  Madame Marton?

He went from neuroses to psychoses, from psychoses to psycho-neuroses, from hysteria to paranoia, and, like those good folk who when they immerse themselves in a medical dictionary discover that they are suffering from each illness in turn, he found under every heading symptoms which would apply just as well to the one as to the other of his two characters.

From time to time he grunted, or repeated a word or a phrase, and Madame Maigret darted anxious little glances at him.

In the end he got up, like someone who has had enough, threw the book on to the table and, opening the sideboard in the dining-room, took the bottle of prunelle and filled one of the little gilt-edged glasses.

It was a sort of protest on behalf of common sense against all this learned rubbish, a way of getting back to earth with both feetr firmly on the ground.

Pardon was right: the result of too much studying of the anomalies of human behaviour, classifying them and subdividing them, was that you ended up not knowning what a man of sound mind was like any more.

Was he one himself? After what he had just been reading, he was not so sure.

'Have you got a difficult case on?' ventured Madame Maigret, who rarely bothered about her husband's work at the Quai des Orfèvres.

He contented himself with shrugging his shoulders and growling:

'A mad business!'

A little later, after emptying his glass, he added:

'Let's go to bed.'

***

From the English translation of Robert Eglesfield published in Five Times Maigret by Harcourt, Brace and World in 1964.

Which Tim Cavanaugh at Hit and Run reviews here.  Baker is memorialising his elementary school teacher, who has imposed haiku on her pupils.

... What did she really mean by "It doesn't have to rhyme?" Did she mean it could rhyme but it didn't have to? No. She meant Don't rhyme. She meant: I am going to manacle your poor pliable brains with freedom. I'm going to insist that you must be free. She wrote "FREE VERSE" on the board.

And I...thought, What does she mean it doesn't have to rhyme? It does have to rhyme! It's got to rhyme, because rhyme is poetry. Where did Little Miss Muffet sit? Did she sit on a cushion? Did she sit on a love seat? No, she sat on a tuffet.....

I am of an age to have escaped the fascist haiku but do sure as hell know that Baker and Cavanaugh are righteous crusaders at least on this mission.  Coincidentally, I heard the Rembrandts' I'll Be There For You on the radio on Good Friday; had forgotten, if I ever knew, that the actual song isn't nearly as saccharine as the television theme version.

Is welcomed by all those of good will. And, her private version of our Holy Religion is odd and her politics odder--but that is me, not the great Laudator.

Serve pretty much the same practical function that this site does for me; my last opera program was, alas, tossed onto the refuse heap (where the instruction booklet for the rice cooker soon followed).  Languagehat g. a.

I doubt I shall ever read Messrs Niven and Pournelle's 'version' of Dante, but I have seen the authors' names--I believe at Instapundit, a few times--and Robert Chase's post at On the Square inclines me to consider my position.

From the blog of the New York Review of Books, Robert Darnton on pre-Revolutionary 'blogging'.

... How new, then, is bloggery? Should we think of it as a by-product of the modern means of communication and a sign of a time when newspapers seem doomed to obsolescence? It makes the most of technical innovations—the possibility of constant contact with virtual communities by means of web sites and the premium placed on brevity by platforms such as Twitter with its limit of 140 characters per message. Yet blog-like messaging can be found in many times and places long before the Internet....

Short, scurrilous abuse proliferated in all sorts of communication systems: taunts scribbled on palazzi during the feuds of Renaissance Italy, ritual insult known as “playing the dozens” among African Americans, posters carried in demonstrations against despotic regimes, and graffiti on many occasions such as the uprising in Paris of May–June 1968 (one read “Voici la maison d’un affreux petit bourgeois”). When expertly mixed, provocation and pithiness could be dynamite—the verbal or written equivalent of Molotov cocktails.....

Fascinating.

Laudator and manages also to pique my interest in buttocks made out of mashed potatoes. 

Grace is to nature?  That's the best I can do in five seconds; Dr Gilleland's post at Laudator Temporis Acti is thought provoking and amusing all at once. "From sek- come sker- and skei-...."