The Clementine Compendium

Collecting and sharing interesting things. This is an anti-racism, anti-sexism, anti-TERF, pro-trans-rights, pro Free Palestine, anti-Zionist and anti-antisemitism, anti-facism, anti-censorship, anti-megachurch, pro-reproductive rights, pro-feminism blog. Any quotes shared from "problematic" or controversial sources aren't necessarily an endorsement of that person's entire ideology, but rather intended to be thought-provoking and inspire your own reading & research. Please enjoy, and feel free to reach out with any questions. http://harriehq.neocities.org

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Alberto Manguel writes in A History of Reading, “Throughout the South, it was common for plantation owners to hang any slave who tried to teach the others how to spell… The slave-owners (like dictators, tyrants, absolute monarchs and other illicit holders of power) were strong believers in the power of the written word. They knew, far better than some readers, that reading is a strength that requires barely a few first words to become overwhelming. Someone able to read one sentence is able to read all… For all these reasons, reading had to be forbidden… An illiterate crowd is easiest to rule; since the craft of reading cannot be untaught once it has been acquired, the second-best recourse is to limit its scope.” — Papyrus: The Invention of Books in the Ancient World by Irene Vallejo

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SteveStrummer, Women's March on Versailles002, Added background color and foreground text "Give us liberty, and give us bread." by The Clementine Compendium, CC BY-SA 4.0

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"When a child is told they’re too sensitive, the message isn’t guidance on how to handle feelings. The message is that the feelings themselves are wrong." — ArtfulParent.com hitting unnecessarily hard

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Damn, does any modern writer go harder than Daniel Handler?!

The three of us stood there for a minute. I don’t know what Stew was thinking, and the filing cabinet wasn’t thinking anything. But I was thinking, is this the world? Is this really the place in which you’ve ended up, Snicket? It was a question that struck me, as it might strike you, when something ridiculous was going on, or something sad. I wondered if this was really where I should be, or if there was another world someplace, less ridiculous and less sad. But I never knew the answer to the question. Perhaps I had been in another world before I was born, and did not remember it, or perhaps I would see another world when I died, which I was in no hurry to do. In the meantime I knew only the world I was in. In the meantime I was stuck in this police station, doing something so ridiculous it felt sad, and feeling so sad that it was ridiculous. The world of the police station, the world of Stain’d-by-the-Sea and all of the wrong questions I was asking, was the only world I could see. — "When Did You See Her Last?" - All The Wrong Questions #2 - Lemony Snicket / Art by Seth

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"One doesn't work for effects, and one doesn't set up in the artist business. One studies and learns and works and thinks to develop oneself as an intelligent, sensitive, and aware human being: and out of the always-increasing resources of intelligence, sensitivity, and awareness, the human being makes music." — Leonard Bernstein, April 1967

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"Epilogue" by Robert Lowell

Those blessèd structures, plot and rhyme— why are they no help to me now I want to make something imagined, not recalled? I hear the noise of my own voice: The painter’s vision is not a lens, it trembles to caress the light. But sometimes everything I write with the threadbare art of my eye seems a snapshot, lurid, rapid, garish, grouped, heightened from life, yet paralyzed by fact. All’s misalliance. Yet why not say what happened? Pray for the grace of accuracy Vermeer gave to the sun’s illumination stealing like the tide across a map to his girl solid with yearning. We are poor passing facts, warned by that to give each figure in the photograph his living name.

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"My first act of free will shall be to believe in free will." — William James

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“Maybe that’s why I tend to equate physical beauty with qualities with which it has absolutely nothing to do. I see a pretty mouth or a moody pair of eyes and imagine all sorts of deep affinities, private kinships. Never mind that half a dozen jerks are clustered round the same person, just because they’ve been duped by the same pair of eyes.” — [Francis] "The Secret History" by Donna Tartt

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"But here let us give the floor to Kandiaronk himself. The first of the Dialogues is about religious matters, in which Lahontan allows his foil calmly to pick apart the logical contradictions and incoherence of the Christian doctrines of original sin and redemption, paying particular attention to the concept of hell. As well as casting doubt on the historicity of scripture, Kandiaronk continually emphasizes the fact that Christians are divided into endless sects, each convinced they are entirely right and that all the others are hell-bound. To give a sense of its flavour:

Kandiaronk: Come on, my brother. Don’t get up in arms… It’s only natural for Christians to have faith in the holy scriptures, since, from their infancy, they’ve heard so much of them. Still, it is nothing if not reasonable for those born without such prejudice, such as the Wendats, to examine matters more closely. However, having thought long and hard over the course of a decade about what the Jesuits have told us of the life and death of the son of the Great Spirit, any Wendat could give you twenty reasons against the notion. For myself, I’ve always held that, if it were possible that God had lowered his standards sufficiently to come down to earth, he would have done it in full view of everyone, descending in triumph, with pomp and majesty, and most publicly… He would have gone from nation to nation performing mighty miracles, thus giving everyone the same laws. Then we would all have had exactly the same religion, uniformly spread and equally known throughout the four corners of the world, proving to our descendants, from then till ten thousand years into the future, the truth of this religion. Instead, there are five or six hundred religions, each distinct from the other, of which according to you, the religion of the French, alone, is any good, sainted, or true. [35]

The last passage reflects perhaps Kandiaronk’s most telling point: the extraordinary self-importance of the Jesuit conviction that an all-knowing and all-powerful being would freely choose to entrap himself in flesh and undergo terrible suffering, all for the sake of a single species, designed to be imperfect, only some of which were going to be rescued from damnation anyway. [36]"

[35] 1704: 106–7. Cited references are to the 1735 English edition of Dialogues, but the translation in this instance is a combination of that, Mann’s (2001: 67–8), and our own. Subsequent translations are our own, based on the 1735 edition.

[36] ‘Assuming he is so powerful and great, how likely is it that such an unknowable being would have made himself into a man, dwelt in misery, and died in infamy, just to work off the sin of some ignoble creature who was as far beneath him as a fly is beneath the sun and the stars? Where does that leave his infinite power? What good would it do him, and what use would he make of it? For my part, it seems to me that to believe in a debasement of this nature is to doubt the unimaginable sweep of his omnipotence, while making extravagant presumptions about ourselves.’ (cited in Mann 2001: 66)

— "The Dawn of Everything" by David Graeber and David Wengrow

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"It is a terrible thing to learn as a child that one is a being separate from all the world, that no one and no thing hurts along with one’s burned tongues and skinned knees, that one’s aches and pains are all one’s own. Even more terrible, as we grow older, to learn that no person, no matter how beloved, can ever truly understand us."

The discussion that day was about loss of self, about Plato’s four divine madnesses, about madness of all sorts; he began by talking about what he called the burden of the self, and why people want to lose the self in the first place. “Why does that obstinate little voice in our heads torment us so?” he said, looking round the table. “Could it be because it reminds us that we are alive, of our mortality, of our individual souls—which, after all, we are too afraid to surrender but yet make feel more miserable than any other thing? But isn’t it also pain that often makes us most aware of self? It is a terrible thing to learn as a child that one is a being separate from all the world, that no one and no thing hurts along with one’s burned tongues and skinned knees, that one’s aches and pains are all one’s own. Even more terrible, as we grow older, to learn that no person, no matter how beloved, can ever truly understand us. Our own selves make us most unhappy, and that’s why we’re so anxious to lose them, don’t you think? Remember the Erinyes?” “The Furies,” said Bunny, his eyes dazzled and lost beneath the bang of hair. “Exactly. And how did they drive people mad? They turned up the volume of the inner monologue, magnified qualities already present to great excess, made people so much themselves that they couldn’t stand it. “And how can we lose this maddening self, lose it entirely? Love? Yes, but as old Cephalus once heard Sophocles say, the least of us know that love is a cruel and terrible master. One loses oneself for the sake of the other, but in doing so becomes enslaved and miserable to the most capricious of all the gods. War? One can lose oneself in the joy of battle, in fighting for a glorious cause, but there are not a great many glorious causes for which to fight these days.” — Donna Tartt, The Secret History

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"The need to make art may not stem solely from the need to express who you are, but from a need to complete a relationship with something outside yourself."

"If art is about self, the widely accepted corollary is that making art is about self-expression. And it is — but that is not necessarily all it is. It may only be a passing feature of our times that validating the sense of who-you-are is held up as the major source of the need to make art. What gets lost in that interpretation is an older sense that art is something you do out in the world, or something you do about the world, or even something you do for the world. The need to make art may not stem solely from the need to express who you are, but from a need to complete a relationship with something outside yourself. As a maker of art you are custodian of issues larger than self.

Some people who make art are driven by inspiration, others by provocation, still others by desperation. Artmaking grants access to worlds that may be dangerous, sacred, forbidden, seductive, or all of the above. It grants access to worlds you may otherwise never fully engage. It may in fact be the engagement — not the art — that you seek. The difference is that making art allows, indeed guarantees, that you declare yourself. Art is contact, and your work necessarily reveals the nature of that contact. In making art you declare what is important." — Art & Fear by David Bayles and Ted Orland

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"The artist is likely to be looked upon with some uneasiness by the more conservative members of society. He seems a little unpredictable. Who knows but that he may arrive for dinner in a red shirt… appear unexpectedly bearded… offer, freely, unsolicited advice… or even ship off one of his ears to some unwilling recipient? However glorious the history of art, the history of artists is quite a different matter. And in any well-ordered household the very thought that one of the young men may turn out to be an artist can be a cause for general alarm. It may be a point of great pride to have a Van Gogh on the living room wall, but the prospect of having Van Gogh himself in the living room would put a good many devoted art lovers to rout." — Ben Shahn, Harvard’s Charles Edward Norton Lectures; collected as "The Shape of Content," fourth lecture: "On Nonconformity"

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“Gertrude Stein did us the most harm when she said, 'You're all a lost generation.' That got around to certain people and we all said, 'Whee! We're lost.'” — Dorothy Parker

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"Some research suggests that girls and autistic women may have a more masculinized or androgynous neurological profile (Baron-Cohen, 2002; Bejerot et al., 2012) due to possible differences in prenatal androgens (Auyeung et al., 2009). It is important to consider that the outward presentation of clothing or toy choice does not necessarily represent the internal cognitive profile. Some autistic girls wear pink and play with dolls, but their brain and thought processes tend to be more pragmatic, logical and less socially intuitive than typically expected of a neurotypical female."

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"In Chapter 1, we discussed the work of Baron-Cohen, Ingudomnukul, Bejerot, Auyeung and colleagues, who all suggest that testosterone plays a part in the development and profile of autism. This leads to the conclusion (by some) that women on the autism spectrum present a less feminized profile. This has typically been interpreted as meaning that autistic girls are more masculinized. As previously discussed, Bejerot et al. (2012) suggest that the profile may simply be more androgynous (i.e. non-gender-specific) as opposed to specifically masculine."

— Women and Girls on the Autism Spectrum: Understanding Life Experiences from Early Childhood to Old Age (Second Edition), Sarah Hendrickx

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Once you get on stage, everything is right. I feel the most beautiful, complete, fulfilled. I think that's why, in the case of noncompromising career women, parts of our personal lives don't work out. One person can't give you the feeling that thousands of people give you.

— Leontyne Price

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Cassandra knew what he was saying. She said, ‘Listen, I don’t know much about this. But so few things happen to us that we have to undergo. Most of the time we’re double, we can stand outside and see an event – hope, fear, anticipate, judge. And then something happens where – where we have no room for thought or imagining – where what happens is real and all that is real. We talk a lot about living fully, but the last thing we want to do is live anything through. We think that sort of single-minded grief is insanity, but it’s only an acknowledgement of a factual truth. An intolerable truth.’

— "The Game" by A. S. Byatt

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‘I’ve had an awful time, Cass. I haven’t the slightest idea – really I haven’t – what I really feel about him. He’s so very odd. I don’t understand what he’s saying half the time. Or why he – Sometimes so desperate and insistent. Sometimes just standoffish and kind. I’ve never felt so uncertain in my life. And begging, and begging.… And then, just when you give in, just going off —’

Her voice rose. ‘Cass, you’ve got to listen, you’re the only person I know, you’re the only one who’d understand.’

‘Clearly I wouldn’t understand. That seems to me all that’s certain.’

‘No, you must let me talk, this time. We’ve got to clear this up. We’ve got to go on knowing each other all our lives. Cass, being friends with you is more important in the long run than anything Simon can ever mean to me.’

‘There is no good to be done by talking.’

‘Oh, there is, there is. Cassandra, I know – with Simon – you think I – only because you —’

‘Yes,’ said Cassandra. She stood with secateurs dangling and held her face together.

‘But you know that’s unjust. What about him, then? What about him? Isn’t he someone, doesn’t he want things and do things, didn’t he start it? I told him I couldn’t because of you. If only you hadn’t – But he does exist, I can’t just not notice him.’

Cassandra winced.

‘Why must everything always be my fault?’ Because it was, Cassandra had thought. She had thought, too, that Julia needed to tell her the details because whatever they had done was not real or finished until she had been made to be the audience, fully informed. As though they were only acting out her fate, her story; their love, or whatever it was, was simply a function of her own fear. Well, it should stay that way; she would not lose what power she had by becoming involved as an actor, or suffering with Julia. That would be the final constriction, the final limitation. She would keep what freedom detachment, or ignorance, provided.

‘You must let me tell you.’

‘When you’ve learned you can’t have things both ways,’ said Cassandra, ‘you’ll begin to grow up. I don’t want to know.’

She walked round her sister, head up, her arms full of branches and flowers. Behind her she heard Julia running, stumbling, in the other direction. She thought that Julia knew where she was vulnerable but could never really believe it, and so was compelled to go on probing. This was only partly Julia’s fault. She felt – as she often felt when she had just parted from Julia – a kind of useless, accepting affection; an inactive understanding.

And then she had been hurt by the phrase ‘just when you give in’. She had, perhaps, after all, allowed herself to be told too much.

— "The Game" by A. S. Byatt