Chrestomathy

"Our writings are as so many dishes, our readers guests, our books like beauty, that which one admires another rejects; so are we approved as men's fancies are inclined. Pro captu lectoris habent sua fata libelli." -Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy

[crestomathy]

The Stones of Florence, Mary McCarthy

[crestomathy]

Streetcar Suburbs: The Process of Growth in Boston 1870-1900, Sam B. Warner, Jr. 

Atheneum, New York, 1974

Paperback

"No special regulatory body was needed to tell most builders what was appropriate; the other houses in the area presented them with models. Thus, in the years between substantial shifts in transportation or architectural style neighborhoods continued in uniform patterns. 

Page 76. 

[crestomathy]

Report of the President's Commision on the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy

United States Government Printing Office, Washington, 1964 

Hardcover

    "Oswald apparently continued to have personal difficulties while he was in Minsk. Although Marina Oswald told the Commission that her husband had good personal relationships in the Soviet Union, Katherine Ford, one of the members of the Russian Community in Dallas with which the Oswalds became acquainted upon their arrival in the United States, stated that Mrs. Oswald told everybody in Russia 'hated him.' Jeanne De Mohrenschildt, another member of that group, said that Oswald told her that he had returned because 'I didn't find what I was looking for.' George De Mohrenschildt thought that Oswald must have become disgusted with life in the Soviet Union as the novelty of the presence of an American wore off and he began to be less the center of attention."

    Page 394

[crestomathy]

Feudalism, F.L. Ganshof

Harper Torchbooks, 1964, New York

Paperback

    "In the first half of the eleventh century there was at least one man alive who was well acquainted with feudal relations in practice and whose intellectual development rendered him capable of expressing them in abstract terms. Bishop Fulbert of Chartres gives a remarkable definition of the obligations created by the contract of vassalage in a letter addressed to Duke William V of Aquitaine in 1020. It is so important that it is worth wile reproducing the passage in its entirety. 'He who swears fealty to his lord should always have these six words present to his memory: "safe and sound", sure, honest, useful, easy, possible. Safe and sound, because he must cause no injury to the body of his lord. Sure, because he must not injure his lord by giving up his secrets or his castles, which are the guarantees of his security. Honest, because he must do nothing to injure the rights of justice of his lord or such other prerogatives as belong to his well-being. Useful because he must do no wrong to the possessions of his lord. Easy and possible, because he must not make difficult for his lord anything which the latter may wish to do, and because he must not make impossible to his lord that which the lord might otherwise accomplish. It is only right that that the vassal should abstain from injuring his lord in any of these ways. But it is not because of such abstention that he deserves to hold his fief. It is not sufficient to abstain from doing wrong, it is necessary to do right. It is therefore necessary in the six matters aforesaid, the vassal shall faithfully give to his lord his counsel and support; if he wishes to appear worthy of his benefice and carry out faithfully the fealty which he has sworn. The lord must also in all things do similarly to the vassal who has sworn fealty to him. If he fails to do this, he will be rightly accused of bad faith, just as a vassal who will have been discovered to have been lacking in his duties, whether by positive action or simply by consent, is guilty of perfidy and perjury.'"

    Page 83

[crestomathy]

Keats, Fred Inglis

Arco Publishing, 1969, New York

Paperback

    On "To Autumn":

"This poem is, for me, the only one Keats wrote about which one is tempted to make no reservations at all. It is as nearly perfect as such writing can be; it is at any rate as great and as perfect as the best of Shakespeare's sonnets or of George Herbert's The Temple or any other of the seventeenth-century masters. The subject is important in itself, and implies a great deal more about human experience than at first appears; the writing is elegant, rich, serene, and grave in all its details, it is profound and civilized. Such a poem is an enduring nourishment to one's humanity; it alters one's vision of the world and it grafts itself imperceptibly into the spirit and the memory."

Page 141.

[crestomathy]

Objects for a Fog Death, Julie Doxsee

Black Ocean, Boston, 2010

Paperback

    "Future

    Adolescent buildings disappear

& the way we be in a place is 

    indistinguishable from the

way we be smoking at the edge

    real cigarettes on a fake

landing, fake smoke over 

    a solid liphold slipping."

    Page 35

[crestomathy]

Bradley's Arnold: Latin Prose Composition, Edited and Revised with an Appendix on Continuous Prose Composition by Sir James Mountford, M.A., D. Litt., Vice-Chancellor of the University of Liverpool

Longman, New York, 1978

Paperback, rebound

    "Thus in the fable: 'The vulture invited the little birds to a feast which he was going to give them,' quod illīs daturus erat would mean he really was going to give them the feast and the narrator vouched for the fact; but quod illīs datūrus esset would mean that the vulture only said he was going to do so, and the writer does not vouch for the truth of the statement."

Page 244

[crestomathy]

The Atomic Age Opens, Gen. Editor, Donald Porter Geddes

Pocket Books, Inc., Aug. 1945

Paperback

    "It was energy that erupted at Hiroshima, and energy more concentrated than had ever been known on earth before. But it was not pure, disembodied energy. When it struck buildings down it was the energy of tremendous air pressure. When it burned everything in reach, it was the energy [of] enormous heat at  a temperature of many  thousands of degrees. But a few seconds earlier that energy had been concentrated and quiet within a small bomb." 

Page 67

[crestomathy]

New and Collected Poems 1917-1976, Archibald MacLeish

Houghton Mifflin Company, Sentry Edition, 1976

Paperback

    "Words to Be Spoken"

For Baoth Wiborg son of Gerald and Sara Murphy who died in New England in his sixteenth year and a tree was planted there

    O shallow ground

That over ledges

Shoulders the gentle year,

    Tender O shallow

Ground your grass is

Sisterly touching us:

    Your trees are still:

They stand at our side in the

Night lantern.

    Sister O shallow

Ground you inherit

Death as we do.

    Your year also--

The young face,

The voice--vanishes.

    Sister O shallow

Ground

   let the silence of

Green be between us

And the green sound. 

    Page 315

[crestomathy]

The Pillow Book of Sei Shōnagon 

Penguin Classics, Transl. Ivan Morris, 1967, Reprinted 1984

Paperback

    "62. Annoying Things 

One has sent someone a poem (or a reply to a poem) and, after the messenger has left, thinks of a couple of words that  ought to be changed. 

One has sewn something in a hurry. The task seems finished, but on pulling out the needle one discovers that one forgot to knot the end of the thread. It is also very  annoying to find that one has sewn something back to front."

Page 114

[crestomathy]

Yugoslavia, Jean-Marie Domenach and Alain Pontault

Vista Books, London, 1962 

Paperback

    "Yugoslavia is a heavy burden for the Yugoslavs to carry. They thought to escape it for a moment, in the mercilessly organized beehives of heavy industry. But then they reconquered their independence, and began the reconquest of themselves at the same time. Like children exploring the family property, the poets awakened dormant images and dreams, and the sculptors rediscovered the Byzantine grace to soften the powerful modern brutality. The East and the West are meeting again in this country of two worlds, on this Greek and Latin foundation."

  Page 170.