A Store-House Long

[polyanthea]

The common prejudice that love is as common as “romance” may be due to the fact that we all learned about it first through poetry. But the poets fool us; they are the only ones to whom love is not only a crucial, but an indispensable experience, which entitles them to mistake it for a universal one.

-Arendt, The Human Condition

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I like a lot of things about Arendt but my favorite has to be her rhetorically complex insults; here she puts down the poets for their parochialism:

[polyanthea]

I have made it my whole business to frame my life: this has been my trade and my work; I am less a writer of books than anything else. I have coveted understanding for the service of my present and real conveniences, and not to lay up a stock for my posterity. He who has anything of value in him,...

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“There are sacred places where one can simply not hold a dinner,” said Salvatore Settis, an expert in cultural heritage law and a former director of the J. Paul Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles. “Not even for four million euros” ($5.4 million).

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Thus much I should perhaps have said though I were sure I should have spoken only to trees and stones; and had none to cry to, but with the Prophet, O earth, earth earth! to tell the very soil it self, what her perverse inhabitants are dead to.

-Milton, The Readie and Easie Way

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... let them but hear the insolencies, the menaces, the insultings of our newly animated common enemies crept lately out of thir holes, thir hell, I might say, by the language of thir infernal pamphlets, the spue of every drunkard, every ribald ... these new fanatics of not the preaching but the sweating-tub, inspir'd with nothing holier than the Venereal pox ...

-Milton, The Readie and Easie Way

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Another way will be, to wel-qualifie and refine elections: not committing all to the noise and shouting of a rude multitude, but permitting only those of them who are rightly qualifi'd, to nominat as many as they will; and out of that number others of a better breeding, to chuse a less number more judiciously, till after a third or fourth sifting and refining of exactest choice, they only be left chosen who are the due number, and seem by most voices the worthiest. To make the people fittest to chuse, and the chosen fittest to govern, will be to mend our corrupt and faulty education...

-Milton, The Readie and Easie Way

[provisionally]

I know not therefor what should be peculiar in England to make successive Parlaments thought safest, or convenient here more then in other nations, unless it be the fickl'ness which is attributed to us as we are Ilanders: but good education and acquisit wisdom ought to correct the fluxible fault, if any such be, of our watry situation.

-Milton, The Readie and Easie Way

[provisionally]

In publishing this Essay of my Poeme, there is this great disadvantage against me; that it commeth out at this time, when Verses are wholly deduc't to Chambers, and nothing esteem'd in this lunatique Age, but what is kept in Cabinets, and must only passe by Transcription

-Michael Drayton, Poly-olbion

[provisionally]

Les allechementz de Venus, la gueule & les ocieuses plumes ont chassé d’entre les hommes tout desir d’immortalité; mais encores est ce chose plus indigne, que ceux qui d’ignorance & toutes especes de vices font leur plus grande gloire, se moquent de ceux qui en tant louable labeur poëtique employent les heures que les autres consument aux jeuz, aux baings, aux banquez, & autres telz menuz plaisirs.

-Du Bellay, La Deffence et Illustration de la langue francoyse

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There is no book so bad that some good cannot be gotten from it.

-Pliny

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Friends of the commonplace and homespun sort, my open-hearted Pieter, have their idea of relationship, like their whole lives, attached to material things; and if ever they have to face a separation, they favor a frequent exchange of rings, knives, caps and other tokens of the kind, for fear that their affection may cool when intercourse is interrupted .... But you and I, whose idea of friendship rests wholly on a meeting of minds and the enjoyment of studies in common, might well greet one another from time to time with presents for the mind and keepsakes of a literary description .... Our aim would be that any loss due to separation in the actual enjoyment of our friendship should be made good, not without interest, by tokens of this literary kind. And so I send a present -- no common present, for you are no common friend, but many jewels in one small book.

-Erasmus to Peter Gilles

[provisionally]

Christ gives no full comments or continu’d discourses, but scatters the heavnly grain of his doctrin like pearle heer and there, which requires a skilful and laborious gatherer; who must compare the words he finds, with other precepts.

-Milton, Doctrine & Discipline of Divorce

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Base and vulgar spirits hover still about home. Those are most Noble and Divine that imitate the Heavens and Joy in Motion.

-Botero, Le Relazioni universali

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... there are a great many things which cannot withstand the implacable, bright light of the constant presence of others on the public scene; there, only what is considered to be relevant, worthy of being seen or heard, can be tolerated, so that the irrele­vant becomes automatically a private matter. This, to be sure, does not mean that private concerns are generally irrelevant; on the contrary, we shall see that there are very relevant matters which can survive only in the realm of the private. For instance, love, in distinction from friendship, is killed, or rather extinguished, the moment it is displayed in public. ("Never seek to tell thy love / Love that never told can be.") Because of its in­herent wordlessness, love can only become false and perverted when it is used for political purposes such as the change or sal­vation of the world.

-Arendt, The Human Condition

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...aussi bien que le Lymacon, qui va tastant le chemin avec ses cornes, & s'il trouve empeschement, les retire soudain a soy.

-Colonna, Songe de Poliphile

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