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One more and I'm done. The rest of y'all have to get to work.
I had thought of Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, which is only a single paragraph and a masterpiece of style and brevity. But I think I'd rather contribute another, less well-known masterpiece.
Executive Mansion, Washington, November 21, 1864
Mrs. Bixby, Boston, Massachusetts:
Dear Madam: I have been shown in the files of the War Department a statement of the Adjutant-General of Massachusetts that you are the mother of five sons who have died gloriously on the field of battle. I feel how weak and fruitless must be any words of mine which should attempt to beguile you from the grief of a loss so overwhelming. But I cannot refrain from tendering to you the consolation that may be found in the thanks of the Republic they died to save. I pray that our Heavenly Father may assuage the anguish of your bereavement, and leave you only the cherished memory of the loved and lost, and the solemn pride that must be yours to have laid so costly a sacrifice upon the altar of freedom.
Yours very sincerely and respectfully,
Abraham Lincoln
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Pooh-Bah
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Byb, you are exactly right. I sat down with book in front of me and there you were already! A real coincidence though is that I started to look at the Alexandria Quartet last night as I thought there was something of Lawrence Durrell's itching at me. Couldn't find it - it may have been in the Avignon series.
I feel the way you do about The Nine Tailors - the best of the best.
dxb
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This from Common Sense, Thomas Paine: SOME writers have so confounded society with government, as to leave little or no distinction between them; whereas they are not only different, but have different origins. Society is produced by our wants, and government by our wickedness; the former promotes our happiness positively by uniting our affections, the latter negatively by restraining our vices. The one encourages intercourse, the other creates distinctions. The first is a patron, the last a punisher.
Society in every state is a blessing, but government even in its best state is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one; for when we suffer, or are exposed to the same miseries by a government, which we might expect in a country without government, our calamity is heightened by reflecting that we furnish the means by which we suffer! Government, like dress, is the badge of lost innocence; the palaces of kings are built on the ruins of the bowers of paradise. For were the impulses of conscience clear, uniform, and irresistibly obeyed, man would need no other lawgiver; but that not being the case, he finds it necessary to surrender up a part of his property to furnish means for the protection of the rest; and this he is induced to do by the same prudence which in every other case advises him out of two evils to choose the least. Wherefore, security being the true design and end of government, it unanswerably follows that whatever form thereof appears most likely to ensure it to us, with the least expense and greatest benefit, is preferable to all others. For the full text click here: http://earlyamerica.com/earlyamerica/milestones/commonsense/text.htmlThe Only WO'N!
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Well, dxb, now you have a challenge -- give us another piece from The Nine Tailors. There's certainly more than one good paragraph in it. I wait with much interest to see what you will choose.
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Pooh-Bah
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Have to give me a little time Byb. Finding the book on the table, a friend of my wife's has borrowed it! At least she showed good taste.
Meanwhile, here's another helping of Lawrence Durrell:
“Swerving down those long dusty roads among the olive groves, down the shivering galleries of green leaf I came, diving from penumbra to penumbra of shadow, feeling that icy contrast of sunblaze and darkness under the ruffling planes, plunging like a river trout in rapids from one pool of shadows to the next, the shadows almost icy in comparison with the outer sunshine and hard metalled blue sky. So to come at last upon Valence where the shift of accent begins: the cuisine veers from cream to olive oil and spices in the more austere dietary of the south, with the first olives and mulberries and the tragic splash of flowering Judas, the brilliant violet brushstroke of unique Judas. Here, like the signature at the end of a score, the steady orchestral drizzle of cicadas: such strange sybilline music and such an exceptional biography, so scant of living time, with so long underground in the dark earth before rising into the light! Anisette everywhere declared itself as the ideal accompaniment for the evening meditations of the players of boules; no village square in summer was without the clickety-click of the little steel balls, no shady village without its boulistes ……”
Lawrence Durrell
“Caesar’s Vast Ghost – Aspects of Provence”
1990
I am fond of this description because on first reading it there was an instant feeling of recognition and nostalgic longing – back came the memory of the light and shade, the burnt umber colours, the tiny villages, the cicadas, the smells…. Even the comparison with the gliding trout brought back an image from a French film; probably it was “Un homme et une femme”. In the film the man makes a car journey by night, I think, unfortunately, the reverse way round, to Paris from the midi. Much of it is shot from above through trees etc and there is exactly that sense of sliding in and out of sight, moving purposefully onward. (Both man and trout driven by the same instinct, now I think of it).
A personal view, as I have no literary qualifications (maybe pretensions!). It strikes me that Durrell does not usually choose to use the spareness of writing, using the exact minimum of words needed to convey images and emotions, of some of the other writers that grace this thread. In his writing, though not so noticeable in the sample above, he frequently spends words prodigiously, seemingly for the love of them, the feel and taste of them in the mind and the mouth. Byb's example earlier in the thread shows some of this. Is this the influence of Provence upon his writing? I love it.
dxb
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Max:
With all due respect: No. One person had a unique opportunity to keep the War for American Independence from happening, and that was our old friend George 3. He personally rejected petitions sent to him from the colonies, maintaining that he was the king and they were his subjects and he would decide what was best for them. His imperial nature prevented any hope of compromise and so polarized his ministers versus the colonists that there was no hope of a reconciliation.
One of the best treatments of this is actually in a relatively new roman a clef by Jeff Shaara called RISE TO REBELLION. I recommend it highly. the approach of the two Shaaras to history is vastly entertaining and an excellent teaching method.
TEd
TEd
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RISE TO REBELLION
Then there's The Two Georges : The Novel of an Alternate America by Richard Dreyfuss and Harry Turtledove. It takes place in an America many years after George Washington and George Ay-yi-yi came to an agreement about the colonists gripes and the Rebellion never happened.
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Max, as I recall what I have read about Geo III and his condtion, whatever it was, he was quite sane at the time of the American Revolution and for some time after. It was not until later, that he first had a spell and was found incompetent. He recovered from that, and I think it was not until after the turn of the century that he went permanently bonkers, necessitating the Regency. So TEd's point is very well taken (in fact, I was going to post something like it myself). At the crucial period, before 1776, Geo was quite sane. Part of his problem was his upbringing. I read somewhere that his mother was always telling him, "Georgie, be a man!" This was one reason why he was so intractable with the colonists. And he had a sense of his position in history and had no intention of presiding over the start of the dissolution of the Empire.
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