Ξεκινήστε με τους Έλληνες, they say. Below are a hundred extracts alluding to Greek mythology, history, etc. (Some non-fiction. No straightfoward translations of Greek literature, but several modified retellings, dramatic monologues, etc.)

This quiz is trickier than usual, so simply identifying an author will get the cute anime girl. That said, people are welcome to name works and/or point out the Hellenic allusions when they’re non-obvious.

Translations marked [*]. Hints on request.


The authors:

Douglas Adams, Louisa May Alcott, Dante Alighieri, Poul Anderson, Ludovico Ariosto, Matthew Arnold, Isaac Asimov, W. H. Auden

Francis Bacon, Ambrose Bierce, J. L. Borges, Charlotte Bronte, Emily Bronte, Thomas Browne, Lord Byron

Albert Camus, Thomas Carlyle, Constantine Cavafy, Miguel Cervantes, Geoffrey Chaucer, John Cheever, G. K. Chesterton, John Crowley

Charles Dickens, Isak Dinesen, Hilda Doolittle, Arthur Conan Doyle, Alexandre Dumas, Lord Dunsany

George Eliot, T. S. Eliot

Sheridan Le Fanu, William Faulkner, Henry Fielding, F. Scott Fitzgerald, James Frazer, Sigmund Freud

Neil Gaiman, J. W. von Goethe, William Golding, William Goyen, Kenneth Grahame, Robert Graves, Thom Gunn

Thomas Hardy, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Seamus Heaney, G. F. Hegel, O. Henry, Zbigniew Herbert, Ted Hughes, Victor Hugo, Aldous Huxley

Robinson Jeffers, Samuel Johnson, Ben Jonson, James Joyce, Ernst Junger

Nikos Kazantzakis, John Keats

D. H. Lawrence, C. S. Lewis, Jack London, H. W. Longfellow, H. P. Lovecraft

Thomas Mann, Christopher Marlowe, Herman Melville, John Milton

Friedrich Nietzsche

Ovid

Sylvia Plath, Edgar Allan Poe, Ezra Pound, Terry Pratchett, Marcel Proust, Thomas Pynchon

Thomas De Quincey

François Rabelais, Ayn Rand

Saki, Arthur Schopenhauer, Walter Scott, William Shakespeare, George Bernard Shaw, P. B. Shelley, R. B. Sheridan, Laurence Sterne, Wallace Stevens, Jonathan Swift, Algernon Charles Swinburne

Alfred Lord Tennyson, W. M. Thackeray, James Thurber, Leo Tolstoy

John Updike

Evelyn Waugh, Oscar Wilde, P. G. Wodehouse

W. B. Yeats

1)
BIRTH, n. The first and direst of all disasters. As to the nature of it there appears to be no uniformity. Castor and Pollux were born from the egg. Pallas came out of a skull. Galatea was once a block of stone. Peresilis, who wrote in the tenth century, avers that he grew up out of the ground where a priest had spilled holy water. It is known that Arimaxus was derived from a hole in the earth, made by a stroke of lightning. Leucomedon was the son of a cavern in Mount Aetna, and I have myself seen a man come out of a wine cellar.


2)
When you start on your journey to Ithaca,
then pray that the road is long,
full of adventure, full of knowledge.
Do not fear the Lestrygonians
and the Cyclops and the angry Poseidon.
You will never meet such as these on your path,
if your thoughts remain lofty, if a fine
emotion touches your body and your spirit.

[*]


3)
Most noble and illustrious drinkers, and you thrice precious pockified blades (for to you, and none else, do I dedicate my writings), Alcibiades, in that dialogue of Plato’s, which is entitled The Banquet, whilst he was setting forth the praises of his schoolmaster Socrates (without all question the prince of philosophers), amongst other discourses to that purpose, said that he resembled the Silenes.

[*]


4)
It lies not in our power to love or hate,
For will in us is overruled by fate.
When two are stripped, long ere the course begin
We wish that one should lose, the other win.
And one especially do we affect
Of two gold ingots like in each respect.
The reason no man knows; let it suffice
What we behold is censured by our eyes.
Where both deliberate, the love is slight:
Who ever loved, that loved not at first sight?


5)
There is surely no greater wisdom than well to time the beginnings and onsets of things. Dangers are no more light, if they once seem light; and more dangers have deceived men than forced them. Nay, it were better to meet some dangers half-way, though they come nothing near, than to keep too long a watch upon their approaches; for if a man watch too long, it is odds he will fall asleep. On the other side, to be deceived with too long shadows (as some have been when the moon was low and shone on their enemies’ back), and so to shoot off before the time, or to teach dangers to come on, by over-early buckling towards them, is another extreme. The ripeness or unripeness of the occasion (as we said) must ever be well weighed: and generally it is good to commit the beginnings of all great actions to Argus with his hundred eyes, and the ends to Briareus with his hundred hands, first to watch, and then to speed. For the helmet of Pluto, which maketh the politic man go invisible, is secrecy in the counsel and celerity in the execution. For when things are once come to the execution, there is no secrecy comparable to celerity — like the motion of a bullet in the air, which flieth so swift as it outruns the eye.

6)
“That boy is a perfect cyclops, isn’t he?” said Amy one day, as Laurie clattered by on horseback, with a flourish of his whip as he passed.

“How dare you say so, when he’s got both his eyes? And very handsome ones they are, too,” cried Jo, who resented any slighting remarks about her friend.

“I didn’t say anything about his eyes, and I don’t see why you need fire up when I admire his riding.”

“Oh, my goodness! That little goose means a centaur, and she called him a Cyclops,” exclaimed Jo, with a burst of laughter.


7)
There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy. All the rest – whether or not the world has three dimensions, whether the mind has nine or twelve categories – comes afterwards.

[*]


8)
LXIX
With heavy spears, the growth of forest hoar,
Saplings rough-hewn, those masters of the just,
Upon the perilous bridge encountering sore,
Exchange, on either side, no gentle thrust.
Nor much their mighty strength or manege-lore
Avails the steeds; for, prostrate in the dust,
Crumbles each knight and charger in mid-course;
Whelmed in one fate, the rider and his horse.

LXX
When either steed would nimbly spring from ground,
As the spur galled and gored his bleeding flank,
He on that little bridge no footing found;
For all too narrow was the scanty plank.
Hence both fall headlong, and the deafening sound
Re-echo vaulted skies and grassy bank.
So rang our stream, when from the heavenly sphere
Was hurled the sun’s ill-fated charioteer.

[*]


9)
Every nine years, nine men come into the house so that I can free them from all evil. I hear their footsteps or their voices far away in the galleries of stone, and I run joyously to find them. The ceremony lasts but a few minutes. One after another, they fall, without my ever having to bloody my hands.

[*]


10)
“ . . . The candy stores are the devil’s distilleries. If you assist in the distribution of these insidious confections you assist in the destruction of the bodies and souls of your fellow-beings, and in the filling of our jails, asylums and almshouses. Think, girl, ere you touch the money for which brandy balls are sold.”

“Dear me,” said Elsie, bewildered. “I didn’t know there was rum in brandy balls. But I must live by some means. What shall I do?”

“Decline the position,” said the lady, “and come with me. I will tell you what to do.”

After Elsie had told the confectioner that she had changed her mind about the cashiership she put on her coat and followed the lady to the sidewalk, where awaited an elegant victoria.

“Seek some other work,” said the black-and-steel lady, “and assist in crushing the hydra-headed demon rum.” And she got into the victoria and drove away.

11)
The gallant Perseus, a son of Jupiter, was the first whaleman; and to the eternal honor of our calling be it said, that the first whale attacked by our brotherhood was not killed with any sordid intent. Those were the knightly days of our profession, when we only bore arms to succor the distressed, and not to fill men’s lamp-feeders. Every one knows the fine story of Perseus and Andromeda; how the lovely Andromeda, the daughter of a king, was tied to a rock on the sea-coast, and as Leviathan was in the very act of carrying her off, Perseus, the prince of whalemen, intrepidly advancing, harpooned the monster, and delivered and married the maid. It was an admirable artistic exploit, rarely achieved by the best harpooneers of the present day; inasmuch as this Leviathan was slain at the very first dart.


12)
. . . Truly men hate the truth; they’d liefer
Meet a tiger on the road.
Therefore the poets honey their truth with lying; but religion-
Venders and political men
Pour from the barrel, new lies on the old, and are praised for kindly
Wisdom. Poor bitch, be wise.


13)
. . . What is it, then, that inhibits him in accomplishing the task which his father’s ghost has laid upon him? Here the explanation offers itself that it is the peculiar nature of this task. Hamlet is able to do anything but take vengeance upon the man who did away with his father and has taken his father’s place with his mother — the man who shows him in realization the repressed desires of his own childhood.

[*]


14)
Water cutting under the keel,
Sea-break from stern forrards,
wake running off from the bow,

And where was gunwale, there now was vine-trunk,
And tenthril where cordage had been,
grape-leaves on the rowlocks,

Heavy vine on the oarshafts,
And, out of nothing, a breathing,
hot breath on my ankles,

Beasts like shadows in glass,
a furred tail upon nothingness.

Lynx-purr, and heathery smell of beasts
where tar smell had been,

Sniff and pad-foot of beasts,
eye-glitter out of black air.


15)
. . . Now if, as a rare exception, we come across a man who possesses a considerable income, but uses only a little of it for himself, and gives all the rest to persons in distress, whilst he himself forgoes many pleasures and comforts, and we try to make clear to ourselves the action of this man, we shall find, quite apart from the dogmas by which he himself will make his action intelligible to his faculty of reason, the simplest general expression and the essential character of his way of acting to be that he *makes less distinction than is usually made between himself and others*. [...] He is free from the perversity with which the will-to-live, failing to recognize itself, here in one individual enjoys fleeting and delusive pleasures, and there in another individual suffers and starves in return for these. Thus this will inflicts misery and endures misery, not knowing that, like Thyestes, it is eagerly devouring its own flesh.

[*]

16)
“How much?” said the people of the city.

“Sixteen sacks of gold.”

“We’d only budgeted for eight.”

“Take it or leave it.”

“Wait here.”

The people of the city went off into a huddle and returned half an hour later.

“Sixteen sacks is all we’ve got left,” they pleaded, “times are hard. You must leave us with something.”


17)
Dr. Bisch relates a lot of conflicts and struggles that take place between the Hercules of the Conscious and the Augean Stables of the Unconscious (that is my own colourful, if somewhat laboured, metaphor and I don’t want to see any of the other boys swiping it). ‘I myself,’ writes Dr. Bisch, ‘forgot the number of a hospital where I was to deliver a lecture when I was about to apologise for my delay. I had talked to that particular hospital perhaps a hundred times before. This was the first time, however, that I was consciously trying to do what unconsciously I did not want to do.’ If you want unconsciously as well as consciously to call a hospital one hundred times out of one hundred and one, I say your conscious and unconscious are on pretty friendly terms. I say you are doing fine.


18)
He who lights his lantern to seek out perfect men should take note of this sign: they are those who always act for the sake of the good and in doing so always attain to the beautiful without giving thought to it.

[*]


19)
Will you go hunt, my lord?

What, Curio?

The hart.

Why, so I do, the noblest that I have.
O, when mine eyes did see Olivia first,
Methought she purg’d the air of pestilence!
That instant was I turn’d into a hart,
And my desires, like fell and cruel hounds,
E’er since pursue me.


20)
It was wonderful, the vast variety of forms into which she threw her intellect, with no continuity, indeed, but darting up and dancing, always in a state of preternatural activity, — soon sinking down, as if exhausted by so rapid and feverish a tide of life, — and succeeded by other shapes of a similar wild energy. It was like nothing so much as the phantasmagoric play of the northern lights. In the mere exercise of the fancy, however, and the sportiveness of a growing mind, there might be little more than was observable in other children of bright faculties; except as Pearl, in the dearth of human playmates, was thrown more upon the visionary throng which she created. The singularity lay in the hostile feelings with which the child regarded all these offspring of her own heart and mind. She never created a friend, but seemed always to be sowing broadcast the dragon’s teeth, whence sprung a harvest of armed enemies, against whom she rushed to battle. It was inexpressibly sad — then what depth of sorrow to a mother, who felt in her own heart the cause! — to observe, in one so young, this constant recognition of an adverse world, and so fierce a training of the energies that were to make good her cause, in the contest that must ensue.

21)
“When we get back,” said Glod, “we ought to have a nice holiday somewhere.”

“Dat’s right,” said Cliff. “If we get out of dis alive, I’m going to put my rock kit on my back and take a long walk, and der first time someone says to me ‘what are dem things on your back?’ dat’s where I’m gonna settle down.”


22)
“ . . . her rank must be at least that of a princess, since she is my queen and lady, and her beauty superhuman, since all the impossible and fanciful attributes of beauty which the poets apply to their ladies are verified in her; for her hairs are gold, her forehead Elysian fields, her eyebrows rainbows, her eyes suns, her cheeks roses, her lips coral, her teeth pearls, her neck alabaster, her bosom marble, her hands ivory, her fairness snow, and what modesty conceals from sight such, I think and imagine, as rational reflection can only extol, not compare.”

[*]


23)
I have just examined what remains of my journal for that year – one of those journals so soon to perish in the holocaust – and find the date unusually full. There’s nothing about the view but much about the glamour of young women, Nimue and the Shakespearian mirages, Perdita, Miranda. There’s an attempt at describing Mary Lou but it is scribbled out and the Wilfred Barclay of that date writes about Helen of Troy! He comments on the way in which Homer gets his story across by describing not the woman but her effect on others. The old men on the wall watch her pass and say it is small wonder such a woman caused so much trouble, nevertheless let her go home before we have even more trouble! Or some such words. I’ve only read Homer in translations but that’s what I remember.


24)
How this tart fable instructs
And mocks! Here’s the parody of that moral mousetrap
Set in the proverbs stitched on samplers
Approving chased girls who get them to a tree
And put on bark’s nun-black
Habit which deflects

All amorous arrows.


25)
. . . so she was right about the father too, since if he hadn’t made General Lee and Jeff Davis mad he wouldn’t have had to nail himself up and die and if he hadn’t died he wouldn’t have left her an orphan and a pauper and so situated, left susceptible to a situation where she could receive this mortal affront: and right about the brother-in-law because if he hadn’t been a demon his children wouldn’t have needed protection from him and she wouldn’t have had to go out there and be betrayed by the old meat and find instead of a widowed Agamemnon to her Cassandra an ancient stiff-jointed Pyramus to her eager though untried Thisbe who could approach her in this unbidden April’s compounded demonry and suggest that they breed together for test and sample and if it was a boy they would marry; would not have had to be blown back to town on the initial blast of that horror and outrage to eat of gall and wormwood stolen through paling fences at dawn.

26)
“It is strange,” said Jackie Newhouse, “for as I eat it, it gets hotter and hotter in my mouth and in my stomach.”

“Yup. It’ll do that. It’s best to prepare for it ahead of time,” said Zebediah T. Crawcrustle. “Eat coals and flames and lightning bugs to get used to it. Otherwise it can be a trifle hard on the system.”


27)
When he endured had a year or two
This cruel torment, and this pain and woe,
At Thebes, in his country, as I said,
Upon a night in sleep as he him laid,
Him thought how that the winged god Mercury
Before him stood, and bade him to be merry.
His sleepy yard in hand he bare upright;
A hat he wore upon his hairs bright.
Arrayed was this god (as he took keep)
As he was when that Argus took his sleep;
And said him thus: “To Athens shalt thou wend;
There is thee shapen of thy woe an end.”


28)
Vholes, sitting with his arms on the desk, quietly bringing the tips of his five right fingers to meet the tips of his five left fingers, and quietly separating them again, and fixedly and slowly looking at his client, replies, “A good deal is doing, sir. We have put our shoulders to the wheel, Mr. Carstone, and the wheel is going round.”

“Yes, with Ixion on it. How am I to get through the next four or five accursed months?” exclaims the young man, rising from his chair and walking about the room.

“Mr. C.,” returns Vholes, following him close with his eyes wherever he goes, “your spirits are hasty, and I am sorry for it on your account. Excuse me if I recommend you not to chafe so much, not to be so impetuous, not to wear yourself out so. You should have more patience. You should sustain yourself better.”


29)
’Tis very certain the desire of life
Prolongs it: this is obvious to physicians,
When patients, neither plagued with friends nor wife,
Survive through very desperate conditions,
Because they still can hope, nor shines the knife
Nor shears of Atropos before their visions:
Despair of all recovery spoils longevity,
And makes men’s miseries of alarming brevity.


30)
Overturned carts broke the uniformity of the slope; an immense dray was spread out there crossways, its axle pointing heavenward, and seemed a scar on that tumultuous façade; an omnibus hoisted gayly, by main force, to the very summit of the heap, as though the architects of this bit of savagery had wished to add a touch of the street urchin humor to their terror, presented its horseless, unharnessed pole to no one knows what horses of the air. This gigantic heap, the alluvium of the revolt, figured to the mind an Ossa on Pelion of all revolutions; ’93 on ’89, the 9th of Thermidor on the 10th of August, the 18th of Brumaire on the 11th of January, Vendemiaire on Prairial, 1848 on 1830. The situation deserved the trouble and this barricade was worthy to figure on the very spot whence the Bastille had disappeared. If the ocean made dikes, it is thus that it would build.

[*]

31)
My mother wanted me. She knew me when she was carrying me under her heart. She knew me better than I will ever get to know myself, even if I live to be a hundred. She wanted me, no matter how I would develop physically, mentally, ethically; she wanted me as I am. Had I been born an idiot, a cripple, a murderer, she would have loved me even more fervently. Her tears are worth more than the father’s pride when he sees his son crossing the threshold in a wreath of laurels.

My father hounded me when my life was frailest. This may be our most exquisite time. My mother concealed me from him in her womb, like Rhea hiding Zeus in the grotto of Ida to shield him from the clutches of a voracious Chronus. Those are monstrous images; they make me shudder — conversations between matter and time. They lie as erratic boulders, uninterpreted, beneath the surveyed land.

[*]


32)
. . . . . . Come, my friends,
’Tis not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
the sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.


33)
She made beauty all round her. When she trod on mud, the mud was beautiful; when she ran in the rain, the rain was silver. When she picked up a toad — she had the strangest, and, I thought, unchanciest love for all manner of brutes — the toad became beautiful.


34)
Zounds! I shall be in a frenzy! — Why, Jack, you are not come out to be any one else, are you?

Ay, sir, there’s no more trick, is there? — you are not like Cerberus, three gentlemen at once, are you?


35)
If the reader will further understand that this affliction was not, as the heaviest afflictions oftentimes become, a mere remembrance echoing from past times — possibly “a long since cancelled woe”; but that it was a two-headed snake, looking behind and before, and gnawing at his heart by the double pangs of memory and of anxiety, gloomy and fearful, watching for the future; and finally, that the object of this anxiety, who might at any moment be torn from his fireside, to return, after an interval of mutual suffering, (not to be measured, or even guessed at, but in the councils of God), was that Madonna-like lady, who, to him renewed the case described with such pathetic tenderness by the Homeric Andromache — being, in fact, his “all the world”; fulfilling at once all offices of tenderness and duty; and making up to him, in her single character of sister, all that he had lost of maternal kindness — all that for her sake he had forborne to seek of affections, conjugal or filial: — weighing these accumulated circumstances of calamity, the feeling reader will be ready to admit that Lamb’s cup of earthly sorrow was full enough, to excuse many more than he could be taxed with, of those half-crazy eccentricities in which a constant load of secret affliction (such, I mean, as must not be explained to the world) is apt to discharge itself.

36)
“Dora Bittholz is coming on Thursday,” said Mrs. Sangrail.

“This next Thursday?” asked Clovis.

His mother nodded.

“You’ve rather done it, haven’t you?” he chuckled; “Jane Martlet has only been here five days, and she never stays less than a fortnight, even when she’s asked definitely for a week. You’ll never get her out of the house by Thursday.”

“Why should I?” asked Mrs. Sangrail; “she and Dora are good friends, aren’t they? They used to be, as far as I remember.”

“They used to be; that’s what makes them all the more bitter now. Each feels that she has nursed a viper in her bosom. Nothing fans the flame of human resentment so much as the discovery that one’s bosom has been utilised as a snake sanatorium.”


37)
How can those terrified vague fingers push
The feathered glory from her loosening thighs?
And how can body, laid in that white rush,
But feel the strange heart beating where it lies?


38)
“Have you considered how you’ll bear the separation, and how he’ll bear to be quite deserted in the world? Because, Miss Catherine — ”

“He quite deserted! we separated!” she exclaimed, with an accent of indignation. “Who is to separate us, pray? They’ll meet the fate of Milo! Not as long as I live, Ellen: for no mortal creature.”


39)
I defy any one to say that our Becky, who has certainly some vices, has not been presented to the public in a perfectly genteel and inoffensive manner. In describing this Siren, singing and smiling, coaxing and cajoling, the author, with modest pride, asks his readers all round, has he once forgotten the laws of politeness, and showed the monster’s hideous tail above water? No!


40)
“Will you believe antiquity? records?
I’ll shew you a book where Moses and his sister,
And Solomon have written of the art;
Ay, and a treatise penn’d by Adam — ”

“How!”

“Of the philosopher’s stone, and in High Dutch.”

“Did Adam write, sir, in High Dutch?”

“He did;
Which proves it was the primitive tongue.”

“What paper?”

“On cedar board.”

“O that, indeed, they say,
Will last ’gainst worms.”

“’Tis like your Irish wood,
’Gainst cob-webs. I have a piece of Jason’s fleece, too,
Which was no other than a book of alchemy,
Writ in large sheep-skin, a good fat ram-vellum.
Such was Pythagoras’ thigh, Pandora’s tub,
And, all that fable of Medea’s charms,
The manner of our work; the bulls, our furnace,
Still breathing fire; our argent-vive, the dragon:
The dragon’s teeth, mercury sublimate,
That keeps the whiteness, hardness, and the biting;
And they are gathered into Jason’s helm,
The alembic, and then sow’d in Mars his field,
And thence sublimed so often, till they’re fixed.
Both this, the Hesperian garden, Cadmus’ story,
Jove’s shower, the boon of Midas, Argus’ eyes,
Boccace his Demogorgon, thousands more,
All abstract riddles of our stone.”

41)
During the days when I was a graduate student in the early forties, we were dealing with chemistry in which there were a great many units used in measuring various quantities — in particular, the entire metric system. A friend of mine, Mario Castillo, and I therefore whiled away one lunch period by making up units and I finally came up with the ‘millihelen’, which is enough beauty to launch one ship.


42)
The prayer of Ajax was for light;
Through all that dark and desperate fight,
The blackness of that noonday night,
He asked but the return of sight,
To see his foeman’s face.

Let our unceasing, earnest prayer
Be, too, for light, — for strength to bear
Our portion of the weight of care,
That crushes into dumb despair
One half the human race.


43)
“ . . . Have you never seen a billy after he’s covered several she-goats? He slobbers at the mouth, his eyes are all misty and rheumy, he coughs a bit and can hardly stand on his feet. Well, poor old Zeus must have been in that sad state quite often.

At dawn he’d come home, saying: ‘Ah! my God! whenever shall I be able to have a good night’s rest? I’m dropping!’ And he’d keep wiping the saliva from his mouth. But suddenly he’d hear a sigh: down there on earth some woman had thrown off her bedclothes, gone out onto the balcony, almost stark naked, and was sighing enough to turn the sails of a mill! And my old Zeus would be quite overcome. ‘Oh, hell! I’ll have to go down again!’ he’d groan. ‘There’s a woman bemoaning her lot! I’ll have to go and console her!’ . . . ”

[*]


44)
Three thousand years of sleep-unsheltered hours,
And moments aye divided by keen pangs
Till they seemed years, torture and solitude,
Scorn and despair — these are mine empire:
More glorious far than that which thou surveyest
From thine unenvied throne, O Mighty God!


45)
“I scorn your idea of love,” I could not help saying, as I rose up and stood before him, leaning my back against the rock. “I scorn the counterfeit sentiment you offer: yes, St. John, and I scorn you when you offer it.”

He looked at me fixedly, compressing his well-cut lips while he did so. Whether he was incensed or surprised, or what, it was not easy to tell: he could command his countenance thoroughly.

“I scarcely expected to hear that expression from you,” he said: “I think I have done and uttered nothing to deserve scorn.”

I was touched by his gentle tone, and overawed by his high, calm mien.

“Forgive me the words, St. John; but it is your own fault that I have been roused to speak so unguardedly. You have introduced a topic on which our natures are at variance — a topic we should never discuss: the very name of love is an apple of discord between us. If the reality were required, what should we do? How should we feel? My dear cousin, abandon your scheme of marriage — forget it.”

46)
An Allegory On Wit And Learning

Wit and Learning were the children of Apollo, by different mothers; Wit was the offspring of Euphrosyne, and resembled her in cheerfulness and vivacity; Learning was born of Sophia, and retained her seriousness and caution. As their mothers were rivals, they were bred up by them from their birth in habitual opposition . . .


47)
I’m so unhappy, finding myself once more a prisoner.
I’ve often wanted to return, deceiving my guard:
But whoever might catch this timid girl is an enemy.
I feared, if I could get right away, I’d be caught at night,
To be sent as a gift to some woman of Priam’s house.
But since I was given, I may be given back. I’ve been absent
So many nights, and no recall. You are idle, and slow to anger.
Patroclus himself, when I was handed over, whispered
In my ear: “Why cry? You’ll soon be here again.”

[*]


48)
But the iniquity of oblivion blindly scattereth her poppy, and deals with the memory of men without distinction to merit of perpetuity. Who can but pity the founder of the pyramids? Herostratus lives that burnt the temple of Diana, he is almost lost that built it. Time hath spared the epitaph of Adrian’s horse, confounded that of himself. In vain we compute our felicities by the advantage of our good names, since bad have equal durations, and Thersites is like to live as long as Agamemnon without the favour of the everlasting register.


49)
Nor skin nor hide nor fleece
Shall cover you,
Nor curtain of crimson nor fine
Shelter of cedar-wood be over you,
Nor the fir-tree
Nor the pine.


50)
Perhaps he would never have dared to raise his eyes, but that, though the piping was now hushed, the call and the summons seemed still dominant and imperious. He might not refuse, were Death himself waiting to strike him instantly, once he had looked with mortal eye on things rightly kept hidden. Trembling he obeyed, and raised his humble head; and then, in that utter clearness of the imminent dawn, while Nature, flushed with fullness of incredible colour, seemed to hold her breath for the event, he looked in the very eyes of the Friend and Helper; saw the backward sweep of the curved horns, gleaming in the growing daylight; saw the stern, hooked nose between the kindly eyes that were looking down on them humourously, while the bearded mouth broke into a half-smile at the corners; saw the rippling muscles on the arm that lay across the broad chest, the long supple hand still holding the pan-pipes only just fallen away from the parted lips; saw the splendid curves of the shaggy limbs disposed in majestic ease on the sward; saw, last of all, nestling between his very hooves, sleeping soundly in entire peace and contentment, the little, round, podgy, childish form of the baby otter. All this he saw, for one moment breathless and intense, vivid on the morning sky; and still, as he looked, he lived; and still, as he lived, he wondered.

51)
Like Argus of the ancient times,
We leave this modern Greece,
Tum-tum, tum-tum, tum-tum, tum-tum,
To shear the Golden Fleece.


52)
Die and be damned to you if you have any sense of decency or grace about you. I can give you a rare old wine that’ll send you skipping to hell and back. Sign a will and leave us any coin you have! If you have none see you damn well get it, steal it, rob it! We’ll bury you in our shrubbery jakes where you’ll be dead and dirty with old Cuck Cohen, my stepnephew I married, the bloody old gouty procurator and sodomite with a crick in his neck, and my other ten or eleven husbands, whatever the buggers’ names were, suffocated in the one cesspool.


53)
She has composed, so long, a self with which to welcome him,
Companion to his self for her, which she imagined,
Two in a deep-founded sheltering, friend and dear friend.

The trees had been mended, as an essential exercise
In an inhuman meditation, larger than her own.
No winds like dogs watched over her at night.

She wanted nothing he could not bring her by coming alone.
She wanted no fetchings. His arms would be her necklace
And her belt, the final fortune of their desire.


54)
And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.

There was so much to read, for one thing, and so much fine health to be pulled down out of the young breath-giving air. I bought a dozen volumes on banking and credit and investment securities, and they stood on my shelf in red and gold like new money from the mint, promising to unfold the shining secrets that only Midas and Morgan and Maecenas knew. And I had the high intention of reading many other books besides. I was rather literary in college – one year I wrote a series of very solemn and obvious editorials for the Yale News – and now I was going to bring back all such things into my life and become again that most limited of all specialists, the “well-rounded man”.


55)
‘Ovey, ovey, ovey!’

Not a single bleat. He went to the hedge; a gap had been broken through it, and in the gap were the footprints of the sheep. Rather surprised to find them break fence at this season, yet putting it down instantly to their great fondness for ivy in winter-time, of which a great deal grew in the plantation, he followed through the hedge. They were not in the plantation. He called again: the valleys and furthest hills resounded as when the sailors invoked the lost Hylas on the Mysian shore: but no sheep. He passed through the trees and along the ridge of the hill. On the extreme summit, where the end of the two converging hedges of which we have spoken were stopped short by meeting the brow of the chalk-pit, he saw the younger dog standing against the sky — dark and motionless as Napoleon at Helena.

56)
When philosophy paints its grey in grey, one form of life has become old, and by means of grey it cannot be rejuvenated, but only know. The owl of Minerva takes its flight only when the shades of night are gathering.

[*]


57)
“The measures adopted were not only the best of their kind, but carried out to absolute perfection. Had the letter been deposited within the range of their search, these fellows would, beyond a question, have found it.”

I merely laughed — but he seemed quite serious in all that he said.

“The measures, then,” he continued, “were good in their kind, and well executed; their defect lay in their being inapplicable to the case, and to the man. A certain set of highly ingenious resources are, with the Prefect, a sort of Procrustean bed, to which he forcibly adapts his designs. But he perpetually errs by being too deep or too shallow for the matter in hand; and many a schoolboy is a better reasoner than he. . . . ”


58)
Once again I had escaped from the impossibility of sleeping, from the deluge, the shipwreck of my nervous storms. I no longer feared the threats that had loomed over me the evening before, when I was deprived of rest. A new life was opening before me; without making a single movement, for I was still shattered, although quite alert and well, I savoured my weariness with a light heart; it had isolated and broken the bones of my legs and arms, which I could feel assembled before me, — ready to come together again, and which I would rebuild merely by singing, like the architect in the fable.

[*]


59)
I would see one of the beggars that brawl on my porch
Reach hands to the bow hardly to be strung by man —
I would see these gluttons, guests by grace of their numbers,
Flung through the door with their bellies full of arrows.


60)
Saying not a word in reply to Vasenka’s assurances that it was quite dry there, Levin silently worked with the coachman to free the horses. But then, getting into the heat of the work, and seeing how diligently and zealously Veslovsky pulled the cart by the splash-board, so that he even broke it off, Levin reproached himself for being too cold towards him under the influence of yesterday’s feeling, and tried to smooth over his dryness by being especially amiable. When everything was put right and the cart was back on the road, Levin ordered lunch to be served.

‘*Bon appétit — bonne conscience! Ce poulet va tomber jusqu’au fond de mes bottes*.’ Vasenka, merry again, joked in French as he finished a second chicken. ‘So, now our troubles are over; now everything’s going to go well. Only, for my sins I ought to sit on the box. Isn’t that right? Eh? No, no, I’m an Automedon. You’ll see how I get you there!’ he said, not letting go of the reins when Levin asked him to let the coachman drive. ‘No, I must redeem my sins, and I feel wonderful on the box.’ And he drove on.

[*]

61)
When I lie on the ground
I rise flushed as a rose in the morning.
In fights I arrange a fall in the ring
To rub myself with sand.

That is operative
As an elixir. I cannot be weaned
Off the earth’s long contour, her river-veins.
Down here in my cave

Girdered with root and rock
I am cradled in the dark that wombed me
And nurtured in every artery
Like a small hillock.


62)
Her singing was less remarkable, but also well trained, and sweet to hear as a chime perfectly in tune. It is true she sang “Meet me by moonlight”, and “I’ve been roaming”; for mortals must share the fashions of their time, and none but the ancients can be always classical. But Rosamond could also sing “Black-eyed Susan” with effect, or Haydn’s canzonets, or “Voi, che sapete”, or “Batti, batti” — she only wanted to know what her audience liked.

Her father looked round at the company, delighting in their admiration. Her mother sat, like a Niobe before her troubles, with her youngest little girl on her lap, softly beating the child’s hand up and down in time to the music.


63)
“I have a great favor to ask of you. The history of modern civilization depends upon your arriving at an intelligent decision. I have heard you speak fluently about your willingness to give your diamond to some starving child or some lonely crone, by-passed by the thoughtless world. Now a much greater opportunity is about to be placed in your hands. I possess the rudiments of a radio — an aerial, a ground and a copper-wire tuner. All I need is an earphone and a diode crystal. The Stone has one and you have the other. With this, with your diamond, the Gordian knot of communications that threatens the Department of Correction and the government itself can be cut. . . . ”


64)
Am I not loyal to you? I say no less
Than is to say;
If more, only from angry-heartedness,
Not for display.

But you know, I know, and you know I know
My principal curse:
Shame at the mounting dues I have come to owe
A devil of verse,

Who caught me young, ingenuous and uncouth,
Prompting me how
To evade the patent clumsiness of truth –
Which I do now.


65)
‘Can we trust him?’ he asked, jerking his head in the direction of Reuben.

‘As myself.’

‘How very charming!’ said he, with something between a smile and a sneer. ‘David and Jonathan — or, to be more classical and less scriptural, Damon and Pythias — eh?’ These papers, then, are from the faithful abroad, the exiles in Holland, ye understand, who are thinking of making a move and of coming over to see King James in his own country with their swords strapped on their thighs. The letters are to those from whom they expect sympathy, and notify when and where they will make a landing. Now, my dear lad, you will perceive that instead of my being in your power, you are so completely in mine that it needs but a word from me to destroy your whole family. Decimus Saxon is staunch, though, and that word shall never be spoken.’

66)
“I believe in the race,” she cried.

“It represents the survival of the pushing.”

“It has development.”

“Decay fascinates me more.”

“What of art?” she asked.

“It is a malady.”

“Love?”

“An illusion.”

“Religion?”

“The fashionable substitute for belief.”

“You are a sceptic.”

“Never! Scepticism is the beginning of faith.”

“What are you?”

“To define is to limit.”

“Give me a clue.”

“Threads snap. You would lose your way in the labyrinth.”

“You bewilder me. Let us talk of some one else.”


67)
The bird spoke its words very slowly, and the boy knew enough Greek to recognize it; it was a verse from Sappho:

‘The moon has sunk and the Pleiads,
And midnight is gone,
And the hours are passing, passing,
And I lie alone.’


68)
A Coördinator in a single-breasted *Soutane*, or Cassock, of black Bruges Velvet and lin’d with Wolverine Fur, stands upon a small podium, before the set of Ebony Handles and Indicators trimm’d in Brass, whilst Chinese attend to the Rigging, and specially trained Indian Converts tend a Peat-fire so as to raise precisely the Temperature of a great green Prism of Brazilian Tourmaline, a-snarl as Medusa with plaited Copper Cabling running from it in all directions, bearing the Pyro-Elecktrical Fluid by which ev’rything here is animated. More intense than the peat-smoke, the smell of Ozone prevails here, the Musk of an unfamiliar Beast, unsettling even to those who breathe it ev’ry day.


69)
Along the margin-sand large foot-marks went,
No further than to where his feet had stray’d,
And slept there since. Upon the sodden ground
His old right hand lay nerveless, listless, dead,
Unsceptred; and his realmless eyes were closed;
While his bow’d head seem’d list’ning to the Earth,
His ancient mother, for some comfort yet.


70)
There was no joy Pierce knew like the joy of finding himself freely chosen by the object of his desire, no joy even remotely like it. The astonished gratification of it, the sudden certainty, as though a hawk had chosen to fall out of the sky and settle on his wrist, still wild, still free, but his. Who would, who could compel that? The closed hearts of call-girls, the glum faces of last-chance pickups: Pierce drunk or coked enough could pretend for an hour or a night, as they could. But.

And if hawks flew then, choosing to fly as they had chosen to alight, and if he failed to understand why — well, he hadn’t understood why they alighted in the first place, had he? And that was, that must be, all right, if one were going to love hawks in the first place. Gentle hawks, kind-unkind.

*Chalkokrotos*.

I wish, he thought, I wish, I wish . . .

*Chalkokrotos*, “bronze-rustling”, where had he come up with that epithet, some goddess’s: *chalkokrotos* for her bronze-colored hair and the rustle of her bangles on a certain night; *chalkokrotos* for her weapons and her wings.

71)
Booze and dope destroy health. Sooner or later sex addicts get involved in responsibilities. Property addicts can never get all the stamps, Chinese vases, houses, varieties of lilies or whatever it may be, that they want. Their escape is a torment of Tantalus. Whereas the Higher Life escapes into a world where there’s no risk to health and the minimum of responsibilities and tortures. A world, what’s more, that tradition regards as actually superior to the world of responsible living — higher. The Higher Shirker can fairly wallow in his good conscience.


72)
At the violet hour, when the eyes and back
Turn upward from the desk, when the human engine waits
Like a taxi throbbing waiting,
I Tiresias, though blind, throbbing between two lives,
Old man with wrinkled female breasts, can see
At the violet hour, the evening hour that strives
Homeward, and brings the sailor home from sea,
The typist home at teatime, clears her breakfast, lights
Her stove, and lays out food in tins.


73)
“Mr. Rearden,” said Francisco, his voice solemnly calm, “if you saw Atlas, the giant who holds the world on his shoulders, if you saw that he stood, blood running down his chest, his knees buckling, his arms trembling but still trying to hold the world aloft with the last of his strength, and the greater his effort the heavier the world bore down upon his shoulders — what would you tell him to do?”


74)
Who would not have to suppress a fleeting shudder, a vague timidity and uneasiness, if it were a matter of boarding a Venetian gondola for the first time or after several years? The strange craft, an entirely unaltered survival from the times of balladry, with that peculiar blackness which is found elsewhere only in coffins — it suggests silent, criminal adventures in the rippling night, it suggests even more strongly death itself, the bier and the mournful funeral, and the last silent journey. And has it been observed that the seat of such a barque, this arm-chair of coffin-black veneer and dull black upholstery, is the softest, most luxuriant, most lulling seat in the world?

[*]


75)
‘ . . . It doesn’t seem to me much to do for a loved aunt.’

‘It seems to me a dashed lot to do for a loved aunt, and I’m jolly well not going to dream — ’

‘Oh, yes you are, because you know what will happen, if you don’t.’ She paused significantly. “You follow me, Watson?’

For this ruthless relative has one all-powerful weapon which she holds constantly over my head like the sword of — of who was the chap? — Jeeves would know — and by means of which she can always bend me to her will — viz. the threat that if I don’t kick in she will bar me from her board and wipe Anatole’s cooking from my lips. I shall not lightly forget the time when she placed sanctions on me for a whole month — right in the middle of the pheasant season, when this superman is at his incomparable best.

76)
Hummel put an asbestos glove on his left hand and plucked a broad scrap of tin from the heap. With the cutters he sliced into the center and, abruptly deft, cleverly folded the piece into a cupped shield, which he fitted around the arrow at the back of Caldwell’s ankle. “So you won’t feel the heat so much,” he explained, and snapped the fingers of his ungloved hand. “Archy, could I have the torch a minute now?”

The helper, careful to keep his feet from tangling in the trailing wire, brought over the acetylene torch. It was a little black jug spitting white flame edged with green. Where the flame streamed from the spout there was a transparent gap. Caldwell locked his jaw on his panic. The arrow had been revealed to him as a live nerve. He braced for the necessary pain.


77)
Nearer he drew, and many a walk travers’d
Of stateliest Covert, Cedar, Pine, or Palm,
Then voluble and bold, now hid, now seen
Among thick-wov’n Arborets and Flowers
Imborder’d on each Bank, the hand of Eve:
Spot more delicious then those Gardens feign’d
Or of reviv’d Adonis, or renown’d
Alcinous, host of old Laertes’ Son,
Or that, not Mystic, where the Sapient King
Held dalliance with his fair Egyptian Spouse.


78)
It is a pardonable whim in men of consequence, to place their exterior advantages in concealment now and then, so as to allow their own internal human nature to operate with the greater purity. For this reason the incognito of princes, and the adventures resulting therefrom, are always highly pleasing: these appear disguised divinities, who can reckon at double its value all the good offices shown to them as individuals, and are in such a position that they can either make light of the disagreeable or avoid it. That Jupiter should be well pleased in his incognito with Philemon and Baucis, and Henry the Fourth with his peasants after a hunting-party, is quite conformable to nature, and we like it well; but that a young man, without importance or name, should take it into his head to derive some pleasure from an incognito, might be construed by many as an unpardonable piece of arrogance.

[*]


79)
I push my big grey wet snout through the green,
Dreaming the flower I have never seen.


80)
Since the war began Barbara had taken to breakfasting downstairs in the mistaken belief that it caused less trouble. Instead of the wicker bed-table tray, a table had to be laid in the small dining-room, the fire had to be lit there two hours earlier, silver dishes had to be cleaned and the wicks trimmed under them. It was an innovation deplored by all.

Basil found her crouched over the fire with her cup of coffee; she turned her curly black head and smiled; both of them had the same devastating combination of dark hair and clear blue eyes. Narcissus greeted Narcissus from the watery depths as Basil kissed her.

‘Spooney,’ she said.

81)
For the reasons mentioned in the preceding chapter, and from some other matrimonial concessions, well known to most husbands, and which, like the secrets of freemasonry, should be divulged to none who are not members of that honourable fraternity, Mrs Partridge was pretty well satisfied that she had condemned her husband without cause, and endeavoured by acts of kindness to make him amends for her false suspicion. Her passions were indeed equally violent, whichever way they inclined; for as she could be extremely angry, so could she be altogether as fond.

But though these passions ordinarily succeed each other, and scarce twenty-four hours ever passed in which the pedagogue was not, in some degree, the object of both; yet, on extraordinary occasions, when the passion of anger had raged very high, the remission was usually longer: and so was the case at present; for she continued longer in a state of affability, after this fit of jealousy was ended, than her husband had ever known before: and, had it not been for some little exercises, which all the followers of Xantippe are obliged to perform daily, Mr Partridge would have enjoyed a perfect serenity of several months.


82)
. . . the town was a perfect *Proteus* — It was Landen, and Trerebach, and Santvliet, and Drusen, and Hagenau, — and then it was Ostend and Menin, and Aeth and Dendermond.

— Surely never did any town act so many parts, since Sodom and Gomorah, as my uncle Toby’s town did.


83)
. . . Under the bridge of the hat, his eagle face looked eager, all the more because it was not only clean-shaven, but without eyebrows. It seemed almost as if all the hair had come off his face from his thrusting it through a throng of elements. His eyes were prominent and piercing. His colour was curiously attractive, while partly tropical; it reminded one vaguely of a blood-orange. That is, that while it was ruddy and sanguine, there was a yellow in it that was in no way sickly, but seemed rather to glow like gold apples of the Hesperides.


84)
What is life but a series of inspired follies? The difficulty is to find them to do. Never lose a chance: it doesn’t come every day. I shall make a duchess of this draggletailed guttersnipe.


85)
“ . . . Hark, how the thunder rumbles! and for summer rain I never saw such broad downright flat drops fall out of the clouds; the oaks, too, notwithstanding the calm weather, sob and creak with their great boughs as if announcing a tempest. Thou canst play the rational? if thou wilt: credit me for once, and let us home ere the storm begins to rage, for the night will be fearful.”

Wamba seemed to feel the force of this appeal, and accompanied his companion, who began his journey after catching up a long quarter-staff which lay upon the grass beside him. This second Eumeus strode hastily down the forest glade, driving before him, with the assistance of Fangs, the whole herd of his inharmonious charge.

86)
By now, my eyes once more were focused on
My lady’s face, and with my eyes my mind,
So earnestly all other thoughts were gone.

And she, with features equable, opined:
“Were I to smile upon you now, you’d be
Like Semele, to flakes of ash consigned:

Because my beauty swells to such degree,
Progressing through this palace’s ascent –
As you’ve had cause to notice previously –

That if it flashed upon you here unpent,
The strength your mortal faculties allow
Would match a branch a lightning-bolt has rent.”

[*]


87)
Sentries occupy all gates and windows; the Printers come not out; they sleep in their workrooms; their very food is handed in to them! A victorious Parlement smells new danger. D’Espréménil has ordered horses to Versailles; prowls round that guarded Printing-Office; prying, snuffing, if so be the sagacity and ingenuity of man may penetrate it.

To a shower of gold most things are penetrable. D’Espréménil descends on the lap of a Printer’s Danae, in the shape of “five hundred louis d’or”: the Danae’s Husband smuggles a ball of clay to her; which she delivers to the golden Counsellor of Parlement. Kneaded within it, their stick printed proof-sheets; — by Heaven! the royal Edict of that same self-registering Plenary Court; of those Grand Bailliages that shall cut short our Lawsuits! It is to be promulgated over all France on one and the same day.


88)
Looking, as we went, toward the water that held beyond us the ship it had spawned, phantom water-egg that had borne us, we stopped; we heard the fogbell forlornly clanging. It had a broken sound that seemed to tell us dread, terror, loss, but some destiny. Waterborn, Glaucus and magician grass, we felt land alien.


89)
Nay, for I love thee, I will have thy hands,
Nay, for I will not loose thee, thou art sweet,
Thou art my son, I am thy father’s wife,
I ache toward thee with a bridal blood,
The pulse is heavy in all my married veins,
My whole face beats, I will feed full of thee,
My body is empty of ease, I will be fed,
I am burnt to the bone with love, thou shalt not go,
I am heartsick, and mine eyelids prick mine eyes,
Thou shalt not sleep nor eat nor say a word
Till thou hast slain me. I am not good to live.


90)
I leave the road at the bottom of the valley and walk singing up the hill. Those few I let come this far with me have been told to abide my return. They shiver in the sunset; the vernal equinox is three days away. I feel no cold myself. I stride exultant among briars and twisted ancient apple trees. If my bare feet leave a little blood in the snow, that is good. The ridges around are dark with forest, which waits like the skeleton dead for leaves to be breathed across it again. The eastern sky is purple, where stands the evening star. Overhead, against blue, cruises an early flight of homebound geese. Their calls drift faintly down to me. Westward, above me and before me, smolders redness. Etched black against it are the women.

91)
“Bravo, bravo,” said Franz; “things go wonderfully. Shall I leave you? Perhaps you would prefer being alone?”

“No,” replied he; “I will not be caught like a fool at a first disclosure by a rendezvous under the clock, as they say at the opera-balls. If the fair peasant wishes to carry matters any further, we shall find her, or rather, she will find us tomorrow; then she will give me some sign or other, and I shall know what I have to do.”

“On my word,” said Franz, “you are as wise as Nestor and prudent as Ulysses, and your fair Circe must be very skilful or very powerful if she succeed in changing you into a beast of any kind.”

[*]


92)
In ancient times, he was obliged to sit on the throne for some hours every morning, with the imperial crown on his head, but to sit altogether like a statue, without stirring either hands or feet, head or eyes, nor indeed any part of his body, because, by this means, it was thought that he could preserve peace and tranquillity in his empire; for if, unfortunately, he turned himself on one side or the other, or if he looked a good while towards any part of his dominions, it was apprehended that war, famine, fire, or some other great misfortune was near at hand to desolate the country. But it having been afterwards discovered, that the imperial crown was the palladium, which by its immobility could preserve peace in the empire, it was thought expedient to deliver his imperial person, consecrated only to idleness and pleasures, from this burthensome duty, and therefore the crown is at present placed on the throne for some hours every morning.


93)
But, thirdly and lastly, it must be allow’d,
I alone can inspire the poetical crowd:
This is gratefully own’d by each boy in the college,
Whom if I inspire, it is not to my knowledge.
This every pretender to rhyme will admit,
Without troubling his head about judgment or wit.
These gentlemen use me with kindness and freedom,
And as for their works, when I please I may read ’em.
They lie open on purpose on counters and stalls,
And the titles I view, when I shine on the walls.


94)
. . . and certainly Devereux had no reason to love that vicious, selfish old lunatic, Lord Athenry, who in his prodigal and heartless reign, before straw and darkness swallowed him, never gave the boy a kind word or gentle look, and owed him a mortal grudge because he stood near the kingdom, and wrote most damaging reports of him at the end of the holidays, and despatched those letters of Bellerophon by the boy’s own hand to the schoolmaster, with the natural results.


95)
along a gravel path
hedged with box
the victor departs
wondering
whether out of Marsyas’ howling
there will not some day arise
a new kind
of art — let us say — concrete

suddenly
at his feet
falls a petrified nightingale

he looks back
and sees
that the hair of the tree to which Marsyas was fastened
is white

completely

[*]

96)
In my tortured ears there sounds unceasingly a nightmare whirring and flapping, and a faint, distant baying as of some gigantic hound. It is not dream — it is not, I fear, even madness — for too much has already happened to give me these merciful doubts. St. John is a mangled corpse; I alone know why, and such is my knowledge that I am about to blow out my brains for fear I shall be mangled in the same way. Down unlit and illimitable corridors of eldritch phantasy sweeps the black, shapeless Nemesis that drives me to self-annihilation.


97)
. . . The numbing cloud
Mounts off my soul; I feel it, I breathe free.

Is it but for a moment?
— Ah, boil up, ye vapors!
Leap and roar, thou sea of fire!
My soul glows to meet you.
Ere it flag, ere the mists
Of despondency and gloom
Rush over it again,
Receive me, save me!


98)
They saw the old men heavy in their chairs and heard the children singing in the fields. They saw far wars and warriors and walled towns, wisdom and wickedness, and the pomp of kings, and the people of all the lands that the sunlight knew.

And the worm spake to the angel, saying: “Behold my food.”

“βῆ δ᾽ ἀκέων παρὰ θῖνα πολυφλοίσβοιο θαλάσσης”, murmured the angel, for they walked by the sea, “and can you destroy that too?”


99)
. . . . the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.


100)
Twisting a curl round his finger, one of those loose curls that always dance free from the captured hair, Leslie said:

“Look how fond your hair is of me; look how it twines round my finger. Do you know, your hair — the light in it is like — oh — buttercups in the sun.”

“It is like me — it won’t be kept in bounds,” she replied.

“Shame if it were — like this, it brushes my face — so — and sets me tingling like music.”

“Behave! Now be still, and I’ll tell you what sort of music you make.”

“Oh — well — tell me.”

“Like the calling of throstles and blackies, in the evening, frightening the pale little wood-anemones, till they run panting and swaying right up to our wall. Like the ringing of bluebells when the bees are at them; like Hippomenes, out-of-breath, laughing because he’d won.”

He kissed her with rapturous admiration.

“Marriage music, sir,” she added.

“What golden apples did I throw?” he asked lightly.

“What!” she exclaimed, half mocking.

“This Atalanta,” he replied, looking lovingly upon her, “this Atalanta — I believe she just lagged at last on purpose.”

“You have it,” she cried, laughing, submitting to his caresses. “It was you — the apples of your firm heels — the apples of your eyes — the apples Eve bit — that won me — hein!”

I only had time for the first 70, but I'll be back for the rest soon.

11) Moby Dick
20) Scarlet Letter
30) Les Miserables
32) Tennyson's Ulysses
38) Wuthering Heights
45) Jane Eyre
55) Far from the Madding Crowd
60) Anna Karenina
66) I know this is Oscar Wilde, likely Dorian Gray.

1. Ambrose Bierce - The Devil's Dictionary
2. Constantine Cavafy - "Ithaka"
3. François Rabelais - Gargantua and Pantagruel
4. Christopher Marlowe - Hero and Leander
5. Francis Bacon - Essays ("Of Delays")
6. Louisa May Alcott - Little Women
7. Albert Camus - The Myth of Sisyphus
8. Ludovico Ariosto - Orlando Furioso
9. J.L. Borges - "The House of Asterion"
10. O. Henry - Short story
11. Herman Melville - Moby-Dick
12. Robinson Jeffers - Poetry
13. Sigmund Freud - The Interpretation of Dreams
14. Ezra Pound - The Cantos (Canto II)
15. Arthur Schopenhauer - The World as Will and Representation
16. Terry Pratchett - Discworld series
17. James Thurber - Let Your Mind Alone!
18. G.F. Hegel - Aesthetics lectures
19. William Shakespeare - Twelfth Night
20. Nathaniel Hawthorne - The Scarlet Letter
21. Terry Pratchett - Soul Music
22. Miguel Cervantes - Don Quixote
23. William Golding - Free Fall
24. Sylvia Plath - Poetry
25. William Faulkner - Absalom, Absalom!
26. Neil Gaiman - "Sunbird"
27. Geoffrey Chaucer - The Canterbury Tales ("The Knight's Tale")
28. Charles Dickens - Bleak House
29. Lord Byron - Don Juan
30. Victor Hugo - Les Misérables
31. Isak Dinesen - Winter's Tales
32. Alfred Lord Tennyson - "Ulysses"
33. Lord Dunsany - Fantasy tales
34. R.B. Sheridan - The Rivals
35. Thomas De Quincey - Confessions of an English Opium-Eater
36. Saki (H.H. Munro) - Short story
37. W.B. Yeats - "Leda and the Swan"
38. Emily Brontë - Wuthering Heights
39. W.M. Thackeray - Vanity Fair
40. Ben Jonson - The Alchemist
41. Isaac Asimov - Essay or The Gods Themselves
42. H.W. Longfellow - Poetry
43. Nikos Kazantzakis - Zorba the Greek
44. P.B. Shelley - Prometheus Unbound
45. Charlotte Brontë - Jane Eyre
46. Samuel Johnson - The Rambler
47. Ovid - Heroides
48. Thomas Browne - Urn Burial
49. Hilda Doolittle (H.D.) - Helen in Egypt
50. Kenneth Grahame - The Wind in the Willows

51. Jack London - Story or poem
52. James Joyce - Finnegans Wake
53. Wallace Stevens - Poetry
54. F. Scott Fitzgerald - The Great Gatsby
55. Thomas Hardy - Far from the Madding Crowd
56. G.F. Hegel - Philosophy of Right
57. Edgar Allan Poe - "The Purloined Letter"
58. Marcel Proust - In Search of Lost Time
59. Ezra Pound - The Cantos
60. Leo Tolstoy - Anna Karenina
61. Seamus Heaney - "Antaeus"
62. George Eliot - Middlemarch
63. John Cheever - Short story
64. Thom Gunn - Poetry
65. Arthur Conan Doyle - Micah Clarke
66. Oscar Wilde - The Picture of Dorian Gray
67. G.K. Chesterton - The Man Who Was Thursday
68. Thomas Pynchon - Mason & Dixon
69. John Keats - "Hyperion"
70. John Crowley - Little, Big or Ægypt series
71. Aldous Huxley - Eyeless in Gaza
72. T.S. Eliot - The Waste Land
73. Ayn Rand - Atlas Shrugged
74. Thomas Mann - Death in Venice
75. P.G. Wodehouse - The Code of the Woosters
76. John Updike - The Centaur
77. John Milton - Paradise Lost
78. J.W. von Goethe - Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship
79. Ted Hughes - Poetry
80. Evelyn Waugh - Unconditional Surrender
81. Henry Fielding - Tom Jones
82. Laurence Sterne - Tristram Shandy
83. G.K. Chesterton - Fiction
84. George Bernard Shaw - Pygmalion
85. Walter Scott - Ivanhoe
86. Dante Alighieri - Paradiso
87. Thomas Carlyle - The French Revolution
88. William Goyen - Fiction
89. Algernon Charles Swinburne - Atalanta in Calydon
90. Poul Anderson - Science fiction/fantasy
91. Alexandre Dumas - The Count of Monte Cristo
92. Jonathan Swift - Gulliver's Travels
93. Jonathan Swift - "Apollo's Edict"
94. Sheridan Le Fanu - Uncle Silas
95. Zbigniew Herbert - "Apollo and Marsyas"
96. H.P. Lovecraft - "The Hound"
97. Matthew Arnold - "Empedocles on Etna"
98. Lord Dunsany - "The Worm and the Angel"
99. W.H. Auden - "Musée des Beaux Arts"
100. D.H. Lawrence - The White Peacock

>>24543949 (OP)
Wrong story
Truth starting with the post-mod3rn

11. Melville, Moby-Dick
49. H.D., from Sea Garden?
56. Hegel, preface to the Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts
68. Pynchon, Mason & Dixon?
74. Mann, Death in Venice
82. Sterne, Tristram Shandy

>>24544476
>Mosaic
But is it a Greek duck or a Roman one?

9/9 here to start things off:

>11) Moby Dick
Perseus the harpooner.

>20) Scarlet Letter
Jason sowing the dragon's teeth.

>30) Les Miserables
Ossa on Pelion.

>32) Tennyson's Ulysses
Presumably he took this idea from Dante, so it's Greek at one remove.

>38) Wuthering Heights
Milo being the wrestler who tried to pull a tree apart, got his hands trapped and was eaten by bears and/or wolves. All seems rather bizarre but who knows? If Aeschylus can succumb to a tortoise being dropped on his head by an eagle anything is possible.

>45) Jane Eyre
The apple of discord from Eris kicking off the whole Trojan thing.

>55) Far from the Madding Crowd
Hylas got abducted by water nymphs whilst argonauting.

>60) Anna Karenina
Automedon = Achilles’ charioteer.

>66) I know this is Oscar Wilde, likely Dorian Gray.
Correct. The clue of thread Ariadne gave Theseus to negotiate the labyrinth,

>>24544503
>>24544507
Not all right, but obviously most of them are. These quizzes sort of rely on people not doing this, obviously. (I am surprised we went as long as we did without it happening.)

I guess those who still want to tackle the quiz can hide these replies; we'll see if anyone does.

>>24544813
All good, more or less —

>11. Melville, Moby-Dick
Correct, although Duck Man already got it.

>49. H.D., from Sea Garden?
Hilda Doolittle, yes. Sea Garden, no (although that does have a lot of Classical stuff too). It's a poem called ‘Lethe’, first published in the collection ‘Heliodorus’.

>56. Hegel, preface to the Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts
Right. I guess Minerva is Roman but she’s just Athene with a new paint job.

>68. Pynchon, Mason & Dixon?
Correct.

>74. Mann, Death in Venice
A gondolier as Charon.

>82. Sterne, Tristram Shandy
Right. Proteus being the Greek of course. Uncle Toby a big help I guess.

Finishing what I started in >>24544476:

75) Bertie Wooster thinking of Damocles
77) Paradise Lost
85) Ivanhoe
91) The Count of Monte Cristo

>>24544902
Its hometown of Ephesus saw both Greeks and Romans. I'm afraid this duck is more likely from the latter, but it's such a nice duck.

>>24544048
>98
I have not read any Lord Dunsany, and forget the thread, but an anon posted a photo of a page a few months back which contained this passage.

>>24544920

i was feeling quite devious when i did it, my apologies. i tried to figure out how to spoiler them and put a warning but i couldn't. i shant do it again, lest you whip my rear!

>>24545169
These modern searches are certainly impressive. Given that, it's interesting to see where it slipped up.

For example, in #23 it gets the author right but not the work. That's weird. I could imagine a neural net perhaps matching the text to an author on weight of evidence and then matching the author to a work by weight of different evidence. But in that case you would expect it to just suggest the author's most popular work, which would be Lord of the Flies.. One possible cause: Free Fall is a first-person novel, like the text.

Another slip is #33. (It has Lord Dunsany for #98 as well so if it knew it needed each author once and once only it wouldn't do this.) #33 is a mildly obscure work but not that obscure. But Dunsany does have lots of lines a bit like this, to be fair.


Not sure whether to be pleased or not that it nailed #86, because that’s my own translation, which is as yet unpublished. I guess the verse form plus the women’s name are a big help. And there will be several key words which appear in other renditions. Even so, I think this is the most impressive. (Or scary, depending how you look at it.)

>>24544507
>>24544503
lol lmao
but also gay GAY
Upside I read through and added some new works to my to read list. Your constant shilling of Wodehouse has finally paid off. But your shilling of Vanity Fair has not. Still not gonna read it.
I hope Zorba the Greek is good though.

>>24545142

Yes all good here:

>75) Bertie Wooster thinking of Damocles
The Code Of The Woosters. His aunt wants him to go and sneer at something in an antique shop so the owner will sell it cheaply to her husband. (I really don’t like this aunt very much.)

>77) Paradise Lost
Satan sneaking up on Eve.

>85) Ivanhoe
Eum(a)eus being Odysseus’s loyal swineherd.

>91) The Count of Monte Cristo
When they go to see someone being executed by mace.


>Its hometown of Ephesus saw both Greeks and Romans.
I checked and it is indeed quite a famous duck. I must have seen it before. Should have recognized it as a Roman.

>but it's such a nice duck.
All ducks are nice but not all get their own star on the Hollywood Walk Of Fame.

>>24545697

>Your constant shilling of Wodehouse has finally paid off.
The Code of The Woosters is a pretty decent sample. If you don’t like that you won't like any of the others.

>But your shilling of VF has not. Still not gonna read it.
Understandable. Life is short and Victorian novels are fat.

>I hope ZtG is good though.
It takes just a couple of pages till Z arrives then it’s fine. (This one was sort of a bluff entry because its author also wrote a massive great verse sequel to the Odyssey which he claimed was his magnum opus, so people might be looking for that.)

>>24543955
>1
lexicon of the khazars, or something from Vollmann perhaps.
>2
Is this from Callimachus, or some other poet of the Hellenistic period?
>4
I suspect this is from Pope.
>7
The Myth of Sisyphus

>>24543961

>9) Borges' House of Asterion
>11) Melville
>13) Either Jung or Freud, but Freud makes more sense because he is queerer

>>24546744
>>24546744
>tfw hit send too soon
>11
Moby-Dick
>13
Something from Freud
>56
This is from Hegel, right?
>62
Middlemarch? I think I remember Rosamond being able to sing as well as play piano.
This was a hard one, OP!

>>24546744
>1
>lexicon of the khazars, or something from Vollmann perhaps.
>2
>Is this from Callimachus, or some other poet of the Hellenistic period?
>4
>I suspect this is from Pope.
All pretty logical, but can’t be right because these authors are not in the Author List at the beginning. I probably should have left those names unspoilered, because the quiz is hard and I was intending that people should look at them.

Also worth noting: this is all people quoting the Ancient Greeks or alluding to them somehow. It doesn't include any Ancient Greek writers themselves. (A couple of modern Greeks are in there.) The oldest is a Roman or two.

>7
>The Myth of Sisyphus
This one is good. Albert Camus.

>>24546794
3/3 here:

>9) Borges' House of Asterion
The minotaur gives his version of events.

>11) Melville
Right, although you're not the first.

>13) Either Jung or Freud
Correct.
>but Freud makes more sense . . .
Also correct, because Jung isn’t in the Author List.
>. . . because he is queerer
Well I guess this will work too.

It's the passage from Interpretation Of Dreams which first describes the Oedipus Complex.

>>24546812

>tfw hit send too soon
Well, breaking a multi-answer post into small chunks will maximize the number of cute anime girls received. In the past that might have been a problem because I sometimes ran out, but I have kidnapped many more since then and carried them off to my cabin so I'm pretty confident the supply will last.


These are all good although you’re not the first:

>11
>Moby-Dick
RIght.

>13
>Something from Freud
Interpretation of Dreams, introducing the Oedipus Complex.

>56
>This is from Hegel, right?
‘Philosophy Of Right’.


This is good and you are:

>62
>Middlemarch? I think I remember Rosamond being able to sing as well as play piano.
The reference to Niobe hinting at bad things to come.


>This was a hard one, OP!
Yeah, it's perhaps unreasonably hard since lots of works are quite obscure AND the extracts are only quite short. We'll see how we go.