like some magician

"If you want to get rich quickly," Konstanjoglo broke in abruptly and sternly, for he was in a bad humour, "you will never get rich. But if you want to get rich without thinking of how long it will take you, then you'll get rich quickly."
  "So that's how it is," said Chichikov.
  "Yes, sir," said Konstanjoglo abruptly as though he was angry with Chichikov himself. "One must love one's work. Without that you can do nothing. One must love farming—yes, sir! And believe me, it is not at all boring. They've taken it into their heads that life in the country is dull and depressing. Why, I'd die, I'd hang myself from depression, if I had to spend one day in town as they spend it in their stupid clubs, pubs, and theatres. The fools, the stupid idiots, the breed of jackasses! A farmer can't be bored. He has no time to be bored. There's not an inch of emptiness in his life. Its completely full. Think of the diversity of his work and what work! Work that truly exalts the spirit. Say what you like, but in the country man walks hand in hand with nature, with the seasons, he participates and communes with everything that goes on in creation. Have a good look at the annual cycle of works: how even before the coming of spring everything in nature is already on the alert and full of expectancy. The seeds must be got ready, the corn in the barns has to be carefully sorted out, measured, and dried, new rates of taxation have to be fixed. The income and expenditure for the whole year has to be carefully considered and calculated in advance. And as soon as the ice starts breaking up and the high-water level of the rivers has gone down and everything is dry again, the earth begins to be turned over—the spades get busy in the kitchen gardens and the orchards and the ploughs and harrows in the fields: planting and sowing ... Do you understand what it all means? A trifle! It's the next harvest that is being sown! It's the happiness of the entire earth that is being sown! It's the sustenance of millions that is being sown! Summer comes. ... The mowing and haymaking begins. ... Soon harvesting time is upon us; after the rye comes the wheat, then the barley and the oats. The work is in full swing; there is not a moment to be lost; if you had twenty eyes there'd be work for them all. And when all this has been happily accomplished and all the grain has been carted to the threshing floors and stacked, and the winter crops have been sown, and the barns, the threshing barns, and the cow-sheds have been repaired for the winter and the women have completed all their work, and the balance of all that has been drawn up and you can see what has been done, why, it's ... And winter! there's threshing on all the threshing floors and the carting of the threshed grain from the threshing floors to the barns. You go round the flour-mill and the factories, you have a look at the workshops, you pay a visit to the peasants to see what they are doing. For my part, if a carpenter knows how to wield his axe, I'm ready to stand for a couple of hours watching him: his work gives me much pleasure. And when on top of it you realize that this work is being done with some purpose and that everything around you is multiplying and multiplying, bringing in both fruits and profits, why, I can't tell you what one feels at the time! And not because your money's growing—after all, money's not everything—but because it's all the work of your hands; because you see that you are the cause and the creator of it all, and that, like some magician, you are scattering riches and abundance everywhere. Where could you find delight to equal it?" said Konstanjoglo, lifting his face from which the wrinkles had suddenly disappeared. Like an emperor on the day of his solemn coronation, he looked transfigured and it seemed as though rays of light were issuing from his face. "Yes, nowhere in the world will you find anything to equal this delight. It is here, yes, here that man imitates God. God has left the work of creation to himself as one of the highest delights and he asks man also to be a creator of like prosperity all around him. And they call that dull work!"
  Chichikov listened with delight to the sweet sound of his host's words like the singing of a bird of paradise. His mouth watered, his eyes grew moist and shone with sweetness, and he could have listened for ever.
 ... "You can talk as much as you like," said Platonov, who was walking behind them, "but it's boring, all the same."

Gogol, Dead Souls (1969: 238-329)

Mansion of Many Apartments

I compare human life to a large Mansion of Many Apartments, two of which I can only describe, the doors of the rest being yet shut upon me - The first we step into we call the infant or thoughtless Chamber, in which we remain as long as we do not think - We remain there a long while, and notwithstanding the doors of the second Chamber remain wide open, showing a bright appearance, we care not to hasten to it; but are at length imperceptibly impelled by the awakening of the thinking principle - within us - we no sooner get into the second Chamber, which I shall call the Chamber of Maiden-Thought, than we become intoxicated with the light and the atmosphere, we see nothing but pleasant wonders, and think of delaying there for ever in delight: However among the effects this breathing is father of is that tremendous one of sharpening one's vision into the heart and nature of Man - of convincing ones nerves that the World is full of Misery and Heartbreak, Pain, Sickness and oppression - whereby This Chamber of Maiden Thought become gradually darken'd and at the same time on all sides of it many doors are set open - but all dark - all leading to dark passages - We see not the ballance of good and evil. We are in a Mist - We are now in that state - We feel the "burden of the Mystery."

John Keats, Letter to J. H. Reynolds, 3 May 1818

money is the most reliable thing in the world

One day, with the first sunshine and the floods of early spring, the father, taking his son with him, set out in a little cart, drawn by a chestnut piebald nag, of the kind known among horse-dealers as "magpies"; it was driven by a little hunchback, the progenitor of the only serf family owned by Chichikov's father, who performed almost all the duties in the house. They drove with the "magpie" for over a day and a half. They spent a night on the road, crossed a river, had their meals of cold pie and roast mutton, and reached the town only on the morning of the third day. The streets of the town dazzled the boy with their unexpected splendour, making him gape for several minutes. Then the "magpie" plunged with the cart into a big hole at the entrance of a narrow lane running downhill and thick with mud; it took the "magpie" a long time to get out of it; after struggling with all her might to wade through the mud, urged on by the hunchback and by the master himself, she finally succeeded in dragging them out into a little yard standing on the slope of the hill. Two flowering apple-trees grew in front of the little old house, covered with shingle and with one narrow opaque window, and there was a small garden at the back. Here lived a relative of theirs, a wizened old woman who still went to market every morning, drying her stockings on the samovar afterwards. She patted the boy on the cheek and admired his plumpness. There he was to stay and go every day to the town school.
  After spending a night there, his father set off home again next morning. No tears were shed by his father at parting. He was given fifty copecks in copper coins for pocket money and to buy sweets and, was was far more important, this wise admonition: "Mind, Pavlusha, do your lessons. Don't play the fool and get into mischief. Above all, do your best to please your teachers and superiors. If you please your chief, you will be all right and you will get ahead of everyone, even if you turn out to be a bad scholar, and even if God has given you no talent. Do not make friends with your classmates. They will teach you no good. But if you do make friends with them, play with those who are better off and might be useful to you. Don't entertain or treat anyone, but behave in such a way that you may be treated by others and, above all, take care and save your pennies: money is the most reliable thing in the world. A classmate or friend may cheat you and be the first to leave you in the lurch when you're in trouble, but money will never let you down whatever trouble you may be in. With money in your pocket you can do anything and money will see you through everything." Having delivered himself of these precepts, the father parted from his son and dragged himself off home again on his "magpie" and from that day his son never set eyes on him again, but his words and precepts sank deeply into his mind.

Gogol, Dead Souls (1961: 235-236)

not once but twice

He turned his eyes fully upon her, now a glacial blue; they were impersonal and seemed to gaze beyond her at all women who had dissolved into one, but who might, at any moment again become dissolved into all. This was the gaze Sabina had always encountered in Don Juan, everywhere, it was the gaze she mistrusted. It was the alchemy of desire fixing itself upon the incarnation of all women into Sabina for a moment but as easily by a second process able to alchemize Sabina into many others.
  Her identity as the "unique" Sabina loved by Alan was threatened. Her mistrust of his glance made the blood flow cold within her.
  She examined his face to see if he divined that she was nervous, that every moment of experience brought on this nervousness, almost paralyzing her.
  But instead of a violent gesture he took hold of her finger tips with his smoothly designed hands, as if he were inviting her for an airy waltz, and said, "Your hands are cold."
  He caressed the rest of her arm, kissing the nook between the elbows, the shoulders, and said: "Your body is feverishly hot. Have you had too much sun?"
  To reassure him she said unguardedly: "Stage fright."
  At this he laughed, mockingly, unbelieving, as she had feared he would. (There was only one man who believed she was afraid and at this moment she would have liked to run back to Alan, to run away from this mocking stranger whom she had attempted to deceive by her poise, her expert silences, her inviting eyes. This was too difficult to sustain and she would fail. She was straining, and she was frightened. She did not know how to regain prestige in his eyes, having admitted a weakness which the stranger mockingly disbelieved, and which was not in harmony with her provocative behavior. This mocking laughter she was to hear once more when later he invited her to meet his closest friend, his companion in adventure, his brother Don Juan, as suave, as graceful and confident as himself. They had treated her merrily as one of their own kind, the adventuress, the huntress, the invulnerable woman, and it had offended her!)
  When he saw she did not share his laughter, he became serious, lying at her side, but she was still offended and her heart continued to beat loudly with stage fright.
  "I have to go back," she said, rising and shaking the sand off with vehemence.
  With immediate gallantry he rose, denoting a long habit of submission to women's whims. He rose and dressed himself, swung his leather bag over his shoulder and walked beside her, ironically courteous, impersonal, unaffected.
  After a moment he said: "Would you like to meet me for dinner at the Dragon?"
  "Not for dinner but later, yes. About ten or eleven."
  He again bowed, ironically, and walked with cool eyes beside her. His nonchalance irritated her. He walked with such full assurance that he ultimately always obtained his desire, and she hated this assurance, she envied it.
  When they reached the beach town everyone turned to gaze at them. The Bright Messenger, she thought, from the Black Forest of the fairytales. Breathing deeply, expanding his wide chest, walking very straight, and then this festive smile which made her feel gay and light. She was proud of walking at his side, as if bearing a trophy. As a woman she was proud in her feminine vanity, in her love of conquest, strength and power: she had charmed, won, such a man. She felt heightened in her own eyes, while knowing this sensation was not different from drunkeness, and that it would vanish like the ecstasies of drink, leaving her the next day even more shaky, even weaker at the core, deflated, possessing nothing within herself.
  The core, where she felt a constant unsureness, this structure always near collapse which could so eaisly be shattered by a harsh word, a slight, a criticism, which floundered before obstacles, was haunted by the image of catastrophe, by the same obsessional forebodings which she heard in Ravel's Waltz.
  The waltz leading to catastrophe: swirling in spangled airy skirts, on polished floors, into an abyss, the minor notes simulating lightness, a mock dance, the minor notes always recalling that man's destiny was ruled by ultimate darkness.
  This core of Sabina's was temporarily supported by an artificial beam, the support of vanity's satisfaction when this man so obviously handsome walked by her side, and everyone who saw him envied the woman who had charmed him.
  When they separated he bowed over her hand in a European manner, with mock respect, but his voice was warm when he repeated: "You will come?" When none of his handsomeness, perfection and nonchalance had touched her, this slight hesitation did. Because he was for a moment uncertain, she felt him for a moment as a human being, a little closer to her when not altogether invulnerable.
  She said: "Friends are waiting for me."
  Then a slow to unfold but utterly dazzling smile illumined his face as he stood to his full height and saluted: "Change of the guards at Buckingham Palace!"
  By his tone of irony she knew he did not expect her to be meeting friends but most probably another man, another lover.
  He would not believe that she wanted to return to her room to wash the sand out of her hair, to put oil on over her sunburnt skin, to paint a fresh layer of polish on her nails, to relive every step of their encounter as she lay in the bath, in her habit of wanting to taste the intoxications of experience not once but twice.

Anaïs Nin, A Spy in the House of Love (1982: 24-27)

a lot of hard spaces

Space is all one space and thought is all one thought, but my mind divides its spaces into spaces into spaces and thoughts into thoughts into thoughts. Like a large condominium. Occasionally I think about the one Space and the one Thought, but usually I don't. Usually I think about my condominium.
  The condominium has hot and cold running water, a few Heinz pickles thrown in, some chocolate-covered cherries, and when Woolworth's hot fudge sundae switch goes on, then I know I really have something.
  (This condominium meditates a lot: it's usually closed for the afternoon, evening, and morning.)
  Your mind makes spaces into spaces. It's a lot of hard work. A lot of hard spaces. As you get older you get more spaces, and more compartments. And more things to put in the compartments.
  To be really rich, I believe, is to have one space. One big empty space.
  I really believe in empty spaces, although, as an artist, I make a lot of junk.
  Empty space is never-wasted space.
  Wasted space is any space that has art in it.

Andy Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (1975: 143)

the full glare

So many of my readers will say, and will blame the author for all sorts of improbabilities, or will call the poor officials 'fools', because man is very lavish in the use of the word 'fool' and is ready to apply it twenty times a day to his neighbour. It is sufficient if out of a dozen sides of his character he has one foolish one for a man to be put down as a fool in spite of his eleven good ones. Readers can find it easy to criticize, looking down from their comfortable corner on the heights from which the whole horizon lies open at everything that is taking place below, where man can only see the object nearest to him. And in the universal chronicle of mankind there are many entire centuries which he could apparently cross out and suppress as unnecessary. Many errors have been made in the world which today, it seems, even a child would not have made. How many crooked, out-of-the-way, narrow, impassable, and devious paths has humanity chosen in the attempt to attain eternal truth, while before it the straight road lay open, like the road leading to a magnificent building destined to become a royal palace. It is wider and more resplendent than all the other paths, lying as it does in the full glare of the sun and lit up by many lights at night, but men have streamed past it in blind darkness. And how many times even when guided by understanding that has descended upon them from heaven, have they still managed to swerve away from it and go astray, have managed in the broad light of day to get into the impassable out-of-the-way places again, have managed again to throw a blinding mist over each other's eyes and, running after will-o'-the-wisps, have manged to reach the brink of the precipice only to ask themselves afterwards with horror: "Where is the way out? Where is the road?" The present generation sees everything clearly, it is amazed at the errors and laughs at the folly of its ancestors, unaware that this chronicle is shot through and through with heavenly fires, that every letter in it cries out aloud to them, that from everywhere, from every direction an accusing finger is pointed at it, at the present generation; but the present generation laughs and proudly and self-confidently enters on a series of fresh errors at which their descendants will laugh again later on.

Gogol, Dead Souls (1961: 220-221)

extraordinary

Chichikov spread an atmosphere of joy and quite extraordinary gaiety. There was not a face that did not express pleasure or at least a reflection of the general pleasure. So it is with the faces of civil servants when the offices entrusted to their charge are being inpected by the chief of a government department: after their first panic has passed off they see that there is a great deal that has pleased him, and when at last he has graciously condescended to joke, that is to say, to utter a few words with a pleasant smile, the civil servants crowding arround him laugh twice as much in reply; those who have hardly heard what he said laugh with all their might too, and finally a policeman standing at the door an appreciable distance away, who has never laughed in his life and who has a minute earlier been shaking his fist at the people outside, even he, according to the unalterable laws of reflection, shows some kind of smile on his face, though it looks more as though he were about to sneeze after a pinch of strong snuff. Our hero responded to all and each and he felt extraordinarily at his ease; he bowed to right and to left, a little to one side, as was his habit, but without the slightest constraint, so that everyone was enchanted by him. The ladies at once crowded round him in a glittering garland, bring with them whole clouds of every kind of scent; one exuded roses, another brought with her the scent of spring and violets, a third was saturated through and through with mignonette; Chichikov just kept lifting up his nose and sniffing. Their dresses displayed an infinite variety of taste: muslins, satins, chiffons were of the pale fashionable shades for which even a name could not be found (such a degree of refinement has modern taste reached). Bows of ribbon and bunches of flowers fluttered about here and there in most picturesque disorder, though much thought had been given to the creation of this disorder. A light head-dress was supported only by the ears, and seemed to be saying, "Look out, I'm going to take flight and I'm only sorry I can't carry the beautiful creature away with me!" The waists were tightly laced and had the most firm and agreeable shape for the eyes to enjoy (it must be noted that, in general, the ladies of the town of N. were rather plump, but they laced themselves so skilfully and carried themselves so charmingly that it was quite impossible to notice how plump they were). They had thought out and forseen everything with most extraordinary care: necks and shoulders were bared just as much as was necessary and not an inch more; each one of them bared her possessions only as far as she thought them capable of ruining a man; the rest was all hidden away with extraordinary taste: either some light ribbon of a neck-band or a scarf that was lighter than a puff pastry known as 'a kiss', ethereally encircled the neck, or tiny fringed pieces of fine cambric known as 'modesties' were let in from under the dress over the shoulders. These 'modesties' concealed in front and at the back what could not possibly bring about a man's ruin and yet made one suspect that it was there that final disaster lay. The long gloves were not draw up as far as the sleeves, but purposely left bare those alluring parts of the arm above the elbow that in many of the ladies were of an enviable plumpness; some ladies had even split their gloves in the effort to pull them up as far as possible—in short, it was as if everything had been inscribed with the legend: "No, this is not a provincial town! This is a capital city! This is Paris itself!" Only here and there a bonnet of a shape never seen on earth before, or some feather that might have been a peacock's, was thrust out in defiance of all fashion and in accordance with individual taste. But you can't help that, for such is the nature of a provincial town: it is bound to trip up somewhere. Standing before them, Chichikov thought: "Who could be the authoress of the letter?" He thrust out his nose, but a whole row of elbows, cuffs, sleeves, ends of ribbons, perfumed chemisettes, and dresses brushed past his very nose. The galop was at its height: the postmaster's wife, the police captain, a lady with a pale blue feather, a lady with a white feather, the Georgian prince, Chipkhaykhilidzev, an official from Petersburg, an official from Moscow, a Frenchman called Coucou, Perkhunovsky, Berebendovsky, all were whirling madly in the dance.
 "Look at them! The whole provincial administration is in full swing!" said Chichikov to himself, standing back, and as soon as the ladies had resumed their seats, he again started trying to find out whether he could tell from the expression of a face or a look in some eyes who the writer of the letter was; but it was utterly impossible to recognize either from the expression of the face or the look in the eyes who the writer was. Everywhere something could be detected that seemed to be on the point of betraying some secret, something elusively subtle—oh, how subtle! ... "No," Chichikov said to himself, "women are a subject such as ..." Here he dismissed it with a wave of the hand: "What's the use of talking! Just try and describe or put into words everything that is flitting over their faces, all the sublte twists of meaning, all the hints—and you simply won't be able to put it into words. Their eyes alone are such a vast realm that if a man ventured to enter it he'd be as good as done for! You won't drag him out of there by hook or by crook. Just try describing, for instance, their glitter alone: moist, velvety, sugary. Goodness only knows what else you may not find there. Harsh and soft, and quite languishing, or as some say, voluptuous or not voluptuous but a hundred times worse than voluptuous—and it clutches at your heart and plays upon your souls, as though with a violin bow. No, one simply can't find the right words: the 'ever so refined' half of the human species, and that's all there is to it!"

Gogol, Dead Souls (1961: 172-174)

of raisins and of soap

Before, long ago, in the days of my youth, in the days of my childhood, which have passed away like a dream never to return, I felt happy whenever I happened to drive up for the first time to an unfamiliar place: it mattered not whether it was a little hamlet, a poor little provincial town, or a large villiage, or some suburb, the inquisitive eyes of a child found a great deal of interest there. Every building, everything that bore the mark of some noticeable peculiarity—everything made me pause in amazement. Whether it was a brick government building of an all too familiar architecture with half of its frontage covered with blind windows, standing incongruously all alone among a mass of rough-hewn, timbered one-storied artisan dwellings, or a round regular cupola covered with sheets of galvanized iron, rising above the snowy whitewashed new church, or a market-place, or some provincial dandy who happened to be taking a stroll in the centre of the town—nothing escaped my fresh, alert attention, and thrusting my nose out of my travelling cart, I gazed at the cut of some coat I had never seen before or at the wooden chests of nails, or sulphur whose yellow colour I could discern from a distance, of raisins and of soap, glimpses of which I caught for a moment through the door of some grocer's shop together with jars of dried up Moscow sweets; I stared, too, at some infantry officer, walking by himself, who had been cast into this dull provincial hole from goodness only knows what province, or at a merchant in his close-fitting, pleated Siberian coat, driving past in a trap at a spanking pace, and I was carried away in my thoughts after them, into their poor lives. If some district official happened to pass by, I immediately began to wonder where he was going, whether it was to a party given by a colleague of his, or straight home to sit on the front steps of his house for half an hour till darkness had fallen, and then sit down to an early supper with his mother, his wife, his wife's sister, and the rest of his family, and I tried to imagine what they would be talking about, while a serf-girl with her coin necklace or a serf-boy in his thick tunic brought in a tallow candle in an ancient candlestick after the soup. Whenever I drove up to the village of some landowner, I would gaze curiously at the tall, narrow, wodden belfry, or at the dark, vast, old wooden church. The red roof and the white chimneys of the manor house beckoned invitingly to me from a distance through the green foliage of the trees, and I waited impatiently for the orchards which surrounded it to fall back on either side so that I might get a fullview of its, in those days, alas, far from vulgar exterior; and from its appearance I tried to guess what sort of a man the landowner was, whether he was stout, and whether he had sons or a whole bevy of daughters, six in all, with loud, happy, girlish laughter, and their games, and the youngest sister, of course, the most beautiful of them all, and whether they had black eyes, and whether he was a jovial fellow himself or as gloomy as the last days of September, looking perpetually at the calendar and talking everlastingly about his rye and wheat, a subject so boring to young people.
  Now it is with indifference that I drive up to every unknown village and it is with indifference that I gaze at its vulgar exterior; there is a cold look in my eyes and I feel uncomfortable, and I am amused no more, and what in former years would have awakened a lively interest in my face, laughter, and an uninterrupted flow of words, now slips by me without notice and my motionless lips preserve an apathetic silence. Oh, my youth! Oh, my freshness!

Gogol, Dead Souls (1961: 119-120)

ignorant of its terms

The storm clouds that had appeared the previous day finally blew off, and I was able to walk to the neighboring village. The route I normally take is circular and leads past a stucco house occupied by a frail elderly couple. For years they raised rabbits in their front yard, but last summer they either ate them, which is normal in this area, or turned them loose, which is unheard of. Then they got rid of the pen and built in its place a clumsy wooden shed. A few months later a cage appeared on its doorstep. It was the type you might keep a rodent in, but instead of a guinea pig they use it to hold a pair of full-grown magpies. They're good-sized birds—almost as tall as crows—and their quarters are much too small for them. Unlike parakeets, which will eventually settle down, the magpies are constantly searching for a way out, and move as if they're on fire, darting from one end of the cage to another and banging their heads against the wire ceiling.
  Their desperation is contagious, and watching them causes my pulse to quicken. Being locked up is one thing, but to have no concept of confinement, to be ignorant of its terms and never understand that struggle is useless—that's what hell must be like. The magpies leave me feeling so depressed and anxious that I wonder how I can possibly make it the rest of the way home. I always do, though, and it's always a welcome sight, especially lately.

David Sedaris, Aerial (When You Are Engulfed in Flames, 2008: 279-80)

persons quite unstable

He arrived, and found to his surprise, not the honourable lady, but the giddy girl, in the room. She had received him with a certain dignified openness of manner, which she had of late been practising, and so constrained him likewise to be courteous.
  At first she rallied him in general on the good fortune which pursued him everywhere, and which, as she could not but see, had led him hither in the present case. Then she delicately set before him the treatment with which of late he had afflicted her; she blamed and upbraided herself; confessed that she had but too well deserved such punishment; described with the greatest candour what she called her former situation; adding, that she would despise herself, if she were not capable of altering, and making herself worthy of his friendship.
  Wilhelm was struck with this oration. He had too little knowledge of the world to understand that persons quite unstable, and incapable of all improvement, frequently accuse themselves in the bitterest manner, confessing and deploring their faults with extreme ingenuousness, though they possess not the smallest power within them to retire from that course, along which the irresistible tendency of their nature is dragging them forward. Accordingly, he could not find in his heart to behave inexorably to the graceful sinner: he entered into conversation, and learned from her the project of a singular disguisement, wherewith it was intended to surprise the countess.

Goethe, Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship Vol. 1 (231-32)

on this earth

Who never ate his bread with tears,
Through nights of grief who, weeping, never
Sat on his bed, midst pangs and fears,
Can, heavenly powers, not know you ever.

Ye lead us forth into this life,
Where comfort soon by guilt is banished,
Abandon us to tortures, strife;
For on this earth all guilt is punished.

Wer nie sein Brod mit Thränen as,
Wer nie die kummervollen Nächte
Auf seinem Bette weinend sas,
Der kennt euch nicht, ihr himmlischen Mächte.

Ihr führt ins Leben uns hinein,
Ihr laßt den Armen schuldig werden,
Dann überlaßt ihr ihn der Pein;
Denn alle Schuld rächt sich auf Erden.

Goethe, Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship Vol. 1 (165)

we intend

... the capacity to impose functions on natural phenomena [is] remarkable, but equally remarkable is the fact that functions may be imposed quite unconsciously, and the functions once imposed are often—so to speak—invisble. So, for example, money may simply have evolved without anyone ever thinking, "We are now imposing a new function to these objects"; and once money has evolved, people may use money to buy and sell without thinking about the logical structure of imposed function. However, for all cases of agentive function, someone must be capable of understanding what the thing is for, or the function could never be assigned. At least some of the participants in the system of exchange must understand, consciously or unconsciously, that money is to buy things with, screwdrivers are for driving screws, and so forth. If we assign a function that is totally apart from human intentions, it would have to fall in the category of nonagentive functions. Thus suppose someone says that the intended agentive function of money is to serve as a medium of exchange and a store of value, but money also serves the hidden, secret, unintended function of maintaining the system of power relationships in society. The first claim is about the intentionality of agentive function. The second claim is about nonagentive function. To see this, simply ask yourself what facts in the world would make each claim true. The first claim is made true by the intentionality with which agents use objects as money. They use it for the purpose of buying, selling, and storing value. The second claim, like the claim that the heart functions to pump blood, would be true if and only if there is a set of unintended causal relations and these serve some teleology, even if it is not a teleology shared by the speaker.

... What is the relation between singular and collective intentionality, between, for example, the facts described by "I intend" and "We intend"? Most efforts I have seen to answer this question try to reduce "We intentionality" to "I intentionality" plus something else, usually mutual beliefs. The idea is that I intend to do it in the belief that you also intend to do it; and you intend to do it in the belief that you also intend to do it; and you intend to do it in the belief that I also intend to do it. And each believes that the other has these beliefs, and has these beliefs about these beliefs . . . etc., in a potentially infinite hierarchy of beliefs. "I believe that you believe that I believe that you believe that I believe. . . .," and so on. In my view all these efforts to reduce collective intentionality to individual intentionality fail. Collective intentionality is a biologically primitive phenomenon that cannot be reduced to or eliminated in favor of something else. Every attempt at reducing "We intentionality" to "I intentionality" that I have seen is subject to counterexamples.
  There is a deep reason why collective intentionality cannot be reduced to individual intentionality. The problem with believing that you believe that I believe, etc., and you believing that I believe that you believe, etc., is that it does not add up to a sense of collectivity. No set of "I Consciousnesses," even supplemented with beliefs, adds up to a "We Consciousness." The crucial element in collective intentionality is a sense of doing (wanting, believing, etc.) something together, and the individual intentionality that each person has is derived from the collective intentionality that they share. Thus, to go back to the earlier example of the football game, I do indeed have a singular intention to block the defensive end, but I have that intention only as part of our collective intention to execute a pass play.
  We can see these differences quite starkly if we contrast the case where there is genuine cooperative behavior with the case where, so to speak, by accident two people happen to find that their behavior is synchronized. There is a big difference between two violinists playing in an orchestra, on the one hand, and on the other hand, discovering, while I am practicing my part, that someone in the next room is practicing her part, and thus discovering that, by chance, we are playing the same piece in a synchronized fashion.
  Why are so many philosophers convinced that collective intentionality must be reducible to individual intentionality? Why are they unwilling to recognize collective intentionality as a primitive phenomenon? I believe the reason is that they accept an argument that looks appealing but is fallacious. The argument is that because all intentionality exists in the heads of individual human beings, the form of that intentionality can make reference only to the individuals in whose heads it exists. So it has seemed that anybody who recognizes collective intentionality as a primitive form of mental life must be committed to the idea that there exists some Hegelian world spirit, a collective consciousness, or something equally implausible. The requirements of methodological individualism seem to force us to reduce collective intentionality to individual intentionality. It has seemed, in short, that we have to choose between reductionism, on the one hand, or a super mind floating over the individual minds, on the other. I want to claim, on the contrary, that the argument contains a fallacy and that the dilemma is a false one. It is indeed the case that all my mental life is inside my brain, and all your mental life is inside your brain, and so on for everybody else. But it does not follow from that that all my mental life must be expressed in the form of a singular noun phrase referring to me. The form that my collective intentionality can take is simply "we intend," "we are doing so-and-so," and the like. In such cases, I intend only as part of our intending. The intentionality that exists in each individual has the form "we intend."

John Searle, The Construction of Social Reality (1995: 21-26)

the want of proper actors

"Oh that I might never hear more of nature, and scenes of nature!" cried Philina, so soon as he was gone: "there is nothing in the world more intolerable than to hear people reckon up the pleasures you enjoy. When the day is bright you go to walk, as to dance when you hear a tune played. But who would think a moment on the music or the weather? It is the dancer that interests us, not the violin; and to look upon a pair of bright black eyes is the life of a pair of blue ones. But what on earth have we to do with wells and brooks, and old rotten lindens?" She was sitting opposite to Wilhelm; and, while speaking so, she looked into his eyes with a glance which he could not hinder from piercing at least to the very door of his heart.
  "You are right," replied he, not without embarrassment: "man is ever the most interesting object to man, and perhaps should be the only one that interests. Whatever else surrounds us is but the element in which we live, or else the instrument which we employ. The more we devote ourselves to such things, the more we attend to and feel concern in them, the weaker will our sense of our own dignity become, the weaker our feelings for society. Men who put a great value on gardens, buildings, clothes, ornaments, or any other sort of property, grow less social and pleasant: they lose sight of their brethren, whom very few can succeed in collecting about them and entertaining. Have you not observed it on the stage? A good actor makes us very soon forget the awkwardness and meannness of paltry decorations, but a splendid theatre is the very thing which first makes us truly feel the want of proper actors."

Goethe, Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship Vol.1

the capacity alone

"In truth, the sale of that cabinet grieved me very much at the time; and often since I have thought of it with regret: but when I consider that it was a necessary means of awakening a taste in me, of developing a talent, which will operate far more powerfully on my history than ever those lifeless pictures could have done, I easily content myself, and honour destiny, which knows how to bring about what is best for me, and what is best for every one."
  "It gives me pain to hear this word destiny in the mouth of a young person, just at the age when men are commonly accustomed to ascribe their own violent inclinations to the will of higher natures."
  "You, then, do not believe in destiny? No power that rules over us and directs all for our ultimate advantage?"
  "The question is not now of my belief, nor is this the place to explain how I may have attempted to form for myself some not impossible conception of things which are incomprehensible to all of us: the question here is, What mode of viewing them will profit us the most? The fabric of our life is formed of necessity and chance: the reason of man takes its station between them, and may rule them both; it treats the necessary as the groundwork of its being; the accidental it can direct and guide, and employ for its own purposes: and only while this principle of reason stands firm and inexpungnable, does man deserve to be named the god of this lower world. But woe to him who, from his youth, has used himself to search in necessity for something of arbitrary will; to ascribe to chance a sort of reason, which it is a matter of religion to obey. Is conduct like this aught else than to renounce one's understanding, and give unrestricted scope to one's inclinations? We think it is a kind of piety to move along without consideration; to let accidents that please us determine our conduct; and, finally, to bestow on the result of such a vacillating life the name of providential guidance."
  "Was it never your case that some little circumstance induced you to strike into a certain path, where some accidental occurrence erelong met you, and a series of unexpected incidents at length brought you to some point which you yourself had scarcely once contemplated? Should not lessons of this kind teach us obedience to destiny, confidence in some such guide?"
  "With opinions like these, no woman could maintain her virtue, no man keep the money in his purse; for occasions enough are occurring to get rid of both. He alone is worthy of respect, who knows what is of use to himself and others, and who labours to control his self-will. Each man has his own fortune in his hands; as the artist has a piece of rude matter, which he is to fashion to a certain shape. But the art of living rightly is like all arts; the capacity alone is born with us; it must be learned, and practiced with incessant care."

Goethe, Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship Vol. 1 (82-84)

unmingled with any sadness

It is quite commonplace for moralists to warn people against supposing that sensual pleasure, fame, and money are genuine or unequivocal goods. It is worth looking in some detail, however, at the particular critique of these attractions that Spinoza offers. Of sensual pleasure he says this: "By sensual pleasure the mind is enthralled to the extent of quiescence, as if the supreme good were actually attained, so that it is quite incapable of thinking of any other object; when such pleasure has been gratified it is followed by extreme melancholy, whereby the mind, though not enthralled, is disturbed and dulled." Spinoza is clearly not talking about the sort of pleasure one gets from a brisk walk in the country. That is not the sort of activity which enthralls us to the point of quiescence or whose appeal drives out all the thoughts of other things. Nor is it common, or even understandable, that an activity of that sort should be followed by melancholy, much less by "extreme melancholy." A bit further on Spinoza asserts that sensual pleasure is followed not merely by melancholy but by repentance. This only confirms the strong impression that, whether or not he is clear about this himself, Spinoza is describing sexual pleasure, which he evidently finds extremely enticing but which he also finds to be mixed characteristically with unpleasant experiences of depression and guilt.
  Spinoza's initial point about money and fame is a somewhat different one. It is that there is no limit to how much of those things people who care about them desire; indeed, the more people have of them the more they tend to want. The pursuit of sensual pleasure is limited by our susceptibility to fatigue or to the exhaustion of our capacity for engaging in, or for enjoying, whatever activity is in question. But no limitation of this kind is inherent in the pursuit of money or the pursuit of fame, which are by nature endless and uncompleteable and which will continue as long as they are not limited by something outside themselves—some goal which defines how much money or how much fame is enough. Spinoza finds that these goods cannot of themselves bring satisfaction, because there is no particular amount of them which is inherently satisfying. Moreover, pursuing either of them is inevitably competitive and leads inescapably to undesirable experiences, such as those of envy, hatred, fear, and disappointment. People who are committed to the pursuit of conventional goods, Spinoza warns, expose themselves to extremes of contradictory emotion. They swing from intense pleasure to feelings of melancholy and guilt; and their satisfactions are often mixed with frustration when they discover that attaining what they desire serves only to arouse a further desire for more than they already have.
  As Spinoza elaborates these points, the quality and tone of his account undergo a conspicuous change. The conventional goods, he says, are not only unreliable and unsatisfying. They are actually evil and extremely dangerous to us; and anyone who devotes himself to them is "in a state of great peril." As he goes on, Spinoza seems to be more and more carried away. The peril to which he refers turns out to be not just a danger of moral corruption of of misery or of some sort of deterioration of the soul. He insists that it is literally a peril of death. And then it becomes not only a peril but even a certainty of death! Conventional goods often cause the deaths of those who possess them, Spinoza declares, and they always cause the deaths of those who are possessed by them. The context makes it unmistakably clear, by the way, that these references to death are not metaphorical. Spinoza's statements really are just as wild as they seem.
  Spinoza never completed the Treatise on the Improvement of the Understanding. He clearly had some notion of completing it, however, since he made a number of notes in the margin of his manuscript concerning changes to be made in a subsequent version which he never actually wrote. One of those notes occurs at the point where he makes the remarkable—indeed, incredible—claim that giving in to or allowing oneself to be possessed by desires for sensual pleasure, money, or fame brings certain death. His note to himself reads: "These considerations should be set forth more precisely." Indeed! Evidently he became aware of the exaggeration into which he had permitted himself to be swept, caught himself up short in his marginal admonition to himself, and intended one day to give a more measured and less fantasy-ridden account of his subject.
  ... In discussing desires for money and fame, Spinoza attributes much of the unsatisfactory quality of these objects as ends in themselves to the fact that they are necessarily scarce. Since there cannot be enough of them to satisfy all possible desires, the satisfaction of one person's desires diminishes the chances of satisfaction for others. Those who desire money or fame are therefore inevitably in competition with others who are also ambitious to acquire them. It is the inevitability of competition which leads Spinoza to regard the value of attaining these goods as inextricably compromised by the evils of hatred, envy, fear of loss, and other disturbances of the mind.
  ... What is the cure for all this? How are we to avoid these disturbances of the mind, which obstruct and interrupt the sustained serenity and joy which Spinoza seeks? The secret, he declares, is to care deeply only for what is eternal and infinite—in other words, for what is neither transitory or scarce. The enjoyment of something of that kind will be, he assures us, unmingled with any sadness; no contrary pain will be inherent in the pleasure it brings. Now, it is pretty clear that being eternal and infinite is not really enough. After all, the number six is eternal; and even if we add all the other positive integers, so that we get an object that is not only eternal but infinite as well, this hardly solves the problem of how to achieve perfect happiness.
  Of course Spinoza has something more particular in mind, which comes out when he begins to describe the ideal condition of human life. Here is the paragraph in which his central claim emerges:
All things which come to pass, come to pass according to the eternal order and fixed laws of Nature. However, human weakness cannot attain to this order in its own thought, but meanwhile man conceives a human character much more stable than his own, and sees that there is no reason why he should not himself acquire such a character ... What that character is we shall show in due time, namely that it is the knowledge of the union existing between the mind and the whole of nature.
  It is clear enough what eternal and infinite object it is that Spinoza identifies in this passage as capable of playing a fundamental role in the achievement of human happiness. It is "the eternal order and fixed laws of Nature." But the observation Spinoza makes next is sometimes misunderstood. After referring to the eternal order and fixed laws of Nature, he observes that we are too weak to attain this order in our own thoughts. Now this has been construed by some readers as a lament over our inability to arrive at a totally comprehensive knowledge of Nature ... we are simply not intelligent enough to grasp the eternal order in all its details.
  Spinoza himself makes it rather clear, however, that his attention is not focused primarily on our intellectual limitations. After alluding to human weakness and to the incapacity it entails, he declares that "man conceives a human character much more stable than his own," and that this conception of a more stable character provides the ideal goal toward which human endeavor must strive. The ideal is not formulated in terms of intelligence or of knowledge or of understanding, but as a matter of stability. In other words, what we conceive as the ideal character for ourselves is not one distinguished primarily by greater knowledge than we possess, but one which emulates the characteristics which Spinoza has just been ascribing to Nature—namely, order and fixity or, to use the his word, stability. Our aim is to be rid of the disturbances which unbalance our condition, interrupt the evenness of our thoughts and feelings, and make us suffer passively the effects upon us of forces with which we do not identify and which we experience as alien to ourselves.
  How does Spinoza imagine this stability can be achieved? There, of course, is where knowledge comes in. We achieve stability by understanding "the union existing between the mind and the whole of nature"—that is, by recognizing ourselves as products of forces which are generated systematically and in a lawful manner according to the fixed nature of the world, and by understanding that what goes on within us is by no means random or unintelligible but that it is (like everything else that happens) a necessary consequence of the fundamental substance and structure of the universe. The more we come to see the events of our own lives—and especially the events of our minds—as manifestations of an eternal and fixed order of natural law and natural necessity, the more intelligible they become to us and the less we are beset by emotions which breach and undermine the order of our nature and the stability of our existence. This reduces our sense that the power of the universe is alien to us and that we are merely passive with respect to it.

Harry Frankfurt, Necessity, Volition, and Love (1999:48-52)

insuring life in a single sentence

4th Question:. . . . . .? (For the second time.)
Answer: Books? Yes, I read a lot, I've always read a lot. No, I'm not sure we do understand each other. I like to read best on the floor, or in bed, almost everything lying down, no, it has less to do with the books, above all it has to do with the reading, with black on white, with the letters, the syllables, lines, the signs, the setting down, this inhuman fixing, this insanity which flows from people and is frozen into expression. Believe me, expression is insanity, it arises out of our insanity. It also has to do with turning pages, with hunting from one page to the other, overflow of verse, with insuring life in a single sentence, and, in turn, with the sentences seeking insurance in life. Reading is a vice which can replace all other vices or temporarily take their place in more intensely helping people live, it is an aberration, a consuming passion. No, I don't take any drugs, I take books, of course I have certain preferences, many books don't suit me at all, some I take only in the morning, others at night, there are books I don't ever let go, I drag them around with me in the apartment, carrying them from the living room into the kitchen, I read them in the hall standing up, I don't use a bookmark, I don't move my lips while reading, early on I learned to read very well, I don't remember the method, but you ought to look into it, they must have used an excellent method in our provincial elementary schools, at least back then when I learned to read. Yes I also realized, but not until later, that there are countries where people don't know how to read, at least not quickly, but speed is important, not only concentration, can you please tell me who can keep chewing on a simple or even a complex sentence without feeling disgust, either with the eyes or the mouth, just keep on grinding away, over and over; a sentence which only consists of subject and preposition must be consumed rapidly, a sentence with many appositions must for that very reason be taken at tremendous speed, with the eyeballs performing an imperceptible slalom, since a sentence doesn't convey anything to itself, it has to "convey" something to the reader. I couldn't "work my way through" a book, that would almost be an occupation. There are people, I tell you, you come across the strangest surprises in this field of reading. . . I do profess a certain weakness for illiterates, I even know someone here who doesn't read and doesn't want to; a person who has succumbed to the vice of reading more easily understands that a state of innocence can be attained only by those truly capable of reading or by complete illiterates.
(Herr Mühlbauer has erased the tape by mistake. Herr Mühlbauer apologizes. I'd only have to repeat a few sentences.)
Yes, I read a lot, but the shocks, the things that really stay with you are merely the vision of a page, a remembrance of five words on the lower left of page 27: Nous allons à l'Espirit. Words on a poster, names on doors, titles of books left in a store window, unsold, a magazine ad discovered in the dentist's waiting room, a gravestone epitaph which struck my eye: HERE LIES. A name while flipping through the phone book: EUSEBIUS. I'll get right to the point. . . For example last year I read: "He wore a Menschikow," I don't know why, but I was immediately convinced that whoever this man might have been, this sentence meant he wore a Menschikow, indeed, that he had to wear one, and that this was important for me to know, it belongs irrevocably to my life. Something will come of it. But, to get back to the point I was trying to make, even if we were to have more sessions, day and night, I couldn't list the books which have impressed me the most or explain why they made such an impression, in which places and for how long. What is then left you will ask, but that's not the point! there are only a few sentences, a few expressions which awake inside my brain again and again, begging to be heard over the years: Der Ruhm hat keine weissen Flügel [The wings of fame aren't white]. Avec ma main brûlée, j'écris sur la nature du feu [With my burned hand I write about the nature of fire]. In fuoco l'amor mi mise, in fuoco d'amor mi mise [Love set me afire, I was set in a fire of love]. To The Onlie Begetter. . .
(I signal and blush, Herr Mühlbauer has to erase that at once, no one cares about that, I wasn't thinking, I let myself get carried away, the Viennese newspaper readers wouldn't understand Italian anyway and most of them wouldn't understand French anymore, not the younger ones, besides, it's not to the point. Herr Mühlbauer wants to think it over, he couldn't keep up entirely, he, too, doesn't know Italian or French, but he's been to America twice and never once encountered the word "begetter" in his journeys.)

Ingeborg Bachmann, Malina (1990:57-59)

completely natural

Despite all our differences, when it comes to our names Malina and I share the same timidity; only Ivan is completely enthused with his own name, and since it is completely natural to him, since he identifies himself with his name, it is also a pleasure for me to pronounce, to think, to whisper to myself. Ivan's name has become a source of pleasure, an indispensable luxury in my poverty-stricken life, and I see to it that Ivan's name is heard, whispered and quietly thought throughout the city. Also when I'm by myself, when I'm walking through Vienna all alone, there are many places I can say, I've walked here with Ivan, I waited for Ivan there, I had dinner with Ivan in the LINDE, I drank espresso with Ivan at the Kohlmarkt, Ivan works on the Kärntnerring, this is where Ivan buys his shirts, over there is Ivan's travel agency. He just can't have to go back to Paris or Munich again so soon! Also the places where I haven't been with Ivan: I say to myself, some time I'll have to come here with Ivan in the evening and look down on the city from the Cobenzl or from the high-rise in the Herrengasse. Ivan reacts immediately and jumps up when his name is called, but Malina hesitates, and in my turn I hesitate the same way. That's why Ivan does well not calling me by name all the time; he uses whatever pejorative comes to mind or simply says "my fräulein." My fräulein, we're letting it show again, what a shame, we're going to have to cure ourselves of that very soon now. Glissons. Glissons.

Ingeborg Bachmann, Malina (1990: 52-53)

the rub

If each of us carries around a set of criteria by which we judge certain acts as loving and tender or hating and brutal, what may be a loving act to one person may be a hating act to another. For example, one woman may be delighted if her suitor uses a "caveman approach" with her; another woman may think of him as repugnant for just the same behavior. The woman who sees the caveman approach as loving may in turn interpret a more subtle approach as "weak," whereas the woman who is repelled by a caveman approach may see the more subtle approach as "sensitive." Thus behavior even of itself does not directly lead to experience. It must be perceived and interpreted according to some set of criteria...
  In order for the other's behavior to become part of self's experience, self must perceive it. The very act of perception entails interpretation. The human being learns how to structure his perceptions, particularly within his family, as a subsystem interplaying with its own contextual subculture, related institutions and overall larger culture...
  Our experience of another entails a particular interpretation of his behavior. To feel loved is to perceive and interpret, that is, to experience, the actions of the other as loving. The alternation of my experience of my behavior to your experience of my behavior—there's the rub.

I act in a way that is cautious to me, but cowardly to you.
You act in a way that is courageous to you, but foolhardy to me.
She sees herself as vivacious, but he sees her as superficial.
He sees himself as friendly, she sees him as seductive.
She sees herself as reserved, he sees her as haughty and aloof.
He sees himself as gallant, she sees him as phony.
She sees herself as feminine, he sees her as helpless and dependent.
He sees himself as masculine, she sees him as overbearing and dominating.

  Experience in all cases entails the perception of the act and the interpretation of it. Within the issue of perception is the issue of selection and reception. From the many things that we see and hear of the other we select a few to remember. Acts highly significant to us may be trivial to others. We happen not to have been paying attention at that moment; we missed what to the other was his most significant gesture or statement. But, even if the acts selected for interpetation are the same, even if each individual perceives these acts as the same, even if each individual perceives these acts as the same act, the interpretation of the identical act may be very different. She winks at him in friendly complicity, and he sees it as seductive. The act is the same, the interpretation and hence the experience of it is disjunctive. She refuses to kiss him goodnight out of "self-respect," but he sees it as a rejection of him, and so on.
  A child who is told by his mother to wear a sweater may resent her as coddling him, but to her it may seem to be simply a mark of natural concern.
  In one society to burp after a good meal is good manners; in another it is uncouth. Thus, even though the piece of behavior under consideration may be agreed upon, the interpretation of this behavior may be diametrically disagreed upon.
  What leads to diametrically opposed interpretations? In general, we can say interpretations are based on our past learning, particularly within our family (i.e., with our parents, siblings and relatives) but also in the larger society in which we travel.
  Secondly, the act itself is interpreted according to the context in which it is found. Thus, for example, the refusal of a goodnight kiss after one date may seem to be perfectly normal for both parties, but after six months' dating a refusal would seem more significant to each of them. Also a refusal after a previous acceptance will seem more significant.
  What happens when two people do not agree on the meaning to be assigned to a particular act? A very complicated process ensues. If communication is optimum, they understand that they differ on the interpretation of the act, and also realize that they both understand that they differ in its interpretation. Once this is established they may get into a struggle over whether or not to change the act under consideration in the future. This struggle may take various forms:

Threat—Do this or else.
Coaxing—Please do this.
Bribery—If you do this I will do that in return.
Persuasion—I believe it is a good idea for you to do this because, etc.

However, often in human affairs where there is a disagreement there is also a misunderstanding and failure of realization of misunderstanding. This may be deliberate, i.e., a simple attempt to ignore the other person's point of view, or it may be an unwitting overlooking of the opposing viewpoint. In either case a disruption of communication occurs.

Laing, Phillipson & Lee, Interpersonal Perception (1966: 10-13)

a sort of pidgin English

The concept of diagnosis is contingent on the concept of disease. Diagnosis is the name of a disease, just as, say, violet is the name of a flower. For example, the term "diabetes" names a type of abnormal glucose metabolism. ... Diseases (lesions) are facts of nature, whereas diagnoses (words) are artifacts constructed by human beings.
  ... Names, semanticists love to remind us, are not things. Manipulating things is difficult, sometimes impossible. Manipulating names is easy. We do it all the time. Violet may be the name of a flower, a color, a woman, or a street. Similarly a disease-sounding term may be the name of a pathological lesion or bodily malfunction, or the name of the malfunction of a car, computer, or economic system, or the behavior of an individual or a group. ... We cannot distinguish between the literal and metaphorical uses of the term "disease" unless we identify its root meaning, agree that it is the literal meaning of the word, and treat all other uses of it as figures of speech. In conformity with traditional practice, I take the root meaning of disease to be a bodily lesion, understood to include not only structural malfunctions but also deviations from normal physiology, such as elevated blood pressure or lowered white cell count. If we accept this definition, then the term "diagnosis," used literally, refers to and is the name of a disease, and used metaphorically, refers to and is the name of a nondisease.
  ... Historically, scientific medicine is based on the postmortem examination of the body. Recalling his early work as a neurologist, Freud proudly reminisced: "The fame of my diagnoses and their post-mortem confirmation brought me an influx of American physicians, to whom I lectured upon the patients in my department in a sort of pidgin-English." In scientific medicine, the pathological diagnosis always trumps the clinical diagnosis.
  The use of diagnostic terms becomes problematic when the conditions they name are not disease but merely subjective, unverifiable complaints, referable to an individual's body, behaviors, or thoughts (communications). Psychopathology is diagnosed by finding unwanted behaviors in persons or by attributing such behaviors to them. For example, the term "kleptomania" is both a phenomenon and a name; diagnosis and disease are one and the same. Once "named," the diagnosis of a mental illness validates its own disease status. Psychopathology, unlike organic pathology, can change with the nosology—changing the name can convert disease into nondisease and vice versa (for example, homosexuality into civil right, smoking into nicotine dependence). Mental diseases are, a fortiori, diagnoses, not diseases.

Thomas Szasz, Pharmacracy: Medicine and Politics in America (2001:28-30)

Teaching Aid

Principles of the Weighty Tome, or How to Write Fat Books.

I. The whole composition must be permeated with a protracted and wordy exposition of the initial plan.
II. Terms are to be included for conceptions that, except in this definition, appear nowhere in the whole book.
III. Conceptual distinctions laboriously arrived at in the text are to be obliterated again in the relevant notes.
IV. For concepts treated only in their general significance, examples should be given; if, for example, machines are mentioned, all the different kinds of machines should be enumerated.
V. Everything that is known a priori about an object is to be consolidated by an abundance of examples.
VI. Relationships that could be represented graphically must be expounded in words. Instead of represented in a genealogical tree, for example, all family relationships are to be enumerated and described.
VII. A number of opponents all sharing the same argument should each be refuted individually.
  The typical work of modern scholarship is intended to be read like a catalogue. But when shall we actually write books like catalogues? If the deficient content were thus to determine the outward form, an excellent piece of writing would result, in which the value of opinions would be marked without their being thereby put on sale.
  The typewriter will alienate the hand of the man of letters from the pen only when the precision of typographic forms has directly entered the conception of his books. One might suppose that new systems with more variable typefaces would then be needed. They will replace the pliancy of the hand with the innervation of commanding fingers.
  A period that, constructed metrically, afterward has its rhythm upset at a single point yields the finest prose sentence imaginable. In this way a ray of light falls through a chink in the wall of the alchemist's cell, to light up gleaming crystals, spheres, and triangles.

Walter Benjamin, One-Way Street (1979: 63-64)

Cui bono?

People often assert that they are ill or that another person is sick. It is an error to believe that people say these things only because they have a disease or only because the person they call sick has a disease. People are often sick but do not say so or say so only to a few confidants, and they often assert, for a variety of reasons, that others—about whom they know next to nothing—are sick: thus, people simulate illness or malinger (to avoid military service), simulate health or deny illness (to avoid medical attention), and claim that others are sick by diagnosing them (to justify treating them as patients). These elementary truths have not been lost on artists, who provide us with perceptive accounts of the often complex and devious motives of patients and doctors.
  Having a demonstrable disease is not enough to explain why the subject asserts that he is ill (assumes the sick role) or why others assert that he is ill (place him in the sick role). To understand the myriad nonmedical meanings and consequences of illness—that is, the tactical rather than descriptive uses of terms such as "ill" and "patient"—we must, at least temporarily, ignore the pathological dimensions of the concept and instead focus on the classic problem, Cui bono? Cicero explained the importance of posing this question, primarily to oneself, as follows: "When trying a case L. Cassius never failed to inquire, 'Who gained by it?' Man's character is such that no man undertakes crimes without hope of gain."
  No man asserts that he or someone else has an illness without hope of gain. The potential gains, for oneself or others, from asserting such a claim—for example, securing medical help, monetary compensation, excusing crime, and so forth—are virtually endless. They depend on the claimant's character and motives, the social context in which the claim is advanced, and the ever-changing legal and social milieu in which medicine is practiced.

Thomas Szasz, Pharmacracy: Medicine and Politics in America (2001:6-7)

plague throughout

As a science, medicine rests on and makes use of the same methods and principles as the physical sciences. One of these principles is that the observer is a person, and the object he observes is not. Chemists and physicists observe, for example, the characteristics of various elements and classify them as helium, lithium, uranium, and so forth. The classification serves the interests of the classifiers. The objects classified have no interests.
  To understand the many conceptual, economic, and political problems that beset contemporary medical practice, that is, medicine as health care, we must distinguish between scientific medicine, whose objects of study are diseases that affect human beings, and clinical medicine, whose objects of study are persons, usually called "patients." Making this distinction does not imply that one is intellectually, morally, or practically better or more important than the other. Each enterprise has its own agenda and vocabulary.

· The aim of scientific medicine, an enterprise barely 150 years old, is to increase our understanding of the causes and cures of conditions scientifically defined as diseases. The aim of clinical medicine, which may be said to be as old as civilization, is to help persons regarded as sick recover their health.

· The practitioner of medical science seeks to understand disease. The practitioner of clinical medicine seeks to relieve dis-ease.

· Scientific medical knowledge is indifferent to individual or collective human well-being; it may be equally useful for biological warfare and the relief of human suffering. In contrast, the raison d'être of clinical medicine is the welfare of the patient.

... In the ancient world, disease was a gnostic concept, concerned with "spiritual truth," not with empirical evidence. In Biblical, Greek, and Roman accounts, disease is a holistic-theistic concept that precludes distinguishing between literal and metaphorical illnesses, between diseases of the body and diseases of the mind. There is no Latin word for our scientific concept of disease. When the Romans spoke of disease, they used the word "morbus"—the root of the English words "morbid" and "morbidity"—which also means disaster, fault, and vice; or the word "malum"—the root of such English words as "malefactor" and "malevolent"—which also means evil, harm, hardship, and punishment. The King James Version of the Scriptures uses the terms "murrain," "plague," and "pestilence," instead of the term "disease." The Revised Standard Version uses "plague" throughout. Accordingly, the act of healing entailed intermingling natural and supernatural means of influence, medical and religious methods of treating the body and the mind.
  ... Deluged by incessant advertising and propaganda about medical treatments, people forget that Christianity is not only a faith of redemption but also a faith of healing, of both body and soul. Unlike Abraham, Jesus is not only a prophet, he is also a healer, the Divine Physician, the Savior (der Heiland in German). For centuries, Christians regarded sickness as punishment for sin, curable by means of prayer, repentance, sacrifice, and the aspersion of holy water by a priest, the representative of an all-forgiving deity.
  To be plague-stricken was to be smitten by God. This put people in a bind: They believed in the theological explanation of the "plague," at least in part, because they could not get at the natural, physical cause of it, and then they refrained from trying to get at the root of the evil because they thought the evil was brought on by the hand of God. Furthermore, everyday life was replete with proof of the efficacy of miraculous cures for illnesses of all kinds. Shrines with powers of healing dotted the Christian landscape. More than 5 million pilgrims a year still visit Lourdes, and, to this day, the Vatican's official procedure for sanctification depends on medical proof of the would-be saint's having performed at least two miraculous cures.
  ... In short, prior to the nineteenth century, neither physicians nor patients had a precise idea about what was and what was not a disease. Disease was simply a discomfort and a danger, often leading to death, to be avoided and relieved as best one could. ... As the taboo against treating the body slowly lifted, there arose a diverse corps of professional healers: barber surgeons performing operations; herbalists prescribing medicines derived from plants; and doctors of medicine relying mainly on purging the body of presumed toxic substances believed to be the causes of disease.

  ... The waning influence of religion and the waxing prestige of science were slow and gradual processes. In the sixteenth century, the Church began to authorize the dissection of executed felons. Although physicians participated in this enterprise, the true fathers of anatomy were the great Renaissance artists, especially Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci.
  ... Once the secrets of nature are revealed, they cannot be ignored. Physicians and lay persons alike began to view the body as a machine whose workings must be understood, rather than merely manipulated in the tradition of herbal empiricists. The stage was now set for the development of the scientific diagnosis of patients, both dead and alive. The diagnosis of live patients is a surprisingly recent development. The first diagnostic method, thoracic percussion, was discovered in 1756 by Leopold Auenbrugger (1722-1809), the son of an innkeeper in Graz, Austria. As a youngster, Auenbrugger learned to tap caskets of wine to determine the quantity of liquid in the container and applied the technique to the human chest. This simple but ingenious method led the famed French physician, René-Théophile-Hyacinthe Laennec (1781-1826) to hit on the idea of thoracic auscultation and, in 1816, to the invention of the stethoscope. Although standard thermometric values were developed in the seventeenth century, the systematic measurement of body temperature was introduced into medicine only in 1851. The development of an ever-growing array of diagnostic instruments and techniques followed quickly. Today, the practicing physician can diagnose many diseases in the living patient as objectively and almost as effectively as the pathologist can diagnose them at autopsy. The long-standing gap between antemortem (clinical) diagnosis and postmortem (autopsy) diagnosis has narrowed but has not disappeared. Despite modern diagnostic techniques, the postmortem examination of the cadaver remains an indispensable tool for scientific medicine and forensic pathology.
  ... Although the development of the modern, scientific concept of disease was a gradual process, the publication, in 1858, of Cellular Pathology as Based upon Physiological and Pathological History, by Rudolf Virchow (1821-1902), is generally accepted as signaling the birth of modern medicine as a profession based on empirical science. The study of pathology as the phenomenology of disease, combined with the study of bacteriology as the etiology of infectious disease, placed medicine as the study of bodily disease on the rock-solid foundation of modern science.

Thomas Szasz, Pharmacracy: Medicine and Politics in America (2001: xxiii-6)

a stately triumph

Look, I confess! I am new prey of thine, O Cupid; I stretch forth my hands to be bound, submissive to thy laws. There is no need of war—pardon and peace is my prayer; nor will it be praise for thine arms to vanquish me unarmed. Bind thy locks with myrtle, yoke thy mother's doves; thy stepsire himself shall give thee fitting car, and in the car he gives shalt thou stand, while the people cry thy triumph, and shalt guide with skill the yoked birds. In thy train shall be captive youths and captive maids; such a pomp will be for thee a stately triumph. Myself, a recent spoil, shall be there with wound all freshly dealt, and bear my new bonds with unresisting heart. Conscience shall be led along, with hands tied fast behind her back; and Modesty, and all who are foes to the camp of Love. Before thee all shall tremble; the crowd, stretching forth their hands to thee, shall chant with loud voice: "Ho Triumph!" Caresses shall be at thy side, and Error, and Madness—a rout that ever follows in thy train. With soldiers like these dost thou vanquish men and gods; strip from thee aids like these, thou wilt be weaponless.

En ego confiteor! tua sum nova praeda, Cupido;
porrigimus victas ad tua iura manus.
nil opus est bello—veniam pacemque rogamus;
nec tibi laus armis victus inermis ero.
necte comam myrto, maternas iunge columbas;
qui deceat, currum vitricus ipse dabit,
inque dato curru, populo clamante triumphum,
stabis et adiunctas arte movebis aves.
ducentur capti iuvenes captaeque puellae;
haec tibi magnificus pompa triumphus erit.
ipse ego, praeda recens, factum modo vulnus habebo
et nova captiva vincula mente feram.
Mens Bona ducetur manibus post terga retortis,
et Pudor, et castris quidquid Amoris obest.
omnia te metuent; ad te sua bracchia tendens
vulgus "io" magna voce "triumphe!" canet.
blanditiae comites tibi erunt Errorque Furorque,
adsidue partes turba secuta tuas.
his tu militibus superas hominesque deosque;
haec tibi si demas commoda, nudus eris.

Ovid, Amores I.ii (1963, 323-25)

to suit his purpose

Lying and bluffing are both modes of misrepresentation or deception. Now the concept most central to the distinctive nature of a lie is that of falsity: the liar is essentially someone who deliberately promulgates a falsehood. Bluffing, too, is typically devoted to something false. Unlike plain lying, however, it is more especially a matter not of falsity but of fakery. This is what accounts for its nearness to bullshit. For the essence of bullshit is not that it is false but that it is phony. In order to appreciate this distinction, one must recognize that a fake or a phony need not be in any respect (apart from authenticity itself) inferior to the real thing. What is not genuine need not also be defective in some other way. It may be, after all, an exact copy. What is wrong with counterfeit is not what it is like, but how it was made. This points to a similar and fundamental aspect of the essential nature of bullshit: although it is produced without concern with the truth, it need not be false. The bullshitter is faking things. But this does not mean that he necessarily gets them wrong.
  ... Telling a lie is an act with a sharp focus. It is designed to insert a particular falsehood at a specific point in a set or system of beliefs, in order to avoid the consequences of having that point occupied by the truth. This requires a degree of craftsmanship, in which the teller of the lie submits to objective constraints imposed by what he takes to be the truth. The liar is inescapably concerned with truth-values. In order to invent a lie at all, he must think he knows what is true. And in order to invent an effective lie, he must design his falsehood under the guidance of that truth.
  On the other hand, a person who undertakes to bullshit his way through has much more freedom. His focus is panoramic rather than particular. He does not limit himself to inserting a certain falsehood at a specific point, and thus he is not constrained by the truths surrounding that point or intersecting it. He is prepared, so far as required, to fake the context as well. This freedom from the constraints to which the liar must submit does not necessarily mean, of course, that his task is easier than the task of the liar. But the mode of creativity upon which it relies is less analytical and less deliberative than that which is mobilized in lying. It is more expansive and independent, with more spacious opportunities for improvisation, color, and imaginative play. This is less a matter of craft than of art. Hence the familiar notion of the "bullshit artist." ...
  What bullshit essentially misrepresents is neither the state of affairs to which it refers nor the beliefs of the speaker concerning that state of affairs. Those are what lies misrepresent, by virtue of being false. Since bullshit need not be false, it differs from lies in its misrepresentational intent. The bullshitter may not deceive us, or even intend to do so, either about the facts or about what he takes the facts to be. What he does necessarily attempt to deceive us about is his enterprise. His only indispensably distinctive characteristic is that in a certain way he misrepresents what he is up to.
  This is the crux of the distinction between him and the liar. Both he and the liar represent themselves falsely as endeavoring to communicate the truth. The success of each depends upon deceiving us about that. But the fact about himself that the liar hides is that he is attempting to lead us away from a correct apprehension of reality; we are not to know that he wants us to believe something he supposes to be false. The fact about himself that the bullshitter hides, on the other hand, is that the truth-values of his statement are of no central interest to him; what we are not to understand is that his intention is neither to report the truth nor to conceal it. This does not mean that his speech is anarchically impulsive, but that the motive guiding and controlling it is unconcerned with how the things about which he speaks truly are.
  It is impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth. Producing bullshit requires no such conviction. A person who lies is thereby responding to the truth, and he is to that extent respectful of it. When an honest man speaks, he says only what he believes to be true; and for the liar, it is correspondingly indispensable that he considers his statements to be false. For the bullshitter, however, all these bets are off: he is neither on the side of the true nor on the side of the false. His eye is not on the facts at all, as the eyes of the honest man and the liar are, except insofar as they may be pertinent to his interest in getting away with what he says. He does not care whether the thing he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose.

Harry Frankfurt, On Bullshit (2005: 51-56)

reward and punishment

To say that in Protestant countries the Reformation led to a progressive secularisation of Charity is something of a commonplace. But through this process of taking responsibility for the poor and the unable, cities and states prepared the way to a new form of sensibility to poverty. A new form of pathos came into being, which no longer spoke of a glorification of pain, nor of salvation proper both to Charity and to Poverty, but concerned rather the idea of civic duty, and showed the poor and destitute to be both a consequence of disorder and an obstacle to order. The aim therefore was no longer to glorify poverty in the act of relieving it, but quite simply to dispose of it altogether. Bound to poverty as such, Charity too suddenly seemed to be a kind of disorder. But if private enterprise, as a 1575 act demanded in England, helped the state to repress poverty, it became part of the social order and acquired meaning. Shorty before the 1662 Settlement Act, the most important text of the seventeenth century regarding the English poor, Sir Matthew Hale had written a Discourse touching Provision for the Poor, which was a clear indication of the new manner in which the meaning of poverty was perceived. To Hale, helping to make poverty disappear was "necessary, and becomes us both as men and as Christians." He recommended that the mission should be entrusted to officers of the peace, who should subdivide counties, group parishes together and set up compulsory workhouses. No one should then beg: "No man will be so vain, an indeed hurtful to the Publique as to give to such as beg, and thereby encourage them."
  Poverty is no longer part of a dialectic of humiliation and glorification but rather of the relationship of disorder to order and is now locked in guilt. After Calvin and Luther, poverty bore the marks of an immemorial punishment, and became, in the world of state-assisted charity, self-complacency and crime against the good order of the state. From being the object of a religious experience and sanctified, poverty became the object of a moral conception that condemned it. The great houses of confinement were a clear result of that evolution. They were indeed the secularisation of charity, but in obscure fashion they were also the moral punishment of poverty.
  ... But Catholic thought was reluctant to change, as were the traditions of the Church. These collective forms of assistance met with initial resistance, as they appeared to downgrade the merit of an act of individual assistance, and removed the eminent dignity that was inherent to poverty. The Christian duty of charity was being turned into little more than a civic obligation, and poverty had simply become a crime against public order. These difficulties slowly disappeared, and appeals were made to the universities to address the problem. The University of Paris approved the public forms of organization that were submitted for its assessment. ... Before long, the Catholic world had adopted the mode of perception of poverty that had come to prevail in the world of Protestant thought ... within the space of a few years, the Catholic Church in France had given its backing to the Great Confinement ordered by Louis XIV. This meant that the poor were no longer recognised as a pretext sent by God to elicit charity, an opportunity for Catholics to work towards their salvation. Catholics, following the example of the Archbishop of Tours, began to see the poor as "the very dregs of the Republic, not on account of their physical poverty, which properly arouses compassion, but for their spiritual indigence, which is a cause of revulsion."
  The Church had chosen its camp, and in so doing had split the Christian world of poverty, which had previously been sanctified in its totality by the medieval world. On the one side was the realm of Good, where poverty submitted and conformed to the order that was imposed on it, and on the other the realm of Evil, where poverty rebelled and tried to escape that order. The former accepted internment, and found its repose there; the latter resisted it, and thereby merited its condition.
  This reasoning was expounded quite bluntly in a text inspired by the Papal court in 1693, which was translated into French at the close of the century under the title La Mendicité abolie (Begging Vanquished). The author made a distinction therein between the good and the bad poor, those of Christ and those of the Devil. Both bear witness to the usefulness of houses of confinement, the former because they gratefully accepted all that the authorities bestowed upon them, "patient, humble, modest, content with their station and the assistance that the Bureau brings them, and thanking God for his providence." The Devil's poor by contrast complained about the General Hospital, and the constraints that it imposed upon them. "Enemies of good order, lazy, deceitful, lascivious and given over to drink, they speak no language other than that of the devil their father, and curse the Bureau's teachers and directors." Therein lay the justification for depriving them of their freedom, a freedom for which they had no use other than the glorification of Satan. Confinement was thus doubly justified, in a movement of undecidable equivocation, both as reward and punishment, according to the moral standing of the person on whom it was inflicted. Up until the close of the classical age, this ambiguity of the practice of confinement remained, its strange reversibility implying that its meaning could alter in response to the merits or faults of its victims. The good poor, the deserving, saw it as a gesture of assistance, and a good work from which they drew comfort, while the bad poor—precisely inasmuch as they were bad—turned the gesture into an act of repression. This opposition between good and bad poor is essential for an understanding of the structure and meaning of confinement. The Hôpital Général classified them as such, and madness too was divided up in similar fashion, so that it too, according to the moral standing it manifested, could fall under the categories of assistance or repression. All internees fell within the scope of this ethical valorisation, and before being objects of knowledge or pity, they were treated as moral subjects.

Michel Foucault, History of Madness (2006:57-60)

Eyes that last I saw in tears

Eyes that last I saw in tears
Through division
Here in death's dream kingdom
The golden vision reappears
I see the eyes but not the tears
This is my affliction

This is my affliction
Eyes I shall not see again
Eyes of decision
Eyes I shall not see unless
At the door of death's other kingdom
Where, as in this,
The eyes outlast a little while
A little while outlast the tears
And hold us in derision.

T.S. Eliot, The Complete Poems and Plays (1969:133)

the delicious skins

"It is a French recipe of my grandmother's," said Mrs Ramsay, speaking with a ring of great pleasure in her voice. Of course it was French. What passes for cookery in England is an abomination (they agreed). It is putting cabbages in water. It is roasting meat till it is like leather. It is cutting off the delicious skins of vegetables. "In which," said Mr Bankes, "all the virtue of the vegetable is contained." And the waste, said Mrs Ramsay. A whole French family could live on what an English cook throws away. Spurred on by her sense that William's affection had come back to her, and that everything was all right again, and that her suspense was over, and that now she was free both to triumph and to mock, she laughed, she gesticulated, till Lily thought, How childlike, how absurd she was, sitting up there with all her beauty opened again in her, talking about the skins of vegetables. There was something frightening about her. She was irresistible. Always she got her own way in the end, Lily thought. Now she had brought this off—Paul and Minta one might suppose, were engaged. Mr Bankes was dining here. She put a spell on them all, by wishing, so simply, so directly, and Lily contrasted that abundance with her own poverty of spirit, and supposed that it was partly that belief (for her face was all lit up—without looking young, she looked radiant) in this strange, this terrifying thing, which made Paul Rayley, the centre of it, all a tremor, yet abstract, absorbed, silent. Mrs Ramsay, Lily felt, as she talked about the skins of vegetables, exalted that, worshiped that; held her hands over it to warm them, to protect it, and yet, having brought it all about, somehow laughed, led her victims, Lily felt, to the altar. It came over her too now—the emotion, the vibration of love. How inconspicuous she felt herself by Paul's side! He, glowing, burning; she, aloof, satirical; he, bound for adventure; she, moored to the shore; he, launched, incautious; she solitary, left out—and ready to implore a share, if it were disaster, in his disaster, she said shyly:
  "When did Minta lose her brooch?"
  He smiled the most exquisite smile, veiled by memory, tinged by dreams. He shook his head. "On the beach," he said.
  "I'm going to find it," he said, "I'm getting up early." This being kept secret from Minta, he lowered his voice, and turned his eyes to where she sat, laughing, beside Mr Ramsay.
  Lily wanted to protest violently and outrageously her desire to help him, envisaging how in the dawn on the beach he would be the one to pounce on the brooch half-hidden by some stone, and thus herself be included among the sailors and adventurers. But what did he reply to her offer? She actually said with an emotion that she seldom let appear, "Let me come with you"; and he laughed. He meant yes or no—either perhaps. But it was not his meaning—it was the odd chuckle he gave, as if he had said, Throw yourself over the cliff if you like, I don't care. He turned on her cheek the heat of love, its horror, its cruelty, its unscrupulosity. It scorched her, and Lily looking at Minta being charming to Mr Ramsay at the other end of the table, flinched for her exposed to those fangs, and was thankful. For at any rate, she said to herself, catching sight of the salt cellar on the pattern, she need not marry, thank Heaven: she need not undergo that degradation. She was saved from that dilution. She would move the tree rather more to the middle.
  Such was the complexity of things. For what happened to her, especially staying with the Ramsays, was to be made to feel violently two opposite things at the same time; that's what you feel, was one; that's what I feel was the other, and then they fought together in her mind, as now. It is so beautiful, so exciting, this love, that I tremble on the verge of it, and offer, quite out of my own habit, to look for a brooch on a beach; also it is the stupidest, the most barbaric of human passions, and turns a nice young man with a profile like a gem (Paul's was exquisite) into a bully with a crowbar (he was swaggering, he was insolent) in the Mile End Road. Yet she said to herself, from the dawn of time odes have been sung of love; wreathes heaped and roses; and if you asked nine people out of ten they would say they wanted nothing but this; while the women, judging from her own experience, would all the time be feeling, This is not what we want; there is nothing more tedious, puerile, and inhumane than love; yet it is also beautiful and necessary. Well then, well then? she asked, somehow expecting the others to go on with the argument, as if in an argument like this one threw one's own little bolt which fell short obviously and left the others to carry it on. So she listened again to what they were saying in case they should throw any light upon the questions of love.
  "Then," said Mr Bankes, "there is that liquid the English call coffee."

Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (1976: 116-19)

such keen pleasure

They had reached the gap between the two clumps of red-hot pokers, and there was the Lighthouse again, but she would not let herself look at it. Had she known that he was looking at her, she thought, she would not have let herself sit there, thinking. She disliked anything that reminded her that she had been sitting thinking. So she looked over her shoulder, at the town. The lights were rippling and running as if they were drops of silver water held firm in a wind. And all the poverty, all the suffering had turned to that, Mrs Ramsay thought. The lights of the town and of the harbour and of the boats seemed like a phantom net floating there to mark something which had sunk. Well, if he could not share her thoughts, Mr Ramsay said to himself, he would be off, then, on his own. He wanted to go on thinking, telling himself the story of how Hume was stuck in a bog; he wanted to laugh. But first it was nonsense to be anxious about Andrew. When he was Andrew's age he used to walk about the country all day long, with nothing but a biscuit in his pocket and nobody bothered about him, or thought that he had fallen over a cliff. He said aloud he thought he would be off for a day's walk if the weather held. He had had enough of Bankes and of Carmichael. He would like a little solitude. Yes, she said. It annoyed him that she did not protest. She knew that he would never do it. He was too old now to walk all day long with a biscuit in his pocket. She worried about the boys, but not about him. Years ago, before he had married, he thought, looking across the bay, as they stood between the clumps of red-hot pokers, he had walked all day. He had made a meal off bread and cheese in a public house. He had worked ten hours at a stretch; an old woman just popped her head in now and again and saw to the fire. That was the country he liked best, over there; those sandhills dwindling away into darkness. One could walk all day without meeting a soul. There was not a house scarcely, not a village for miles on end. One could worry things out alone. There were little sandy beaches where no one had been since the beginning of time. The seals sat up and looked at you. It sometimes seemed to him that in a little house out there, alone—he broke off, sighing. He had no right. The father of eight children—he reminded himself. And he would have been a beast and a cur to wish a single thing altered. Andrew would be a better man than he had been. Prue would be a beauty, her mother said. They would stem the flood a bit. That was a good bit of work on the whole—his eight children. They showed he did not damn the poor little universe entirely, for on an evening like this, he thought, looking at the land dwindling away, the little island seemed pathetically small, half swallowed up in the sea.
  'Poor little place,' he murmured with a sigh.
  She heard him. He said the most melancholy things, but she noticed that directly he had said them he always seemed more cheerful than usual. All this phrase-making was a game, she thought, for if she had said half what he said, she would have blown her brains out by now.
  It annoyed her, this phrase-making, and she said to him, in a matter-of-fact way, that it was a perfectly lovely evening. And what was he groaning about, she asked, half laughing, half complaining, for she guessed what he was thinking—he would have written better books if he had not married.
  He was not complaining, he said. She knew that he did not complain. She knew that he had nothing whatever to complain of. And he seized her hand and raised it to his lips and kissed it with an intensity that brought the tears to her eyes, and quickly he dropped it.
  They turned away from the view and began to walk up the path where the silver-green spear-like plants grew, arm in arm. His arm was almost like a young man's arm, Mrs Ramsay thought, thin and hard, and she thought with delight how strong he still was, though he was over sixty, and how untamed and optimistic, and how strange it was that being convinced, as he was, of all sorts of horrors, seemed not to depress him, but to cheer him. Was it not odd, she reflected? Indeed he seemed to her sometimes made differently from other people, born blind, deaf, and dumb, to the ordinary things, but to the extraordinary things, with an eye like an eagle's. His understanding often astonished her. But did he notice the flowers? No. Did he notice the view? No. Did he even notice his own daughter's beauty, or whether there was pudding on his plate or roast beef? He would sit at table with them like a person in a dream. And his habit of talking aloud, or saying poetry aloud, was growing on him, she was afraid for sometimes it was awkward—

Best and brightest, come away!

poor Miss Giddings, when he shouted that at her, almost jumped out of her skin. But then, Mrs Ramsay, though instantly taking his side against all the silly Giddingses in the world, then, she thought, intimating by a little pressure on his arm that he walked uphill too fast for her, and she must stop for a moment to see whether those were fresh mole-hills on the bank, then, she thought, stooping, down to look, a great mind like his must be different in every way from ours. All the great men she had ever known, she thought, deciding that a rabbit must have got in, were like that, and it was good for young men (though the atmosphere of lecture-rooms was stuffy and depressing to her beyond endurance almost) simply to hear him, simply to look at him. But without shooting rabbits, how was one to keep them down? she wondered. It might be a rabbit; it might be a mole. Some creature anyhow was ruining her Evening Primroses. And looking up, she saw above the thin trees the first pulse of the full-throbbing star, and wanted to make her husband look at it; for the sight gave her such keen pleasure. But she stopped herself. He never looked at things. If he did, all he would say would be, Poor little world, with one of his sighs.
  At that moment, he said, "Very fine," to please her, and pretended to admire the flowers. But she knew quite well that he did not admire them, or even realize that they were there. It was only to please her ...

Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (1973: 79-83)