When I was digging out the poems now published here
https://animalwild.blog/2024/05/05/a-poet-called-norrie/
I also came across two notebooks and an envelope file filled with various quotations which I had liked and some occasional writings of my own. Some of it, especially of the latter, is pretty cringeworthy to say the least, even excruciating, but perhaps not all of it.
I studied German and French as well as English for my A-levels. Some of the quotations are in German and I can no longer translate them without assistance. I seem to have been a bit sloppy about attributions too, so apologies for absences or vagueness. In the hope that some of the better ones may entertain or move, here goes. It has been interesting to revisit my former self and we are talking about four decades ago when I was a schoolboy and student. Whether I am wiser as well as older is a moot point, but most of those things about which I am most passionate, such as animal rights and the environment, not forgetting reggae music, along with what I hope is a generally egalitarian outlook, do not seem to have changed very much.
The first notebook is pale green, ringbound, quarto and bears the crest of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. It would have been a present from my father, returning from one of his annual business trips to the libraries and universities of North America and Canada. Quotations from Goethe at the beginning, although I always struggled with the German language and we were not well taught, plenty of Shakespeare (Macbeth in particular and King Lear, in which I once played a very small part, the King of France), Marvell and other Metaphysical poets, smatterings from the Romantics and the WW1 poets, Blake, Camus, Hesse, Beckett and T.S. Eliot and my favourite poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins, especially his ‘The Windhover’, for me the greatest poem ever written, which I quoted in Animal Trust. Also my favourite novelist, Thomas Hardy whose poetry I also love, including the whole of ‘Shelley’s Skylark’ and Michael Henchard’s almost unbearably poignant will from The Mayor of Casterbridge.
For our A-levels we studied Corneille’s Le Cid and this still seems to me to have a beautiful symmetry:
Tu t’es, en m’offensant, montré digne de moi;
Je me dois, par ta mort, montrer digne de toi.
I am not a religious person, agnostic at least leaning words atheism; this by Franz Grillparzer, the nineteenth-century Austrian dramatist, is for me a perfect summary:
Its is highly probable that there is a centre and complex of divinity, even a force which disposes and creates – to which, however, we may come closer if we say “There is no God” than if with our human comprehension we say “There is a God.”
This romantic line is from Andorra by Max Frisch, the Swiss playwright, published in 1961:
Ich lieb dein Haar, dein rotes Haar, dein leichtes warmes bitteres Haar, Barblin, ich werde sterben, wenn ich es verliere.
Wordsworth’s ‘Lines Composed Above Tintern Abbey’ yielded:
The sounding cataract
Haunted me like a passion
Duncan and the Captain in Macbeth:
Dismay’d not this our captains, Macbeth and Banquo?
Yes;
As sparrows eagles, or the hare the lion.
It isn’t all fraught with earnestness. There’s an anecdote about an American radio presenter asking what various ambassadors would most like for Christmas. “The French ambassador asked for peace for all mankind, the German ambassador for an end to all wars and the British ambassador asked for a pair of slippers and some after-shave.”
Thoreau’s Walden was an influence: “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.”
Einstein is here;
If relativity is proved right the Germans will call me a German, the Swiss will call me a Swiss citizen, and the French will call me a great scientist. If relativity is proved wrong, the French will call me a Swiss, the Swiss will call me a German, and the Germans will call me a Jew.”
Sir Alec Guinness, receiving an Oscar:
It dawned on me when I was at drama school 47 years ago that, if I wanted to get into movies, the idea was to do absolutely nothing at all – and that’s what I’ve done ever since.”
A nice mockery of booksellers and collectors from Benson’s Ship of Fools, 1509:
Still am I besy bokes assemblynge ,
For to have plenty it is a pleasant thynge
In my conceyt, and to have them ay in honde;
But what they mene do I not understande.
There are the opening lines from Gray’s Elegy which I used in Animal Trust – it’s extraordinary how some things stay in one’s head for so long.
Hardy mourns the parting of soldiers to the front in ’Embarcation’:
Wives, sisters, parents, wave white hands and smile
As if they knew not that they weep the while.
And from his ‘Departure’:
When shall the saner softer politics
Whereof we dream, have sway in each proud land
And patriotism, grown Godlike, scorn to stand
Bondslave to realms, but circle earth and seas?
Ronald Knox is amusing in Bishop Berkely’s Thesis:
There was a young man who said, ‘God,
I find it exceedingly odd
That this tree that I see
Should continue to be
When there’s no one about in the Quad.’
‘Dear Sir:
Your astonishment’s odd:
I am always about in the Quad.
And that’s why the tree
Will continue to be
Since observed by
Yours faithfully,
God.”
I was always a fan of the witty journalism and activism of Bernard Levin, who was famously punched live on air by the husband of a woman who’s play he had criticised. Here’s an extract from his interview with the pianist Arthur Rubinstein:
BL: You were quite a society man in your youth were you not?
AR: You ought to get Liszt here and ask him that!”
BL: And what would he say?
AR: He’d say it’s none of your damn business.
Dennis Potter in Richard Dawkins mode:
Religion is not a bandage, it’s the wound.
I still find this from Middleton’s The Changeling laugh out loud funny:
Alibius: I am old, Lollio.
Lollio: No sir, ‘tis I am old Lollio.
An honourable mention for my grandfather in Affectionately T.S. Eliot:
I also told him of my indebtedness to Bertram Rota, the eminent London booksellers, for getting them for me. “I have never met Rota.” Eliot said, “though of course he is well known to me.”
Jude the Obscure gives this wonderful description of Jude and Sue Bridehead:
Indeed when they talked on indifferent subject, as now, there was ever a second, silent conversation passing between their emotions, so perfect was the reciprocity between them.
A powerful sentiment from Family Matters by Günter Grass:
In our museum – we always go there on Sundays –
they have opened a new department.
Our aborted children, pale, serious embryos,
sit there in plain glass jars
and worry about their parents’ future.
Colin Wilson’s The Outsider was another big influence:
…the military mentality is invariably stupid.
From Dostoevsky’s The Idiot against capital punishment:
To kill for murder is an immeasurably greater crime than the crime itself. Murder by legal process is immeasurably more dreadful than murder by a brigand.
Some humour and Colemanballs (pace Private Eye) from a page dated 1996:
It’s no good wearing fucking sandals on a rainy night (a friend of mine to a born-again Christian).
You’re only as old as your mind wants to let you (a football manager on the youth of a player).
A lot of people think us models haven’t got a single brain cell to rub together … between us (Page 3 girl).
There are the famous words of Chief Seathl:
What is man without the beasts? If all the beasts were gone Man would die from a great loneliness of spirit. For whatever happens to the beast also happens to the man. All things are connected. Whatever befalls the earth, befalls the sons of the earth.
I like this from Fiona Campbell’s On Foot through Africa:
… a glassy smooth river – the kind of surface that must have the same effect on swimmers as a fresh slab of clean white cartridge paper does on an artist.
I have quoted Burning Spear in the blog Jeremy Clarkson is a damn blasted liar – Animal Wild:
Christopher Columbus is a damn blasted liar
Christopher Columbus is a damn blasted liar
Yes, Jah
Ah, he is saying that, ah, he is the first one
Who discover Jamaica
I and I say that
What about the Arawak Indians and the few Black men
Who were ’round here before him?
Here I also quote Joseph Hill from the band Culture’s song ‘Bring Back the Money’:
We don’t wanna hear no more about your great
Sir Francis Drake
We don’t wanna hear no more about your great
Long John Silver
Them ain’t no proper use to the sufferers
Also Alpha Blondy, reggae artist from the Ivory Coast:
I say, I woke with Jah rising sun
Tears in my eyes
Cause I heard a dreadful news last night
I heard that Bob Marley die
And I know mighty dread shall rise
Zion lion just flew away
To his mystic resting place
Silent night, silent news, silent mystic night move.
Then two amazing passages from Louis de Bernière’s Captain Corelli’s Mandolin:
And another thing. Love is a temporary madness, it erupts like volcanoes and then subsides. And when it subsides you have to make a decision. You have to work out whether your roots have so entwined together that it is inconceivable you should ever part. Because this is what love is. Love is not breathlessness, it is not excitement, it is not the promulgation of promises of eternal passion, it is not the desire to mate every second minute of the day, it is not lying awake at night imagining that he is kissing every cranny of your body. No, don’t blush, I am telling you some truths. That is just being “in love”, which any fool can do. Love itself is what is left over when being in love has burned away, and this is both an art and a fortunate accident. Your mother and I had it, we had roots that grew towards each other underground, and when all the pretty blossom had fallen from our branches we found that we were one tree and not two.
It is said that in ancient times all lands were one, and it seems that the continents themselves profess nostalgia for that state of affairs, just as there are some people who say that they belong not to their nation but to the world, demanding an international passport and a universal right of residence. Thus India pushes northwards, ploughing up the Himalayas, determined not to be an island but to press its tropical and humid lust on Asia. The Arabian peninsula wreaks a sly revenge on the Ottomans by leaning against Turkey casually in the hope of causing it to fall into the black sea. Africa, tired of white folk who think of it as a mushy, perilous, unknowable and romantic, squeezes northward in the determination that Europe shall look it in the face for once, and admit that after all its civilisation was conceived in Egypt. Only the Americas hurry away westwards, so determined to be isolated and superior that they have forgotten that the world is round and that one day perforce they will find themselves glued prodigiously to China.
Finally, this made me laugh from The Risk Pool by Richard Russo:
For some reason Harry always viewed the Holiday Inn as his chief competition for the Mohawk restaurant dollar, and he could never see why people paid the extra to go there. When they’d opened a year ago, he’d given them six months to go belly up. “Same frigging trout,” he insisted. “They got backs on their chairs there,” my father explained from his stool at the counter. “You can lean back without falling on your ass.” Harry snorted. “Give me the extra three bucks and I‘ll stand behind you.”
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