From a search in this journal for Salinger —
“… the wind was noisy the way it is in spooky movies
on the night the old slob with the will gets murdered.”
— From the opening sentence of the first Holden Caulfield
story, published in the Collier’s of December 22, 1945
See as well the previous post.
The trailer pictured above is from the 2016 film Blood Father .
See as well the blood father of Wonderland's Alice:
A Lexicon for Housman — See the posts of June 21, 2013.
From A.E. Housman's 1892 lecture in the previous post —
"In the day when the strong men shall bow themselves,
and desire shall fail…."
Today's readers may be less familiar than was Housman's 1892
audience with the source of those phrases —
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"Nor again will I pretend that, as Bacon asserts, `the pleasure and delight of knowledge and learning far surpasseth all other in nature'. This is too much the language of a salesman crying his own wares. The pleasures of the intellect are notoriously less vivid than either the pleasures of sense or the pleasures of the affections; and therefore, especially in the season of youth, the pursuit of knowledge is likely enough to be neglected and lightly esteemed in comparison with other pursuits offering much stronger immediate attractions. But the pleasure of learning and knowing, though not the keenest, is yet the least perishable of pleasures; the least subject to external things, and the play of chance, and the wear of time. And as a prudent man puts money by to serve as a provision for the material wants of his old age, so too he needs to lay up against the end of his days provision for the intellect. As the years go by, comparative values are found to alter: Time, says Sophocles, takes many things which once were pleasures and brings them nearer to pain. In the day when the strong men shall bow themselves, and desire shall fail, it will be a matter of yet more concern than now, whether one can say `my mind to me a kingdom is'; and whether the windows of the soul look out upon a broad and delightful landscape, or face nothing but a brick wall."
– A.E. Housman, Inaugural Lecture as Professor of Latin,
http://spenceralley.blogspot.com/2016/01/ |
A geometric diagram by the late Andrew Jobbings (1951-2019) —
From a book review quoted here on the date of Jobbings's death —
"Dodge is eventually brought back to life, or a kind of virtual afterlife,
in the 'Bitworld' where he exists as ones and zeros. Initially inchoate,
Dodge’s mind evolves, along with the digital environment he creates
around him, a kind of information-age Genesis story that Stephenson
describes evocatively."
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