Sir Alec Guinness and Ovid

From A Positively Final Appearance:

Before leaving for our eight-day holiday with our friend Marriott White in Baden-Baden...I got very fussy about what to take to read. A little pile was made of Herodotus, Elmore Leonard's thriller Out of Sight, Shakespeare's Henry VIII and Piers Paul Read's new novel, Knights of the Cross.  (p.40)

In the past few weeks there have been suggested all sorts of new schemes for quickly getting rid of unwanted babies in the womb. In my head I hear a snatch of office chatter. 'Free for lunch today?' 'Awfully sorry, no. I thought I'd just slip out and have an abortion.' If the human race survives to the third millenium will our age be given a thought? Will we be hailed as the pioneers of cloning or dismissed as a trashy slip-up after the centuries of recognizable values? Most likely the future will be ignorant of the fact that we even existed. (p.49)

A few days ago, rummaging in a drawer of batteries, film spools, etc., I spotted a sixty-minute cassette tape I must have recorded ten years or more ago of various poems or speeches I had wished to learn...The tape included 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock', Ulysses' great cynical speech from Troilus, beginning ''Time hath, my lord, a wallet at his back', the nineteenth psalm, poems by Robert Graves, R.S. Thomas, Vaughan and Herbert, and the Duke of Burgundy's marvellous evocation of the French countryside in his championship of the peace towards the end of Henry V. (p.84)

Somewhere along the line of the day I managed to buy Ted Hughes's Tales from Ovid (and read 'Echo and Narcissus' immediately with intense pleasure while having a haircut; I refrained from looking in the mirror). (p.112)

Why Writers Keep Dictionaries on Their Shelves...

...to prevent them from writing sentences like this:

The terms used to describe them [negative symptoms of schizophrenia] are derived from the Greek: affective flattening, alogia, and avolition. (p.328, from A Beautiful Mind by Sylvia Nasar)

Well, not really. I will give her "alogia."

And the rest?

Affective (Latin) < ad + facio
Flattening (Germanic) < flato- + -en
Avolition (Greek & Latin) < α + volo

The last one is the most interesting. In college we used to make a game of catching these nasty neologisms from two different languages. They are often a sure sign of bad prose. For those unaware, the technical term is σαρδισμός (sardismos), i.e. the kind of word you would find in Sardis, where Greek, Lydian, Persian, and other languages mingled in odd combinations.

The most beautiful sentiment

From Saint Gianna Molla: Wife, Mother, & Doctor:

Love is the most beautiful sentiment the Lord has put into the soul of men and women.   (St. Gianna in a letter to her future husband, quoted in Blessed John Paul II's May 16, 2004 homily at the Mass of Canonization, p.145)

As to the past, let us entrust it to God's Mercy, the future to Divine Providence. Our task is to live holy the present moment. (p.149)

Ignatian Perseverance

I once knew a Jesuit priest in my days in Rome who remarked once on the strange vacillation today about making decisions in life. In short, half our productive life is over before we settle on a goal that requires that productivity.

The same sentiment can be found in St. Ignatius' autobiography:

There flashed upon his mind the idea of the difficulty that attended the kind of life he had begun, and he felt as if he heard some one whispering to him, "How can you keep up for seventy years of your life these practices which you have begun?" Knowing that this thought was a temptation of the evil one, he expelled it by this answer: "Can you, wretched one, promise me one hour of life?" In this manner he overcame the temptation, and his soul was restored to peace.

 Again, I apologize that the Kindle does not allow for page references.

The Classical Wodehouse

From A Damsel in Distress:

What a girl! He had never in his life before met a woman who could write a letter without a postscript, and this was but the smallest of her unusual gifts.

"I have never heard of Brooklyn." "You've heard of New York?" "Certainly." "New York's one of the outlying suburbs."

The gift of hiding private emotion and keeping up appearances before strangers is not, as many suppose, entirely a product of our modern civilization. Centuries before we were born or thought of there was a widely press-agented boy in Sparta who even went so far as to let a fox gnaw his tender young stomach without permitting the discomfort inseparable from such a proceeding to interfere with either his facial expression or his flow of small talk. Historians have hadned it down that, even in the later stages of the meal, the polite lad continued to be the life and soul of the party...Of all the qualities which belong exclusively to Man and are not shared by the lower animals, this surely is the one which marks him off most sharply from the beasts of the field.

(Of Lord Marshmoreton about to impose himself against his overbearing sister) It was the look which Ajax had in his eyes when he defied the lightning...

The Spartan boy is related by Plutarch (Moralia, Apothegmata Laconica 35). The Ajax is the lesser one of Aeneid 1 fame. These just show the thorough grounding of Wodehouse in the Classics.

*I should add a note on the problems of the Kindle: (1) I cannot refer to page numbers. (2) Bookmarks have a tendency to float from page to page.