Only a Cough and Spit

From My Name Escapes Me:

Wednesday 7 June (1995)

...It seems a pity that the good old phrase 'living in sin' is likely to be dropped by the C of E. So many friends, happily living in sin, will feel very ordinary and humdrum when they become merely partners; or, as the Americans say, 'an item'. Living in sin has always sounded daring and exotic...

p.s. He includes on March 28th, 1995 this citation of Canon Liddon that "The applause of all but very good men is no more than the precise measure of their possible hostility." I find this a much more pleasant way to express what Pericles did in the opening of his funeral oration.

p.p.s. The title of this post is a phrase, new to me, but old to actors, for a small dramatic role and employed to dismiss a lack of opportunity.

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)

Plus ça change plus c'est la même chose: Guinness and Thucydides

From Alec Guinness' autobiography Blessings in Disguise:

(16 yrs. old) The next thing for me to brush up some poetry in case the Cassons invited me to recite. I knew some Ella Wheeler Wilcox, which I found hysterically funny; also some Keats, Tennyson, Chesterton and a few yards of Shakespeare.

The last time I saw Sybil [Thorndike] to talk to was at a small private lunch party at the Garrick Club. She was an old lady by then, suffering acutely from arthritis but remarkably gallant and cheerful. I asked her if she still managed to learn a few lines of verse each day, which had been her life-long custom. 'Yes,' she said, 'but only a very few. I've given up the Greeks. But the real sadness is my silly old hands, which don't allow me to play Bach any more...' 

I would be quite happy to see a return of black for mourning, and to hear no more electric guitars in church. Perhaps we could return to resounding hymns... 

As I set off to join the Navy he [Guinness' father-in-law] handed me a pocket edition of Thucydides, saying, 'This will help you keep things in perspective.' Inside the book he had scribbled, 'Plus ça change plus c'est la même chose.' It was a more acceptable gift than the vast unplucked turkey which he dumped, on Christmas Eve, in the kitchen of our tiny cottage. Seizing the duck we were going to have he said, 'That's just what I want; an extra duck,' and made off with it. The turkey wouldn't go in our oven anyway and Merula burst into tears. Not only had I found a wife; I had acquired a family.