People From Florence

"What is Mysticism? Is it not the attempt to draw near to God, not by rites or ceremonies, but by inward disposition? Is it not merely a hard word for " The Kingdom of Heaven is within"? Heaven is neither a place nor a time. There might be a Heaven not only here but now. It is true that sometimes we must sacrifice not only health of body, but health of mind (or, peace) in the interest of God; that is, we must sacrifice Heaven. But "thou shalt be like God for thou shalt see Him as He is": this may be here and now, as well as there and then. And it may be for a time — then lost — then recovered — both here and there, both now and then."

"That Religion is not devotion, but work and suffering for the love of God; this is the true doctrine of Mystics — as is more particularly set forth in a definition of the 16th century: "True religion is to have no other will but God's." Compare this with the definition of Religion in Johnson's Dictionary: "Virtue founded upon reverence of God and expectation of future rewards and punishments"; in other words on respect and self-interest, not love. Imagine the religion which inspired the life of Christ "founded" on the motives given by Dr. Johnson! Christ Himself was the first true Mystic. "My meat is to do the will of Him that sent me and to finish His work." What is this but putting in fervent and the most striking words the foundation of all real Mystical Religion? — which is that for all our actions, all our words, all our thoughts, the food upon which they are to live and have their being is to be the indwelling presence of God, the union with God; that is, with the Spirit of Goodness and Wisdom."

"Where shall I find God? In myself. That is the true Mystical Doctrine. But then I myself must be in a state for Him to come and dwell in me. This is the whole aim of the Mystical Life; and all Mystical Rules in all times and countries have been laid down for putting the soul into such a state. That the soul herself should be heaven, that our Father which is in heaven should dwell in her, that there is something within us infinitely more estimable than often comes out, that God enlarges this "palace of our soul" by degrees so as to enable her to receive Himself, that thus he gives her liberty but that the soul must give herself up absolutely to Him for Him to do this, the incalculable benefit of this occasional but frequent intercourse with the Perfect: this is the conclusion and sum of the whole matter, put into beautiful language by the Mystics. And of this process they describe the steps, and assign periods of months and years during which the steps, they say, are commonly made by those who make them at all."

"These old Mystics whom we call superstitious were far before us in their ideas of God and of prayer (that is of our communion with God). "Prayer," says a mystic of the 16th century, "is to ask not what we wish of God, but what God wishes of us." "Master who hast made and formed the vessel of the body of Thy creature, and hast put within so great a treasure, the Soul, which bears the image of Thee": so begins a dying prayer of the 14th century. In it and in the other prayers of the Mystics there is scarcely a petition. There is never a word of the theory that God's dealings with us are to show His "power"; still less of the theory that "of His own good pleasure" He has " predestined" any souls to eternal damnation. There is little mention of heaven for self; of desire of happiness for self, none. It is singular how little mention there is either of "intercession " or of " Atonement by Another's merits." True it is that we can only create a heaven for ourselves and others "by the merits of Another," since it is only by working in accordance with God's Laws that we can do anything. But there is nothing at all in these prayers as if God's anger had to be bought off, as if He had to be bribed into giving us heaven by sufferings merely "to satisfy God's justice." In the dying prayers, there is nothing of the "egotism of death." It is the reformation of God's church — that is, God's children, for whom the self would give itself, that occupies the dying thoughts. There is not often a desire to be released from trouble and suffering. On the contrary, there is often a desire to suffer the greatest suffering, and to offer the greatest offering, with even greater pain, if so any work can be done. And still, this, and all, is ascribed to God's goodness. The offering is not to buy anything by suffering, but — If only the suppliant can do anything for God's children! These suppliants did not live to see the " reformation" of God's children. No more will any who now offer these prayers. But at least we can all work towards such practical " reformation." The way to live with God is to live with Ideals — not merely to think about ideals, but to do and suffer for them. Those who have to work on men and women must above all things have their Spiritual Ideal, their purpose, ever present. The "mystical " state is the essence of common sense."

"Now just look at the degree in which women have sympathy — as far as my experience is concerned. And my experience of women is almost as large as Europe. And it is so intimate too. I have lived and slept in the same bed with English Countesses and Prussian Bauerinnen [farm laborers]. No Roman Catholic Supérieure [president of a French university system known for their diverse, eclectic teaching methods] has ever had charge of women of the different creeds that I have had. No woman has excited "passions" among women more than I have. Yet I leave no school behind me. My doctrines have taken no hold among women. … No woman that I know has ever appris à apprendre [learned to learn]. And I attribute this to want of sympathy. You say somewhere that women have no attention. Yes. And I attribute this to want of sympathy. … It makes me mad, the Women's Rights talk about "the want of a field" for them — when I know that I would gladly give £500 a year [roughly $50,000 a year in 2008] for a Woman Secretary. And two English Lady Superintendents have told me the same thing. And we can't get one."

"In one sense, I do believe I am "like a man," as Parthe [the writer's sister] says. But how? In having sympathy. … Women crave for being loved, not for loving. They scream out at you for sympathy all day long, they are incapable of giving any in return, for they cannot remember your affairs long enough to do so. … They cannot state a fact accurately to another, nor can that other attend to it accurately enough for it to become information. Now is not all this the result of want of sympathy?"

"People often say to me, You don't know what a wife and mother feels. No, I say, I don't and I'm very glad I don't. And they don't know what I feel. … I am sick with indignation at what wives and mothers will do of the most egregious selfishness. And people call it all maternal or conjugal affection, and think it pretty to say so. No, no, let each person tell the truth from his own experience."

"Patriotism is not enough. I must have no hatred or bitterness toward anyone."

"I think I have never known a woman labour as she has done. It is a most remarkable experience; she indeed deserves the name of a worker."

"One of my most valued acquaintances was Miss Florence Nightingale, then a young lady at home, but chafing against the restrictions that crippled her active energies. Many an hour we spent by my fireside in Thavies Inn, or walking in the beautiful grounds of Embley, discussing the problem of the present and hopes of the future. To her, chiefly, I owed the awakening to the fact that sanitation is the supreme goal of medicine, its foundation and its crown."

"The subscription has been the result of voluntary individual offerings, and the amount of £4195 15s. 6d., already received, plainly indicates the universal feeling of gratitude which exists among the troops engaged in the Crimea for the care bestowed upon, the relief administered to, themselves and their comrades, at the period of their greatest sufferings, by the skilful arrangements, the unwearying, constant, personal attention of Miss Nightingale and the other ladies associated with her."

"Though known as the founder of the Red Cross, and the originator of the Diplomatic Convention of Geneva, it was to Miss Florence Nightingale that all the honour of that Convention was due. It was her work in the Crimea that inspired him to go to Italy during the war of 1859, to share the horrors of war, to relieve the helplessness of the unfortunate victims in those great struggles, and to soothe the physical and moral distress and anguish of so many poor men who had come from all parts to fall victims to their duty."

"Her statistics were more than a study, they were indeed her religion... Florence Nightingale believed — and in all the actions of her life acted upon that belief — that the administrator could only be successful if he were guided by statistical knowledge. The legislator — to say nothing of the politician — too often failed for want of this knowledge. Nay, she went further; she held that the universe — including human communities — was evolving in accordance with a divine plan; that it was man's business to endeavor to understand this plan and guide his actions in sympathy with it. But to understand God's thoughts, she held we must study statistics, for these are the measure of His purpose. Thus the study of statistics was for her a religious duty."

"Speaking of the cholera in the Middlesex Hospital, she said, "The prostitutes come in perpetually — poor creatures staggering off their beat! It took worse hold of them than any. One poor girl, loathsomely filthy, came in, and was dead in four hours. I held her in my arms and I heard her saying something. I bent down to hear. 'Pray God, that you may never be in the despair I am in at this time.' I said, 'Oh, my girl, are you not now more merciful than the God you think you are going to? Yet the real God is far more merciful than any human creature ever was, or can ever imagine.'""

"They had in Miss Nightingale a woman of genius, who had made her subject her particular study... Moreover, he had no hesitation in saying that Miss Nightingale in her present position had exhibited greater power of organisation, a greater familiarity with details, while at the same time she took a comprehensive view of the general bearing of the subject, than had marked the conduct of any one connected with the hospitals during the present war. (Cheers.) An anecdote which had lately been sent to him by a correspondent, showed her great power over all with whom she came into contact. Here was the passage:—"I have just heard such a pretty account from a soldier describing the comfort it was to see even Florence pass—‘She would speak to one and another, and nod and smile to a many more; but she couldn't do it to all, you know, for we lay there by hundreds; but we could kiss her shadow as it fell, and lay our heads on the pillow again content.’" And his correspondent then very justly remarked,—"What poetry there is in these men!" And again:—"I think I told you of another, who said, ‘Before she came there was such cussin and swearin, but after that it was as holy as a church.’" He had been told, too, by eye-witnesses that it was most singular to remark how, when men, frenzied, perhaps, by their wounds and disease, had worked themselves into a passionate refusal to submit to necessary operations, a few calm sentences of hers seemed at once to allay the storm, and the men would submit willingly to the painful ordeal they had to undergo. They could not pretend to offer to such a woman any recompense for her services without lowering their high standard. The only suitable mark of gratitude which could be shown her would be one which would testify the confidence of the English people in her energy, ability, and zeal."

"In an undertaking so wholly new to our English customs, so at variance with the usual education given to women in this country, we shall meet with perplexities, difficulties, even failures... It will be the true, the lasting glory of Florence Nightingale and her band of devoted assistants, that they have broken through what Goethe calls a "Chinese wall of prejudices;" prejudices religious, social, professional; and established a precedent which will indeed "multiply the good to all time.""

"If the generous women thus sacrificing themselves were all alike in devotion to their sacred cause, there was one of them —the Lady-in-Chief—who not only came armed with the special experience needed, but also was clearly transcendent in that subtle quality which gives to one human being a power of command over others. Of slender, delicate form, engaging, highly-bred, and in council a rapt careful listener, so long as others were speaking, and strongly, though gently, persuasive whenever speaking herself, the Lady-in-Chief—the Lady Florence, Miss Nightingale—gave her heart to his enterprise in a spirit of absolute devotion."

"Lo! in that house of misery A lady with a lamp I see Pass through the glimmering gloom. And flit from room to room."

"A Lady with a Lamp shall stand In the great history of the land, A noble type of good. Heroic womanhood."

"History can be helpful in making sense of the world we live in. It can also be fascinating, even fun. How can even the best novelist or playwright invent someone like Augustus Caesar or Catherine the Great, Galileo or Florence Nightingale? How can screenwriters create better action stories or human dramas than exist, thousand upon thousand, throughout the many centuries of recorded history? There is a thirst out there both for knowledge and to be entertained, and the market has responded with enthusiasm."

"In literature, books which disclosed life and its miseries, and character with its sufferings, burnt themselves in upon her mind, and created much of her future effort. She was never resorted to for sentiment. Sentimentalists never had a chance with her. Besides that her character was too strong, and its quality too real for any sympathy with shallowness and egotism, she had two characteristics which might well daunt the sentimentalists—her reserve, and her capacity for ridicule. Ill would they have fared who had come to her for responsive sympathies about sentiment, or even real woes in which no practical help was proposed; and there is perhaps nothing uttered by her, from her evidence before the Sanitary Commission for the Army to her recently published Notes on Nursing, which does not disclose powers of irony which self-regardant persons may well dread."

"While history abides, the image of Florence Nightingale, lamp in hand, going through miles of beds, night by night, noting every patient as she went, and ministering wherever most wanted, will always glow in men's hearts; and the sayings of the men about her will be traditions for future generations to enjoy."

"The intense and exquisite humanity to the sick, underlying the glorious common sense about affairs, and the stern insight into the weaknesses and the perversions of the healthy, troubled as they are by the sight of suffering, and sympathising with themselves instead of the patient, lay open a good deal of the secret of this wonderful woman's life and power."

"Her chief contribution to the inheritance of the race has been that, besides demonstrating in action the full perfection of the allied arts of nursing and sanitation, she has left in her writings a philosophy, as it were, of nursing, together with an intellectual demonstration of the scientific and natural basis of hygiene and its practical application, and has laid down once and for all their essential underlying principles with a clarity, a logic, an originality, and a depth of reflection that mark the genius and place her works among the classics."

"Great as Miss Nightingale was as a nurse, her nursing reflected only a part of her genius. She was, perhaps, even greater as a teacher, and without a doubt greatest as a sanitarian. Though it was by her nursing that she seized and held the hearts and imaginations of men—so that those who know nothing further of her know that she was the heroine of the Crimea and the reformer of nursing,—it is the intellectual quality of her deep insight into problems of health that keeps her work and will always keep it fresh and vivid."

"Miss Nightingale in appearance, is just what you would expect in any other well-bred woman, who may have seen perhaps rather more than thirty years of life; her manner and countenance are prepossessing, and this without the possession of positive beauty; it is a face not easily forgotten, pleasing in its smile, with an eye betokening great self possession, and giving when she wishes, a quiet look of firm determination to every feature. Her general demeanour is quiet and rather reserved; still I am much mistaken if she is not gifted with a very lively sense of the ridiculous. In conversation, she speaks on matters of business with a grave earnestness, one would not expect from her appearance. She has evidently a mind disciplined to restrain under the principles of the action of the moment, every feeling which would interfere with it. She has trained herself to command, and learned the value of conciliation towards others, and constraint over herself. I can conceive her to be a strict disciplinarian; she throws herself into a work—as it's Head—as such she knows well how much success must depend upon literal obedience to her every order. She seems to understand business thoroughly, though to me she had the failure common to many "Heads," a too great love of management in the small details which had better perhaps have been left to others. Her nerve is wonderful; I have been with her at very severe operations; she was more than equal to the trial. She has an utter disregard of contagion; I have known her spend hours over men dying of cholera or fever. The more awful to every sense any particular case, especially if it was that of a dying man, her slight form would be seen bending over him, administering to his ease in every way in her power, and seldom quitting his side till death released him."

"Miss Nightingale raised the art of nursing in this country from a menial employment to an honoured vocation; she taught nurses to be ladies, and she brought ladies out of the bondage of idleness to be nurses. This, which was the aim of her life, was no fruit of her Crimean experience, although that experience enabled her to give effect to her purpose more readily than were otherwise possible. Long before she went to the Crimea she felt deeply the "disgraceful antithesis" between Mrs. Gamp and a sister of mercy. The picture of her at Scutari is of a strong-willed, strong-nerved energetic woman, gentle and pitiful to the wounded, but always masterful among those with whom she worked. After the war she worked with no less zeal or resolution, and realised many of her early dreams. She was not only the reformer of nursing but a leader of women."

"If our social arrangements were so adjusted that each person could follow that calling in life which they are by nature adapted for, what a great gainer society as a whole would be. These few who are so fortunate as to be able to follow the calling of their heart’s desire make a success of life. Florence Nightingale was one of the fortunate few, who could engage in that occupation for which she was best adapted. Florence Nightingale was a born nurse. In her was found that rare combination of heart, brain and sympathy which makes the ideal nurse. It is when one is laid low by the ravages of disease that they can appreciate to its utmost depth the value of human kindness...In the future, when the war drum will be heard no more, and the only reveille to be sounded will be that which shall call men to the peaceful walks of life, the name of Florence Nightingale will be revered, as a woman who, though delicate and far removed from want, nevertheless was willing to risk her own life, that she might bring relief to that most stupid victim of our present system, the soldier."

"The woman activist or artist born of a family-centered mother may in any case feel that her mother cannot understand or sympathize with the imperatives of her life; or that her mother has preferred and valued a more conventional daughter, or a son. In order to study nursing, Florence Nightingale was forced to battle, in the person of her mother, the restrictive conventions of upper-class Victorian womanhood, the destiny of a life in drawing rooms and country houses in which she saw women going mad "for want of something to do.""

"Emily Dickinson was always stirred by the existences of women like George Eliot or Elizabeth Barrett, who possessed strength of mind, articulateness, and energy. (She once characterized Elizabeth Fry and Florence Nightingale as "holy"-one suspects she merely meant, "great.")"

"I had been in the "home" less than a week when an invitation came from Miss Nightingale for me to visit her in her London home. Shall I ever forget the excitement that invitation caused? Miss Crossland told me Miss Nightingale would ask my opinion of the different nurses, both ladies and others, and I could see that there was a little anxiety felt concerning the answers I might give. I went on the appointed day and must say I did not feel quite at my ease as the maid took me to Miss Nightingale's room, but one look into those kind, clear-blue eyes, and the hearty grasp of the little hand quite set me at ease, and before I knew it I was talking as freely to her, who had done more than any one woman living to alleviate suffering, as I would have to a life-long friend."

"I went from Edinburgh for a few days with Miss Nightingale, and received from her words of encouragement which have lasted all these years. In one of her letters to me just as I was leaving England she bade me and our profession "god-speed," saying, "Outstrip us, that we in turn may outstrip you again.""

"Every element of army hygiene, diet, shelter, ventilation, latrines, clothing, rest periods, provision of orderlies, was to be codified. Miss Nightingale, drawing upon excellent advice from her Crimea cronies, provided the codes. Together the Notes constitute an astonishing example of her gift for imagining palpable needs and assembling workable remedies. She was creating a self-acting, self-regulating system, embodying individual will-power in action, designed to secure the maximum output of useful work for the total money and manpower expended."

"She is rather high in stature, fair in complexion, and slim in person; her hair is brown, and is worn quite plain; her physiognomy is most pleasing; her eyes, of a bluish tint, speak volumes, and are always sparkling with intelligence; her mouth is small and well formed, while her lips act in unison, and make known the impression of her heart—one seems the reflex of the other. Her visage, as regards expression, is very remarkable, and one can almost anticipate by her countenance what she is about to say: alternately, with matters of the most grave import, a gentle smile passes radiantly over her countenance, thus proving her evenness of temper; at other times, when wit or a pleasantry prevails, the heroine is lost in the happy, good-natured smile which pervades her face, and you recognise only the charming woman. Her dress is generally of a greyish or black tint; she wears a simple white cap, and often a rough apron. In a word, her whole appearance is religiously simple and unsophisticated. In conversation no member of the fair sex can be more amiable and gentle than Miss Nightingale. Removed from her arduous and cavalier-like duties, which require the nerve of a Hercules,—and she possesses it when required,—she is Rachel on the stage in both tragedy and comedy."

"Wherever there is disease in its most dangerous form, and the hand of the spoiler distressingly high, there is that incomparable woman sure to be seen; her benignant presence is an influence for good comfort even amid the struggles of expiring nature. She is a "ministering angel" without any exaggeration in these hospitals, and as her slender form glides quietly along each corridor every poor fellow's face softens with gratitude at the sight of her. When all the medical officers have retired for the night, and silence and darkness have settled down upon those miles of prostrate sick, she may be observed alone, with a little lamp in her hand, making her solitary rounds."

"We have made Miss Nightingale's acquaintance and are delighted and very much struck with her great gentleness, simplicity, and wonderful clear and comprehensive head. I wish we had her at the War Office. Her modesty and unselfishness are really hardly to be believed, and she is so ladylike."

"Florence Nightingale lifted the vague, casual, though kindly and devoted, feeling of women into organized, efficient and invaluable service; she enlarged the nurse’s vision to sympathy for great groups outside her family or particular tribe."

"Her position in Indian affairs was even more extraordinary than her position at the War Office. She had never been to India, she never did go to India, and yet she was considered an expert on India and consulted on its affairs by men who had lived there all their working lives. This knowledge was the reward of her enormous labours on the Station Reports. To her bedroom had come a return from almost every military station in India, not from one Presidency or one district but the entire Peninsula. Year after year she had toiled, examining, classifying, grouping. She possessed prodigious powers of absorbing, retaining, and marshaling masses of facts, and when she had completed her task the whole vast teeming country lay before her mind's eye like a map."

"Quando mi viene in mente un bell'aforisma, lo metto in conto a Montesquieu, od a La Rochefoucauld. Non si sono mai lamentati."

"I have never dreamt of contesting the Church her right to remain faithful to herself, meaning to the commandments that come from Doctrine... but that she expects to impose these commandments upon me who do not have the good fortune of being a believer, trying to pour them into civil law in a way that they become obligatory even to us non-believers, is it right? To me it doesn't seem so."

"I do not want to suffer, I do not have a christian concept of suffering. They tell us that suffering elevates the spirit; no suffering is something that hurts and that's all, it elevates nothing. And therefore I fear suffering. Because with regards to death, I, who in everything believe to be moderate, am absolutely radical. If we have a right to life, we have also a right to death. It rests on us, and it must be recognized the right to choose the when and the how of our own death."

"This isn't the Right, this is the billy-club. Italians don't know how to go Right without ending up in the billy-club."

"This materialist, hedonist and exhibitionist world doesn't thrill me either; and, considering that you are reading me, you should know it. But I would want to know the system that you have in mind, and don't have the courage or the ability to propose. A Franciscan world? Wonderful: but look around you, and tell me if you see a habit. A revised and corrected communism? It would end up like the other, even if it won't repeat its disasters. Believe me G., the only social and economic system acceptable today, in the West, is the one based on the market: a controlled and tempered capitalism, so to speak. It is desirable that it may also be corrected: this does not always happen, it is true. The trouble is that capitalism is made by capitalists - and those, I must admit, are often difficult to digest. Don't try to confuse my ideas, therefore. You won't succeed. I am probably three times your age, and I have seen where these generic tirades against "the multinationals" lead: sooner or later, someone will drop the bar and take the gun. I forgot: I sign my opinions, you throw the stone and hide your hand. Are you all so brave, you Seattle boys ?"

"The American death penalty exists and resists in America because it was a basic and constitutive element of its birth and development. Of the famous 102 Pilgrims who first landed from the Mayflower on that Continent not to plunder as the Spaniards and Portuguese did in Mexico and in South America, but to build you a new and free society, about two thirds were convicts escaping Justice and the jails of Europe, and a third were men that sought freedom and above all religious freedom. The former had a pistol in their pocket, the latter the Bible, but in its Calvinist version of the law of retaliation, based on the idea of an executioner God that demands death of those who deliver it without just cause."

"The list of P2 affiliates includes, they say, 953 names, corresponding to the highest ranks of politics, the judiciary, the armed forces, bureaucracy, industry and finance. All ‘brothers’. It's proof that, in this country, woe betide only children."

"In Italy there is a fringe of imbeciles who believe they can resurrect communism. To bury the corpse of Marxism is not easy, because for many people that would mean denying the whole of existence. Of course Bertinotti is not one of those: he knows nothing about Marxism, he doesn't care, he is a little clown, an Italian-style populist who stirs masses of poor devils in the streets and still speaks of the working masses that only he sees."

"Gladio had been established in almost all of the countries that belonged to Nato. And by Nato's will, aware that its European partners could not have withstood the attack of a super-armed Soviet Union, they would have had to wait an American intervention for a comeback. It's demonstrated by the fact that when this plan was revealed, no other country found much to say about it. Only we Italians – the usual idiot novelists and perhaps something worse than idiots – made it the subject of scandal and a pretext of «Crime fictions» that still find credit, as your letter shows. I also feel shocked, and bit offended. But only because no one has asked me to join Gladio: I would have done it with enthusiasm."

"Which ever one of you will want to become a journalist, let him remember to choose his own master: the reader."

"Certainly, for a newspaper director, to have within arm's reach a Travaglio, about whom every starring actor, supporting cast and extra of Italian political life he is ready upon cold request to provide an inquiry brief refined in the most minute details is a nice comfort. But also a bit unsettling. The day I asked him if in that archive, into which no one is allowed to stick their nose, there were a brief with my name on it, Marco changed the subject."

"We Italians owe something to Elvis Presley: it's one of the rare occasions when we prefer to be Italian rather than American."