columbia-university-alumni

"The brilliant and worldly society, before whom the Provençal lyric was sung, lived under the domination of the ideals of chivalry, ideals which demanded that men should fight and that men should love. The poetry that would please this society must, therefore, bear the stamp of these same ideals and subject itself to the tyranny of the same narrow circle of thought. Religion could mostly be left to the close of life, except as it stirred warriors to battle for the Holy Sepulchre. The vast range of emotion open to a Burns, a Heine, a Hugo, lay in an untrodden, if not undreamed, region. The courtly singers, be their birth royal, noble or base, treat, with hardly an exception, of two subjects, and two subjects alone—of war and of love.The love, indeed, was of that peculiar sort termed lady-service. The object of affection was almost invariably a married woman of high rank, to whom the poet addressed his homage and his humble supplications. How much of real passion and how much of simulated adoration this relationship represented, it is impossible to discover. It is reasonable to believe, however, that, in general, the limits of propriety were strictly observed.Without doubt the burning phrases of the earliest troubadours expressed their true sentiments, and we can hardly believe that even the later poets were always confined to emotions purely Platonic. Yet, on the whole, the exaggerated anguish and the equally exaggerated joy, the unlimited praises, the assurances of absolute devotion and unchangeableness, the wishes, the hopes, the despairs of these lovers must be interpreted as we interpret the same sort of language addressed by needy suppliants to Queen Elizabeth of England.In Provence, rich heiresses married young, and after marriage they enjoyed much liberty. Becoming social queens, they patronized the poor singers, who in turn gratified their ladyships' vanity by prolonging and spreading the fame of their beauty. These singers, while professing love, professed also the deepest humility, a humility most strongly marked in those of much lower birth than the ladies they addressed. Every one of them proclaimed himself his lady's vassal, until this convention became so firmly established that even a king (Alfonso II) sang: "Her man, warranted and sworn, shall I now be, if it please her, before all other lords.""

"There was the vers, a simple, early form, which developed into the canso. This was an elaborate poem, of from five to seven stanzas, dealing always with the subject of love, and requiring a melody of its own. On the other hand, from the sirventesc love was properly excluded, and it was written to fit some well-known and popular air. The subject was moral or religious, political or personal. In the planh the poet lamented the death of his patron, or his lady-love. A most curious form was the tenso, a play of wit, in which, usually with great personal bitterness, two poets debated, in alternate stanzas, such questions as: Which are the greater, the benefits or the ills of love? Which contribute most to keep a lover faithful, the eyes or the heart? Which loves the more deeply, one who can not keep from speaking to everyone of his lady, or one who does not speak of her at all, but thinks of her night and day?Such questions of love causistry are thoroughly characteristic of the social element in the troubadour poetry. They are questions of which the knights and ladies seemed never weary."

"A jongleur was one who, either as author or performer, made poetry and music a profession. The name troubadour, on the other hand, was reserved for him who composed, whether for money or merely for pleasure. It is among the troubadours, therefore, that we find the greatest variety of personages. Some were peasants or townsmen, some poor knights, some unfrocked priests or monks. Such made a living by song. Their rivals in fame, though not in pecuniary reward, included powerful barons, princes, and even kings. Music and verse, it must be remembered, were inseparable, and the author was almost invariably the composer as well. Those who could sing, moreover, produced their own compositions to the accompaniment of the fiddle or the harp; others employed professional singers, who frequently carried the song to a distant patron or friend."

"Even in the exhortations to the Crusades, love is often more prominent than duty toward God and the Church. Usually it was only at the close of life that the other world cast its shadow upon their thoughts. Many of them, atoning for lighter days by fasting and penance, ended their careers in the cloister."

"Just as the ideas settled into a system, so the free forms of popular poetry also hardened into categories, so that later writers were enabled to set down a code of almost absolute laws. Even very early care for form became excessive. As a general rule, the rhymes of every stanza throughout a poem are identical; there was an effort to devise new kinds of poetry; complicated rhyming schemes were invented; to these were added word-play, alliteration and forced constructions; difficulties of every kind were sought. Some poets even boasted it as a merit that they could not be understood.This artificiality and elaboration seem strange when we remember that neither the poets nor their audiences were really educated people. Some few authors, it is true, possessed a slight acquaintance with the Classics,—enough to make an occasional allusion to Ovid,—but there were many who could not even read their native tongue. These, of course, transmitted their songs orally to the jongleur, who preserved both words and music in his memory."

"Again and again we find the same ideas expressed in the same language. In the Provençal lyric formalism crushed and annihilated all freshness and life."

"The poetry of the troubadours was essentially social in character. Unlike Goethe's minstrel, who sang as the bird among the branches, these bards exercised their art for the sake of applause and gain,—a recompense which could be won only by pleasing the knights and ladies gathered at the court of some wealthy and noble patron. Of the three classes into which feudal society was divided—commons, clergy and nobles—the last alone possessed either the means or the desire to reward literary and musical skill. It was to this class, therefore, to the Counts of Provence and Toulouse, to Eleanore of Aquitaine and Ermengarde of Narbonne, to Richard the Lionhearted and Alfonso of Aragon, that the Provençal lyric was addressed."

"No field has offered better opportunities to our modern poets than the biographies of these wandering singers.They are biographies that, in this critical age, we cannot accept as truth; but what we reluctantly yield in the domain of fact, we cling to, with greater persistence, in the domain of poetry. Real events, the treasures of folk-lore, and the play of imaginative genius, have combined to mould these stories into shapes that cannot die.The jongleur, before he chanted a song, narrated the life-history upon which it was founded. Sometimes, perhaps, he told that which he knew; more frequently, however, he relied upon tradition, or even upon his own fancy. Thus were accumulated the materials for those tales of passion which have inspired succeeding poets from Dante to Swinburne and Browning, the Biographies of the Troubadours. In them are to be found tragedy and comedy, faithfulness and deception, affection, jealousy and hate. No one who reads them, with any belief in their accuracy, can help feeling that, when their heroes occupied the stage, the chief business of life was love.We read of Rudel, who was enamoured of the Countess of Tripoli, without ever having seen her, solely upon the reports of her beauty and virtue which he heard from pilgrims returning from the Holy Land. In her honor he made all his songs, and at last, in order that he might see her, he joined the Crusaders and began his voyage across the sea. But a great sickness fell upon him, and when he reached the haven he was dying. Yet he could thank God that, before his death, he had seen his lady. Within her arms he breathed his last, and she, in her grief, entered a convent that very day.Less tragic, but hardly less romantic, is a story of Peire Vidal, who at one time believed himself Emperor of Constantinople. In love with Madame Loba—a name that signifies wolf—he attired himself in a wolf-skin, allowed himself to be pursued in the mountains by huntsmen and hounds, and was almost killed for his pains.Guilhem de Balaruc, learning from a friend that a lover, reconciled to his sweetheart after a quarrel, has a happiness equal to that caused by the first interchange of affection, departs from his lady, insults her messengers, and refuses all offers of reconcilement. When he thinks it time to renew his courtship, it is she who is obdurate, and only after long efforts and the intervention of many friends, is he pardoned. The penance imposed upon him by the lady is severe. He must draw out the nail of his little finger, and send it to her with a song in which he declares his folly and expresses his sorrow for his fault. Both conditions he, of course, joyfully fulfils.Most famous of all, perhaps, is the story of Guilhem de Cabestaing. This knight fell under the suspicions of his lord, but, by pretending that his passion was for his lady's sister, and by enlisting her services in the imposture, he for some time escaped detection. At length, however, one of his own songs betrayed his secret. He was slain, and his heart was served to his lady at her repast. When informed what it was she had eaten unaware, she said: "My lord, you have given me so good a food to eat, that I will never again taste of any other." And casting herself from a lofty balcony, she died.In such wise has romantic fiction embellished the lives of the troubadours and reflected its splendor upon their songs. Other bards have celebrated an Achilles, a Roland, or a Siegfried, but these bards are themselves heroes of poetry.Among them all, there is none, perhaps, who is, at the same time, so distinguished for his own poems and for his legendary reputation, as Bertran de Born. Living during the eventful period of the wars between Henry II of England and his rebellious sons, and himself taking a prominent part in these contests, this singer represents, in the fullest degree, the warlike element in the Provençal lyric. Love, indeed, he sang, but his chief inspiration was the trumpet of battle. He was, in turn, in friendly and in hostile relations with all three of the young princes—with Henry, known as "the Young King," with Geoffrey, and with Richard of the Lion-heart."

"Illiterate and yet cultivated, these lords and ladies demanded of their poets a strict adherence to generally recognized conventional forms, and, at the same time, an elaboration of artificial conceits and an originality of metrical complication, which gave pleasure in the feeling of difficulties overcome.The conventionalism, both in ideas and in forms, must be obvious to every reader. Instead of the description of nature, we find vague references to green meadows, fragrant flowers, and singing birds. It is the same with the expression of love. The griefs and joys of the lover, his hopes and cares, are set forth in general terms. The detail that would give life to the picture is conspicuously absent. Even in the most personal songs of affection, sorrow or hatred, there is the same indefiniteness of image. A fund of materials was accumulated from which all could draw. The chief demand upon the poet was that these materials should be perpetually rearranged in slightly varied combinations."

"In the ancient land of vintage and dance and sun-burnt mirth, there resounded during the Middle Ages a sweet chorus of song, which was the delight, not only of the native lords and ladies, but of cultivated society in all neighboring countries. Spreading to France, Spain, Germany and Italy, its underlying ideas and fancies furnished the basis of much that is greatest in medieval literature. Its sudden appearance, its rapid development, its brief glory, and its untimely extinction, invest this lyric outburst with a special, almost tragic, interest."

"For him delicious flavors dwell In books as in old Muscatel."

"When Simon de Montfort destroyed the chivalry of Southern France, the troubadours perished from the earth. Some few, indeed, might keep alive a spark of the old spirit in foreign lands, but the flame was spent, and it could not be rekindled. In 1324 the townsmen of Toulouse tried to revivify the ancient lyric, but the Floral Games which they instituted, with prizes and degrees distributed before a great concourse of citizens, could not invigorate this child of chivalry. The old forms were maintained—indeed they were reduced to a science—and the lyric which had celebrated earthly passion now celebrated the love of the Virgin Mary and the love of God. Yet all real life had fled. The Provençal lyric was the offspring and the expression of chivalric society, and when that society died, this lyric died with it.It was no problem poetry, as so much of our recent verse pretends to be. Limited in range, and appealing to the fancy rather than to the heart, it produced no surpassing singer, no Burns, no Heine. But its influence still survives. Like a butterfly among the flowers, it flourished for its brief season, and then perished utterly. And yet, in the artistic impulse which it gave to poetic endeavor, in the civilizing and, with all its faults, elevating influence which it exerted upon European ideals, and in the passionate, tender and brave romance with which it has gifted succeeding generations, the Provençal lyric remains, and must remain, a precious—in truth, an invaluable—contribution to universal literature."

"And in the evening, everywhere Along the roadside, up and down, I see the golden torches flare Like lighted street-lamps in the town."

"Song like a rose should be; Each rhyme a petal sweet; For fragrance, melody, That when her lips repeat The words, her heart may know What secret makes them so:— Love, only Love!"

"Every poet uttered the same exaggerated laments and praises. He would contrast his past joy with his present grief, and resolve to abandon song forever—a resolution, it may be said, that was rarely kept. Nothing could alleviate such pain, nor could words express it: joy is hateful, the mere thought of his loss is enough to slay the mourner; it were better to have died first, for the world seems miserable and worthless; all people are called upon to join in weeping, and curses are heaped upon false, traitorous, injurious Death. At the same time, the lady is represented as the best, noblest, completest, that could exist; she is the summit and the source of worth and virtue; with her everything splendid has sunk into the grave: may the Lord save her soul and place her among the saints in heaven."

"In the eleventh century the nobility, which had previously been terribly rough and barbarous, began to grow more refined. Under the influence of favorable conditions, chivalry was developed. Particularly in the south of France, where wealth had long accumulated and where, through rights, taxes and the sale of privileges, it flowed largely into the hands of the great lords, the delight in life became conspicuous. Prodigality was the fashion. As in the Elizabethan age in England, the love of splendor manifested itself particularly in gorgeousness of dress and magnificence of entertainments. A host of attendants accompanied the man of rank, and the ideal prince bestowed gifts lavishly and without thought upon knights, squires, and, above all, upon jongleurs.These jongleurs—the successors of the Latin Mimi—supplied entertainment to the commons at the fairs and to the higher classes at their feasts. The meaner kind not only recited, sang and played on musical instruments, but performed as jugglers, dancers, acrobats and exhibitors of trained animals. But the courtly singers were not of this order. Though mostly professional minstrels, they were not infrequently the friends and companions of princes. When they wandered from castle to castle, they were honorably received; when they attached themselves to some particular patron, they were caressed and richly paid. We are told that one great lord was so highly pleased with the first song of Aimeric de Pegulhan that he gave him his own palfrey and the very clothes he wore."

"We Southerners are, of course, a mythological people. Supposed to dwell in moonlight or incandescence, we are in part to blame for our own legendary character. Lost by choice in dreaming of high days gone and big house burned, now we cannot even wish to escape."

"Physically the Low Country retains its glamorous air under the scourings and sweepings of industrial change. 'Down on the salt,' as they say, the sea-islands still offer their long, palmetto-fringed beaches and their wide green marshes to the enormous sky. A little way inland the dense woods hung with grey Spanish moss, the nostalgic ruins of plantation houses destroyed by war or fire, the cypress pools of clear black water in which the herons stand like fabulous white blooms on their stalks — these trappings of the Gothic romances have their old power to stir the imagination."

"Augustus sat hunched on the sofa, strangely shrunken; even the Charvet dressing gown had an air of ruin."

"Capitalism is not necessarily more immoral than previous social systems with regard to cruelty to humans and the gratuitous destruction of nature. As a mode of production and a social system, however, capitalism requires people to be destructive of the environment. Three destructive aspects of the capitalist system stand out when we view this system in relation to the extinction crisis: 1) capitalism tends to degrade the conditions of its own production; 2) it must expand ceaselessly in order to survive; 3) it generates a chaotic world system, which in turn intensifies the extinction crisis."

"There is substantial evidence, over a wide attitudinal and experimental range, that perceptions, opinions and values are systematically ordered in modern societies....Modern society...is more or less unique in the extent to which it produces standardized contexts of experience."

"[There is] an increasing insistence by the customers on using consumption to express themselves, to help in fashioning their own identities....For increasing numbers of Americans, the clothes they wear are not simply material objects; on the contrary, they are viewed...as the most basic expression of life style, indeed of identity itself."

"The successful funds in any given year are mostly lucky; they have a good roll of the dice. There is general agreement among researchers that nearly all stock pickers, whether they know it or not— and few of them do— are playing a game of chance."

"When it comes to learning, Triumph is the real foe; it’s Disaster that’s your teacher. It’s Disaster that brings objectivity. It’s Disaster that’s the antidote to that greatest of delusions, overconfidence. And ultimately, both Triumph and Disaster are impostors. They are results that are subject to chance. One of them just happens to be a better teaching tool than the other."

"Your likelihood of slipping in a shower is orders of magnitude larger than your likelihood of being in a terrorist attack— but just try convincing someone of that, especially if they knew someone who died in the Twin Towers."

"Ensuring robust national referral mechanisms (NRMs), which are resourced and functional in implementation is an important step in identification, individual assistance and support, criminal justice and redress and social inclusion of victims and survivors of human trafficking. The design of effective victim and survivor support should incorporate the lived experience and professional expertise of survivor leaders and be tailored to the needs of individual survivors."

"A two-year study made by Gray (3) of one family's food during the indicated that even intelligent persons living on a very low income are likely to have a deficient diet. The of the three women in this family, two of whom were college students, furnished per person per day 2372 Calories, 41 grams , 0.59 gram , 0.79 gram , and 0.000754 gram iron. ... 3. Gray, Greta. One family's food during the depression. Jour. Home Econ. 27:24-25. 1935."

"The house and its surroundings are intimately connected with the home, each modifies the other. Hawthorne's , Poe's , there reports of investigations of housing committees, , all tell us the same story. The dwellers in a house put their stamp upon it, even when they have left it empty it reflects something of their characters and habits from its walls and floors, from the very air which has surrounded them. Still more the house modifies the home and the people who dwell in it. Disease and death come more frequently to the damp, unventilated house than to the sunlit one. The inconvenient house, making irksome the necessary work, influences the dispositions of all under its roof. The quiet dignified house with a beautiful outlook brings soothing and inspiration."

"A convenient kitchen is one in which the necessary work can be done with the least possible effort. To plan such a kitchen requires at least two things. First, there must be a clear idea of all the routine jobs to be done in the kitchen in the order that they are most likely to come. , cooking, serving, clearing away and are the jobs that follow each other most often in the majority of kitchens. Second, after the plan of work is clearly in mind, comes the choosing and placing of the needed equipment. The relation of the kitchen to the rest of the house, especially the dining portion, also plays an important part in convenience."

"Even the most optimistic advocate of innovation in medicine cannot ignore ever-increasing , costs associated in some measure with that we so much admire. And, as we are equally well aware, access to clinical services is far from universal or equitable. As I write this introduction, more than forty million Americans lack and medical expenses remain a major cause of bankruptcy. Still another paradox complicates the relationship between society and medicine. Though expectations of therapeutic efficacy have never been more euphoric and patients appear to trust their own physicians, respect for the medical profession has declined ... The is trusted even less."

"In an account that both travels over explored territory and covers new ground, Charles Rosenberg provides a vivid and complex history of a key institution. Rosenberg divides The Care of Strangers into two periods: the pre-Civil War era, before the advent of modern medicine, and from the war to the 1920s, by which time the had assumed modern form. The underlying theme of the book is that hospitals are a product of the interaction of and physicians. Hospitals were dominated by reformers as long as medical science was weak. But with its rise and the subsequent power of physicians, reformers and their social welfare goals faded."

"Medicine has always had its s, but until recently it was a history written by and for practitioners. Until the early nineteenth century, in fact, history and practice could hardly be distinguished. Galen and Hippocrates could be and were used to bolster arguments about the nature of fever or the logic of a particular therapeutic choice. A learned physician read Latin and , not simply to mystify the laity but to work with those master texts that still figured meaningfully in his intellectual life. By the late nineteenth century, of course, the writings of and were no longer alive in the thought and practice of even educated practitioners. History had become quite clearly history — something in the past. This is not to suggest that interest in the medicine of previous eras disappeared. It remained was to become gradually — if even today incompletely — an academic field. But the history of medicine was still populated almost entirely by scholars trained in medical schools, the great majority of whom made their living as physicians."

"... and Hugh Hodge, Philadelphia's leading teachers of in the 1840s and 1850s were vociferous in rejecting the suggestion that might be contagious, indeed often spread by the obstetrician himself ... The intensity of their response suggests that something more than mere intellectual difference was involved; one of the roots of their hostility to a contagionist point of view lay in the threat it implied for the physician's status, especially in relation to female patients."

"was the classic epidemic disease of the nineteenth century, as had been of the . When cholera first appeared in the United States in 1832, and smallpox, the great epidemic diseases of the previous two centuries, were no longer truly national problems. Yellow fever had disappeared from the , and had deprived smallpox of much of it menace. Cholera, on the other hand, appeared in almost every part of the country in the course of the century. ... Before 1817, there had probably never been a cholera epidemic outside the ; during the nineteenth century, it spread through almost the entire world ..."

"Far into the nineteenth century, Washington remained a small, rather provincial city. Life was seasonal. Oppressed by heat and malaria during the summer, the capital did not awake to its foreshortened and unnaturally frenetic life until fall and the convening of Congress."

"Physicians and since the days of Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Rush have criticized the peculiar tensions of American life. The speculative pathologies which explain precisely how these tensions injured the mind and body have changed in form since the days of Rush, but the ambivalent attitudes which they express toward American life have not. Yet neither Benjamin Rush nor his successors later in the century—, , and , among others—were willing, warn as they might of the psychic perils of American life, to exchange its liberties for the placid tyranny of the Russian or Turkish empires (or, most Americans felt, their Protestantism for the formalistic reassurances of Catholicism)."

"Just as s and s assumed that their research illuminated the glory of God in His works, so did most nineteenth-century American physicians assume that there could be no conflict between their findings and the truths of morality. The human organism was a thing both material and divine, and offenses both physical and moral were necessarily punished with disease. Drinking, overeating, sexual excess, all carried with them inevitable retribution, not because the Lord deigned to intercede directly in human affairs, but because He had created man's body so that infringing on God's moral law meant disobeying the laws of . Moralism thus drew upon the prestige of science, while medicine was pleased that its findings supported the dictates of morality."

"Blacks are by and large are still, in a majority sense, Democrats"

"Performing artists are less political today than they were years ago because they're not called on to be political"

"I would say that a deeper patriotism is required when we consider to whom we owe our patriotic response"

"Art has a deep responsibility, social, cultural, and otherwise. And that the basic motivation for the creation of art is, in a sense, to meet those responsibilities. Now, it doesn't mean that you cannot express yourself in any way you want to, but it takes place in a social context, whether you mean it to do so or not"

"We're going somewhere, even if it's only around the Goddamn corner"

"If you can’t outfight the man, outsmart him"

"I come together to say, I choose to live for brotherhood and not for folly. I choose peace and not war. I choose life and not death."

"I fully expected that a black man particularly would by lynched from time to time because it was going on when I came into the world"

"We have freedom. What we don't have is equality!"

"in the end it is history that will tell the story"

"Mankind, humankind is at stake"

"when the time comes we'll give each other our own Oscar and attend our own funerals and screw the rest of it if necessary"

"I’d hate to go to hell and say I was busy trying to save the Oscars"