People From London

"I say, what gloomy tidings about the CRABS! Could it be me? I'll tell you why this odd doubt exists, instead of robust certainty one way or the other: just after arriving back in London from Athens, I was suddenly alerted by what felt like the beginnings of troop-movements in the fork, but on scrutiny, expecting an aerial view of general mobilisation, there was nothing to be seen, not even a scout, a spy, or a despatch rider. Puzzled, I watched and waited and soon even the preliminary tramplings died away, so I assumed, as the happy summer days of peace followed each other, that the incident, or the delusive shudder through the chancelleries, was over. While this faint scare was on, knowing that, thanks to lunar tyranny, it couldn't be from you, I assumed (and please spare my blushes here!) that the handover bid must have occurred by dint of a meeting with an old pal in Paris, which, I'm sorry to announce, ended in brief carnal knowledge, more for auld lang syne than any more pressing reason. On getting your letter, I made a dash for privacy and thrashed through the undergrowth, but found everything almost eerily calm: fragrant and silent glades that might never have known the invaders' tread. The whole thing makes me scratch my head, if I may so put it. But I bet your trouble does come from me, because the crabs of the world seem to fly to me, like the children of Israel to Abraham's bosom, a sort of ambulant Canaan. I've been a real martyr to them. What must have happened is this. A tiny, picked, cunning and well-camouflaged commando must have landed while I was in Paris and then lain up, seeing me merely as a stepping stone or a springboard to better things, and, when you came within striking distance, knowing the highest when they saw it, they struck (as who wouldn't?) and then deployed in force, leaving their first beachhead empty. Or so I think! (Security will be tightened up. They may have left an agent with a radio who is playing a waiting game . . . )........."

"All this is going on under a rush mat shelter with a table where I write at 11.00 on Sunday morning with lots of cicadas grinding away and Joan's voice up above calling to her cats — two different sets of kittens, with their clans, who are not allowed to meet, so the house is sundered by a sort of cats' Berlin Wall, dividing the house into two mews flats, as Johnny C[raxton] (or I) might say."

"Meanwhile, the kittens - downholsterers and interior desecrators to a kitten - demolish all."

"A propos of Dr Oblivion, did I ever send you my first hint of untimely forgetfulness? One is at sea, and at the same instant that one forgets something, a German submarine with a skull-and-crossbones flag surfaces, and fires a shot across one's bows. Then the lid of the conning-tower opens and the top of an admiral, with monocle and fencing scars, sticks out smiling, salutes and says, `Gut morning! That is just a sighting shot. I am Admiral von Alzheimer. Ve vill meet again!', salutes, and sinks ..."

"I constantly find myself saying `I must write — or tell — that to Joan', then suddenly remember that one can't, and nothing seems to have any point."

"In Greece just after the Second World War, Patrick Leigh Fermor was on a lecture tour for the British Council. The lecture was supposed to be on British culture, but he had been persuaded to talk about his wartime exploits on Crete. Leigh Fermor took sips from a large glass as he spoke and when it was nearly finished, he topped it up from a carafe of water. The liquid turned instantly cloudy: he had added water to a nearly empty tumbler of neat ouzo. A roar of appreciation went up from the audience at this impromptu display of leventeia. A quality prized in Greece, leventeia indicates high spirits, humour, quickness of mind and action, charm, generosity, the love of living dangerously and a readiness for anything. Sir Patrick Michael Leigh Fermor had leventeia in spades."

"It was one of the ones I knew! I continued from where he had broken off:nec jam sustineant onus, Silvae laborantes, geluque, Flumina constiterint acuto"

"THE INTERNATIONAL PRIMATE PROTECTION LEAGUE. This came, usual thing asking for money. Poor Archbishops, I thought, feeling the pinch. But it turned out to be monkeys."

"Oh, I did enjoy myself at Kardamyli. Of course that big room, as I've written to Paddy, is one of the rooms of the world."

"Germany! . . . I could hardly believe I was there. For someone born in the second year of World War I, those three syllables were heavily charged. Even as I trudged across it, early subconscious notions, when one first confused Germans with germs and knew that both were bad, still sent up fumes; fumes, moreover, which the ensuing years had expanded into clouds as dark and baleful as the Ruhr smoke along the horizon and still potent enough to unloose over the landscape a mood of - what? Something too evasive to be captured and broken down in a hurry."

"It was a time of anxiety and danger; and for our captive, of hardship and distress. During a lull in the pursuit, we woke up among the rocks just as a brilliant dawn was breaking over the crest of Mount Ida. We had been toiling over it, through snow and then rain, for the last two days. Looking across the valley at this flashing mountain-crest, the general [Kriepe] murmured to himself:Vides ut alta stet nive candidum, Soracte..."

"Busy, curious, thirsty Fly, Gently drink, and drink as I; Freely welcome to my Cup, Could’st thou sip, and sip it up; Make the most of Life you may, Life is short and wears away. Just alike, both mine and thine, Hasten quick to their Decline; Thine’s a Summer, mine’s no more, Though repeated to threescore; Threescore Summers when they’re gone, Will appear as short as one."

"Being at Leeds in Yorkshire, soon after Mr. Ralph Thoresby the antiquary died, anno 1725, I saw his museum; and in it, among his other rarities, what himself has publicly called (in the catalogue thereof, annexed to his Antiquities of that town) sir Walter Ralegh's tobacco box. From the best of my memory, I can resemble its outward appearance to nothing more nearly than one of our modern muff-cases; about the same height and width, covered with red leather, and opened at top (but with a hinge, I think) like one of those. In the inside there was a cavity for a receiver of glass or metal, which might hold half a pound or a pound of tobacco; and from the edge of the receiver at top, to the edge of the box, a circular stay or collar, with holes in it, to plant the tobacco about, with six or eight pipes to smoke it in. This travelling box, with the MSS. medals, and other rarities in its company, descending to a young clergyman, the son of the deceased, was soon after reported to have been translated to London."

"Yeah, I love fashion. Love it, love it, love it. I love clothes. I’m a vegan, so I’m really interested now in sustainability and fashion being sustainable. I’m very kind of new to the veganism kind of fashion side, I’ve been a vegan for god… 15 years now or so. I was a vegan before it was cool to be vegan. Old school, you know?"

"When our President first telephoned to Greece and suggested that I should have the great honour of saying a ‘few words’ on this important anniversary, I was rather alarmed; and, for several nights afterwards, between sleeping and waking, I had some nightmarish visions, curiously entangled with the adjuncts and impedimenta of SOE. I saw myself sneaking into a Special Forces Club whose appearance and atmosphere had subtly but completely changed from the snug and welcoming haven we all know: it was entirely different, too from the Royal and Ducal precincts where we are feasting tonight. The place had become a daunting and shadowy Valhalla, a club only fit for primordial heroes to drink in, and it was guarded by ogreish janitors. I sneaked in with trepidation, almost forgetting the password as I did so, leaving my coat in a grim cloak-and-dagger room and, at last, with misgiving found my place at a very unusual dining table with a commando-knife on one side of my place, a gelignite plunger on the other and a stick of plastic instead of a roll. The menu was written on a one-time pad in disappearing ink and just as well perhaps; because, between dagger and plunger lay an unappetising Teller mine with limpets and clams to follow….. The cocktails were all Molotoff; the wine glasses were abrim with hair-dye and knock-out drops; and instead of polished wood or peerless napiery, the dolefully groaning board was partly laid with old and tattered parachute material and partly with the blown-up maps of enemy-occupied territory that used to be sewn into the pre-infiltration outfits of agents about to be dropped in the dark……But worse was to come. An intimidating assembly of nightmare veterans were gathered and, as they subsided into their chairs round the eerie banquet, all the cutlery, sinister enough already, started to shift and gravitate in a hair-raising, concerted and centrifugal movement: there was a clinking and clattering. What on earth was going on? Suddenly revelation descended: everything metallic on the table had come simultaneously under siege from the scores of escapecompasses transformed into magnetic trouser-buttons as the guests sat down…….And it is only now, gazing round at fellow-members and seeing that they are not nightmare veterans at all, but friendly contemporaries, a few of them a bit older and a great many very much young than I, that these early misgivings are exorcized. There was nothing to be alarmed about at all."

"Here's a riddle to change the subject: what English catch-phrase, indicating someone is better than he seems, would also apply to a yacht owner whose vessel is even more dangerous than the inlet in which she is anchored? - His barque is worse than his bight."

"[the sale of his two trunks from the Harrods Depository] 'still aches sometimes, like an old wound in wet weather'"

"and so on, through the remaining five stanzas to the end. The general's blue eyes had swivelled away from the mountain-top to mine — and when I'd finished, after a long silence, he said: `Ach so, Herr Major!' It was very strange. As though, for a long moment, the war had ceased to exist. We had both drunk at the same fountains long before; and things were different between us for the rest of our time together."

"However healthy a love one may have of civilization and all its fleshpots, the best thrill of the year is when one leaves them all behind, and sets off for the unknown with a lot of lumpy luggage that contains hardly any clothes at all. It is good to feel that one has left one's little niche in the every­day world, where each one of us is assessed and tabulated to a nicety; to slough off one's everyday accepted self, and to loose oneself in the anonymity of a strange country and people, among whom one has to make good solely by the leverage of one's personality and will to win. The thrill increases till the last vestige of civilization is gone and one is at grips with the unknown, when it comes down to earth, and settles into a hard absorbing fight with primitive conditions; with the problems of health and climate and transport, with the daily struggle for food, water and trans­port, and the groping after understanding of the strange and sometimes antagonistic people one is among. All the complexities of life disappear, and one is reduced to the state, mental and physical, of a healthy animal. As long as one's "tummy" is reasonably full, and there is a prospect of somewhere safe and dry to sleep, one is perfectly, almost stupidly happy. The creature comforts of life no longer matter. For the first few days one misses one's bath most terribly, but in a short time, I am ashamed to say, one doesn't mind if one never had a bath again! Cleanliness may be next to godliness, but in the wilds it comes a long way after food and sleep, or even a good camel."

"Why, praise is satire in these sinful days."

"Fond of your freedom spurn the venal fee, And prove he's only great—who dares to be free."

"With the sports of the field there's no pleasure can vie, While jocund we follow our hounds in full cry."

"Honour’s a mistress all mankind pursue, Yet most mistake the false one for the true: Lur’d by the trappings, dazzled by the paint, We worship oft the idol for the saint."

"Nothing in language is immutably fixed: the best writers are constantly changing it. Absolute government by dictionary would mean the arrest of this healthy process of change and growth."

"What I mean by reading is not skimming, not being able to say as the world saith, "Oh, yes, I've read that!," but reading again and again, in all sorts of moods, with an increase of delight every time, till the thing read has become a part of your system and goes forth along with you to meet any new experience you may have."

"Mr. Montague has written a very fine book. He has extenuated nothing and set down nothing in malice. I have seen no book about the war so temperate or so human. He was in the war, and being a man of fine intelligence must have suffered more than most from the fools from whom men then had to suffer, but the book is without any littleness or bitterness.... It is one of the very best of the books which have been written about the war."

"The true delight of travel, the one that is going to print itself unaccountably and indelibly on you, seems to prefer to come as a thief in the night, and not at the hours you specially fix for its entertainment."

"It was the fault of the war, the outlandish, innovatory war that did not conform to the proper text-books as it ought to have done; an unimagined war of flankless armies scratching each other's faces across an endless thorn hedge, not dreamt of in Staff College philosophy; a war that was always putting out of date the best that had been known and thought and invented, always sending everyone to school again."

"All of ourselves, with our boastful chatter about “the public school spirit”, our gallant, robust contempt for “swats” and “smugs” and all who invented new means to new ends and who trained and used their brains with a will – we had arranged for these easy battues of thousands of Englishmen, who, for their part, did not fail. To-morrow you would see it again – a few hundred square yards of ground gained by the deaths, perhaps of twenty thousand men."

"War hath no fury like a non-combatant."

"We all see more of architecture than of any other art. Every street is a gallery of architects’ work, and in most streets, whatever their age, there is good work and bad. Through these amusing shows many of us walk unperceivingly, all our days, like illiterates in a library, so richly does the fashionable education provide us with blind sides ."

"Patriotism has served, at different times, as widely different ends as a razor, which ought to be used to keep your face clean and yet may be used to cut your own throat or that of some more innocent person."

"Alas, for our towns and cities. Monstrous carbuncles of concrete have erupted in gentle Georgian Squares."

"It is well within the order of things That man should listen when his mate sings; But the true male never yet walked Who liked to listen when his mate talked."

"If all the good people were clever, And all clever people were good, The world would be nicer than ever We thought that it possibly could.But somehow, ’tis seldom or never The two hit it off as they should; The good are so harsh to the clever, The clever so rude to the good!"

"She was a gentlewoman, a scholar, and a saint, and after having been three times married, she took a vow of celibacy. What more could be expected of any woman?"

"The people as a source of sovereign power are in truth only occasional partners in the constitutional minuet danced for most of the time by Parliament and the political party in power."

"A government above the law is a menace to be defeated."

"[Hindu lore, like the Mahābhārata, ] “must have already been current in some form (…) as many have realized, the Vedic texts relate only a small part of the culture of the Vedic period. But it is much less recognized how much comparison can do to fill out the picture, and identify the material that bypassed the Vedas.”"

"For present purposes, many questions about this proto narrative can be left unanswered. Was it told in prose or verse or a mixture of the two? Was it told in the Urheimat or original homeland (whatever the location and date of that logically necessary zone of space-time), or did it diffuse somewhat after the dispersal began? It does not matter. The similarities cannot be explained either by chance, or by Jungian archetypes, or by diffusion of the Homeric epics from Greece to India. If they are as striking as I think, then, one way or another, they must be due to common origin in a proto-narrative."

"[Nick Allen has repeatedly shown that in many parallel motifs in the Mahābhārata and in Homer’s epics, the Indian version contains a spiritual element lacking in the European version:] “in parts of their careers, Arjuna and Odysseus show similarities so numerous and detailed that they must be cognate figures, sharing an origin in the proto-hero of an oral proto-narrative. (…) So, if both stories descend from a proto-narrative, there are two possibilities. Either the proto-journey was like the Greek and contained nothing relating to yoga, in which case the yogic aspect of the Sanskrit story was an innovation that developed in the Indian branch of the tradition. Or the proto journey was like the Sanskrit and was quasi-yogic or proto-yogic in character, in which case Greek epic tradition largely or wholly eliminated that aspect of the story. I shall argue for the second scenario, claiming both that the proto-narrative shared certain features with yoga and that the telling of such a story makes it likely that there already existed ritual practices ancestral to yoga. (…) I argue that some significant and fairly precisely identifiable features of yoga go back to the culture of those who told the proto-narrative (…) may well have been proto-Indo-European speakers.” ... “it is a priori quite likely that the account of the proto-hero's journey served as a myth explaining and justifying ritual practices ancestral to yoga as we know it.”"

"Much of the narrative heritage of India and Greece goes back to shared ancestral narratives told in early IE times – to ‘protonarratives’. (…) the Greek tradition quite often fuses or amalgamates traditions that were separate in the protonarrative and remain separate in the Sanskrit... At first sight the similarity consists in little more than a conflict between protagonist and god, leading to a change in sacrificial practice. However, on closer inspection one can distinguish at least eighteen rapprochements."

"High school is like a kingdom, only instead of temperamental royals, golden thrones, and designer outfits flown in from Europe, the hallways are filled with loud postpubescent teens, the classrooms with rows of wooden desks and students dressed in ugly plaid skirts, navy-colored slacks, and stiff blue blazers."

"Most people think the three of us are friends, since we’re almost always seen together. But we’re not friends. Our relationship is a transaction."

"I know no good comes from comparing what I have to what they have, but seeing all that money and privilege, and having none, hurts. I try to convince myself that being a scholarship kid doesn’t matter, that I shouldn’t care."

"Even though I know I shouldn’t care, it annoys me that when girls know what they want and how they’re going to get it, they’re seen as cocky. But guys who know what they want? They’re confident or strong."

"The familiar sense of peace rises inside, and my hands stretch toward the piano. And then I play."

"Perhaps if hierarchies weren’t so important and people weren’t constantly trying to take me down, maybe I’d be more trusting of people, and Ava and I would be more than just two girls using each other to survive high school."

"I didn't like doing things I wasn't good at, but it turned out I loved learning how to love with him."

"Pieces of me fell into place. I was growing into what I should be. We were growing. It wasn't as if our love built me, it's that it galvanized me, making me stronger because he saw me fully, the best and worst parts."