D.H. Lawrence (11 September 1885–2 March 1930)

How Beastly The Bourgeois Is


How beastly the bourgeois is
especially the male of the species--

Presentable, eminently presentable--
shall I make you a present of him?

Isn't he handsome? Isn't he healthy? Isn't he a fine specimen?
Doesn't he look the fresh clean Englishman, outside?
Isn't it God's own image? tramping his thirty miles a day
after partridges, or a little rubber ball?
wouldn't you like to be like that, well off, and quite the
thing

Oh, but wait!
Let him meet a new emotion, let him be faced with another
man's need,
let him come home to a bit of moral difficulty, let life
face him with a new demand on his understanding
and then watch him go soggy, like a wet meringue.
Watch him turn into a mess, either a fool or a bully.
Just watch the display of him, confronted with a new
demand on his intelligence,
a new life-demand.

How beastly the bourgeois is
especially the male of the species--

Nicely groomed, like a mushroom
standing there so sleek and erect and eyeable--
and like a fungus, living on the remains of a bygone life
sucking his life out of the dead leaves of greater life
than his own.

And even so, he's stale, he's been there too long.
Touch him, and you'll find he's all gone inside
just like an old mushroom, all wormy inside, and hollow
under a smooth skin and an upright appearance.

Full of seething, wormy, hollow feelings
rather nasty--
How beastly the bourgeois is!

Standing in their thousands, these appearances, in damp
England
what a pity they can't all be kicked over
like sickening toadstools, and left to melt back, swiftly
into the soil of England.

E. M. Forster, 1879 - 1970

English novelist E. M. Forster was born in London (1879). He grew up the son of an affluent family in an old house the English countryside. After he inherited some money that made it unnecessary to earn a living, Forster began traveling around Europe and writing novels about the English social classes. In just five years he published four novels, including Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905), A Room with a View (1908) and Howard's End (1910). Then he wrote nothing for fourteen years while he worked for the Red Cross in Egypt during World War I and then traveled to India.

When he got back from India, Forster published A Passage to India (1924) which many consider his masterpiece, about a young British woman named Adela Quested, traveling in India, who falsely accuses an Indian man of attempted rape and then later retracts her accusation.

A Passage to India was Forster's most successful novel to date. He was at the height of his career. And so it was a surprise to everyone that, though he lived for almost fifty more years, he never published another novel.

*. . . the crime of suicide lies rather in its disregard for the feelings of those whom we leave behind.


*If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.


*What is wonderful about great literature is that it transforms the man who reads it towards the condition of the man who wrote.

*Unless we remember we cannot understand

*The only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gone a little farther down our particular path than we have yet got ourselves.

*I am sure that if the mothers of various nations could meet, there would be no more wars.

*What is the good of your stars and trees, your sunrise and the wind, if they do not enter into our daily lives?

*Nonsense and beauty have close connections.

*I have only got down on to paper, really, three types of people: the person I think I am, the people who irritate me, and the people I'd like to be.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti May 12, 1828–April 09, 1882

Gabriel Charles Dante Rossetti, who later changed the order of his names to stress his kinship with the great Italian poet, was born in London May 12, 1828, to Gabriele and Frances (Polidori) Rossetti.

Mr. Rossetti was an Italian patriot exiled from Naples for his political activity and a Dante scholar who became professor of Italian at King's College, London, in 1831. Since Mrs. Rossetti was also half-Italian, the children (Maria [1827-76], Dante, William Michael [1828-1919], and Christina [1830-94]) grew up fluent in both English and Italian. As part of the large Italian expatriate community in London, they welcomed other exiles from Mazzini to organ-grinders; and although they were certainly not wealthy, Professor Rossetti was able to support the family comfortably until his eyesight and general health deteriorated in the 40s. Certainly none of the family seems to have been obsessed with money the way that Tennyson was, for instance.

In the late '60s Rossetti began to suffer from headaches and weakened eyesight, and began to take chloral mixed with whiskey to cure insomnia. Chloral accentuated the depression and paranoia latent in Rossetti's nature, and Robert Buchanan's attack on Rossetti and Swinburne in "The Fleshly School of Poetry" (1871) changed him completely. In the summer of 1872 he suffered a mental breakdown, complete with hallucinations and accusing voices. He was taken to Scotland, where he attempted suicide, but gradually recovered, and within a few months was able to paint again. His health continued to deteriorate slowly (he was still taking chloral), but did not much interfere with his work. He died of kidney failure on April 9, 1882.

Severed Selves

Two separate divided silences,
Which, brought together, would find loving voice;
Two glances which together would rejoice
In love, now lost like stars beyond dark trees;
Two hands apart whose touch alone gives ease;
Two bosoms which, heart-shrined with mutual flame,
Would, meeting in one clasp, be made the same;
Two souls, the shores wave-mocked of sundering seas:—

Such are we now. Ah! may our hope forecast
Indeed one hour again, when on this stream
Of darkened love once more the light shall gleam?
An hour how slow to come, how quickly past,
Which blooms and fades, and only leaves at last,
Faint as shed flowers, the attenuated dream.

____


Lovesight

When do I see thee most, beloved one?
When in the light the spirits of mine eyes
Before thy face, their altar, solemnize
The worship of that Love through thee made known?
Or when in the dusk hours (we two alone)
Close-kissed and eloquent of still replies
Thy twilight-hidden glimmering visage lies,
And my soul only sees thy soul its own?

O love, my love! if I no more should see
Thyself, nor on the earth the shadow of thee,
Nor image of thine eyes in any spring,--
How then should sound upon Life's darkening slope
The ground-whirl of the perished leaves of Hope,
The wind of Death's imperishable wing?

Cavalier Poets

Though the Cavalier Poets only occasionally imitated the strenuous intellectual conceits of Donne, and his followers, and were fervent admirers of Jonson's elegance, they took care to learn from both parties.

Thomas Carew, Sir John Suckling, Richard Lovelace, Lord Herbert

They are 'cavalier' in the sense, not only of being Royalists (though Waller changed sides twice), but in the sense that they distrust the over-earnest, the too intense. They accept the ideal of the Renaissance Gentleman who is at once lover, soldier, wit, man of affairs, musician, and poet, but abandon the notion of his being also a pattern of Christian chivalry. They avoid the subject of religion, apart from making one or two graceful speeches. They attempt no plumbing of the depths of the soul. They treat life cavalierly, indeed, and sometimes they treat poetic convention cavalierly too. For them life is far too enjoyable for much of it to be spent sweating over verses in a study. The poems must be written in the intervals of living, and are celebratory of things that are much livelier than mere philosophy or art. To put it in a nutshell, the Mistress in no longer an impossibly chaste Goddess to be wooed with sighs, but a woman who may be spoken to in a forthright fashion.

by: Thomas Carew (1595?-1639?)

TO HIS INCONSTANT MISTRESS

WHEN thou, poor Excommunicate
From all the joys of Love, shalt see
The full reward and glorious fate
Which my strong faith shall purchase me,
Then curse thine own inconstancy!

A fairer hand than thine shall cure
That heart which thy false oaths did wound;
And to my soul a soul more pure
Than thine shall by Love's hand be bound,
And both with equal glory crown'd.

Then shalt thou weep, entreat, complain
To Love, as I did once to thee;
When all thy tears shall be as vain
As mine were then: for thou shalt be
Damn'd for thy false apostasy.

Ben Jonson, 1572 - 1637

English poet and playwright Ben Jonson was born in London in 1572. His father wanted him to continue the family tradition of laying bricks for a living, but Jonson was bored by the trade and went off to become an actor. In 1592, he married a woman and she gave birth to a son whom Jonson called his "best piece of poetry." In 1598, he killed a fellow actor in a duel, and went to prison, narrowly escaping a death sentence. He got out after a couple of years and wrote two of his greatest plays, Volpone (1607) and The Alchemist (1610). In 1616, he was so popular that he could publish a complete edition of his works, something playwrights almost never did at that time. He wrote, "No man is so wise that he may not easily err if he takes no other counsel than his own. He that is taught only by himself has a fool for a master."
*True happiness consists not in the multitude of friends, but in the worth and choice.

*Drink to me only with thine eyes, And I will pledge with mine; Or leave a kiss but in the cup And I'll not look for wine
Ben Jonson quote

*Follow a shadow, it still flies you,
Seem to fly it, it will pursue.
So court a mistress, she denies you;
Let her alone, she will court you.
Say, are not women truly, then
Styled but the shadows of us men?

*There is no greater hell than to be a prisoner of fear.

*They say Princes learn no art truly, but the art of horsemanship. The reason is, the brave beast is no flatterer. He will throw a prince as soon as his groom.

*Art hath an enemy called Ignorance.

*He knows not his own strength that has not met adversity.

*They that know no evil will suspect none.

*Good men are the stars, the planets of the ages wherein they live, and illustrate the times”

Honor's a good brooch to wear in a man's hat at all times.

*Weigh the meaning and look not at the words.

*PRAY thee, take care, that tak'st my book in hand,
To read it well—that is, to understand.

*II. — TO MY BOOK.

It will be look'd for, BOOK, when some but see
Thy title, EPIGRAMS, and named of me,
Thou shouldst be bold, licentious, full of gall,
Wormwood, and sulphur, sharp, and tooth'd withal ;
Become a petulent thing, hurl ink, and wit,
As madmen stones ; not caring whom they hit.
Deceive their malice, who could wish it so ;
And by thy wiser temper, let men know
Thou art not so covetous of least self-fame,
Made from the hazard of another's shame ;
Much less, with lewd, profane, and beastly phrase,
To catch the world's loose laughter, or vain gaze.
He that departs with his own honesty
For vulgar praise, doth it too dearly buy.


VI. — TO ALCHEMISTS.

If all you boast of your great art be true ;
Sure, willing poverty lives most in you.

Andrew Marvell

Andrew Marvell was born at Winestead-in-Holderness, Yorkshire, England (1621). His academic career was cut short when his father died, and Marvell was forced to leave school to become a tutor. Marvell's fame came three years after his death when his former housekeeper, who claimed to be his widow, found some of his writings, which were later published as Miscellaneous Poems by Andrew Marvell, Esq. His best known poem is "To His Coy Mistress" (1650):

Had we but world enough and time,
This coyness, Lady, were no crime...
But at my back I always hear
Time's winged chariot hurrying near:
And yonder all before us lie
Deserts of vast eternity.

Eudora Welty, 1909 - 2001

Writer Eudora Welty was born in Jackson, Mississippi (1909). Her mother was a schoolteacher, and Welty learned to love books before she was even able to read them. She said, "It had been startling and disappointing to me to find out that story books had been written by people, that books were not natural wonders, coming up of themselves like grass."

She tried working in advertising but said, "It was too much like sticking pins into people to make them buy things they didn't need or really want." So she became a writer.

Though she wrote several novels, including The Optimist's Daughter (1972), she's best known for her short stories in collections such as The Wide Net (1943) and The Golden Apples (1949). She wrote and rewrote, revising her stories by cutting them apart with scissors at the dining-room table and reassembling them with straight pins.

Her story "Why I Live At the PO" begins, "I was getting along fine with Mama, Pap-Daddy and Uncle Rondo until my sister Stella-Rondo just separated from her husband and came back home again. Mr. Whitaker! Of course I went with Mr. Whitaker first, when he first appeared here in China Grove, taking 'Pose Yourself' photos, and Stella-Rondo broke us up. Told him I was one-sided. Bigger on one side than the other, which is a deliberate, calculated falsehood: I'm the same. Stella-Rondo is exactly twelve months to the day younger than I am and for that reason she's spoiled."

A critic once asked Welty to explain where she got the idea for a marble cake in one of her stories. She replied, "It's a recipe that's been in my family for some time."

David Herbert Lawrence 1885 - 1930

David Herbert Lawrence was born in Eastwood, England (1885). He wrote poetry and plays and literary criticism, but he's best known for his novels Sons and Lovers (1913), Women in Love (1920), and Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928).

He spent most of his adult life struggling against his own government. During World War I, he was suspected of being a German spy, because his wife was German and he opposed the war. British authorities were constantly trailing him and accusing him of sending signals to the Germans with white scarves and night-lights. Most of all, he struggled against censorship. More than almost any other writer at the time, he believed that in order to write about human experience, novelists had to write explicitly about sex. When he published his first important novel, Sons and Lovers (1913), he found that his editor had deleted numerous erotic passages without his permission.

D.H. Lawrence said, "Be still when you have nothing to say; [but] when genuine passion moves you, say what you've got to say, and say it hot."



To Women, As Far As I'm Concerned

The feelings I don't have I don't have.
The feelings I don't have, I won't say I have.
The felings you say you have, you don't have.
The feelings you would like us both to have, we
neither of us have.
The feelings people ought to have, they never have.
If people say they've got feelings, you may be pretty
sure they haven't got them
So if you want either of us to feel anything at all
you'd better abandon all idea of feelings altogether.

_____________________________


Intimates

Don't you care for my love? she said bitterly.
I handed her the mirror, and said:
Please address these questions to the proper person!
Please make all request to head-quarters!
In all matters of emotional importance
please approach the supreme authority direct!--
So I handed her the mirror.

And she would have borken it over my head,
but she caught sight of her own refection
and that held her spellbound for two seconds
while I fled.

____________________

If You are a Man
If you are a man, and believe in the destiny of mankind
then say to yourself: we will cease to care
about property and money and mechanical devices,
and open our consciousness to the deep, mysterious life
that we are now cut off from.

The machine shall be abolished from the earth again;
it is a mistake that mankind has made;
money shall cease to be, and property shall cease to perplex
and we will find the way to immediate contact with life
and with one another.

To know the moon as we have never known
yet she is knowable.
To know a man as we have never known
a man, as never yet a man was knowable, yet still shall be.

_____________________________________


*A man has no religion who has not slowly and painfully gathered one together, adding to it, shaping it; and one's religion is never complete and final, it seems, but must always be undergoing modification.

*All that we know is nothing, we are merely crammed wastepaper baskets, unless we are in touch with that which laughs at all our knowing.

*But better die than live mechanically a life that is a repetition of repetitions.
David Herbert Lawrence

*Consciousness is an end in itself. We torture ourselves getting somewhere, and when we get there it is nowhere, for there is nowhere to get to.

*Death is the only pure, beautiful conclusion of a great passion.

*Do not allow to slip away from you freedoms the people who came before you won with such hard knocks.

*Ethics and equity and the principles of justice do not change with the calendar.

*For man, as for flower and beast and bird, the supreme triumph is to be most vividly, most perfectly alive.
David Herbert Lawrence

*God doesn't know things. He is things.

*God how I hate new countries: They are older than the old, more sophisticated, much more conceited, only young in a certain puerile vanity more like senility than anything.

*God is only a great imaginative experience.

*Having achieved and accomplished love... man... has become himself, his tale is told.

*I am in love - and, my God, it is the greatest thing that can happen to a man. I tell you, find a woman you can fall in love with. Do it. Let yourself fall in love. If you have not done so already, you are wasting your life.

*I can never decide whether my dreams are the result of my thoughts, or my thoughts the result of my dreams.
David Herbert Lawrence

William Makepeace Thackeray, 1811 - 1863

Novelist William Makepeace Thackeray, born in Calcutta, India (1811). His father worked for the British East India Company, but he died when Thackeray was just a boy, and Thackeray's mother sent him back to England to go to boarding school. He missed his mother so much in England that every night, before he went to bed, he prayed that he would dream of her.

He hated school, and spent all his time drawing humorous pictures and writing satirical essays about his teachers. He had an inheritance waiting for him from his late father, but he wouldn't receive it until he turned twenty-one, so he decided to kill time by studying law. Unfortunately, he couldn't stand law. He wrote in his diary, "I find I cannot read. I have tried it at all hours & it fails—I don't know so much now as when I came to town & that God knows was little enough." He began to spend all his time going to taverns and gaming houses, racking up gambling debts.

Just as he was about to receive his inheritance, he learned that the Indian banking houses in which his father's money was invested had collapsed, and what remained of his inheritance was gone. He was deep in debt, and he'd made no progress on a career in law. Desperate for a way to make money, he turned to the only thing he'd ever enjoyed back when he was in school: funny drawings and satirical essays. He began contributing illustrations and journalism to newspapers, and they turned out to be very popular. He made his name with a satirical column he wrote for Punch magazine called "The Snobs of England By One of Themselves." At that time, the word "snob" meant a person of the lower class, but Thackeray redefined the word as, "one who meanly admires mean things."

After he got married, Thackeray began to write novels, and he went on to become the second most popular novelist of his lifetime, after Charles Dickens. At the time, many intellectuals thought Dickens was too vulgar and sentimental, and they preferred Thackeray's work. His masterpiece was the novel Vanity Fair (1847). It's the story of Becky Sharp, the poor daughter of a drawing master who fights her way up through society by any means necessary. She delivers the novel's most famous line when she says, "I think I could be a good woman if I had five thousand a year."

Thackeray said, "There are a thousand thoughts lying within a man that he does not know till he takes up a pen to write."


*A clever, ugly man every now and then is successful with the ladies, but a handsome fool is irresistible.

*A good laugh is sunshine in the house.

*An evil person is like a dirty window, they never let the light shine through.

*Bravery never goes out of fashion.

*Dinner was made for eating, not for talking.

*Do not be in a hurry to succeed. What would you have to live for afterwards? Better make the horizon your goal; it will always be ahead of you.

*Except for the young or very happy, I can't say I am sorry for anyone who dies.

*Follow your honest convictions and be strong.

*Good humor is one of the best articles of dress one can wear in society.

*I would rather make my name than inherit it.

*It is best to love wisely, no doubt; but to love foolishly is better than not to be able to love at all.

*It is only hope which is real, and reality is a bitterness and a deceit.

*It is to the middle-class we must look for the safety of England.

*Mother is the name for God in the lips and hearts of little children.

*Next to excellence, comes the appreciation of it.

*Next to the young, I suppose the very old are the most selfish.

*People hate as they love, unreasonably.

*People who do not know how to laugh are always pompous and self-conceited.

*The two most engaging powers of an author are to make new things familiar, familiar things new.

*The world is a looking glass and gives back to every man the reflection of his own face.

*There are many sham diamonds in this life which pass for real, and vice versa.

*To love and win is the best thing. To love and lose, the next best.

*When you look at me, when you think of me, I am in paradise.

If You are a Man

If you are a man, and believe in the destiny of mankind
then say to yourself: we will cease to care
about property and money and mechanical devices,
and open our consciousness to the deep, mysterious life
that we are now cut off from.

The machine shall be abolished from the earth again;
it is a mistake that mankind has made;
money shall cease to be, and property shall cease to perplex
and we will find the way to immediate contact with life
and with one another.

To know the moon as we have never known
yet she is knowable.
To know a man as we have never known
a man, as never yet a man was knowable, yet still shall be.

DH Lawrence

Dear Christ! the very prison walls
Suddenly seemed to reel,
And the sky above my head became
Like a casque of scorching steel;
And, though I was a soul in pain,
My pain I could not feel.

I only knew what haunted thought
Quickened his step, and why
He looked upon the garish day
With such a wistful eye;
The man had killed the thing he loved,
And so he had to die.

Yet each man kills the thing he loves,
By each let this be heard,
Some do it with a bitter look,
Some with a flattering word,
The coward does it with a kiss,
The brave man with a sword!

William Carlos Williams, 1883 - 1963

SPRING STRAINS

IN a tissue-thin monotone of blue-grey buds
crowded erect with desire against
the sky--
tense blue-grey twigs
slenderly anchoring them down, drawing
them in--

two blue-grey birds chasing
a third struggle in circles, angles,
swift convergings to a point that bursts
instantly!

Vibrant bowing limbs
pull downward, sucking the sky
that bulges from behind, plastering itself
against them in packed rifts, rock blue
and dirty orange!

But--
(Hold hard, rigid jointed trees!)
the blinding and red-edged sun-blur--
creeping energy, concentrated
counterforce--welds sky, buds, trees,
rivets them in one puckering hold!

Sticks through! Pulls the whole
counter-pulling mass upward, to the right,
locks even the opaque, not yet defined
ground in a terrific drag that is
loosening the very tap-roots!

On a tissue-thin monotone of blue-grey buds
two blue-grey birds, chasing a third,
at full cry! Now they are
flung outward and up--disappearing suddenly!

Bette Davis Eyes

Her hair is Harlowe gold
Her lips sweet surprise
Her hands are never cold
She's got Bette Davis eyes
She'll turn her music on you
You won't have to think twice
She's pure as New York snow
She got Bette Davis eyes

And she'll tease you
She'll unease you
All the better just to please you
She's precocious and she knows just
What it takes to make a pro blush
She got Greta Garbo stand off sighs
She's got Bette Davis eyes

She'll let you take her home
It whets her appetite
She'll lay you on her throne
She got Bette Davis eyes
She'll take a tumble on you
Roll you like you were dice
Until you come out blue
She's got Bette Davis eyes

She'll expose you, when she snows you
Off your feet with the crumbs she throws you
She's ferocious and she knows just
What it takes to make a pro blush
All the boys think she's a spy
She's got Bette Davis eyes

And she'll tease you
She'll unease you
All the better just to please ya
She's precocious, and she knows just
What it takes to make a pro blush
All the boys think she's a spy
She's got Bette Davis eyes

She'll tease you
She'll unease you
Just to please ya
She's got Bette Davis eyes
She'll expose you, when she snows you
She knows ya
She's got Bette Davis eyes

Gerard Manley Hopkins (July 28, 1844 – June 8, 1889)

British poet Gerard Manley Hopkins was born in Stratford, England (1844). He loved poetry as a kid, but when he was in college in 1866, he gave up poetry for Lent. That summer, he converted to Catholicism. Less than a week later, he burned all of his own poems and didn't write again for seven years. He went into a kind of exile, joined the Jesuits, and traveled to rural Wales to be ordained as a priest. Those months in Wales would be one of the happiest periods of his life. It was while he was there, in 1877, preparing for his ordination, that he realized he could continue to write poetry as long as he was using his poetry to praise God. And so, in that single year of 1877, Hopkins wrote most of the poems for which he is remembered today, poems like "God's Grandeur" (1877), "Pied Beauty" (1877), and "The Starlight Night," (1877). He wrote in his diary at the time, "This world is ... a book [God] has written ... a poem of beauty."

But after his ordination, the Jesuits sent him to teach the poor children of industrial cities in Northern England, Scotland, and Ireland. Hopkins had looked forward to a life of hard work and sacrifice, but he had no idea how much he would hate living in these polluted, ugly cities. He wrote less and less, and finally, at the age of 44, he died from typhoid, which he'd caught from the polluted water in Dublin. He had published very few of his poems in his lifetime, and he might have been forgotten, except that he had kept up a lifelong correspondence with a friend from college: the poet Robert Bridges.

Hopkins had sent Bridges many of his poems, and after Hopkins's death, Bridges began to publish Hopkins's poetry


Pied Beauty


GLORY be to God for dappled things—
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough; 5
And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change: 10
Praise him.


pied: of different colors

dappled: made up of cloudy, rounded patches of different shades of the same color

couple-colored: two-colored

brinded: having dark streaks or flecks

rose-moles: rose-colored spots

stipple: a painting technique which uses the ends of the brush bristles to make dots

fresh fire-coal chestnut falls: the brightness of new chestnuts when they fall from the trees, looking as though they are lit with fire from within

fold: pasture land, or a paddock or corral where animals are penned up

fallow: land left to rest every seven years, covered with grass and wildflowers

plow: plowed cropland, with crops of wheat or oats

counter: opposite, as in counterclockwise

fickle: erratically changeable

adazzle: shining brilliantly

The Importance of Being Ernest

John (Jack/Ernest) Worthing, J.P. - The play’s protagonist. Jack Worthing is a seemingly responsible and respectable young man who leads a double life. In Hertfordshire, where he has a country estate, Jack is known as Jack. In London he is known as Ernest. As a baby, Jack was discovered in a handbag in the cloakroom of Victoria Station by an old man who adopted him and subsequently made Jack guardian to his granddaughter, Cecily Cardew. Jack is in love with his friend Algernon’s cousin, Gwendolen Fairfax. The initials after his name indicate that he is a Justice of the Peace.
Jack Worthing (In-Depth Analysis)

Algernon Moncrieff - The play’s secondary hero. Algernon is a charming, idle, decorative bachelor, nephew of Lady Bracknell, cousin of Gwendolen Fairfax, and best friend of Jack Worthing, whom he has known for years as Ernest. Algernon is brilliant, witty, selfish, amoral, and given to making delightful paradoxical and epigrammatic pronouncements. He has invented a fictional friend, “Bunbury,” an invalid whose frequent sudden relapses allow Algernon to wriggle out of unpleasant or dull social obligations.
Algernon Moncrieff (In-Depth Analysis)

Gwendolen Fairfax - Algernon’s cousin and Lady Bracknell’s daughter. Gwendolen is in love with Jack, whom she knows as Ernest. A model and arbiter of high fashion and society, Gwendolen speaks with unassailable authority on matters of taste and morality. She is sophisticated, intellectual, cosmopolitan, and utterly pretentious. Gwendolen is fixated on the name Ernest and says she will not marry a man without that name.
Gwendolen Fairfax (In-Depth Analysis)

Education in Victorian Age

Since 1872 every Victorian child has been entitled to secular, compulsory, and free education to the age of 15 years. Both state and independent schools operate; some two-thirds of pupils attend state schools. Primary schools offer seven years of education, and secondary schools six years. In the early 1990s the introduction of the Victorian Certificate was a major development. The Certificate aims to encourage students to complete a full 13-year course and to provide a foundation for their further study, working lives, and participation in society. The state has several universities.

George Bernard Shaw (26 July 1856 – 2 November 1950)

It's the birthday of playwright George Bernard Shaw, born in Dublin, Ireland (1856). His most famous play is Pygmalion (1913), about a cockney girl who learns to pass as a lady. It was the basis for the musical My Fair Lady (1956). As a young man, he moved to London from Dublin with his mother, who was a music teacher. She made enough money for the two of them to live on, so Shaw could devote himself to writing. He spent his days reading at the library and writing novels that no one would publish. He got into politics in his twenties, fighting for the rights of the working poor, but he was always terrified that public demonstrations would turn violent.

Shaw wrote his first play, Widowers' Houses (1892), about the evils of slumlords. The play was viciously attacked by people who opposed his politics, and Shaw figured that he must be a good playwright if he could make people so angry. He revolutionized English theater by writing plays about ideas when most other playwrights were writing sentimental melodramas. He wrote dozens of plays, including Man and Superman (1905) and Saint Joan (1923).

He was an obsessive letter writer and wrote about a quarter of a million letters in his lifetime, averaging nine letters a day, every day, for seventy-five years. He had an opinion about everything, and eventually became more famous for his personality than for his writing.

Shaw said, "Few people think more than two or three times a year; I have made an international reputation for myself by thinking once or twice a week."

*A day's work is a day's work, neither more nor less, and the man who does it needs a day's sustenance, a night's repose and due leisure, whether he be painter or ploughman.

*A fashion is nothing but an induced epidemic.

*A fool's brain digests philosophy into folly, science into superstition, and art into pedantry. Hence University education.

*A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing.

*A lifetime of happiness! No man alive could bear it; it would be hell on earth.

*Americans adore me and will go on adoring me until I say something nice about them.

*An American has no sense of privacy. He does not know what it means.There is no such thing in the country.

*Criminals do not die by the hands of the law. They die by the hands of other men.

*Democracy is a device that ensures we shall be governed no better than we deserve.

*England and America are two countries separated by a common language.

*Everything happens to everybody sooner or later if there is time enough.

*Few people think more than two or three times a year; I have made an international reputation for myself by thinking once or twice a week.

*Gambling promises the poor what property performs for the rich--something for nothing.

*Hegel was right when he said that we learn from history that man can never learn anything from history.

*Hell is full of musical amateurs.

*I can forgive Alfred Nobel for having invented dynamite, but only a fiend in human form could have invented the Nobel Prize.

*I often quote myself. It adds spice to my conversation.

*If all economists were laid end to end, they would not reach a conclusion.

*If history repeats itself, and the unexpected always happens, how incapable must Man be of learning from experience.

*If the lesser mind could measure the greater as a footrule can measure a pyramid, there would be finality in universal suffrage. As it is, the political problem remains unsolved.

*If you cannot get rid of the family skeleton, you may as well make it dance.

*Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire, you will what you imagine and at last you create what you will.

*Lack of money is the root of all evil.

*Life does not cease to be funny when people die any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh.

*Martyrdom is the only way in which a man can become famous without ability.

*Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it.

*Reading made Don Quixote a gentleman. Believing what he read made him mad.

*Self-sacrifice enables us to sacrifice other people without blushing.

*The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one.

*The liar's punishment is not in the least that he is not believed but that he cannot believe anyone else.

*And he said, "Youth is a wonderful thing. What a crime to waste it on children.

LA BELLA DONNA DELLA MIA MENTE

LA BELLA DONNA DELLA MIA MENTE (Lovely Lady of My Memory)

by: Oscar Wilde

My limbs are wasted with a flame,
My feet are sore with travelling,
For, calling on my Lady's name,
My lips have now forgot to sing.

O Linnet in the wild-rose brake
Strain for my Love thy melody,
O Lark sing louder for love's sake,
My gentle Lady passeth by.

She is too fair for any man
To see or hold his heart's delight,
Fairer than Queen or courtesan
Or moonlit water in the night.

Her hair is bound with myrtle leaves,
(Green leaves upon her golden hair!)
Green grasses through the yellow sheaves
Of autumn corn are not more fair.

Her little lips, more made to kiss
Than to cry bitterly for pain,
Are tremulous as brook-water is,
Or roses after evening rain.

Her neck is like white melilote
Flushing for pleasure of the sun,
The throbbing of the linnet's throat
Is not so sweet to look upon.

As a pomegranate, cut in twain,
White-seeded, is her crimson mouth,
Her cheeks are as the fading stain
Where the peach reddens to the south.

O twining hands! O delicate
White body made for love and pain!
O House of love! O desolate
Pale flower beaten by the rain!

John Donne, 1572 - 1631

Death be not proud

Death be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadfull, for, thou art not so,
For, those, whom thou think'st, thou dost overthrow,
Die not, poore death, nor yet canst thou kill me.
From rest and sleepe, which but thy pictures bee, 5
Much pleasure, then from thee, much more must flow,
And soonest our best men with thee doe goe,
Rest of their bones, and soules deliverie.
Thou art slave to Fate, Chance, kings, and desperate men,
And dost with poyson, warre, and sicknesse dwell, 10
And poppie, or charmes can make us sleepe as well,
And better then thy stroake; why swell'st thou then;
One short sleepe past, wee wake eternally,
And death shall be no more; death, thou shalt die.

_____


"Twice or thrice had I loved thee, Before I knew thy face or name."
"Come live with me, and be my love, And we will some new pleasures prove Of golden sands, and crystal brooks, With silken lines, and silver hooks."
"Death comes equally to us all, and makes us all equal when it comes."
"Love built on beauty, soon as beauty, dies."
"More than kisses, letters mingle souls."
"No man is an Island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the Continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friends or of thine own were; any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankind; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee."
"Love all love of other sights controls, And makes one little room an everywhere."
"Our fear of death is like our fear that summer will be short, but when we have had our swing of pleasure, our fill of fruit, and our swelter of heat, we say we have had our day."

Of Truth-Bacon
As a pragmatic and as an empirical thinker Bacon subscribed to the fundamental Renaissance ideals—Sepantia (search for knowledge) and Eloquentia (the art of rhetoric). Here in the essay Of Truth he supplements his search for truth by going back to the theories of the classical thinkers and also by taking out analogies from everyday life. It is to be noted here that his explication of the theme is impassioned and he succeeds in providing almost neutral judgements on the matter. Again, it is seen that Bacon’s last essays, though written in the same aphoristic manner, stylistically are different in that he supplied more analogies and examples to support or explain his arguments. As this essay belongs to the latter group, we find ample analogies and examples.
Bacon, while explaining the reasons as to why people evade truth, talks of the Greek philosophical school of sceptics, set up by Pyrro. Those philosophers would question the validity of truth and constantly change their opinions. Bacon says that now people are like those philosophers with the important difference that they lack their force and tenacity of argument. He says that like him the Greek philosopher Lucian was equally puzzled at the fact that people are more attracted to lies and are averse to truth. Bacon is surprised by the fact that people are loathed to find out or even acknowledge truth in life. It seems to him that this is an innate human tendency to do so. He finds evidence in support of his arguments in the behaviour of the ancient Greek sceptics who used to question the validity of truth and would have no fixed beliefs. Bacon thinks that people behave like those philosophers. But he understands that they lack their strength of arguments. He then finds the Greek philosopher Lucian, while considering the matter, was equally baffled. Lucian investigated and found that poets like lies because those provides pleasure, and that businessmen have to tell lies for making profit. But he could not come to a definite conclusion as to why people should love lies. Bacon says that men love falsehood because truth is like the bright light of the day and would show up pomp and splendour of human life for what they are. They look attractive and colourful in the dim light of lies. Men prefer to cherish illusions, which make life more interesting. Bacon here gives an interesting analogy of truth and falsehood. He says that the value of truth is like that of a pearl, which shines best in the day-light, while a lie is like a diamond or carbuncle, which shines best producing varied rays in dim light of candles. He comes to the conclusion that people love falsehood because it produces imaginary pleasure about life.
Bacon also examines the statement of one of the early Church authorities, which severely condemned poetry as the wine of the devils. Bacon here shows that even the highest art of man—poetry, is composed of lies. He seems to have compounded the two statements made by two early Christian thinkers. He agrees with St Augustine who criticized poetry as “the wine of error”, and with Hironymous, who condemned poetry as “the food of demons”. The equation is that, since the devil or Satan works by falsehood, lies are its food. Poetry tends to be Satanic because it resorts to falsehood while producing artistic pleasure. Bacon, however, makes a distinction here between poetic untruth and fascination with falsehood in everyday life. He thinks that poetic untruth is not harmful, as it does not leave lasting impressions on the mind and character of a person. On the other hand, the lies, which are embedded in the mind and control and regulate every thought and action of a person, are harmful.
Bacon refers to the Epicurean doctrine of pleasure, beautifully expressed by the famous poet of that school, Lucretius, who considered the realization of truth to be the highest pleasure of life. Bacon says that the value of truth is understood by those who have experienced it. The inquiry, knowledge and the belief of truth are the highest achievements that human beings can pursue. He amplifies the matter by giving an analogy from the Bible. According to him, God created the light of the senses first so that men could see the world around them. The last thing he created, according to him, was the light of reason, that is, the rational faculty. Bacon here interestingly comments that, since he finished the work of Creation, God has been diffusing the light of His spirit in mankind. He supports his argument by referring to the Epicurean theory of pleasure beautifully expressed by Lucretius who held that there is no greater pleasure than that given by the realization of truth. The summit of truth cannot be conquered and there is tranquillity on this peak from which one can survey the errors and follies of men as they go through their trials; but this survey should not fill the watcher with pity and not with pride. The essence of heavenly life on this earth lies in the constant love of charity, an unshakable trust in God, and steady allegiance to truth.
At the concluding section of the essay Bacon explains the value of truth in civil affairs of life. He is conscious of the fact that civil life goes on with both truth and falsehood. He feels that the mixture of falsehood with truth may sometimes turn out to be profitable. But it shows the inferiority of the man who entertains it. This is, he says, like the composition of an alloy, which is stronger but inferior in purity. He then compares this kind of way of life to that of a serpent, which is a symbol of Satan itself. Bacon finds a striking similarity between the crooked and mean devices adopted by people and the zigzag movements of a serpent. To clarify his point more clearly, Bacon quotes Montaigne who said that a man, who tells lies, is afraid of his fellow men but is unafraid of God who is all perceiving. Bacon concludes his arguments by saying that falsehood is the height of wickedness, and such that it will invite the wrath of God on Doomsday.

Irwin Shaw (February 27, 1913 – May 16, 1984)

Irwin Shaw was born in the Bronx, New York City (1913). Shaw was the child of Russian Jewish immigrants, and they changed their family name from Shamforoff when they moved to Brooklyn when Shaw was a boy. Shaw attended Brooklyn College but was expelled after his first year, for failing calculus. And so, Shaw worked in New York City, in a cosmetics factory, a furniture house, and a department store. Then he returned to Brooklyn College, where he became the quarterback of the football team.

Shaw played football professionally for a short time, but he needed to support his family, and so he began to write radio scripts for programs like "Dick Tracy" and "The Gumps." Of this, Shaw said, "Even when I was writing the junk, I knew it was junk; but I did it the best way I could ... and I make no excuses for eating. Or feeding a family. Or fighting for the freedom to write all these short stories, all these plays, all these novels."

Shaw wrote his play Bury the Dead (1936) for a contest for new playwrights held by the New Theatre League. Shaw missed the deadline, but he impressed them anyway, and they gave his play two off-Broadway performances. During this time, Shaw also began publishing his short stories in The Paris Review and The New Yorker.

Shaw enlisted in the military during World War II, and he worked with a camera crew. His crew traveled to Normandy two weeks after D-Day, and Shaw helped photograph battles for the liberation of French cities and towns, and this gave him the idea for his novel The Young Lions (1948). After the war, Shaw was blacklisted for a time, because he was mistakenly accused of being a Communist. Shaw claimed the blacklist "only glancingly bruised" his career. Still, he moved to Paris in 1951, and would remain abroad for 25 years, writing many stories, novels, and plays.

Irwin Shaw said, "If you organize chaos, you organize as much as you can to show that it's chaos. It's the way I do it. To pretend it's not chaotic is a lie."

Sue Townsend, 1946 -

Sue Townsend was born in Leicester in 1946 and left school at 15 years of age. She worked in a variety of jobs including factory worker and shop assistant, joining a writers' group at the Phoenix Theatre, Leceister in her thirties. At the age of 35, she won the Thames Television Playwright Award for her play Womberang (published in Bazaar and Rummage, 1984) and started her writing career. Other plays followed including The Great Celestial Cow (1984), Ten Tiny Fingers, Nine Tiny Toes (1990), and most recently Are You Sitting Comfortably? but she has become most well-known for her series of books about Adrian Mole.

The first of these, The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole aged 13 3/4 was published in 1982 and was followed by The Growing Pains of Adrian Mole (1984). These two books made her the best-selling novelist of the 1980s. They have been followed by several more in the same series including Adrian Mole: The Wilderness Years (1993), and most recently, Adrian Mole and the Weapons of Mass Destruction (2004). The books have been adapted for radio, television and theatre, the first book being broadcast on radio in 1982, and Adrian Mole:The Wilderness Years (1993) and Adrian Mole: The Cappuccino Years (1999) also being serialised for radio. Sue Townsend also wrote the screenplays for television adaptations of the first and second books.

Several books have been adapted for the stage, including The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole aged 13 3/4: the Play (1985), and The Queen and I: a Play with Songs (1994) which was performed by the Out of Joint Touring Company at the Vaudeville Theatre and toured Australia. The latter play is based on another of her books, in which the Royal Family become deposed and take up residence on a council estate in Leicester. Other books include Rebuilding Coventry (1988) and Ghost Children (1997).

In 2001, Sue Townsend published The Public Confessions of a Middle-Aged Woman aged 55 3/4 (2001), a collection of monthly columns written for Sainsbury's magazine from 1993-2001. Leicester University awarded her an Honorary MA in 1991. Her most recent book is Queen Camilla (2006).

CRITICAL PERSPECTIVE
Adrian Mole is one of the most memorable and enduring comic creations of recent decades. Long before Bridget Jones we had the diaries of the neglected intellectual of Ashby de la Zouch: neurotic, acne ridden and hopelessly devoted to Pandora Braithwaite. Mole’s is a particularly British story: that of continued, almost heroic, failure. Despite his best intentions he never quite gets what he wants. Like Basil Fawlty and, more recently, David Brent, much of the comedy in these books derives from self-delusion. It is the repetition of the same errors which invests these characters with a kind of tragic grandeur. We identify with them not because they are grotesque caricatures but because we know there is something of all of us within them.

The Mole diaries provide the reader with a voyeuristic thrill, privy as we are to the character’s innermost thoughts. Adrian Mole is Suburban Everyman, desperate to be interesting and worldly. He is in constant fight against his own circumstances, his background, his very identity: 'I have just realised I have never seem a real female nipple or a dead body. This is what comes from living in a cul-de-sac.' Despite his protestations to intellectualism Mole often reveals his own cultural ignorance. 'There is a new girl in our class. She sits next to me in Geography. She is all right. Her name is Pandora, but she likes being called "Box". Don't ask me why.' He confuses Evelyn Waugh’s gender, and upon discovering his error goes on to do exactly the same thing with Waugh’s son, Auberon. Townsend has a lot of fun undercutting Mole’s artistic pretension - his decision to become a writer is, at first at least, one based more upon his notion of what a writer represents rather than an interest in writing - but in doing so she manages to generate an extraordinary empathy for her character.

Those of us who are more or less the same age as Mole have grown up with him and have, inevitably, measured our own lives against his. In an era in which certainties such as the job for life have disappeared, Mole’s shifts in fortune reveal that beneath his wildly unrealistic artistic ambitions lies an understanding of the practical necessity of work. He is, at various times, a minor civil servant at the Department of the Environment (with special responsibility for newts), an Offal chef and a second hand bookshop assistant. None of these, of course, represent his life’s dreams and Townsend seems to be offering a comment here on the tension between what we imagine for ourselves and what life offers us. This sense of disappointment, of failed or thwarted ambition, is something we can all relate to. It is brought into even sharper relief when we consider the upper middle class character of Pandora Braithwaite who has all the social, financial and cultural advantages that Mole lacks. Her steady rise in the world of politics and her constant romantic trysts serve as a painful counterpoint to Mole’s repeatedly stalled attempts to live the life he believes himself destined for: that of the urbane (at one point in the diaries he describes himself as wanting to be an ‘urban’) intellectual.

Like Willy Russell, Townsend is a writer for whom social commentary is as natural as breathing. Throughout the Mole books, Townsend has offered a caustic evaluation of contemporary Britain. There is an underlying seriousness to her work, a political consciousness, the desire to attack injustice and intolerance. The withering anti-Thatcher poem, ‘Do you weep, Mrs Thatcher, do you weep? / Do you weep like a sad willow? / On your Marks and Spencer’s pillow? / Are your tears molten steel? / Do you weep?’ may make us laugh at how seriously Mole takes it as a work of poetry but the ‘molten steel’ phrase jolts us out of any belief that Townsend is doing nothing more than engaging in gentle mockery of her character.

In Adrian Mole and the Weapons of Mass Destruction (2004), the New Labour Government receives the same treatment. The bite beneath Mole’s letter to the Prime Minister asking for confirmation of his claim that Saddam Hussein’s weapons can hit Cyprus within 45 minutes, is made even more telling given that it is written out of Mole’s desire to get a refund back from his travel agent’s on a trip to Paphos. This, for me, is the essence of the Mole series. Townsend is able to say in a couple of sentences what it would take many political journalists a thousand words to convey. Mole is an unknowingly subversive character and that is why he causes such delight. Laugh out loud funny, yet often painfully sad and poignant, the Mole books reveal Townsend’s natural sense of comic timing and empathetic gifts.

Inevitably, given her success with Adrian Mole, the rest of Townsend’s work tends to be overlooked. The most successful of her other novels is The Queen and I (1992), which turns on the conceit of the Royal family being forced out of Buckingham Palace by a new Republican Government and forced to live in one of the poorest Council House estates in the Midlands. It is full of a deliciously mocking wit, and offers a wholesale demolition of the entire institution of the Monarchy. The Queen and I asks why Britain tolerates its status as a constitutional monarchy in an age in which deference and respect for the Royal Family has all but evaporated.

Number Ten (2002), a thinly veiled attack on the vanity of New Labour, is not as effective as The Queen and I in its assault on an unpopular institution, in that it relies on weak puns and its criticism feels more affectionate than caustic. For all its apparent levity however, it does offer a reminder to its readers of the smugness of power, of how the first causality in any election victory is a sense of perspective.

Ghost Children (1997) differs from the rest of Townsend’s novels in its grittiness. An uncompromising portrait of exclusion, lost love and many different kinds of betrayal, there is a bleakness and a raw spirit to the book that is entirely different from her comic novels. We see how society fails and isolates its citizens. These are the kinds of concerns that Townsend has also dealt with in her plays, which are written with her characteristic verve and indignation. Set in places as diverse as an adult literacy class, a waiting room of a gynaecology clinic and a future in which only the upper classes are allowed to breed, they by turns delight, shock and engage.

We cannot help but return to Mole for he is the reason Townsend will be remembered. In the latest instalment there is the suggestion that Mole may finally have found some kind of happiness. Does this spell the end? If there are to be no further diaries in the series then maybe the next time you come to think of your New Year’s Resolutions list you can put 're-read Mole' at the top.


Garan Holcombe, 2004

*"I have a problem. I am an intellectual, but at the same time I am not very clever."

- Adrian Albert Mole

George Santayana, 1863 - 1952

Philosopher and poet George Santayana was born in Madrid (1863). He was the man who coined the famous phrase, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." Santayana's father was Spanish and his mother was Scottish. He spent almost his entire life in the United States, though he never wanted to become a citizen. For many years he taught philosophy at Harvard, and his students included T.S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein, Conrad Aiken, Robert Frost and Wallace Stevens.

Santayana wrote a great deal about art and the importance of creative thinking. He once said, "Cultivate imagination, love it, give it endless forms, but do not let it deceive you. Enjoy the world, travel over it and learn its ways, but do not let it hold you." As he grew older, he became tired of teaching and what he called the "thistles of trivial and narrow scholarship," so he left Harvard and spent the rest of his life writing. His books include many philosophical works, as well as collections of poetry. He also spent about 20 years working on a novel, The Last Puritan (1935), about a young man's struggles in Boston high society just before World War I.

He said, "The lover knows much more about absolute good and universal beauty than the logician or theologian, unless the latter, too, be lovers in disguise."

And, "There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval."




Sonnet III

O world, thou choosest not the better part!
It is not wisdom to be only wise,
And on the inward vision close the eyes,
But it is wisdom to believe the heart.
Columbus found a world, and had no chart,
Save one that faith deciphered in the skies;
To trust the soul's invincible surmise
Was all his science and his only art.

Our knowledge is a torch of smoky pine
That lights the pathway but one step ahead
Across a void of mystery and dread.
Bid, then, the tender light of faith to shine
By which alone the mortal heart is led
Unto the thinking of the thought divine.

_____________

*A man is morally free when, in full possession of his living humanity, he judges the world, and judges other men, with uncompromising sincerity.

*A man's feet should be planted in his country, but his eyes should survey the world.

*Advertising is the modern substitute for argument; its function is to make the worse appear the better.

*America is a young country with an old mentality.

*Before he sets out, the traveler must possess fixed interests and facilities to be served by travel.

*Character is the basis of happiness and happiness the sanction of character.

*Sanity is a madness put to good use.

*Science is nothing but developed perception, interpreted intent, common sense rounded out and minutely articulated.

*Skepticism, like chastity, should not be relinquished too readily.

*The body is an instrument, the mind its function, the witness and reward of its operation.

*The wisest mind has something yet to learn.

*Those who speak most of progress measure it by quantity and not by quality.

*To be interested in the changing seasons is a happier state of mind than to be hopelessly in love with spring.

*To knock a thing down, especially if it is cocked at an arrogant angle, is a deep delight of the blood.

*Why shouldn't things be largely absurd, futile, and transitory? They are so, and we are so, and they and we go very well together.

*Our character...is an omen of our destiny, and the more integrity we have and keep, the simpler and nobler that destiny is likely to be.

*The young man who has not wept is a savage,
and the old man who will not laugh is a fool.

*Happiness is the only sanction of life; where happiness fails, existence remains a mad and lamentable experiment.

*Fanaticism consists in redoubling your effort when you have forgotten your aim.

*An artist is a dreamer consenting to dream of the actual world.

*Nothing is really so poor and melancholy as art that is interested in itself and not in its subject.

*The truth is cruel, but it can be loved, and it makes free those who have loved it.

*There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval.

*Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. In the first stage of life the mind is frivolous and easily distracted, it misses progress by failing in consecutiveness and persistence. This is the condition of children and barbarians, in which instinct has learned nothing from experience.

*Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

*For an idea ever to be fashionable is ominous, since it must afterwards be always old-fashioned.

*Intolerance itself is a form of egoism, and to condemn egoism intolerantly is to share it.

HERMAN HUPFELD (February 1, 1894–June 8, 1951)

Popular music in America is the richer for the presence on an earlier musical landscape of Herman Hupfeld. One of his major contributions as a songwriter was and continues to be the memorable, "As Time Goes By," a song which first saw the light of day as part of the score for the 1931 musical, "Everybody's Welcome."

Since that first hearing on the legitimate musical stage, the song has gone on to become almost a living definition of the term, "standard." Its most celebrated presence, without question, was its spotlight treatment in the movie classic, "Casablanca," the war-time Bogart and Bergman opus in which Dooley Wilson played the tune on an upright piano in a smokey North African bar.

Thirty years later, in 1972, pianist Wilson appeared on screen all over again, playing the familiar strains of "As Time Goes By," in the movie, "Play It Again Sam." Between '72 and 1986, the song popped up again in three more motion pictures, "What's Up Doe?," "Blue Skies Again" and "Round Midnight."

But there is no final curtain for this wonderful and nostalgic American ballad. Jimmy Durante's rendition of the song in all its wistful glory on the soundtrack to yet another major film, "Sleepless in Seattle," starring Tom Hanks-Meg Ryan, which produced yet another new wave of popularity just two years ago.

Hupfeld, who was born in Montclair, NJ, served in the US Navy in World War I, and played and sang in camps and hospitals during World War II. A number of other Hupfeld songs have also left their mark on the popular culture, songs like "Sing Something Simple," "Let's Put Out the Lights and Go to Sleep," "Down the Old Back Road" and "Baby's Blue." Still the revered and renowned songwriter, Herman Hupfeld, leaves a very special and indelible musical legacy with "As Time Goes By."

_____________

You must remember this
A kiss is still a kiss
A sigh is still (just) a sigh
The fundamental things apply
As time goes by

And when two lovers woo
They still say: "I love you"
On that you can rely
No matter what the future brings
As time goes by

Moonlight and love songs - never out of date
Hearts full of passion - jealousy and hate
Woman needs man - and man must have his mate
That no one can deny

It's still the same old story
A fight for love and glory
A case of do or die
The world will always welcome lovers
As time goes by

Dorothy Parker (August 22, 1893–June 7, 1967)

Dorothy Parker was born Dorothy Rothschild in West End, New Jersey (1893). She's remembered as one of the greatest wits of the 20th century, even though she only wrote a few books of poetry and short stories. She started her career just after World War I, in an era when slick magazines were one of the most popular forms of entertainment. The writers for these magazines wrote in a jaded, wisecracking tone of voice, and it was Dorothy Parker who proved that women could wisecrack just as well as any man.

Parker was four feet and eleven inches tall, and she loved to swear. The drama critic Alexander Woollcott described her as, "A blend of Little Nell and Lady Macbeth." She said, "[I'm] just a little Jewish girl, trying to be cute."

She was the only woman who belonged to the famous group of New York writers who met every day at the Round Table of the Algonquin Hotel to trade wit and gossip. That circle included Harold Ross, who created the New Yorker, and he said he borrowed the tone of voice for his magazine from those Algonquin meetings. He later hired Parker as a columnist.

Much of her writing was collected in the Portable Dorothy Parker, which has been in print since 1944. Of the first ten Portables published by Viking, only the Portable Shakespeare and the Portable Bible sold as well and as steadily as the Portable Parker.

Dorothy Parker said, "I don't care what is written about me so long as it isn't true."

And, "People are more fun than anybody."

I'm never going to be famous. I don't do anything, not one single thing. I used to bite my nails, but I don't even do that any more.

• I don't care what is written about me so long as it isn't true.

• Wit has truth in it; wisecracking is simply calisthenics with words.

• I know that there are things that never have been funny, and never will be. And I know that ridicule may be a shield, but it is not a weapon.

• You can't teach an old dogma new tricks.

• Women and elephants never forget.

• I might repeat to myself slowly and soothingly, a list of quotations beautiful from minds profound -- if I can remember any of the damn things.

• Men seldom make passes at girls who wear glasses.

• Four be the things I'd have been better without:
Love, curiosity, freckles and doubt.

• A girl's best friend is her mutter.

• I require only three things of a man. He must be handsome, ruthless and stupid.

• Take care of luxuries and the necessities will take care of themselves.

• Salary is no object; I want only enough to keep body and soul apart.

• Money cannot buy health, but I'd settle for a diamond-studded wheelchair.

• The two most beautiful words in the English language are 'cheque enclosed.'

• If you want to know what God thinks of money, just look at the people he gave it to.

• The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity.

• The best way to keep children home is to make the home atmosphere pleasant -- and let the air out of the tires.

• Now, look, baby, 'Union' is spelled with 5 letters. It is not a four-letter word.

• It serves me right for keeping all my eggs in one bastard.

• All I need is room enough to lay a hat and a few friends.

• Heterosexuality is not normal, it's just common.

• Scratch a lover, and find a foe.

• Men don't like nobility in woman. Not any men. I suppose it is because the men like to have the copyrights on nobility -- if there is going to be anything like that in a relationship.

• That woman speaks eighteen languages, and can't say No in any of them.

• People are more fun than anybody.

• I like to have a martini,
Two at the very most.
After three I'm under the table,
after four I'm under my host.

• I'd rather have a bottle in front of me, than a frontal lobotomy.

• You can lead a horticulture, but you can't make her think.

• Ducking for apples -- change one letter and it's the story of my life.

• The Monte Carlo casino refused to admit me until I was properly dressed so I went and found my stockings, and then came back and lost my shirt.

• Brevity is the soul of lingerie.

• This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force.

• She runs the gamut of emotions from A to B.

• The only ism Hollywood believes in is plagiarism.

New York City

New York City (pronounced /nʲuːˈjɔɹk/) (officially The City of New York) is the most populous city in the United States, with its metropolitan area ranking among the largest urban areas in the world. It has been the largest city in the United States since 1790. For more than a century, it has been one of the world's major centers of commerce and finance. New York City is rated as an alpha world city for its global influences in media, politics, education, entertainment, arts and fashion. The city is also a major center for foreign affairs, hosting the headquarters of the United Nations.
New York City comprises five boroughs, each of which is coextensive with a county: The Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan, Queens and Staten Island. With over 8.2 million residents within an area of 322 square miles (830 km²), New York City is the most densely populated major city in the United States.[3][4][5]
Many of the city's neighborhoods and landmarks are known around the world. The Statue of Liberty greeted millions of immigrants as they came to America in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, at Ellis Island, a small part of which lies within the city. Wall Street, in Lower Manhattan, has been a dominant global financial center since World War II and is home to the New York Stock Exchange. The city has been home to several of the tallest buildings in the world, including the Empire State Building and the twin towers of the World Trade Center, which were destroyed in the September 11, 2001 attacks.
New York is the birthplace of many American cultural movements, including the Harlem Renaissance in literature and visual art, abstract expressionism (also known as the New York School) in painting, and hip hop,[6] punk,[7] salsa, and Tin Pan Alley in music. In 2005, nearly 170 languages were spoken in the city and 36% of its population was born outside the United States.[8][9] With its 24-hour subway and constant bustling of traffic and people, New York is known as "The City That Never Sleeps;" it was first linked with "Gotham" by Washington Irving in 1807.[10]

Oscar Wilde (October 16, 1854 – November 30, 1900)

Oscar Wilde was born in Dublin (1854), who was already a successful playwright when he fell into a love affair with the young aristocrat Lord Alfred Douglas. Wilde was married with two children at the time, and the affair ruined his reputation in society. He later wrote, "I curse myself night and day for my folly in allowing him to dominate my life." But it was the most creative period of his life. He wrote three plays in two years about people leading double lives, including A Woman of No Importance (1893), An Ideal Husband (1895), and his masterpiece, The Importance of Being Earnest (1895), about two men who use an imaginary person named Earnest to get themselves out of all kinds of situations, until their invented stories and identities get so complicated that everything is revealed.

The actor who played Algernon Moncrieff later said, "In my fifty-three years of acting, I never remember a greater triumph than the first night of The Importance of Being Earnest." But that same year, Wilde was accused of sodomy by the father of his lover. Wilde might have let the accusation pass, but he chose to sue his accuser for libel, because he thought he could win the case by his eloquence alone. Private detectives had dug up so much damning evidence on Wilde that he was convicted of sodomy and sentenced to two years of hard labor. His plays continued to be produced on the stage, but his name was removed from all the programs. He was released from prison in 1897 and died three years later in a cheap Paris hotel.

Oscar Wilde, who said, "All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling." And, "An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all."

Wilde's mother was a famous poet and journalist and Irish nationalist. His father was an ear and eye doctor. Oscar went to college at Oxford where he began to affect an aristocratic accent and began dressing in velvet knee breeches. He stayed in England after college and became part of a movement in art and literature called Aestheticism, whose motto was "Art for art's sake."

Oscar Wilde said, "Even a good sense of color is more important in the development of the individual than a sense of right and wrong."

He went on a big lecture tour of the United States, traveling to Des Moines, Denver, St. Paul, Houston, and Pennsylvania—just to name a few. He returned to London in 1883 and made his reputation in 1891 with his first and only novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, about a beautiful young man who remains young while a portrait of him grows old.

And then in the 1890s, Oscar Wilde burst on the British theater scene with four consecutive comedy hits: Lady Windermere's Fan, A Woman of No Importance, An Ideal Husband, and The Importance of Being Earnest.

Oscar Wilde said, "There is no such thing as a romantic experience. There are romantic memories, and there is the desire of romance—that is all. I myself would sacrifice everything for a new experience, and I know there is no such thing as a new experience at all. I think I would more readily die for what I do not believe in than for what I hold to be true. I would go to the stake for a sensation and be a skeptic to the last! Only one thing remains infinitely fascinating to me, the mystery of moods. Sometimes I think that the artistic life is a long and lovely suicide, and am not sorry that it is so."

*A little sincerity is a dangerous thing, and a great deal of it is absolutely fatal.

*A man can be happy with any woman as long as he does not love her.

*Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much.

*America had often been discovered before Columbus, but it had always been hushed up.

*America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between.

*Anyone who lives within their means suffers from a lack of imagination.

*Arguments are to be avoided; they are always vulgar and often convincing.

*At twilight, nature is not without loveliness, though perhaps its chief use is to illustrate quotations from the poets.

*Biography lends to death a new terror.

*Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative.

*Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter.

*Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months.

*Genius is born--not paid.

*I always like to know everything about my new friends, and nothing about my old ones.

*I am not young enough to know everything.

*I think that God in creating Man somewhat overestimated his ability.

*I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took out a comma. In the afternoon I put it back again.

*If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise they'll kill you.

*Illusion is the first of all pleasures.

*It is a very sad thing that nowadays there is so little useless information.

*It is always a silly thing to give advice, but to give good advice is fatal.

*Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.

*Morality, like art, means drawing a line someplace.

*Most modern calendars mar the sweet simplicity of our lives by reminding us that each day that passes is the anniversary of some perfectly uninteresting event.

*Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone elses opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.

*Music makes one feel so romantic - at least it always gets on one's nerves - which is the same thing nowadays.

*One can survive everything, nowadays, except death, and live down everything except a good reputation.

*One should always play fairly when one has the winning cards.

*Patriotism is the virtue of the vicious.

*Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live.

*Seriousness is the only refuge of the shallow.

*The aim of life is self-development. To realize one's nature perfectly - that is what each of us is here for.

*The only thing to do with good advice is pass it on. It is never any use to oneself.

*The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about.

*The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.

*There are only two kinds of people who are really fascinating: people who know absolutely everything, and people who know absolutely nothing.

*To disagree with three-fourths of the British public is one of the first requisites of sanity.

*We live in an age when unnecessary things are our only necessities.

*We teach people how to remember, we never teach them how to grow.

*Whenever people agree with me I always feel I must be wrong.

*Why was I born with such contemporaries?

*Wisdom comes with winters.

*One should absorb the colour of life, but one should never remember its details. Details are always vulgar.
"The Picture of Dorian Gray"

*The only thing that sustains one through life is the consciousness of the immense inferiority of everybody else, and this is a feeling that I have always cultivated.
"The Remarkable Rocket"

*The secret of life is to appreciate the pleasure of being terribly, terribly deceived.
A Woman of No Importance, Act 3

*I don't play accurately-any one can play accurately- but I play with wonderful expression. As far as the piano is concerned, sentiment is my forte. I keep science for Life.
Algernon from The Importance of Being Earnest

*When the gods wish to punish us, they answer our prayers.
An Ideal husband

*Only dull people are brilliant at breakfast.
An Ideal Husband, 1893, Act I

*Suffering is one very long moment. We cannot divide it by seasons.
De Profundis

*Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.
De Profundis, 1905

*Work is the curse of the drinking classes.

*One's real life is often the life that one does not lead.

*My own business always bores me to death; I prefer other people's.
Lady Windermere's Fan, 1892

*I can resist anything but temptation.
Lady Windermere's Fan, 1892, Act I

*It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious.
Lady Windermere's Fan, 1892, Act I

*Life is far too important a thing ever to talk seriously about.
Lady Windermere's Fan, 1892, Act I

*Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes.
Lady Windermere's Fan, 1892, Act III

*Scandal is gossip made tedious by morality.
Lady Windermere's Fan, 1892, Act III

*We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.
Lady Windermere's Fan, 1892, Act III

*What is a cynic? A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.
Lady Windermere's Fan, 1892, Act III

*Only the shallow know themselves.

*We have really everything in common with America nowadays except, of course, language.

*But what is the difference between literature and journalism?
...Journalism is unreadable and literature is not read. That is all.

*The public is wonderfully tolerant. It forgives everything except genius.

*One is tempted to define man as a rational animal who always loses his temper when he is called upon to act in accordance with the dictates of reason.

*Do not speak ill of society, Algie. Only people who can't get in do that.
The Importance of Being Earnest

*The truth is rarely pure and never simple.
The Importance of Being Earnest

*To lose one parent, Mr Worthing, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.
Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest

*Thirty-five is a very attractive age. London society is full of women of the very highest birth who have, of their own free choice, remained thirty-five for years.

*Children begin by loving their parents; as they grow older they judge them; sometimes they forgive them.
The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1891

*I choose my friends for their good looks, my acquaintances for their good characters, and my enemies for their good intellects. A man cannot be too careful in the choice of his enemies.

*I like persons better than principles, and I like persons with no principles better than anything else in the world.

*I love acting. It is so much more real than life.

*One can always be kind to people about whom one cares nothing.

*Perhaps, after all, America never has been discovered. I myself would say that it had merely been detected.

*The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it. Resist it, and your soul grows sick with longing for the things it has

*The reason we all like to think so well of others is that we are all afraid for ourselves. The basis of optimism is sheer terror.

*There are many things that we would throw away if we were not afraid that others might pick them up.

The Tragedy of King Richard II

Poem: "109" by William Shakespeare

O never say that I was false of heart,
Though absence seemed my flame to qualify.
As easy might I from myself depart,
As from my soul, which in thy breast doth lie.
That is my home of love; if I have ranged
Like him that travels I return again,
Just to the time, not with the time exchanged,
So that myself bring water for my stain.
Never believe, though in my nature reigned
All frailties that besiege all kinds of blood,
That it could so preposterously be stained
To leave for nothing all thy sum of good —
For nothing this wide universe I call,
Save thou, my rose; in it thou art my all.