"The Path to Rome"

[fiefoe]

It's nice to be privy to the thoughts of someone who has interesting thoughts.

• This way of stretching a village all along one street is Roman, and is the mark of civilization. When I was at college I was compelled to read a work by the crabbed Tacitus on the Germans, where, in the midst of a deal that is vague and fantastic nonsense and much that is willful lying, comes this excellent truth, that barbarians build their houses separate, but civilized men together.
• It is a matter often discussed why bakers are such excellent citizens and good men. For while it is admitted in every country I was ever in that cobblers are argumentative and atheists..., while it is public that barbers are garrulous and servile, that millers are cheats..., yet--with every trade in the world having some bad quality attached to it--bakers alone are exempt, and every one takes it for granted that they are sterling.
• Now it is the function of all ritual... to relieve the mind by so much of responsibility and initiative and to catch you up (as it were) into itself, leading your life for you during the time it lasts. In this way you experience a singular repose, after which fallowness I am sure one is fitter for action and judgement.
• I thought how wearisome it would be if this became a common way of doing things, and if one should call the Thames 'the River of London', and Essex 'the North side'... but considering that this fantastic method was only indulged in by one wretched village, I released myself from fear, relegated such horrors to the colonies.
  

Sometimes I haven't a ghost of an idea what Belloc was talking about, but it still sounds cool. (On the other hand, he would never know how amused a modern reader would be by this line, 'Cigar is, however, even in Undervelier, a cigar.')

• my... introspective, self-analysing, autoscopic, and generally reentrant friends, who spout the 'Hue! Pater, oh! Lenae!'
• the cure of Maigre, who formed a syndicate to sell at a scutcheon a gross such souls as were too insignificant to sell singly

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