"Reminiscences of a Student's Life", ("The Library at Mount Char")

[fiefoe]

Jane Harrison's slight memoir is prefaced by Daniel Mendelsohn:

• her popular lectures throughout the United Kingdom, complete with colorful slides and eerie sound effects, had made her one of the first “public intellectuals” of modern times.
• Harrison’s evolution from a mid-Victorian beauty who had posed for Pre-Raphaelite painters to a groundbreaking heroine of intellectual life well into the Jazz Age—her fellow Yorkshireman, Prime Minister Herbert Asquith, considered her the most “distinguished woman scholar in the word”—traces an arc that mirrors the evolution of feminism itself.
• “but I was perverse.” And so she retorted that she preferred the darkly ironic skeptic, Euripides. Disgusted, Gladstone left soon after.
• Toward the end of her life, she abandoned her lifelong focus on Classics to become a scholar of Russian.
• it was Harrison who urged the groundbreaking choreographer Isadora Duncan to find inspiration in the Ancient Greeks.
• Harrison was among the first scholars to question a number of assumptions about Ancient Greek religion. At the time, most of these had been based on what the Greeks themselves wrote about their beliefs and practices. Harrison, by contrast, turned to archaeological evidence—
• Above all, she insisted on the preeminence of archaic ritual practice (“that which is done”) over literary accounts (“that which is said”) as bases for understanding the Greeks’ myth, art, society, and institutions.
• who came to be known as the “Cambridge Ritualists,” to see ritual as the living seed from which myth and a number of later cultural practices had sprung. Greek tragedy, for instance, was supposed to have sprung from a murderous rite in which the “year spirit” had to be slain. In certain circles, Harrison’s interest in the violent origins of certain rites earned her the nickname “Bloody Jane.”

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• When later I learnt that to some people Moscow was a cathedral city, not a dog, my universe rocked with Einsteinian relativity.
• a few reindeers’ tongues found their way to our schoolroom breakfast, where they were keenly appreciated by one little greedy fat child. Oh those reindeers’ tongues! they tasted not only of reindeer, but—but of snow-fields and dreaming forests.
• When I was spending a winter at S. Moritz a friend died. Her funeral procession was a long line of sledges. It was unspeakably solemn and silent. When I die, if I cannot be buried at sea, I should like to go to my grave in a sledge.
• I hate the Empire; it stands to me for all that is tedious and pernicious in thought; within it are always and necessarily the seeds of war. I object to nearly all forms of patriotism. But when I search the hidden depths of my heart, I find there the most narrow and local of parochialisms. I am intensely proud of being a Yorkshire woman.
• * My gifted friend Hope Mirrlees has written a wonderful novel, Counterplot, in which she shows that only in and through the pattern of art, or it may be of religion, which is a form of art, do we at all seize and understand the tangle of experience which we call Life.
• beneath all that lies Aunt Glegg, rigidly, irrationally conservative, fibrous with prejudice, deep-rooted in her native soil.
• Now my father was never called “Charlie”; he was far too remote and solemn a man for diminutives. She was using what grammarians call—or would call if they ever attended to anything of any importance—the subjective diminutive.
• I like to think that we Yorkshire people have another trait in common with the Russians. The vice we hate above all others is pretentiousness... but try to show off, to impress him in any way, and you are done.
• for my cult was for Lady Jane Grey. I had a child’s magical habit of mind; if I could get the name exactly, I should somehow possess the person. To name is to create.
• * I was, and remain, a physical coward, and in a community of bold riders was an object of ignominy. No one understood, no one sympathised, till at a Swedish sanatorium I, by good fortune, met Mr. Lytton Strachey... “Take my advice,” he said; “as soon as they touch you begin to yell, and go on yelling till they stop.” It was sound advice, sympathetically given. I learnt then, for the first time, how tender, if how searching, is the finger Mr. Strachey lays on our human frailties.
• She was a conscientious woman and tried to do her duty, I am sure, to the three rather dour little girls who had been her pupils and were later presented to her as stepdaughters.
• * “God would have our whole hearts or nothing.” I think I early felt that this was not quite fair. Why, if we were to care for Him only, had He made this delightful world full of enchanting foreign languages?
• We always had to write out one of the sermons from memory, and were never told which. This has given me a bad habit of attending closely to any nonsense I may happen to hear at a meeting or a lecture. I see my happier friends sleeping and yawning or nudging each other; my attention is glued to the speaker.
• Anyhow, even now when I see a faultlessly turned out man or woman I always expect he or she will prove to be a fool and a bore. We cannot all be distinguished, but for heaven’s sake let us all be shabby and comfortable.
• Victorian education was ingeniously useless. Every day I spent an hour doing exquisite hems and seams. I cannot to this day make the simplest garment.
• Again, it surprised me a little when at Cambridge I asked a young man to tea for the first time and he answered on a post-card: “I’ll come if I can, but don’t count on me.” “Count on” him, the lout!... When I was young, to apologise by saying “sorry” would have been—witness the Punch of the period—to write yourself down a shop-man; now I hear “sorry” drop quite easily from the most blue-blooded lips.
• Alas! that curate did not confine his attentions to the Greek text. I was summarily dispatched in dire disgrace to Cheltenham. My stepmother said I was behaving “like a kitchen-maid.” Considering the subject of my converse with the curate, I fail to see the analogy.
• I was indeed, and still am, for what do you think was the offence? After his signature “Peveril” had written “Give my love to the Examiners!” The story may stand to mark the abyss of fatuous prudery into which the girls’ schools of the middle Victorian period—even the very best—had fallen.
• I, too, am a Justice of the Peace... A candid friend told me that I had been chosen just “to represent Art and Letters,” and that therefore only an elegant indolence was expected of me... I felt that all consideration was due to any one who could speak Armenian, perhaps the most difficult of all European languages.
• The unknown to me has always had an irresistible lure, and all my life I have had a curiosity to know what really bad language consisted of. In the stables at home I had heard an occasional “damn” from the lips of a groom, but that was not very informing. Now was the chance of my life. The paper reached the old gentleman next me. I had all but stretched out an eager hand. He bent over me in a fatherly way and said, “I am sure you will not want to see this.” I was pining to read it, but sixty years of sex-subservience had done their work. I summoned my last blush, cast down my eyes and said, “O no! No. Thank you so much.”
• when later at Cambridge I heard Mr. Bertrand Russell discourse on the amazing beauty of mathematics, I felt like a Peri outside Paradise.
• in a moment the quiet white sugar is a seething black volcano. Things are never the same to you again. You know they are not what they seem; you picture hidden terrific forces, you can even imagine that the whole solid earth is only such forces held in momentous balance.
• A child between the ages of eight and eighteen, the normal school years, is too young to form a collective opinion, children only set up foolish savage taboos... Let children early speak at least three foreign languages, let them browse freely in a good library, see all they can of the first-rate in nature, art, and literature—above all, give them a chance of knowing what science and scientific method means, and then leave them to sink or swim. Above all things, do not cultivate in them a taste for literature.
• Yorkshire is a Paradise for dogs, specially sporting dogs. I have seen them crowding the platform at York station about the Twelfth of August, waited on assiduously by eager porters while their masters went neglected.

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• Women’s colleges were a novelty, and distinguished visitors were brought to see us as one of the sights. Turgenev came, and I was told off to show him round.
• * Ruskin came. I showed him our small library. He looked at it with disapproving eyes. “Each book,” he said gravely, “that a young girl touches should be bound in white vellum.”
• Tennyson: he took me on a long, memorable Sunday morning walk, recited “Maud” to me, and countless other things. It was an anxious joy; he often forgot his own poems and was obviously annoyed if I could not supply the words... He was intensely English, and therefore not at his best as a conscious thinker; but he felt soundly,
• The men and women who influenced me most—my real friends—are living still. Of them I may not write.
• _And God leads round His starry Bear._  <> “How beautiful!” I murmured fatuously (my friends tell me that at any mention of a bear I am apt to get maudlin).
• Mrs. Raleigh was always called in her family “Mrs. Fox,” because of the unexpected whiskings of her mind.
• British Lionesses: They were all spinsters, well-born, well-bred, well-educated and well off... They were a fine upstanding breed, and I miss them. They had no unsatisfied longings, had never heard of “suppressed complexes,” and lived happily their vigorous, if somewhat angular, lives.
• and always, always, at the end came the inevitable: A perfect woman, nobly planned / To warn, to comfort, and command.
• Another time I was holding forth on the supreme importance of classics in education. “Don’t you think,” she said, “you a little confuse between the importance of your subject and the extraordinary delight you manage to extract from it?”
• * Every one ought to see a little of royalties. It is so humbling and at first irritating to have to behave like a servant, and it makes you understand how servants really must feel.

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• My reactions to art are, I think, always second-hand; hence, about art, I am docile and open to persuasion. In literature I am absolutely sure of my own tastes, and a whole Bench of Bishops could not alter my convictions. Happily, however, bit by bit, art and archæology led to mythology, mythology merged in religion; there I was at home.
• When you learn you “get yourself used to” a thing. That is worth a whole treatise of pedagogy. And it explained to me my own processes. One reads round a subject, soaks oneself in it, and then one’s personal responsibility is over; something stirs and ferments, swims up into your consciousness, and you know you have to write a book.
• It was worth many hardships to see forty German professors try to mount forty recalcitrant mules. My own horsemanship, as already hinted, is nothing to “write home about,” but compared to those German professors I am a centaur.
• Fired with missionary zeal, the Hegoumenos sent for the “Lord,” and finding him dumb, pointed to a place about an inch above his wrists, told him that thus far, without danger to his soul, could a Christian man wash himself.
• They maligned themselves; they feared nothing in the world except that they might have to apply their minds to something sometime.
• She must have been set up originally in the precinct of Artemis Brauronia. Within this precinct, year by year, went on the arkteia or bear-service. No well-born Athenian would marry a girl unless she had accomplished her bear-service, unless she was, in a word, confirmed to Artemis.
• At her side, a shrine with “horns of consecration.”
• the Hymn of the Kouretes found in the temple of Diktaean Zeus. Here we have embodied the magical rite of the Mother and the Son, the induction of the Year-Spirit who long preceded the worship of the Father.
• The Matterhorn is, to me, one of the ugliest objects in all nature, like nothing on earth but a colossal extracted fang turned upside down, but all the same, every night during the season, the terrace of the Riffel Alp’s Hotel is crowded with archdeacons gazing raptly at the Matterhorn and praising God for the beauties of His handiwork.
• some passages, like the end of the Idiot and the scene between Dimitri Karamasov and Grushenka, seemed to me in their poignancy to pass the limits of the permissible in art. They hurt too badly and too inwardly.
• It was like coming out of a madhouse into a quiet college quadrangle where all was liberty and sanity, and you became a law to yourself. The doctrine of virtue as the Mean—what an uplift and revelation to one “born in sin”!
• A ritual dance, a ritual procession with vestments and lights and banners, move me as no sermon, no hymn, no picture, no poem has ever moved me; perhaps it is because a procession seems to me like life, like durée itself, caught and fixed before me.
• A thing has little charm for me unless it has on it the patina of age. Great things in literature, Greek plays for example, I most enjoy when behind their bright splendours I see moving darker and older shapes. That must be my apologia pro vita mean.
• Marriage, for a woman at least, hampers the two things that made life to me glorious—friendship and learning.
• I like to live spaciously, but rather plainly, in large halls with great spaces and quiet libraries. I like to wake in the morning with the sense of a great, silent garden round me.
• In my old age she has sent me, to comfort me, a ghostly daughter, dearer than any child after the flesh, more gifted than any possible offspring of Aunt Glegg.

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Scott Hawkins's fantasy novel has an intriguing start, but when it intersects with reality it becomes rather dull.

• Americans called this time of year “October” or, sometimes, “Autumn,” but the librarians reckoned time by the heavens. Tonight was the seventh moon, which is the moon of black lament.
• Isha was reluctant at first. Red deer have a dozen words for grace, and none of them applied to Carolyn’s human feet, so large and clumsy when seen next to the delicate hooves of Asha and the other fawns. But Isha was loyal to Nobununga, who was Emperor of these forests, and thus loyal in turn to Father.
• A year or two ago, David took up the practice of squeezing blood from the hearts of his victims into his hair. He was a furry man and any one heart yielded only a few tablespoons, but of course they added up quickly. Over time, the combination of hair and blood hardened into something like a helmet. Once, curious, she asked Peter how strong this would be. Peter, whose catalog included mathematics and engineering, looked up at the ceiling for a moment, thinking. “Pretty strong,” he said meditatively. “Clotted blood is harder than you’d think, but it’s brittle. The strands of hair would tend to alleviate that. It’s the same principle as rebar in concrete. Hmm.”... For a while David had dripped it into his beard as well, but Father made him chisel this off when it became difficult to turn his head.
• A flat crack rang out across the clearing. Carolyn, who had long experience of David’s slaps, winced again. He leaned into that one.
• She had been expecting this—well, this or something like it—but still the air whooshed out of her lungs. She didn’t go to her knees, though. At least there’s that, she thought, savoring the coppery taste of her hate.
• “If the Duke repairs himself to the point where he can start feeding again, complex life will be history. It wouldn’t take long, either. Five years, probably. Maybe ten.”
• “Carolyn—I need you to go back into America. We need an innocent heart. We will offer it to Nobununga when he arrives. Do you think you can handle that?”
  “An innocent heart? In America?” She hesitated. “Possibly.”
  Misunderstanding, he said, “It’s easy. Just cut through the ribs.”
• In the phlegmy yellow glow of the streetlamp he could see a bundle of money outlined against the canvas of the bag. He grimaced the way you do when you swallow medicine.
• Everyone who was anyone in Father’s court attended. The ambassador of the forgotten lands came bearing the regrets of his mistress. He wore a black robe, smoking hot against the cold of the living world. The last Monstruwaken made an appearance as well, which was a great honor. He lived barricaded in the crown of the black pyramid at the end of time, and rarely manifested in the former world. Some said that he was just an older incarnation of Father himself.
• A week or so later he tested her, quizzing her about the events of the summer, first in Mandarin and then in the argot of low dragons.
• “Yes. That.” Michael smiled at her, grateful for the help. “I learn with—study with—Diver Eye.” Diver Eye, a sea tortoise, was one of Father’s ministers. Loyal and ancient, he had sole charge of the Pacific Ocean, and sole responsibility for guarding against the things in the Sea of Okhotsk.
• “It means, uh, ‘heart too big for the hunt.’ David is, maybe, too friendly? Too kind to be a fight?”
• The problem with a heart coal is that the memory always diverges from the actual thing. She remembers an idealized version of her son. She’s forgotten that he was selfish, that he enjoyed giving little offenses. It wasn’t really an accident that they saw him and the other man fucking on the couch... He would be gone again soon enough, only this time she would no longer have the comfort of the illusion.
• “Our Lord Nobununga honors us with his visit,” she said.
  Michael translated, surprisingly deep rumbles booming from his small chest.
  Then, as an aside to Michael, “You might have told me he was a fucking tiger, Michael.”
• * “Is he the one with the tentacles?”
  “No, that’s Barry O’Shea. Q-33 North is the sort of iceberg with legs, remember? Up in Norway.”
• “What’s reissak ayrial?” said Alicia. “It means ‘the denial that shreds,’ ”
• Carolyn held him in her lap all through that autumn afternoon, saying things like “I’m so very sorry” and “I know the two of you were friends.” The words felt like ashes in her mouth. She knew every word that had ever been spoken, but she could think of nothing to say that might ease his grief.
• But I know it’s sort of a perimeter-defense mechanism. Basically, it’s a sphere anchored in the plane of regret. There’s some sort of token associated with it—”
• First, Father—or, lately, Jennifer—would heal whatever wound had done it for her in the first place. Then he would call her back into her body. Once, though, he’d taken a break in the middle of all this to go use the bathroom. That time Margaret’s healed body had gotten up and wandered around the room, picking up random objects and saying “Oh no” over and over again. She seemed to be not all there... Carolyn suspected that was where the dead ones came from. They had been reanimated but not resurrected.
• The child who went into the bull had been aggressive, and sometimes casually cruel to the rest of them.
• But David had truly loved Father. But Carolyn knew for an absolute certainty that that was no longer true. Uzan-iya, they called it on the Himalayan steppe six thousand years ago. Uzan-iya—the moment when the heart turned first to murder.
  One day David would move to kill Father. She could not guess when that day would be. She knew only that it would come.
  For the first time, it occurred to her to wonder whether David might be of some use.
• Erwin, whose instincts had been honed to exquisite sharpness through a decade-long association with murderous men, thought, The trick now is not to show panic. If he sees fear, it will excite him. “Yeah,” he said casually. “Carolyn. Lisa, too.”
• Carolyn collected her things and emerged into the afternoon sunshine. That went rather well, she thought. Mission accomplished, and Steve is in a safe place. It was true that the dead ones were fierce defenders of their quarters. It had to be that way. Their private lives could not bear much inspection. But there were exceptions. The librarians could come and go as they pleased, as could others who had been resurrected.
• Anyway, nine years and two presidents later, here he was in the Room itself. It wasn’t small, but it wasn’t quite as big as he would have expected. But…really nice job on the baseboards. Perfectly molded plinth blocks, good clean shoe molding, and nearly invisible joins on the scalloping up above.
• Steve, devastated, tripped over his grief with every thought: my-teeth-feel-fuzzy-better-brush-’em-because-Mom-says, I’m-hungry-wonder-if-Dad-will-get pizza. The loss throbbed in the core of him like a toothache.
• As the days and weeks and seasons wore on he found himself repeating this nothing, not wanting to. Gradually he came to understand that this particular nothing was all that he could really say now. He chanted it to himself in cell blocks and dingy apartments, recited it like a litany, ripped himself to rags against the sharp and ugly poetry of it. It echoed down the grimy hallways and squandered moments of his life, the answer to every question, the lyric of all songs.
• “Dresden may be in exile, but he is still king. In his language the word for ‘promise’ is the same as the word for ‘a bone that cannot be cracked.’