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A former professor of ancient languages, literature, and mathematics who had paid for his first year of college by working as a carpenter, Garfield's interests and abilities were as deep as they were broad.
Inexplicably, it seemed that the only cause for which Garfield would not fight was his own political future. In an early-adopted eccentricity that would become for him a central "law of life," he refused to seek an appointment or promotion of any kind. "I suppose I am morbidly sensitive about any reference to my own achievements," he admitted. "I so much despise a man who blows his own horn, that I go to the other extreme."
Garfield himself referred to [the Democrat party] as the "rebel party" and growled that "every Rebel guerrilla and jayhawker, every man who ran to Canada to avoid the draft, every bounty-jumper, every deserter, every cowardly sneak that ran from danger and disgraced his flag,… every villain, of whatever name or crime, who loves power more than justice, slavery more than freedom, is a Democrat.
Watson had left the Bell Telephone Company about the same time Bell did, announcing his attention to travel and enjoy his modest wealth.
"You [black men] were not made free merely to be allowed to vote, but in order to enjoy an equality of opportunity in the race of life," Garfield had told a delegation of 250 black men just before he was elected president. "Permit no man to praise you because you are black, nor wrong you because you are black. Let it be known that you are ready and willing to work out your own material salvation by your own energy, your own worth, your own labor."
I have sometimes thought that we cannot know any man thoroughly well while he is in perfect health. As the ebb-tide discloses the real lines of the shore and the bed of the sea, so feebleness, sickness, and pain bring out the real character of a man. - James A. Garfield
Science had not been able to prevent the president's death, Bell conceded, but neither had religion. "If prayers could avail to save the sick," he reasoned sadly, "surely the earnest heartfelt cry of a whole nation to God would have availed in this case.
Saturday, September 27, 2014
Monday, September 15, 2014
The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy, r. Sep. 2014
p. 56 And in autumn airy spheres of thistledown floated into the same street, lodged upon the shop fronts, blew into drains; and innumerable tawny and yellow leaves skimmed along the pavement, and stole through people's doorways into their passages with a hesitating scratch on the floor, like the skirts of timid visitors.
p. 116 [Elizabeth-Jane] sat up with her mother to the utmost of her strength night after night. To learn to take the universe seriously there is no quicker way than to watch - to be a "waker," as the country-people call it. Between the hours at which the last toss-pot went by and the first sparrow shook himself, the silence in Casterbridge - barring the rare sound of the watchman - was broken in Elizabeth's ear only by the time-piece in the bedroom ticking frantically against the clock on the stairs; ticking harder and harder till it seemed to clang like a gong; and all this while the subtle-souled girl asking herself why she was born, why sitting in a room, and blinking at the candle; why things around her had taken the shape they wore in preference to every other possible shape. Why they stared at her so helplessly, as if waiting for the touch of some wand that would release them from terrestrial constraint; what that chaos called consciousness, which spin in her at this moment like a top, tended to, and began in. Her eyes fell together; she was awake, yet she was asleep.
p. 157 "It's better to stay at home, and that's true; but a man must live where his money is made. It is a great pity, but it's always so!"
p. 172 The Scotchman seemed hardly the same Farfrae who had danced with her and walked with her in a delicate poise between love and friendship - that period in the history of a love when alone it can be said to be unalloyed with pain.
p. 184 [The fortune teller] was sometimes astonished that men could profess so little and believe so much at his house, when at church they professed so much and believed so little.
p. 192 Nearly the whole town had gone into the fields. The Casterbridge populace still retained the primitive habit of helping one another in time of need; and thus, though the corn belonged to the farming section of the little community - that inhabiting the Durnover quarter - the remainder was no less interested in the labour of getting it home."
p. 231 "If I could afford it, be hanged if I wouldn't keep a church choir at my own expense to play and sing to me at these low, dark times of my life. But the bitter thing is, that when I was rich I didn't need what I could have, and now I be poor I can't have what I need!"
p. 317 And thus Henchard found himself again on the precise standing which he had occupied a quarter of a century before. Externally there was nothing to hinder his making another start on the upward slope, and by his new lights achieving higher things than his soul in its half-formed state had been able to accomplish. But the ingenious machinery contrived by the Gods for reducing human possibilities of amelioration to a minimum - which arranges that wisdom to do shall come pari passu with the departure of zest for doing - stood in the way of all that. He had no wish to make an arena a second time of a world that had become a mere painted scene to him…. Very often, as his hay-knife crunched down among the sweet-smelling grassy stems, he would survey mankind and say to himself: "Here and everywhere be folk dying before their time like frosted leaves, though wanted by their families, the country, and the world; while I, an outcast, an encumberer of the ground, wanted by nobody, and despised by all, live on against my will!"
p. 332 …[Elizabeth-Jane] thought she could perceive no great personal difference between being respected in the nether parts of Casterbridge and glorified at the uppermost end of the social world.
p. 116 [Elizabeth-Jane] sat up with her mother to the utmost of her strength night after night. To learn to take the universe seriously there is no quicker way than to watch - to be a "waker," as the country-people call it. Between the hours at which the last toss-pot went by and the first sparrow shook himself, the silence in Casterbridge - barring the rare sound of the watchman - was broken in Elizabeth's ear only by the time-piece in the bedroom ticking frantically against the clock on the stairs; ticking harder and harder till it seemed to clang like a gong; and all this while the subtle-souled girl asking herself why she was born, why sitting in a room, and blinking at the candle; why things around her had taken the shape they wore in preference to every other possible shape. Why they stared at her so helplessly, as if waiting for the touch of some wand that would release them from terrestrial constraint; what that chaos called consciousness, which spin in her at this moment like a top, tended to, and began in. Her eyes fell together; she was awake, yet she was asleep.
p. 157 "It's better to stay at home, and that's true; but a man must live where his money is made. It is a great pity, but it's always so!"
p. 172 The Scotchman seemed hardly the same Farfrae who had danced with her and walked with her in a delicate poise between love and friendship - that period in the history of a love when alone it can be said to be unalloyed with pain.
p. 184 [The fortune teller] was sometimes astonished that men could profess so little and believe so much at his house, when at church they professed so much and believed so little.
p. 192 Nearly the whole town had gone into the fields. The Casterbridge populace still retained the primitive habit of helping one another in time of need; and thus, though the corn belonged to the farming section of the little community - that inhabiting the Durnover quarter - the remainder was no less interested in the labour of getting it home."
p. 231 "If I could afford it, be hanged if I wouldn't keep a church choir at my own expense to play and sing to me at these low, dark times of my life. But the bitter thing is, that when I was rich I didn't need what I could have, and now I be poor I can't have what I need!"
p. 317 And thus Henchard found himself again on the precise standing which he had occupied a quarter of a century before. Externally there was nothing to hinder his making another start on the upward slope, and by his new lights achieving higher things than his soul in its half-formed state had been able to accomplish. But the ingenious machinery contrived by the Gods for reducing human possibilities of amelioration to a minimum - which arranges that wisdom to do shall come pari passu with the departure of zest for doing - stood in the way of all that. He had no wish to make an arena a second time of a world that had become a mere painted scene to him…. Very often, as his hay-knife crunched down among the sweet-smelling grassy stems, he would survey mankind and say to himself: "Here and everywhere be folk dying before their time like frosted leaves, though wanted by their families, the country, and the world; while I, an outcast, an encumberer of the ground, wanted by nobody, and despised by all, live on against my will!"
p. 332 …[Elizabeth-Jane] thought she could perceive no great personal difference between being respected in the nether parts of Casterbridge and glorified at the uppermost end of the social world.
Friday, September 5, 2014
Crossing to Safety by Wallace Stegner, r. Sep. 2014
p. 3 Floating upward through a confusion of dreams and memory, curving like a trout through the rings of previous risings, I surface. My eyes open. I am awake. Cataract sufferers must see like this when the bandages are removed after the operation: every detail as sharp as if seen for the first time, yet familiar too, known from before the time of blindness, the remembered and the seen coalescing as in a stereoscope.
p. 10 [Reminiscing] is what I do for a good long time. It is no effort. Everything compels it. From the high porch, the woods pitching down to the lake are more than a known and loved place. They are a habitat we were once fully adapted to, a sort of Peaceable Kingdom where species such as ours might evolve unchallenged and find their step on the staircase of being. Sitting with it all under my eye, I am struck once more, as I was up on the Wightman road, by its changelessness. The light is nostalgic about mornings past and optimistic about mornings to come.
p. 18 Is that the basis of friendship? Is it as reactive as that? Do we respond only to people who seem to find us interesting? Was our friendship for the Langs born out of simple gratitude to this woman who had the kinds to call on a strange young wife stuck in a basement without occupation or friends? Was I that avid for praise, to feel so warm toward them both because the professed to like my story? Do we all buzz or ring or light up when people press our vanity buttons, and only then? Can I think of anyone in my whole life whom I have liked without his first showing signs of liking me? Or did I (I hope I did) like Charity Lang on sight because she was what she was, open, friendly, frank, a little ribald as it turned out, energetic, interested, as full of vitality as her smile was full of light?
p. 43 I believe that most people have some degree of talent for something - forms, colors, words, sounds. Talent lies around in us like kindling waiting for a match, but some people, just as gifted as others, are less lucky. Fate never drops a match on them. The times are wrong, or their health is poor, or their energy low, or their obligations too many. Something.
p. 46 But he won't talk about his poems. He turns the conversation to that banal subject, fascinating to non-writers, of why writers write. Ego enhancement, sure. What else? Psychological imbalance? Neurosis? Trauma? And if trauma, how far can trauma go before it stops being stimulating and becomes destructive? Academic pressures to publish, do those mean anything? Not much, we agree. How about the reforming impulse, a passion for social justice?
p. 57 Aunt Emily believes in the freedom of summer. She doesn't much care what the children do so long as they do something, and know what they are doing. It is idleness and randomness of mind that she cannot abide.
p. 59 it is a fact that no child ever followed George Barnwell Ellis to his work, or aped his way with any tool. His routines are simply not imitable. He appears mistily and cheerfully at breakfast, and shortly disappears - in winter to his office or to the Divinity School, where a child would have a difficult time finding anything at all to do, and in summer up the path to his think house, which by his assumption and Aunt Emily's interdict is off limits to the young.
p. 88 "She's great, she's thoughtful, and loving, she's kept a book on both of the children since the day they were born - you know, first smile, first tooth, first word, first sign of individuality as they develop. Pictures at every stage. She's teaching Barney to count and tell time and read already, they set aside a half hour every afternoon. She's simply incredible, the way she can organize a day. But one thing, I don't think I ever saw her pick up one of those cute kids and give him a big squeeze, just because he's himself, and hers, and she loves him. When we get ours, don't let me have an agenda every time I'm with him."
p. 89 But what memory brings back from there is not politics, or the meagerness of living on a hundred and fifty dollars a month, or even the writing I was doing, but the details of friendship - parties, picnics, walks, midnight conversations, glimpses from the occasional unencumbered hours. Amicitia lasts better than res publica, and at least as well as ars publica. Or so it seems now. What really illuminates those months is the faces of our friends.
p. 123 Some things that astonished Sally - hard beds, hard chairs, unfinished walls, Ivory soap, no liquor harder than sherry - could not dispel the impression I got of a complicity expensively purchased and self-consciously cherished…
p. 130 It seemed to me that nothing could do so much for a man as a good long jail sentence. To have all of one's physical needs taken care of by specially appointed assistants; to be marched to and from meals with neither choice nor cooking, payment nor dishwashing, on one's mind; to be sent at stipulated times to the yard for exercise; to have whole mornings, afternoons, evenings of freedom from interruption, with only the passing and repassing of a guard's steps in the corridor to assure and emphasize it; to hear the clang of opening and closing of doors down the cellblock and know that one needn't be concerned, one still had months to serve - who could not write the history of the world under such circumstances? Who could not, in a well-insulated but austerely padded cell, think all the high thoughts, read all the great books, perhaps even write one or two?
p. 157 While we were at it, we might have discussed the dangers inherent in conducting your life according to rules whimsically adopted from some book, and ignoring the testimony and experience of people around you.
p. 174 I said, "Puttering can be a comfort. It goes with rumination, and he's a ruminator. He should have been a literate gentleman farmer with a telescope in his backyard, and a big library, and all kinds of time to think." "A rustic Newton?" she flashed. "Where's his Principia?" There was something so close to contempt in her voice that she made me mad. "Is it compulsory to be one of the immortals?" I said. "We're all decent godless people, Hallie. Let's not be too hard on each other if we don't set the world afire. There's been enough of that."
p. 185 Good cooks dirty a lot of dishes, especially when they themselves don't have to wash them.
p. 194 - Hallie, you've got the wrong idea of what writers do. They don't understand any more than other people. They invent only plots they can resolve. They ask the questions they can answer. Those aren't people that you see in books, those are constructs. Novels or biographies, it makes no difference. I couldn't reproduce the real Sid and Charity Lang, much less explain them; and if I invented them I'd be falsifying something I don't want to falsify.
p. 202 Youth hasn't got anything to do with chronological age. It's times of hope and happiness.
p. 237 "[Death]'s as natural as being born," she said, "and even if we stop being the individuals we once were, there's an immortality of organic molecules that's absolutely certain. Don't you find that a wonderful comfort? I do. To think that we'll become part of the grass and trees and animals, that we'll stay right here where we loved it while we were alive. People will drink us with their morning milk and pour us as maple syrup over their breakfast pancakes. So I say we should be happy and grateful, and make the most of it. I've had a wonderful life, I've loved every minute."
p. 263 For a moment I studied her sad, resigned, trying-to-be-cheerful face. I thought of how it might be to look at the face of the woman you loved and had lived your life with, and know that this might be the last, or the next-to-last, or the next-to-next-to-last time you would see it.
p. 10 [Reminiscing] is what I do for a good long time. It is no effort. Everything compels it. From the high porch, the woods pitching down to the lake are more than a known and loved place. They are a habitat we were once fully adapted to, a sort of Peaceable Kingdom where species such as ours might evolve unchallenged and find their step on the staircase of being. Sitting with it all under my eye, I am struck once more, as I was up on the Wightman road, by its changelessness. The light is nostalgic about mornings past and optimistic about mornings to come.
p. 18 Is that the basis of friendship? Is it as reactive as that? Do we respond only to people who seem to find us interesting? Was our friendship for the Langs born out of simple gratitude to this woman who had the kinds to call on a strange young wife stuck in a basement without occupation or friends? Was I that avid for praise, to feel so warm toward them both because the professed to like my story? Do we all buzz or ring or light up when people press our vanity buttons, and only then? Can I think of anyone in my whole life whom I have liked without his first showing signs of liking me? Or did I (I hope I did) like Charity Lang on sight because she was what she was, open, friendly, frank, a little ribald as it turned out, energetic, interested, as full of vitality as her smile was full of light?
p. 43 I believe that most people have some degree of talent for something - forms, colors, words, sounds. Talent lies around in us like kindling waiting for a match, but some people, just as gifted as others, are less lucky. Fate never drops a match on them. The times are wrong, or their health is poor, or their energy low, or their obligations too many. Something.
p. 46 But he won't talk about his poems. He turns the conversation to that banal subject, fascinating to non-writers, of why writers write. Ego enhancement, sure. What else? Psychological imbalance? Neurosis? Trauma? And if trauma, how far can trauma go before it stops being stimulating and becomes destructive? Academic pressures to publish, do those mean anything? Not much, we agree. How about the reforming impulse, a passion for social justice?
p. 57 Aunt Emily believes in the freedom of summer. She doesn't much care what the children do so long as they do something, and know what they are doing. It is idleness and randomness of mind that she cannot abide.
p. 59 it is a fact that no child ever followed George Barnwell Ellis to his work, or aped his way with any tool. His routines are simply not imitable. He appears mistily and cheerfully at breakfast, and shortly disappears - in winter to his office or to the Divinity School, where a child would have a difficult time finding anything at all to do, and in summer up the path to his think house, which by his assumption and Aunt Emily's interdict is off limits to the young.
p. 88 "She's great, she's thoughtful, and loving, she's kept a book on both of the children since the day they were born - you know, first smile, first tooth, first word, first sign of individuality as they develop. Pictures at every stage. She's teaching Barney to count and tell time and read already, they set aside a half hour every afternoon. She's simply incredible, the way she can organize a day. But one thing, I don't think I ever saw her pick up one of those cute kids and give him a big squeeze, just because he's himself, and hers, and she loves him. When we get ours, don't let me have an agenda every time I'm with him."
p. 89 But what memory brings back from there is not politics, or the meagerness of living on a hundred and fifty dollars a month, or even the writing I was doing, but the details of friendship - parties, picnics, walks, midnight conversations, glimpses from the occasional unencumbered hours. Amicitia lasts better than res publica, and at least as well as ars publica. Or so it seems now. What really illuminates those months is the faces of our friends.
p. 123 Some things that astonished Sally - hard beds, hard chairs, unfinished walls, Ivory soap, no liquor harder than sherry - could not dispel the impression I got of a complicity expensively purchased and self-consciously cherished…
p. 130 It seemed to me that nothing could do so much for a man as a good long jail sentence. To have all of one's physical needs taken care of by specially appointed assistants; to be marched to and from meals with neither choice nor cooking, payment nor dishwashing, on one's mind; to be sent at stipulated times to the yard for exercise; to have whole mornings, afternoons, evenings of freedom from interruption, with only the passing and repassing of a guard's steps in the corridor to assure and emphasize it; to hear the clang of opening and closing of doors down the cellblock and know that one needn't be concerned, one still had months to serve - who could not write the history of the world under such circumstances? Who could not, in a well-insulated but austerely padded cell, think all the high thoughts, read all the great books, perhaps even write one or two?
p. 157 While we were at it, we might have discussed the dangers inherent in conducting your life according to rules whimsically adopted from some book, and ignoring the testimony and experience of people around you.
p. 174 I said, "Puttering can be a comfort. It goes with rumination, and he's a ruminator. He should have been a literate gentleman farmer with a telescope in his backyard, and a big library, and all kinds of time to think." "A rustic Newton?" she flashed. "Where's his Principia?" There was something so close to contempt in her voice that she made me mad. "Is it compulsory to be one of the immortals?" I said. "We're all decent godless people, Hallie. Let's not be too hard on each other if we don't set the world afire. There's been enough of that."
p. 185 Good cooks dirty a lot of dishes, especially when they themselves don't have to wash them.
p. 194 - Hallie, you've got the wrong idea of what writers do. They don't understand any more than other people. They invent only plots they can resolve. They ask the questions they can answer. Those aren't people that you see in books, those are constructs. Novels or biographies, it makes no difference. I couldn't reproduce the real Sid and Charity Lang, much less explain them; and if I invented them I'd be falsifying something I don't want to falsify.
p. 202 Youth hasn't got anything to do with chronological age. It's times of hope and happiness.
p. 237 "[Death]'s as natural as being born," she said, "and even if we stop being the individuals we once were, there's an immortality of organic molecules that's absolutely certain. Don't you find that a wonderful comfort? I do. To think that we'll become part of the grass and trees and animals, that we'll stay right here where we loved it while we were alive. People will drink us with their morning milk and pour us as maple syrup over their breakfast pancakes. So I say we should be happy and grateful, and make the most of it. I've had a wonderful life, I've loved every minute."
p. 263 For a moment I studied her sad, resigned, trying-to-be-cheerful face. I thought of how it might be to look at the face of the woman you loved and had lived your life with, and know that this might be the last, or the next-to-last, or the next-to-next-to-last time you would see it.
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