Bohemia Quotes

You see, but you do not observe.

Milena - what a rich heavy name, almost too full to be lifted, and in the beginning I didn't like it much, it seemed to me a Greek or Roman gone astray in Bohemia, violated by Czech, cheated of its accent, and yet in colour and form it is marvellously a woman, a woman whom one carries in one's arms out of the world, and out of the fire, I don't know which, and she presses herself willingly and trustingly into your arms.

I am lost without my Boswell. [Sherlock Holmes on Dr. Watson.]

By the way, Doctor, I shall want your cooperation.' 'I shall be delighted.' 'You don't mind breaking the law?' 'Not in the least.' 'Nor running a chance of arrest?' 'Not in a good cause.' 'Oh, the cause is excellent!' 'Then I am your man.' 'I was sure that I might rely on you.

Bohemia is a commune in which the Revolution is over and everyone is a member of the aristocracy

Cemeteries in Bohemia are like gardens. The graves are covered with grass and colourful flowers. Modest tombstones are lost in the greenery. When the sun goes down, the cemetery sparkles with tiny candles... no matter how brutal life becomes, peace always reigns in the cemetery. Even in wartime, even in Hitler's time, even in Stalin's time..

In his eyes she eclipses and predominates the whole of her sex.

You and your books. Ah, what a gift it must be to discover the world in those squiggly lines.

Never theorize before you have data.Invariably you end up twisting facts to suit theories instead of theories to suit facts. -Sherlock holmes

Philosophy, art, politics, religion and bohemia have never sought to do away entirely with the status hierarchy; they have attemptee, rather, to institute new kinds of hierarchies based on sets of values unrecognised by, and critical of, those of the majority.. They have provided us with persuasive and consoling reminders that there is more than one way of succeeding in life.

It was not what he expected from a foulmouthed flower of bohemia, but he had a feeling there was both more and less to her than that.

Gertrude’s remedy for her mood swings was to print up hundreds of black-bordered calling cards embossed with the single word “Woe,” which she handed out gaily declaring, “Woe is me.

I rose to go, but Holmes caught me by my wrist and pushed me back into my chair. 'It is both, or none,' said he. 'You may say before this gentleman anything which you may say to me.

En España el mérito no se premia. Se premia el robar y el ser sinvergüenza. En España se premia todo lo malo.

Leontes is whispering nothing? Is leaning cheek to cheek? Is meeting noses? Kissing with inside lip? Stopping the career Of laughter with a sigh?- a note infallible Of breaking honesty. Horsing foot on foot? Skulking in corners? Wishing clocks more swift; Hours, minutes; noon, midnight? And all eyes Blind with the pin and web but theirs, theirs only, That would unseen be wicked - is this nothing? Why, then the world and all that's in't is nothing; The covering sky is nothing; Bohemia nothing; My wife is nothing; nor nothing have these nothings, If this be nothing.

I love and am loved by a better man than he.

There is no normal, not really. Not a right and a wrong way to be. But there is belonging. That day in Bohemia with Jeremey and David and the girls, I belonged. I belonged as much as anybody on the mean. Maybe even a little bit more.

And that was how a great scandal threatened to affect the kingdom of Bohemia, and how the best plans of Mr. Sherlock Holmes were beaten by a woman’s wit. He used to make merry over the cleverness of women, but I have not heard him do it of late. And when he speaks of Irene Adler, or when he refers to her photograph, it is always under the honourable title of the woman.

To Sherlock Holmes she is always the woman. I have seldom heard him mention her under any other name. In his eyes she eclipses and predominates the whole of her sex…there was but one woman to him, and that woman was the late Irene Adler, of dubious and questionable memory.

We are homeless enough in this world under the best of circumstances without going to any special effort to test our capacity to be more so.

How unlikely! Yet here we are.

Finally, when someone asked [Pollack] how he knew when a painting was finished, he replied, “How do you know when you’ve finished making love?

En España podrá faltar el pan, pero el ingenio y el buen humor no se acaban

Bohemya Krallığı'nı tehdit eden büyük bir skandalın ve Sherlock Holmes'un bir kadının zekasına yenilmesinin hikayesiydi bu. O günden beri bir daha kadınların zekasıyla ilgili espriler yaptığını duymadım. Ayrıca Irene Adler'den veya fotoğrafından her zaman övgüyle söz etti.

It might be said of Miss [Djuna] Barnes,” [T.S. Eliot] wrote, “who is incontestably one of the most original writers of our time, that never has so much genius been combined with so little talent.

In one book, your father is a hero. In another book, he is a monster. The men who don’t have books written about them have it easier.

It drives me crazy how quickly the great ones get canonized. 'Blah-blah-blah is such a terrible loss.' Does that mean that the death of one mediocre slob is not as terrible? Do fags have to be geniuses to justify living?

The greatness of a nation is in its symbols, its gestures, in doing things that are unprecedented. It's why the Americans are falling behind - they built a nation on the idea of doing new things, and now they'd rather sit and pray that the world won't make them adapt too much.

España, en su concepción religiosa, es una tribu del Centro de África.

Straight people are the most pathetic of all. I’ve never seen such a miserable group of people in my life. They don’t know anything about themselves

There is only one thing left for you to do,” John Sloan advised one artist. “Pull off your socks and try with your feet.

[I]t was [Barnett] Newman who made the famously wry remark, “Aesthetics is for the artist as ornithology is for the birds,

Cemetaries in Bohemia are like gardens

Nowadays you have to pay a very high price to become a bohemian.

...Women are naturally secretive, and they like to do their own secreting." -Sherlock Holmes, A Scandal in Bohemia

I know this,” Sisi said, ignoring the noblewoman’s censorious stare. “It is: Franz Joseph the First, by the Grace of God, Emperor of Austria; King of Hungary and Bohemia; King of Lombardy and Venice; Grand Duke of Tuscany and Kraków; Duke of Lorraine; Grand Duke of Transylvania; Margrave of Moravia; Duke of Upper and Lower Silesia, of Modena, and Parma, and Piacenza—

The assassination of Allende quickly covered over the memory of the Russian invasion of Bohemia, the bloody massacre in Bangladesh caused Allende to be forgotten, the din of war in the Sinai Desert drowned out the groans of Bangladesh, the massacres in Cambodia caused the Sinai to be forgotten, and so on, and on and on, until everyone has completely forgotten everything.

Jamás sanaría su repulsa a la gente bienpensante, al aburrimiento como fuente de pensamiento, al lado cursi del amado, del arte, del poderoso el lamento, del cristiano, del ayuntamiento, amando, como amaba, la estulticia de la bohemia.

But there were other great writers who had done all these things. What set Shakespeare apart...even from other greats, was his generosity: his invitation, even insistence,for others to join him in the act of imagining...His reticence [to add stage directions] made his works wonderfully elastic. It also made them demnding--sometimes maddeningly so--for directors and actors who had to figure out at every turn why these words and no others needed to be said right here and now. But Shakespeare was also demanding of his audiences: 'Yes,' you could almost hear him say, 'you are sitting in a fairly barren wooden theater. But dream yourselves to France. To a seacoast in Bohemia. To a magic-haunted island in a tempest-tossed sea. I dare you.' -Kate Stanley

The monasteries of Bohemia demand more of their brotherhood than some are prepared to give. The daily routine of back-breaking idleness proves too much for certain novices. The self-inflicted orgies that are the inevitable punishment for the slightest deviation into the bourgeois way of life are more than their frail flesh can stand. Many discover to their shame that they have scruples; they have roots, and greatest disadvantage of all, they have hope

The neighborhood-towns were part of larger ethnic states. To the north of the Loop was Germany. To the northwest was Poland. To the west were Italy and Israel. To the southwest were Bohemia and Lithuania. And to the south was ireland... you could always tell, even with your eyes closed, which state you were in by the odors of the food stores and the open kitchen windows, the sound of the foreign or familiar language, and by whether a stranger hit you in the head with a rock.

Exhausted after a full day of treating patients, William Carlos Williams angrily answered the phone. “Doctor,” said a woman’s voice, “my child has swallowed a mouse.” “Then get him to swallow a cat,” he replied, and slammed down the receiver.

That’s the thing about toxic relationships. They aren’t always toxic. They give us moments of happiness that we wish would last a lifetime. Those are the moments we cling onto. You convince yourself that there is enough love, underneath all of the chaos and mayhem you created in each other’s lives. You tell yourself that maybe there’s enough love left to make things work. And this made you question every little thing, including yourself. Maybe it wasn’t just him that was toxic. Maybe I was toxic to myself by continually opening the same closed doors, very well knowing there was nothing good behind them.

What is the use of beauty in woman? Provided a woman is physically well made and capable of bearing children, she will always be good enough in the opinion of economists. What is the use of music? -- of painting? Who would be fool enough nowadays to prefer Mozart to Carrel, Michael Angelo to the inventor of white mustard? There is nothing really beautiful save what is of no possible use. Everything useful is ugly, for it expresses a need, and man's needs are low and disgusting, like his own poor, wretched nature. The most useful place in a house is the water-closet. For my part, saving these gentry's presence, I am of those to whom superfluities are necessaries, and I am fond of things and people in inverse ratio to the service they render me. I prefer a Chinese vase with its mandarins and dragons, which is perfectly useless to me, to a utensil which I do use, and the particular talent of mine which I set most store by is that which enables me not to guess logogriphs and charades. I would very willingly renounce my rights as a Frenchman and a citizen for the sight of an undoubted painting by Raphael, or of a beautiful nude woman, -- Princess Borghese, for instance, when she posed for Canova, or Julia Grisi when she is entering her bath. I would most willingly consent to the return of that cannibal, Charles X., if he brought me, from his residence in Bohemia, a case of Tokai or Johannisberg; and the electoral laws would be quite liberal enough, to my mind, were some of our streets broader and some other things less broad. Though I am not a dilettante, I prefer the sound of a poor fiddle and tambourines to that of the Speaker's bell. I would sell my breeches for a ring, and my bread for jam. The occupation which best befits civilized man seems to me to be idleness or analytically smoking a pipe or cigar. I think highly of those who play skittles, and also of those who write verse. You may perceive that my principles are not utilitarian, and that I shall never be the editor of a virtuous paper, unless I am converted, which would be very comical. Instead of founding a Monthyon prize for the reward of virtue, I would rather bestow -- like Sardanapalus, that great, misunderstood philosopher -- a large reward to him who should invent a new pleasure; for to me enjoyment seems to be the end of life and the only useful thing on this earth. God willed it to be so, for he created women, perfumes, light, lovely flowers, good wine, spirited horses, lapdogs, and Angora cats; for He did not say to his angels, 'Be virtuous,' but, 'Love,' and gave us lips more sensitive than the rest of the skin that we might kiss women, eyes looking upward that we might behold the light, a subtile sense of smell that we might breathe in the soul of the flowers, muscular limbs that we might press the flanks of stallions and fly swift as thought without railway or steam-kettle, delicate hands that we might stroke the long heads of greyhounds, the velvety fur of cats, and the polished shoulder of not very virtuous creatures, and, finally, granted to us alone the triple and glorious privilege of drinking without being thirsty, striking fire, and making love in all seasons, whereby we are very much more distinguished from brutes than by the custom of reading newspapers and framing constitutions.

MAX: También se matan los jóvenes, Collet. MADAMA COLLET: No por cansancio de la vida. Los jóvenes se matan por romanticismo. MAX: Entonces, se matan por amar demasiado la vida.

She has the face of the most beautiful of women, and the mind of the most resolute of men.

Paying for your lover’s funeral is the gay version of a bar mitzvah. It is how you know that you have become a man.

As George Russell defined a literary movement: “Five or six men who live in the same town and hate each other.

Nature is kind to him who goes on foot, and makes him aware of beauties and delights never discovered to the traveller on wheels.

Per Sherlock Holmes ella è sempre la donna. Raramente l’ho sentito accennare a lei in altro modo. Ai suoi occhi, supera e annulla tutte le altre esponenti del suo sesso.

She died early in the morning of February 13, 1662, at the age of sixty-five, one day shy of what would have been her forty-ninth wedding anniversary.

Once you trap yourself into believing you can be your own company, you will cross the dangerous line between contentment and madness.

Aomame imagined the carefree winds sweeping across the plains of Bohemia and thought about the vicissitudes of history.

She could hear her heart beating. And in her head, in time with the beat, resounded the opening fanfare of Janáček’s Sinfonietta. Soft, silent breezes played across the green meadows of Bohemia. She was aware that she had become split in two. Half of her continued to press the dead man’s neck with utter coolness. The other half was filled with fear. She wanted to drop everything and get out of this room now. I’m here, but I’m not here. I’m in two places at once. It goes against Einstein’s theorem, but what the hell. Call it the Zen of the killer.

As a Juilliard student I would write music by day and by night hear John Coltrane at the Village Vanguard, Miles Davis and Art Blakey at the Café Bohemia, or Thelonious Monk trading sets with the young Ornette Coleman, who was just up from Louisiana playing his white plastic saxophone at the Five Spot at St. Marks Place and the Bowery. Years later, I got to know Ornette.

About my interests: I don’t know if I have any, unless the morbid desire to own a sixteen-millimeter camera and make experimental movies can be so classified. Otherwise, I love to eat and drink – it’s my melancholy conviction that I’ve scarcely ever had enough to eat (this is because it’s impossible to eat enough if you’re worried about the next meal) – and I love to argue with people who do not disagree with me too profoundly, and I love to laugh. I do not like bohemia, or bohemians, I do not like people whose principal aim is pleasure, and I do not like people who are earnest about anything. I don’t like people who like me because I’m a Negro; neither do I like people who find in the same accident grounds for contempt. I love America more than any other country in the world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually. I think all theories are suspect, that the finest principles may have to be modified, or may even be pulverized by the demands of life, and that one must find, therefore, one’s own moral center and move through the world hoping that this center will guide one aright. I consider that I have many responsibilities, but none greater than this: to last, as Hemingway says, and get my work done.

When she [Elizabeth, Princess of Bohemia] went to take the waters at Spa, he [René Descartes] wrote to her that to get any benefit from them she should free her mind from all sorts of sad thoughts and even from serious reflections, because those who look long on the green of the forest, the colors of a flower, the flight of a bird, can beguile themselves into not thinking, or thinking of nothing. 'Which is not wasting time but using it well.

Emperor Maximillian had brought peace to the kingdoms of Moravia, Austria, Bohemia, and Hungary. Though he had no time for his many children, he had found time to cultivate tulips in his beloved hrad gardens in the city of Prague.

I think this coming summer the King of Sicilia means to pay Bohemia the visitation which he justly owes him. ARCHIDAMUS Wherein our entertainment shall shame us we will be justified in our loves; for indeed,— CAMILLO Beseech you,—

There are two basic coping mechanisms. One consists of dreading the chaos, fighting it and abusing oneself after losing, building a structured life of work/marriage/gym/reunions/children/depression/affair/divorce/alcoholism/recovery/heart attack, in which every decision is a reaction against the fear of the worst (make children to avoid being forgotten, fuck someone at the reunion in case the opportunity never comes again, and the Holy Grail of paradoxes: marry to combat loneliness, then plunge into that constant marital desire to be alone). This is the life that cannot be won, but it does offer the comforts of battle—the human heart is content when distracted by war. “The second mechanism is an across-the-board acceptance of the absurd all around us. Everything that exists, from consciousness to the digestive workings of the human body to sound waves and bladeless fans, is magnificently unlikely. It seems so much likelier that things would not exist at all and yet the world shows up to class every morning as the cosmos takes attendance. Why combat the unlikeliness? This is the way to survive in this world, to wake up in the morning and receive a cancer diagnosis, discover that a man has murdered forty children, discover that the milk has gone sour, and exclaim, 'How unlikely! Yet here we are,' and have a laugh, and swim in the chaos, swim without fear, swim without expectation but always with an appreciation of every whim, the beauty of screwball twists and jerks that pump blood through our emaciated veins.

The paper was made in Bohemia,” I said. “Precisely. And the man who wrote the note is a German. Do you note the peculiar construction of the sentence—‘This account of you we have from all quarters received.’ A Frenchman or Russian could not have written that. It is the German who is so uncourteous to his verbs. It only remains, therefore, to discover what is wanted by this German who writes upon Bohemian paper and prefers wearing a mask to showing his face. And here he comes, if I am not mistaken, to resolve all our doubts.

In the same way, our own Christian versions of bohemia—our self-constructed religious spaces of critique—cannot save. Mumford notes that while the bohemian position wanted to retain the “Christian impulse of love … they failed to retain the co-ordinate doctrine of sacrifice.”2

During the last two hundred years the blackbird has abandoned the woods to become a city bird. From the planet's viewpoint, the blackbird's invasion of the human world is certainly more important than the Spanish invasion of South America or the return to Palestine of the Jews. A shift in the relationships among the various kinds of creation (fish, birds, humans, plants) is a shift of a higher order than changes in relations among various groups of the same kind. Whether Celts or Slavs inhabit Bohemia, whether Romanians or Russians conquer Bessarabia, is more or less the same to the earth. But when the blackbird betrayed nature to follow humans into the artificial unnatural world, something changed in the organic structure of the planet. And yet no one dares to interpret the last two centuries as the history of the invasion of man's cities by the blackbird. All of us are prisoners of a rigid conception of what is important and what is not, and so we fasten our anxious gaze on the important, while from a hiding place behind our backs the unimportant wages ts guerrilla war, which will end in surreptitiously changing the world and pouncing on us by surprise.

When he was still living in Bohemia and would run into people who had known him earlier, he was always surprised to find that they considered him a fairly courageous person (he thought himself cowardly), with a caustic wit (he considered himself a bore) and a kind heart (he remembered only his stinginess).

One night--it was on the twentieth of March, 1888--I was returning from a journey to a patient(for I had now returned to civil practice), when my way led me through Baker Street. As I passed the well-remembered door...I was seized with a keen desire to see Holmes again, and to know how he was employing his extraordinary powers. His rooms were brilliantly lit, and, even as I looked up, I saw his tall, spare figure pass twice in a dark silhouette against the blind. He was pacing the room swiftly, eagerly, with his head sunk upon his chest and his hands clasped behind him. To me, who knew his every mood and habit, his attitude and manner told their own story. He was at work again. He had risen out of his drug-created dreams and was hot upon the scent of some new problems.

Barcelona había sido una ciudad bonita, había tenido un puerto decadente, putas, bohemia, travestis, cafés, una revolución, bombas, otra revolución, más travestis, un montón de cines de una sola sala, y unas olimpiadas. y después de las olimpiadas, ¿Qué? Después de las olimpiadas, nada. Se había metido a escaparate.

Marine human material was not one whit better than that of the human society from which it came. But it had been hammered into form in a different forge, hardened with a different fire. The Marines were the closest thing to legions the nation had. They would follow their colors from the shores of home to the seacoast of Bohemia, and fight well either place.

Existence vyžaduje energii, plynulý pohyb vpřed, ale přesto nikdy nepřestaneme hledat bod, kde to všechno začalo, velký třesk, který nás vystřelil na nevyhnutelnou životní dráhu.

Populus me sibilat, at mihi plaudo Ipse domi simul ac nummos contemplar in arca

The public hisses at me, but I applaud myself in my own house and simultaneously contemplate the money in my chest.

Ahora que me ha puesto usted al corriente, haré lo posible por olvidarlo

Where there is no imagination there is no horror

Hans then asked him about painting from nature; Jackson...bluntly offered a phrase that entered Village lore, “I am nature.

I put my hands upon these books, remembering those nights of silence when our forearms had touched and we had read until sleep took us, the pages mixed between limbs and sheets.

Este pueblo miserable transforma todos los grandes conceptos en un cuento de beatas costureras".

No more potatoes and sour cream. Grandma will eat like a queen tonight.

I at this writing am an old man, only three years short of my three score and ten. And they tell me that Wycliffe’s bones have been dug up and burned and cast into the river that leads to the sea. The Church--she thinks--has had her revenge. But, as I hear it, Wycliffe’s writings had already touched one man in Bohemia, John Huss, whom the Church burned several years ago. And though both Wycliffe and Huss be dead, There are rumors of unrest in that small country, unrest caused by those who seek true religion. In England, King Henry rules hand in glove with the Pope, but not forever, I think. We are still here--the Lollards, I mean. Did you guess it? Yes, I have become a “poor priest.” And I will tell you this: the writings of Wycliffe have been driven out of Oxford, but they can be found in every other nook in England. Indeed, many a time I have talked with an Oxford scholar on the road and have seen God open his heart to the truth. This is what Saint Paul meant when he spoke of Christians as being pressed but never pinned. The Church rages, but the truth goes on. Many a stout English yeoman embraces it in these days and leads his family in true godly worship. John Wycliffe was our morning star. When all was darkest and England lay asleep in the deadly arms of the papacy, God sent him to us. The Scripture has come to England. What will it hold back? Soon--though perhaps not in my lifetime-- the dawn will break, and there will be a new day in England.

And that was how a great scandal threatened to affect the kingdom of Bohemia, and how the best plans of Mr. Sherlock Holmes were beaten by a woman’s wit. He used to make merry over the cleverness of women, but I have not heard him do it of late. And when he speaks of Irene Adler, or when he refers to her photograph, it is always under the honourable title of the woman.

When you're no one from nowhere it's best to know your limits. Rich kids can play at bohemia, but wealth has long tendrils; it twines into a safety net which can also be a trap for the unprepared. Rich kids have families and backgrounds and connections, and they ask questions, because their world functions on being able to place people. I couldn't expose myself to that.

La cueva de Zaratustra en el Pretil de los Consejos. Rimeros de libros hacen escombro y cubren las paredes. Empapelan los cuatro vidrios de una puerta cuatro cromos espeluznantes de un novelón por entregas. En la cueva hacen tertulia el gato, el can, el loro y el librero. Zaratustra, abichado y giboso -la cara de tocino rancio y la bufanda de verde serpiente- promueve con su caracterización de fantoche, una aguda y dolorosa disonancia muy emotiva y muy moderna. Encogido en el roto pelote de su silla enana, con los pies entrapados y cepones en la tarima del brasero, guarda la tienda. Un ratón saca el hocico intrigante por un agujero. Zaratustra: ¡No pienses que no te veo, cabrón! El gato: ¡Fu! ¡Fu! ¡Fu! El can: ¡Guau! El loro: ¡Viva España!

Es un error capital teorizar antes de tener datos. Sin darse cuenta, uno comienza a distorsionar los hechos para que se ajusten a las teorías, en lugar de formular teorías que se ajusten a los hechos

But one has to ask: why do the big things at such a high cost? I chose the quiet life. I like the idea of being recognized by my field and no one else. This way I have a purpose, one I believe in, but I'm not burdened by the constant idea of putting on a public image, a view of myself the masses can accept. Nobody cares whether I'm fat or cheat on my taxes. It is not the only right kind of life, of course, but it is the honest life for me. What I'm saying is, I make the right choices for myself.

It’s what we do now instead of bohemias,” he says. “Instead of what?” “Bohemias. Alternative subcultures. They were a crucial aspect of industrial civilization in the two previous centuries. They were where industrial civilization went to dream. A sort of unconscious R&D, exploring alternate societal strategies. Each one would have a dress code, characteristic forms of artistic expression, a substance or substances of choice, and a set of sexual values at odds with those of the culture at large. And they did, frequently, have locales with which they became associated. But they became extinct.” “Extinct?” “We started picking them before they could ripen. A certain crucial growing period was lost, as marketing evolved and the mechanisms of recommodification became quicker, more rapacious. Authentic subcultures required backwaters, and time, and there are no more backwaters. They went the way of geography in general. Autonomous zones do offer a certain insulation from the monoculture, but they seem not to lend themselves to recommodification, not in the same way. We don’t know why exactly.

Don't be so hard on yourself, as if you'd been trapped and sealed in amber. Since you passed away I've been following your trail, traced only with lost words. Recently I went looking for the castle and found it in Bohemia. You'd given orders for diligent restorers to renew its façades on all sides. They hadn't finished back then, they're still at it today, and they will be tomorrow. Because it crumbles, cracks appear, mold swells the plaster, withers its bright skin, on the weather side first. It comforts me, their toil, for I too loved you on all sides, in vain.

In 1589, Denmark introduced the death penalty for gypsy ringleaders,’ he said. ‘Fifty years later the Swedes decided all male gypsies should be hanged. In Moravia they cut the left ear off gypsy women, in Bohemia the right. The Archbishop of Mainz proclaimed that all gypsies should be executed without a conviction as their way of life was outlawed. In 1725, a law was passed in Prussia that all gypsies over eighteen should be executed without a trial, but later this law was repealed–the age limit was put down to fourteen. Four of my father’s brothers died in captivity. Only one of them during the War. Shall I continue?

Probably the first book that Hamilton absorbed was Malachy Postlethwayt’s Universal Dictionary of Trade and Commerce, a learned almanac of politics, economics, and geography that was crammed with articles about taxes, public debt, money, and banking. The dictionary took the form of two ponderous, folio-sized volumes, and it is touching to think of young Hamilton lugging them through the chaos of war. Hamilton would praise Postlethwayt as one of “the ablest masters of political arithmetic.” A proponent of manufacturing, Postlethwayt gave the aide-de-camp a glimpse of a mixed economy in which government would both steer business activity and free individual energies. In the pay book one can see the future treasury wizard mastering the rudiments of finance. “When you can get more of foreign coin, [the] coin for your native exchange is said to be high and the reverse low,” Hamilton noted. He also stocked his mind with basic information about the world: “The continent of Europe is 2600 miles long and 2800 miles broad”; “Prague is the principal city of Bohemia, the principal part of the commerce of which is carried on by the Jews.” He recorded tables from Postlethwayt showing infant-mortality rates, population growth, foreign-exchange rates, trade balances, and the total economic output of assorted nations.

Cemeteries in Bohemia are like gardens. The graves are covered with grass and colorful flowers. Modest tombstones are lost in the greenery. When the sun goes down, the cemetery sparkles with tiny candles. It looks as though the dead are dancing at a children's ball. Yes, a children's ball, because the dead are as innocent as children. No matter how brutal life becomes, peace always reigns in the cemetery. Even in wartime, in Hitler's time, in Stalin's time, through all occupations. When she felt low, she would get into the car, leave Prague far behind, and walk through one or another of the country cemeteries she loved so well. Against a backdrop of blue hills, they were as beautiful as a lullaby.

Alas, we are what we are, and we need the stories, we need the public transportation, the anxiety meds, the television shows by the dozens, the music in bars and restaurants saving us from the terror of silence, the everlasting promise of brown liquor, the bathrooms in national parks, and the political catchphrases we can all shout and stick to our bumpers.

I consider, that a man's brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it

We know that the world operates on a whim, a system of coincidences. There are two basic coping mechanisms. One consists of dreading the chaos, fighting it and abusing oneself after lost, building a structured life ... in which every decision is a reaction against the fear of the worst ... This is the life that cannot be won, but it does offer the comfort of battle - the human heart is content when distracted by war. The second mechanism is an across-the-board acceptance of the absurd all around us ... This is the way to survive in this world, to walk up in the morning ... and exclaim, 'How unlikely! Yet here we are,' and have a laugh, and swim in the chaos, swim without fear, swim without expectation but always with an appreciation of every whim, the beauty of screwball twists and jerk that pump blood through our emaciated veins.

The entire Habsburg landscape was given a deep, even coating of musical interpretation, whether Smetana and Dvorak in Bohemia or Haydn and Schubert in Austria or Bartok and Kodaly in Hungary. As soon as you head south from Hungary or the Carpathians this music stops. And with food, the greedy, complex and extravagant Habsburg world of layered cakes, a mad use of chocolate, subtle soups and fine wines goes off a cliff. This is obviously an enormous subject, ludicrously compressed here, but the very idea of such complex foods trickled down in the west from royal courts, famously with the development of the idea of the 'French restaurant' in the aftermath of the Revolution. Indeed, we all eagerly guzzle a range of court foods - with many Indian and Chinese restaurants in the west also serving essentially court Mughal or Qing banquet foods, albeit in mutilated forms.

Christianity spread across northern Europe more or less from west to east, slowly, but with greater speed after 950 or so. Ireland was first, in the fifth and sixth centuries; there followed Pictish Scotland, England and central Germany in the seventh century, Saxony – by force as we have seen – after Charlemagne’s conquests in the eighth, Bulgaria, Croatia and Moravia in the ninth, Bohemia in the tenth, Poland, Rus’ (covering parts of European Russia and Ukraine) and Denmark in the late tenth, Norway, Iceland and Hungary in the years around 1000, Sweden more slowly across the eleventh century.3 Only the far north-east of Europe was left out of this, the Baltic- and Finnish-speaking lands, the former of which would eventually, in the thirteenth century, turn into the only large and powerful pagan polity in medieval Europe, Lithuania, before its grand dukes went Christian as late as 1386–87.

While glass had been used by the rich to drink wine for hundreds of years, most beers until the nineteenth century were drunk from opaque vessels such as ceramic, pewter, or wooden mugs. Since most people couldn’t see the color of the liquid they were drinking, it presumably didn’t matter much what these beers looked like, only what they tasted like. Mostly, they were dark brown and murky brews. Then in 1840 in Bohemia, a region in what is now the Czech Republic, a method to mass-produce glass was developed, and it became cheap enough to serve beer to everyone in glasses. As a result people could see for the first time what their beer looked like, and they often did not like what they saw: the so-called top-fermented brews were variable not just in their taste, but in their color and clarity too. Not ten years later, a new beer was developed in Pilsen using bottom-fermenting yeast. It was lighter in color, it was clear and golden, it had bubbles like champagne—it was lager.

On March 13, 1938, Austria was annexed by Germany. It didn’t seem to help that President Roosevelt had sent a letter to Adolf Hitler seeking peace. The year ended with Kristallnacht, when many Jewish shops and synagogues were looted, burned and otherwise destroyed, throughout the fatherland. In 1939, Hitler expanded the German Navy and, in violation of the Munich Agreement, occupied parts of the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia. Germany then established the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. This protectorate included those portions of Czechoslovakia that had not already been incorporated into Germany. On August 30, 1939, the German Reich issued an ultimatum to Poland concerning the Polish Corridor and the Free City of Danzig. On September 1st, without waiting for a response to its ultimatum, Germany invaded Poland. Much to Hitler’s surprise, England honored its treaty with Poland. Neville Chamberlain declared war on Germany, thereby ushering in another World War. Officially, “The Second World War” in Europe was started by the German Reich when it attacked Poland, although at the time Germany blamed the Treaty of Versailles.

Those who had fought for what they called the revolution maintained a great pride: the pride of being on the correct side of the front lines. Ten or twelve years later (around the time of our story) the front lines began to melt away, and with them the correct side. No wonder the former supporters of the revolution feel cheated and are quick to seek substitute fronts; thanks to religion they can (in their role as atheists struggling against believers) stand again on the correct side and retain their habitual and precious sense of their own superiority. But to tell the truth, the substitute front was also useful to others, and it will perhaps not be too premature to disclose that Alice was one of them. Just as the directress wanted to be on the correct side, Alice wanted to be on the opposite side. During the revolution they had nationalized her papa's shop, and Alice hated those who had done this to him. But how should she show her hatred? Perhaps by taking a knife and avenging her father? But this sort of thing is not the custom in Bohemia. Alice had a better means for expressing her opposition: she began to believe in God.

Here, till our navy of a thousand sail Have made a breakfast to our foe by sea, Let us encamp to wait their happy speed.- Lorraine, what readiness is Edward in? How hast thou heard that he provided is Of martial furniture for this exploit? Lorraine To lay aside unnecessary soothing, And not to spend the time in circumstance, 'Tis bruited for a certainty, my lord, That he's exceeding strongly fortified; His subjects flock as willingly to war As if unto a triumph they were led. Charles England was wont to harbor malcontents, Bloodthirsty and seditious Catilines, Spendthrifts, and such as gape for nothing else But changing and alteration of the state. And is it possible that they are now So loyal in themselves? Lorraine All but the Scot, who solemnly protests, As heretofore I have informed his grace, Never to sheathe his sword or take a truce. King John Ah, that's the anch'rage of some better hope. But, on the other side, to think what friends King Edward hath retained in Netherland Among those ever-bibbing epicures -- Those frothy Dutchmen puffed with double beer, That drink and swill in every place they come -- Doth not a little aggravate mine ire; Besides we hear the emperor conjoins And stalls him in his own authority. But all the mightier that their number is, The greater glory reaps the victory. Some friends have we beside domestic power: The stern Polonian, and the warlike Dane, The King of Bohemia, and of Sicily Are all become confederates with us, And, as I think, are marching hither apace. [Drums within.] But soft, I hear the music of their drums, By which I guess that their approach is near. Enter the King of Bohemia, with Danes, and a Polonian Captain with other soldiers, some Muscovites, another way. King of Bohemia King John of France, as league and neighborhood Requires when friends are any way distressed, I come to aid thee with my country's force. Polonian Captain And from great Moscow, fearful to the Turk, And lofty Poland, nurse of hardy men, I bring these servitors to fight for thee, Who willingly will venture in thy cause. King John Welcome Bohemian King, and welcome all. This your great kindness I will not forget; Besides your plentiful rewards in crowns That from our treasury ye shall receive, There comes a hare-brained nation decked in pride, The spoil of whom will be a treble gain. And now my hope is full, my joy complete. At sea we are as puissant as the force Of Agamemnon in the haven of Troy; By land, with Xerxes we compare of strength, Whose soldiers drank up rivers in their thirst. Then Bayard-like, blind, overweening Ned, To reach at our imperial diadem Is either to be swallowed of the waves Or hacked a-pieces when thou com'st ashore.

Almost immediately after jazz musicians arrived in Paris, they began to gather in two of the city’s most important creative neighborhoods: Montmartre and Montparnasse, respectively the Right and Left Bank haunts of artists, intellectuals, poets, and musicians since the late nineteenth century. Performing in these high-profile and popular entertainment districts could give an advantage to jazz musicians because Parisians and tourists already knew to go there when they wanted to spend a night out on the town. As hubs of artistic imagination and experimentation, Montmartre and Montparnasse therefore attracted the kinds of audiences that might appreciate the new and thrilling sounds of jazz. For many listeners, these locations leant the music something of their own exciting aura, and the early success of jazz in Paris probably had at least as much to do with musicians playing there as did other factors. In spite of their similarities, however, by the 1920s these neighborhoods were on two very different paths, each representing competing visions of what France could become after the war. And the reactions to jazz in each place became important markers of the difference between the two areas and visions. Montmartre was legendary as the late-nineteenth-century capital of “bohemian Paris,” where French artists had gathered and cabaret songs had filled the air. In its heyday, Montmartre was one of the centers of popular entertainment, and its artists prided themselves on flying in the face of respectable middle-class values. But by the 1920s, Montmartre represented an established artistic tradition, not the challenge to bourgeois life that it had been at the fin de siècle. Entertainment culture was rapidly changing both in substance and style in the postwar era, and a desire for new sounds, including foreign music and exotic art, was quickly replacing the love for the cabarets’ French chansons. Jazz was not entirely to blame for such changes, of course. Commercial pressures, especially the rapidly growing tourist trade, eroded the popularity of old Montmartre cabarets, which were not always able to compete with the newer music halls and dance halls. Yet jazz bore much of the criticism from those who saw the changes in Montmartre as the death of French popular entertainment. Montparnasse, on the other hand, was the face of a modern Paris. It was the international crossroads where an ever changing mixture of people celebrated, rather than lamented, cosmopolitanism and exoticism in all its forms, especially in jazz bands. These different attitudes within the entertainment districts and their institutions reflected the impact of the broader trends at work in Paris—the influx of foreign populations, for example, or the advent of cars and electricity on city streets as indicators of modern technology—and the possible consequences for French culture. Jazz was at the confluence of these trends, and it became a convenient symbol for the struggle they represented.

Philosophy is one of those subjects, like astrophysics and neurosurgery, that are not for the fainthearted. To delve into the absolutes of the human experience, to seek to advance the progress of enlightenment first expounded by the likes of the revered Aristotle and Plato, to search for the answers to the profound questions of the universe, often at the risk of deadly reprisal from entrenched powers, requires not only brilliance and tenacity but a deep sense of purpose. But even among this select fraternity, [René] Descartes stands out. From him did we get practical discoveries like coordinates in geometry and the law of refraction of light. But what he really did was to shake loose the human mind from the shackles of centuries of stultifying religious orthodoxy by creating an entirely original approach to reasoning: the Cartesian method.

Back in my room, I woke to a strange scratching coming from the air-conditioning vent. It began with hesitance, a creature feeling its way around a new environment. After a few minutes, the scratching gained a rhythm - shka shka shkashka shka shka - the rhythm of work that some small rodent figured would bring it to freedom. Consistency. Work without interruption, work with intensity. Surely, working at a steady pace, without breaks, the creature could reach its goal. I listened to my companion, refusing to take away its dignity by opening the vent. It took twenty minutes for the rhythm to reach its climax - shkakakakashkakakakashkakakaka, now with true desperation, as the rodent beat at the world to convince it of its worth, not a plea but a demand: Hear me! Let me out! I am here! I decided it was time for relief for the both of us, and when I stood up I saw a small brown nose peeking through the bars, two black eyes fixed on mine. I unscrewed the cover with a coin. When I opened it, a small tail was peeking from a dark corner deep in the shaft. It was hiding from me. It would not be rescued. I tried to reach the tail without any luck. I sat on my bed with the vent uncovered for an hour, waiting for my new fried to come out. It didn't. I put the cover back on, and while I was fastening the last screw, the nose appeared again, followed by the laborious scratching. Work will save me. Diligent, patient, never-ending. It must. I put a coat on and walked outside.

Late in the nineteenth century came the first signs of a “Politics in a New Key”: the creation of the first popular movements dedicated to reasserting the priority of the nation against all forms of internationalism or cosmopolitanism. The decade of the 1880s—with its simultaneous economic depression and broadened democratic practice—was a crucial threshold. That decade confronted Europe and the world with nothing less than the first globalization crisis. In the 1880s new steamships made it possible to bring cheap wheat and meat to Europe, bankrupting family farms and aristocratic estates and sending a flood of rural refugees into the cities. At the same time, railroads knocked the bottom out of what was left of skilled artisanal labor by delivering cheap manufactured goods to every city. At the same ill-chosen moment, unprecedented numbers of immigrants arrived in western Europe—not only the familiar workers from Spain and Italy, but also culturally exotic Jews fleeing oppression in eastern Europe. These shocks form the backdrop to some developments in the 1880s that we can now perceive as the first gropings toward fascism. The conservative French and German experiments with a manipulated manhood suffrage that I alluded to earlier were extended in the 1880s. The third British Reform Bill of 1884 nearly doubled the electorate to include almost all adult males. In all these countries, political elites found themselves in the 1880s forced to adapt to a shift in political culture that weakened the social deference that had long produced the almost automatic election of upper-class representatives to parliament, thereby opening the way to the entry of more modest social strata into politics: shopkeepers, country doctors and pharmacists, small-town lawyers—the “new layers” (nouvelles couches) famously summoned forth in 1874 by Léon Gambetta, soon to be himself, the son of an immigrant Italian grocer, the first French prime minister of modest origins. Lacking personal fortunes, this new type of elected representative lived on their parliamentarians’ salary and became the first professional politicians. Lacking the hereditary name recognition of the “notables” who had dominated European parliaments up to then, the new politicians had to invent new kinds of support networks and new kinds of appeal. Some of them built political machines based upon middle-class social clubs, such as Freemasonry (as Gambetta’s Radical Party did in France); others, in both Germany and France, discovered the drawing power of anti-Semitism and nationalism. Rising nationalism penetrated at the end of the nineteenth century even into the ranks of organized labor. I referred earlier in this chapter to the hostility between German-speaking and Czech-speaking wage earners in Bohemia, in what was then the Habsburg empire. By 1914 it was going to be possible to use nationalist sentiment to mobilize parts of the working class against other parts of it, and even more so after World War I. For all these reasons, the economic crisis of the 1880s, as the first major depression to occur in the era of mass politics, rewarded demagoguery. Henceforth a decline in the standard of living would translate quickly into electoral defeats for incumbents and victories for political outsiders ready to appeal with summary slogans to angry voters.