Louise Bennett Quotes

Everybody knows deep down that life is as much about the things that do not happen as the things that do and that's not something that ought to be glossed over or denied because without frustration there would hardly be any need to daydream. And daydreams return me to my original sense of things and I luxuriate in these fervid primary visions until I am entirely my unalloyed self again. So even though it sometimes feels as if one could just about die from disappointment I must concede that in fact in a rather perverse way it is precisely those things I did not get that are keeping me alive.

I only wish you could spend just five minutes beneath my skin and feel what it’s like. Feel the savage swarming magic I feel.

Quite often I’m terribly disappointed by how things turn out, but that’s usually my own fault for the simple reason that I’m too quick to conclude that things have turned out as fully as it is possible for them to turn, when in fact, quite often, they are still on the turn and have some way to go until they have turned out completely.

I haven't yet discovered what my first language is so for the time being I use English words in order to say things: I expect I will always have to do it that way; regrettably I don't think my first language can be written down at all.

If we have lost the knack of living, I thought, it is a safe bet to presume we have forfeited the magic of dying.

No matter what book we had in our hands we found it simply impossible to refrain from wondering incessantly about what kinds of words exactly were inside the other books.

She has spent a lot of time on her own and certainly that makes a person susceptible to overthinking simple transactions and occasionally losing perspective.

If you are not from a particular place the history of that particular place will dwell inside you differently to how it dwells within those people who are from that particular place. Your connection to certain events that define the history of a particular place is not straightforward because none of your ancestors were in any way involved or affected by those events. You have no stories to relate and compare, you have no narrative to inherit and run with, and all the names are strange ones that mean nothing to you at all. And it's as if the history of a particular place knows all about this blankness you contain. Consequently if you are not from a particular place you will always be vulnerable for the reason that it doesn't matter how many years you have lived there you will never have a side of the story; nothing with which you can hold the full force of the history of a particular place at bay. And so it comes at you directly, right through the softly padding soles of your feet, battering up throughout your body, before unpacking its clamouring store of images in the clear open spaces of your mind. Opening out at last; out, out, out And shimmered across the pale expanse of a flat defenceless sky. All the names mean nothing to you, and your name means nothing to them.

…it’s very likely that the sentences I’ll underline in future will be different from the sentences I underlined in the past, when I was in Tangier—you don’t ever step into the same book twice after all.

Where is my fucking sense of eventuality actually?

I drink to plough and fortify a one-track mind and suddenly, briefly, the blood surrenders, shuffles through the old channels, and there is no such thing as a false move.

Sometimes a banana with coffee is nice. It ought not to be too ripe - in fact there should be a definite remainder of green along the stalk, and if there isn't, forget about it. Though admittedly that is easier said than done. Apples an be forgotten about, but not bananas, not really. They don't in fact take at all well to being forgotten about. They wizen and stink of putrid and go almost black.

I’ve decided that once and for all. I don’t want to be in the business of turning things into other things, it feels fatal for one reason. As if making the world smaller because of all the intact explanations that need to occur in order for one thing to become another thing.

…the impulse for transgression and a taste for abasement is not so difficult to locate and arouse. Because of course it is thrilling to be astutely defiled. To have every revered trait and inimitable asset compromised, undermined, and subverted.

English, strictly speaking, is not my first language by the way. I haven't yet discovered what my first language is so for the time being I use English words in order to say things. I expect I will always have to do it that way; regrettably I don't think my first language can be written down at all. I'm not sure it can be made external you see. I think it has to stay where it is; simmering in the elastic gloom betwixt my flickering organs.

Mimicry can be unkind, but at least it acknowledges that you’re there.

I rarely acquire any enthusiasm for the opposite sex outside of being drunk.

Communing with the dark, in all its primordial and transformative potency, is somewhat unsettling, certainly. But who on earth wants to keep their feet on the ground on and on?

The desire to come apart irrevocably will always be as strong as, if not stronger than, the drive to establish oneself.

The hopelessness of everything I was trying to occupy myself with was at last glaringly crystal clear. But

Writing could do that. Here was a way of reaching someone, of being with them, when they were not and never could be. Here was where we met. Here was where the distinction between us blurred.

Everybody knows deep down that life is as much about the things that do not happen as the things that do and that’s not something that ought to be glossed over or denied because without frustration there would hardly be any need to daydream.

Sometimes all it takes is just one sentence. Just one sentence, and there you are, part of something that has been part of you since the beginning, whenever that might rightly be. The source, yes, you can feel it thrumming and surging, and it’s such a relief, to feel you are made of much more than just yourself, that you are only a rind really, a rind you should take care of yet mustn’t get too attached to, that you mustn’t be afraid to let melt away now and then.

He'd solved the problem you see—and that's the way some people are. They are ceaselessly finding ways of getting to grips with the world, of surmounting certain antipathies so as to apply themselves to it that little bit more. It's quite admirable really, how they refuse to let anything come between them and the rest of it—Oh, the rest of it! Sort of there, sort of hovering there all the time. Different ideas come to me now and again—strategies I suppose that might inculcate a little more compatibility. I just don't know if I'll ever get the hang of it if you want to know—as a matter of fact I think I've left it a little too late to cultivate the necessary outlook.

One has to have illustrated links with the fair to middling ranks of reality I should think in order for something like Christmas to really work out otherwise it just seems odd and sort of accusatory and one feels turbulent and extrinsic and can't wait for it all to slump backwards into its shambolic velvet envelope and shuffle off down the hill.

And even though the mountain did nothing the mountain was not impervious to the storm and in fact dreaded its retreat and longed for it always to come back, and to come back again.

Later on we often had a book with us. Our fingers tingle, madly, madly yes, just as if they are coming to life.

Yet in my heart I was bereft, grieving – homesick for a place I had never seen. For a place that doesn't exist, yet I belonged there nonetheless. Ridiculous really. Ridiculous, yet so acute and abiding.

Nobody was taking any notice of me yet there was a lovely comforting sensation that beneficent things were being done for me somewhere. I think, as human experiences go, that is one of my favourite ones.

everybody was a lady—the fish lady, the yam lady, the store lady, the teacher lady’.6 She noticed, however, many instances of self-contempt. ‘When I was a child,’ she said, ‘nearly everything about us was bad, you know; they would tell yuh seh yuh have bad hair, that black people bad… and that the language yuh talk was bad. And I know that a lot of people I knew were not bad at all, they were nice people and they talked this language.’7

One sets off to investigate you see, to develop the facility to really notice things so that, over time, and with enough practice, one becomes attuned to the earth’s embedded logos and can experience the enriching joy of moving about in deep and direct accordance with things. Yet invariably this vital process is abruptly thwarted by an idiotic overlay of literal designations and inane alerts so that the whole terrain is obscured and inaccessible until eventually it is all quite formidable. As if the earth were a colossal and elaborate deathtrap. How will I ever make myself at home here if there are always these meddlesome scaremongering signs everywhere I go.

Everybody knows deep down that life is as much about the things that do not happen as the things that do and that’s not something that ought to be glossed over or denied because without frustration there would hardly be any need to daydream. And daydreams return me to my original sense of things and I luxuriate in these fervid primary visions until I am entirely my unalloyed self again. So even though it sometimes feels as if one could just about die from disappointment I must concede that in fact in a rather perverse way it is precisely those things I did not get that are keeping me alive.

Turning the pages. Turning the pages. When we turn the page we are born again. Living and dying and living and dying and living and dying. Again, and again. And really that’s the way it ought to be. The way that reading ought to be done. Yes. Yes. Turning the pages. Turning the pages. With one’s entire life.

an unbearably tense and disorienting paradox that underscores everyday life in a working-class environment—on the one hand it’s an abrasive and in-your-face world, yet, at the same time, much of it seems extrinsic and is perpetually uninvolving. One is relentlessly overwhelmed and understimulated all at the same time.

Quite often I'm terribly disappointed by how things turn out, but it's usually my own fault for the simple reason that I'm too quick to conclude that things have turned out as fully as it is possible for them to turn, when in fact, quite often, they are still on the turn and have some way to go until they have turned out completely.

We do not grow absolutely, chronologically. We grow sometimes in one dimension, and not in another; unevenly. We grow partially. We are relative. We are mature in one realm, childish in another. The past, present, and future mingle and pull us backward, forward, or fix us in the present. We are made up of layers, cells, constellations.

Anansi stories were, up to recently, frequently told to children at bedtime,’ Olive Senior confirms.‘The telling of Anansi stories is part of the tradition of African villages where everyone gathered around a fire at night to hear the old tales. In Jamaica, as in Africa, Anansi stories were in the past never told in the daytime. Among adults they are still told at wakes and moonlight gatherings.’3 Louise listened to many Anancy stories. She also read some, including those in Jamaican Song and Story,4 collected and edited by Walter Jekyll (an Englishman, a mentor of Claude McKay).When the Jekyll collection was republished in 1966 she contributed one of the introductory essays, in which she wrote:

On account of my radical immaturity—characterised by a persistent lack of ambition—real events don’t make much difference to me, as such the impact they have upon my mind is either zilch or blistering, and so, naturally, I have to question my facility to form memories that have any congruity at all with what in fact took place—landmark events and so on included.

In ‘Colonization in Reverse’41 (a famous poem much anthologized) the speaker is presented as a more or less reliable commentator who implies that Jamaicans who come to ‘settle in de motherlan’ are like English people who settled in the colonies. West Indian entrepreneurs, shipping off their countrymen ‘like fire’, turn history upside down. Fire can destroy, but may also be a source of warmth to be welcomed in temperate England. Those people who ‘immigrate an populate’ the seat of the Empire seem, like many a colonizer, ready to displace previous inhabitants. ‘Jamaica live fi box bread/Out a English people mout’ plays on a fear that newcomers might exploit the natives; and some of the immigrants are—like some of the colonizers from ‘the motherland’—lazy and inclined to put on airs. Can England, who faced war and braved the worst, cope with people from the colonies turning history upside down? Can she cope with ‘Colonizin in reverse’?

Afterwards, when people were milling about and nodding in little groups, and I wasn't sure which of the several exits to make immediate use of, one of the academic big guns approached me and commented on my paper. This all happened several years ago by the way – and I'm not absolutely sure why I'm recounting it here since it hardly situates me in a very flattering light – anyway, I don't recall exactly what he said to me, but it was exceedingly condescending and I very very clearly remember thinking why don't you fall over. Why don't you become tangled in some cables near the screen at the front on your way out and fall over and why don't you smack your head off a very sharp corner of the desk where earlier I sat and delivered my oh so charming missive and cut your head open ever so slightly so that a little bit of blood drops out. Just a little trickle of blood so that you don't look injured, only stupid and a bit iffy. Thank you very much, I said.

Fridays always felt different anyway. Friday afternoons especially. Everyone felt it, pupils and teachers alike. You could get away with more on a Friday afternoon because no one was entirely there anyway. Everyone was on a sort of threshold and often did and said anomalous things with the tacit understanding that in the cold light of Monday morning whatever had been said and done last thing on a Friday belonged to a completely different world and ought not to be acknowledged or referred to in any way, now that we were all so firmly installed back in this very familiar and boring one.

Everybody knows deep down that life is as much about the things that do not happen as the things that do and that's not something that ought to be glossed over or denied because without frustration there would hardly be any need to daydream. And daydreams return me to my original sense of things and I luxuriate in these fervid primary visions until I am entirely my unalloyed self again. So even though it sometimes feels as if one could just about die from disappointment I must concede that in fact in a rather perverse way it is precisely those things that I did not get that are keeping me alive.

Out beyond and way back and further past that still. And such was it since. But after all appearances and some afternoons misspent it came to pass not all was done and over with. No, no. None shally shally on that here hill. Ah, but that was idle then and change was not an old hand. No, no. None shilly shilly on that here first rung. So, much girded and with new multitudes, a sun came purple and the hail turned in a year or two. And that was not all. No, no. None ganny ganny on that here moon loose. Turns were taken and time put in, so much heft and grimace, there, with callouses, all along the diagonal. Like no other time and the time taken back, that too like none other that can be compared to a bovine heap raising steam, or the eye-cast of a flailing comet. Back and forth, examining the egg spill and the cord fray and the clowning barnacle. And all day with no break to unwrap or unscrew or squint and flex or soak the brush. No, no. None flim flim on that here cavorting mainstay. From tree to tree and the pond there deepening and some small holes appearing and any number of cornstalks twisting into a thing far from corn. That being the case there was some wretched plotting, turned to stone, holding nothing. No, no. None rubby rubby on that here yardstick. Came then from the region of silt and aster, all along the horse trammel and fire velvet, first these sounds and then their makers. When passed betwixt and entered fully, pails were swung and notches considered. There was no light. No, none. None wzm wzm on that here piss crater. And it being the day, still considered. Oh, all things considered and not one mentioned, since all names had turned in and handed back. Knowing this the hounds disbanded and knowing that the ground muddled headstones and milestones and gallows and the almond-shaped buds of freshest honeysuckle. And among this chafing tumult fates were scrambled and mortality made untidy and pithy vows took themselves a breather. This being the way and irreversible homewards now was a lifted skeletal thing of the past, without due application or undue meaning. No, no. None shap shap on that here domicile shank. From right foot to left, first by the firs, then by the river, hung and loitered, and the blaze there slow to come. All night waking with no benefit of sleeping and the breath cranking and the heart-place levering and the kerosene pervading but failing to jerk a flame from out any one thing. No, none. None whoosh whoosh on that here burnished cunt. Oh, the earth, the earth and the women there, inside the simpering huts, stamped and spiritless, blowing on the coals. Not far away, but beyond the way of return.

It’s not that I want children to fall into the pond per se, though I can’t really see what harm it would do them; it’s that I can’t help but assess the situation from the child’s perspective. And quite frankly I would be disgusted to the point of taking immediate vengeance if I was brought to a purportedly magical place one afternoon in late September and thereupon belted down to the pond, all by myself most likely, only to discover the word pond scrawled on a poxy piece of damp plywood right there beside it. Oh I’d be hopping. That sort of moronic busybodying happens with such galling regularity throughout childhood of course and it never ceases to be utterly vexing.

wanted to find out about men, about the world they lived in and the kinds of things they got up to in that world, the kinds of things too that they thought about as they drifted out of train stations, hung about foreign ports, went up and down escalators, barrelled through revolving doors, looked out of taxi windows, lost a limb, swirled brandy around a crystal tumbler, followed another man, undressed another man’s wife, lay down upon a lawn with arms folded upon their chest, cleaned their shoes, buttered their toast, swam so far out to sea their head looked like a small black dot. I wanted to know the things they felt sad about, regretted, felt enlivened by, drawn towards, were obsessed with.

I feel utterly flimsy, yet I don't look in the mirror, nothing like that; I just stand for a moment, my back to the door and my tapering hands side by side on the worktop, pressing down. Pressing down with the concentrated effort of trying to give myself a little more density. I go to the doorway. I go to the window. I go to the entrance and push closed the top half of the door. And then I move across to the fireplace; sometimes I put both hands flat against the oak beam, and then I turn, and then I finally turn. But no, that is not it. I appear to have turned but I have only twisted in fact; some of me has turned, and some of me has remained away. And yet it is an adequate gesture, enough to create a general impression of having turned fully and thus of being engaged and unopposed, even of enjoying the conversation perhaps. I do not have the courage to take the risk. To risk turning entirely and coming to face something very ordinary. I couldn't stand that so I stay twisted.

You could always go back to school,” Louise said. “You’re never too old to learn.” “But there’s just so much. Not just this world, but so many others. By the time I got caught up, I would be too old.” “To spend the rest of your life learning?” Louise asked, shaking her head in wonderment. “What could be better than that?” Such a twenty-fourth-century attitude, Clare thought.

My absence would hardly be conspicuous anyway since it was going to be a big day in many places that day due to the fact that all kinds of events had been organised all over the country so that all sorts of people could discover and participate in the cultural life in their particular region. That being the case, since I appear to be a very culturally oriented sort of person, it is perfectly plausible that I was already under enormous pressure to negotiate a riveting panoply of worthy ventures further afield.

None of that has anything to do with now by the way. Despite how promising I seem to have made the encounter with the man and the hot water bottle sound it was in fact an ill-starred liaison and, perhaps less surprisingly, the inviability of my academic career eventually acquired a palpability of such insidious force that one day I came out of a shop unwrapping a pack of cigarettes and went nowhere for approximately half an hour. My wherewithal had quite dried up you see, I’d snubbed it for so long it had completely dried up and so I had come to a standstill, not knowing at all whether to turn left or right.

Privacy. Secrets. But it became more and more difficult to get that not-knowing and the deeply glamorous feeling that came with it and now it doesn’t exist at all the outcast minutes of the day gently clawing at you, over here, over here, and it’s harder to know where you are or what you’re doing and how you really feel about any of it. One’s on tenterhooks nearly all the time and there’s nothing remotely glamorous about tenterhooks.

Comunque sia lei deve avermi preparato una tazza di tè, prima di uscire per piazzare un avviso nei pressi dello stagno, che, tra parentesi, tutto è fuorché profondo. Dipendesse da me, non metterei un cartello vicino a uno stagno con su scritto STAGNO, ci scriverei qualcos'altro, tipo SBOBBA PER MAIALI, o lascerei perdere proprio. So qual è lo scopo, so che si vuole evitare che i bambini si avvicinino allo stagno correndo troppo e ci cadano dentro, eppure non sono granché d'accordo. Non è che io voglia vedere bambini ruzzolare nello stagno, malgrado davvero non capisca che male potrebbe fargli; è che non posso fare a meno di soppesare il problema dalla prospettiva di un bambino. E in tutta franchezza mi sentirei disgustata al punto di ordire una vendetta immediata se in un pomeriggio di settembre inoltrato venissi condotta in un luogo di presunta magia e mi fiondassi sullo stagno, quasi certamente sola, per scoprire la parola stagno scribacchiata in modo illeggibile su un misero e umidiccio pezzo di compensato lì accanto. Oh, mi infurierei. Quel genere di idiota invadenza si ripete con tale fastidiosa regolarità nel corso dell'infanzia ed è sempre fonte di estrema irritazione. Vedi si comincia con l'indagare, con lo sviluppare la capacità di notare davvero le cose e, a forza di tempo e con la pratica necessaria, si entra in sintonia con il logos radicato nella terra e si arriva a conoscere l'arricchente gioia di muoversi in accordo diretto e profondo con le cose. Eppure questo processo vitale viene bruscamente intralciato dall'immancabile e stupido dispiego di nomi letterali e avvisi insensati, tanto che l'intero terreno ne risulta oscurato e inaccessibile finché tutto non diventa temibile. Manco la terra fosse un'immensa ed elaborata trappola mortale.

Later on we often had a book with us. Later on. When we were a bit bigger at last though still nowhere near as big as the rest of them we brought over books with us. Oh loads of books. And sat with them there in the grass by the tree. Just one book in fact. Just one, that’s right. Lots of books, one at a time. That’s it, one at a time. We didn’t very much like tons of books did we. No, not really, and neither do we now. We like one book. Yes, we like one book now and we liked one book then. We went to the library for instance and we soon lost the habit didn’t we of taking out lots and lots of books. Yes.

Consistent people give me the creeps. Whoever really trusts the smooth!

For books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul was whose progeny they are; nay, they do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them. —areopagitica, john Milton

Pears don't mix well. Pears should always be small and organised nose to tail in a bowl of their very own and perhaps very occasionally introduced to a stem of the freshest redcurrants, which ought not to be hoisted like a mantle across the freckled belly of the topmost pear, but strewn a little further down so that some of the scarlet berries loll and bask between the slowly shifting gaps.

We have a tendency don’t we of reading the last few sentences on the right page hurriedly. We do actually. We enjoy turning the pages of a book and our anticipation of doing so is obviously fairly fervid and undermines our attention to such an extent that we can’t help but skim over the last couple of sentences on the right page probably without really taking in a single word.

His eyebrows were raised incredulously and I think he said something about so many tears coming out of such a small girl and probably that made me cry even more because it was such a tender and funny thing to say and I would have been so relieved to hear him talk to me that way because when he didn’t look at me at all the world seemed completely bland and indifferent and interminable and I felt so very odious.

No matter what book we had in our hands we found it simply impossible to refrain from wondering incessantly about what kinds of words exactly were inside the other books. We couldn’t help it could we.

When I read Quin I recognise her fidgeting forensic polyvocal style as a powerful and bona fide expression of an unbearably tense and disorienting paradox that underscores everyday life in a working-class environment - on the one hand it's an abrasive and in-your-face world, yet, at the same time, much of it seems extrinsic and is perpetually uninvolving. One is relentlessly overwhelmed and understimulated all at the same time. Is it any wonder then, that such a paradox would engender a heightened aesthetic sensitivity that is as detached as it is perspicacious? Quin mentions somewhere in one of her shorter pieces the 'partition next to my bed', how it 'shook at night from the manoeuvres, snores of my anonymous neighbour.' If your immediate locale doesn't offer you much in terms of dependable boundaries it's not entirely inconceivable is it that you'll end up writing a kaleidoscopic sort of prose that is constantly shuffling the distinction between objects and beings, self and other, and conceives of the world in terms of form and geometry, texture and tone. The walls are paper-thin. You rarely have any privacy. And neither do you have the safety nets, the fenders, the filters, nor the open doors which people from affluent backgrounds enjoy from day one. When you are living with no clear sense of future, day-to-day life is precarious, disjointed, frequently invasive, and beyond your control.

Attribution given to the Honorable Robert Nesta Marley, Peter Tosh, Jimmy Cliff, Marcus Garvey, Usain Bolt, the Honorable Portia Simpson-Miller, Louise Bennett, Grace Jones, and Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce. Deepest gratitude to all the leaders that continue to inspire us to be our best selves.

And as I go along reading it again I’ll underline sentences here and there once more, but they won’t be the same sentences—it’s very likely that the sentences I’ll underline in future will be different from the sentences I underlined in the past, when I was in Tangier—you don’t ever step into the same book twice after all.

So even though it sometimes feels as if one could just about die from disappointment I must concede that in fact in a rather perverse way it is precisely those things I did not get that are keeping me alive.

Lemon Head, the chemistry teacher, found this recurrent animate response vexingly ludicrous and not a little unsettling. It was idiotic, and, worse than that, it was inscrutable.

I’m not long for this world. I’m not long for this world. That’s something I grew accustomed to hearing my grandmother avow while waiting for instance for the kettle to boil. The dull infinite rumbling sound of water shuddering to vapour heaven knows can all of a sudden bring on such celestial yearnings. Or perhaps after, seated. While she stirred sugar into her tea and I herded cake crumbs about the tea plate on my knee with the small engrossed pad of my middle finger. She said it one day while we were both sat waiting for pudding in the living room of my aunt’s house near the brook and my aunt came flying in from the kitchen holding up a large steaming spoon and said very crossly, “Mum! Don’t say things like that in front of her.” But I didn’t mind, I didn’t mind one bit. In fact I rather liked it when she said that and said it myself later on when I got home and was sitting on the edge of my bed. I am not long for this world. I am not long for this world. I was already experiencing the sensation by this time that I was outside of the world, looking in, and the feelings that sense mostly gave rise to were ones of forlornness and anguish. Sat on the edge of my rosebud-patterned bed, repeating my grandmother’s mantra, however, I felt noble, mysterious, and independent. As if I were only visiting this world in any case and had somewhere a million times better to return to. I am not long for this world. I am not long for this world.

Stirring the fractious air, smiling, smiling, now reaching forward. One irrepressible hand coming to rest first of all on a jar of pickled cucumber then moving impishly along to a jar of pickled cucumber containing dill and the Russian man is very fond of dill especially in his pickled cucumber because he likes to eat pickled cucumber as an accompaniment to red salmon and red salmon and dill are natural bedfellows and it is this very jar of pickled cucumber containing dill in fact that the Russian man is settling into his basket when I enter the condiment aisle with a pen in my hand and my hair twisted back into a french plait on my way to checkout 19 where I will sit myself down upon a lopsided swivel chair and commence yet another nine-hour shift because these are the summer months and in the summer I work all the hours the devil sends so I have a sizeable wedge squirreled away for when I return to the college equidistant from the woeful library and the marooned casino slap-bang in the centre of the fastest-growing town in Europe in order to resume my studies in three subjects pertaining to the humanities come September.

And we read not one of them all the way through. It was simply impossible. We couldn’t get engrossed. No matter what book we had in our hands we found it simply impossible to refrain from wondering incessantly about what kinds of words exactly were inside the other books. We couldn’t help it could we. We just couldn’t stop ourself from thinking about the other books and the different kinds of words they each contained and when we picked up one of the other books in order to find out it was just the same.

Amongst the millions of words of poetry and philosophy and theory and prose that were desecrated was a sentence by the nineteenth-century German poet Heinrich Heine, who in 1821 had written in his play Almansor the words: “Dort, wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man auch am Ende Menschen”—“Where they burn books, they will, in the end, also burn people.

And so I would just stand there, shaking perforce on my small doweling perch,feeling helpless and culpable and vicious for reasons I could not really examine nor wholly accept.

OH, TOMATO PUREE—let me lay you out and pummel those rigid furrows and creases!

I wonder actually if anyone will ask what the party is for. Because of the summer I’ll say. It’s because of the summer—this house is very nice in the summer—and that’ll be quite evident to anyone who asks. Yes! It’s for the summer, I’ll say, and that’ll take care of it.

and I was pleased about that, in addition my friend with tenure brought beer and a bottle of my favourite gin,

Look here, it’s perfectly obvious by now to anyone that my head is turned by imagined elsewheres and hardly at all by present circumstances—even so no one can know what trip is going on and on in anyone else’s mind and so, for that reason solely perhaps, the way I go about my business, such as it is, can be very confusing, bewildering, unaccountable—even, actually, offensive sometimes.