Vesuvius Quotes

For believe me! — the secret for harvesting from existence the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment is: to live dangerously! Build your cities on the slopes of Vesuvius! Send your ships into uncharted seas! Live at war with your peers and yourselves! Be robbers and conquerors as long as you cannot be rulers and possessors, you seekers of knowledge! Soon the age will be past when you could be content to live hidden in forests like shy deer! At long last the search for knowledge will reach out for its due: — it will want to rule and possess, and you with it!

We are born into this time and must bravely follow the path to the destined end. There is no other way. Our duty is to hold on to the lost position, without hope, without rescue, like that Roman soldier whose bones were found in front of a door in Pompeii, who, during the eruption of Vesuvius, died at his post because they forgot to relieve him. That is greatness. That is what it means to be a thoroughbred. The honorable end is the one thing that can not be taken from a man.

A book is an arrangement of twenty-six phonetic symbols, ten numerals, and about eight punctuation marks, and people can cast their eyes over these and envision the eruption of Mount Vesuvius or the Battle of Waterloo.

The secret of realizing the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment of existence is: to live dangerously! Build your cities on the slopes of Vesuvius! Send your ships out into uncharted seas! Live in conflict with your equals and with yourselves! Be robbers and ravagers as soon as you ca not be rulers and owners, you men of knowledge! The time will soon past when you could be content to live concealed int he woods like timid deer!

One man's fish is another man's poisson.

Well, what was I to do? For the well-bred gentleman there was clearly only one recourse. I fucked him.

You still waste time with those things, Lenu? We are flying over a ball of fire. The part that has cooled floats on the lava. On that part we construct the buildings, the bridges, and the streets, and every so often the lava comes out of Vesuvius or causes an earthquake that destroys everything. There are microbes everywhere that make us sick and die. There are wars. There is a poverty that makes us all cruel. Every second something might happen that will cause you such suffering that you'll never have enough tears. And what are you doing? A theology course in which you struggle to understand what the Holy Spirit is? Forget it, it was the Devil who invented the world, not the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Do you want to see the string of pearls that Stefano gave me?

It was all quite ghastly and I was very fond of it.

Familiarity makes the lion more dangerous.

Compared to the unleashed forces of warfare and of faith, Mount Vesuvius was kinder to the legacy of antiquity.

Lily might be icy on the outside, but inside she was Vesuvius.

A bronze plaque read: GAIUS PLINIUS CAECILIUS SECUNDUS Dan made a face. "Get a load of the guy with the funny name." "I think that's Pliny the younger, the famous Roman writer," Amy supplied. She bent down to read the English portion of the tablet. "Right. In A.D. 79, Pliny chronicled the destruction of Pompeii by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius. It's one of the earliest eyewitness accounts of a major disaster." Dan yawned. "Doesn't this remind you of the clue hunt? You know–you telling me a bunch of boring stuff, and me not listening?

You entered, Abrupt like “Take it!”, Mauling suede gloves, you tarried, And said: “You know,- I’m soon getting married.” Get married then. It’s all right, I can handle it. You see - I’m calm, of course! Like the pulse Of a corpse. Remember? You used to say: “Jack London, Money, Love and ardour,”-- I saw one thing only: You were La Gioconda, Which had to be stolen! And someone stole you. Again in love, I shall start gambling, With fire illuminating the arch of my eyebrows. And why not? Sometimes, the homeless ramblers Will seek to find shelter in a burnt down house! You’re mocking me? “You’ve fewer emeralds of madness than a beggar kopecks, there’s no disproving this!” But remember Pompeii came to end thus When somebody teased Vesuvius! Hey! Gentlemen! You care for Sacrilege, Crime And war. But have you seen The frightening terror Of my face When It’s Perfectly calm? And I feel- “I” Is too small to fit me. Someone inside me is getting smothered.

The Vesuvius of today is a very poor affair compared to the mighty volcano of Kilauea, in the Sandwich Islands, but I am glad I visited it. It was well worth it.

There is only one world-view that is worthy of us, and which has already been discussed as the Choice of Achilles—better a short life, full of deeds and glory, than a long life without substance. The danger is so great, for every individual, every class, every people, that to cherish any illusion whatsoever is deplorable. Time cannot be stopped; there is no possibility for prudent retreat or wise renunciation. Only dreamers believe there is a way out. Optimism is cowardice. We are born into this time and must courageously follow the path to the end as destiny demands. There is no other way. Our duty is to hold on to the lost post, without hope, without rescue, like the Roman soldier whose bones were found in front of a door in Pompeii, who, during the eruption of Vesuvius, died at his post because they forgot to relieve him. That is greatness. . . . The honorable end is the one thing that can not be taken from a man. P 30

One often hears of writers that rise and swell with their subject, though it may seem but an ordinary one. How, then, with me, writing of this Leviathan? Unconsciously my chirography expands into placard capitals. Give me a condor's quill! Give me Vesuvius' crater for an inkstand! Friends, hold my arms! For in the mere act of penning my thoughts of this Leviathan, they weary me, and make me faint with their out-reaching comprehensiveness of sweep, as if to include the whole circle of the sciences, and all the generations of whales, and men, and mastodons, past, present, and to come, with all the revolving panoramas of empire on earth, and throughout the whole universe, not excluding its suburbs. Such, and so magnifying, is the virtue of a large and liberal theme! We expand to its bulk. To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme. No great and enduring volume can ever be written on the flea, though many there be who have tried it.

Within the last two years it had been called Tony's, Belle's Bar Sinister, The Ole Plantation, Tony's, Alt Wien, Paris Soir--or Sewer--Victor's Vesuvius, Chez Cocotte, York House, Gay Madrid, and Tony's.

There were some so afraid of death that they prayed for death.

I suppose it had never struck him that, Ischia, which he looked at every evening to see what the weather would be like the next day, or Vesuvius, pearly in the dawn, had anything to do with him at all; but when he ceased to have them before his eyes he realized, in some dim fashion that they were as much part of him as his hands and his feet.

I thought I had found a living volcano, a female Vesuvius. I never thought of a human ship going down in an ocean of despair, in a Sargasso of impotence.

Volcanoes be in Sicily And South America I judge from my Geography– Volcanoes nearer here A lava step at any time Am I inclined to climb– A Crater I may contemplate Vesuvius at Home.

One often hears of writers that rise and swell with their subject, though it may seem but an ordinary one. How, then, with me, writing of this leviathan? Unconsciously my chirography expands into placard capitals. Give me a condor’s quill! Give me Vesuvius’ crater for an inkstand! Friends, hold my arms!

I’m no expert, but I know one thing about anger—it’s like alcohol. At some point, if you pour enough in there, it’s coming back up. You may think you’ve built up a tolerance, but the truth is this—no man, not even Unc, can bury it so deep that it doesn’t erupt at some point like Vesuvius and splatter your soul across the earth.

These wafers had entered the mythology of the company, including their names: Tunguska, Vesuvius, Tokyo. The Vesuvius wafer put you on the Bay of Naples at 7:00 a.m. on August 24, A.D. 79, just before burning ash killed everyone. Tunguska left you in Siberia in 1908, just before the giant meteor struck, causing a shock wave that killed every living

People were often good, and did good things, such as the things that had been done to help after Vesuvius erupted, but as soon as those same people were given any authority or power, they abused it, or ignored the human consequences of their actions. And the people who ended up suffering most were always the women, because they had no authority or power

Lord Cut-Glass, in his kitchen full of time, squats down alone to a dogdish, marked Fido, of peppery fish-scraps and listens to the voices of his sixty-six clocks, one for each year of his loony age, and watches, with love, their black-and-white moony loudlipped faces tocking the earth away: slow clocks, quick clocks, pendulumed heart-knocks, china, alarm, grandfather, cuckoo; clocks shaped like Noah's whirring Ark, clocks that bicker in marble ships, clocks in the wombs of glass women, hourglass chimers, tu-wit-tuwoo clocks, clocks that pluck tunes, Vesuvius clocks all black bells and lava, Niagara clocks that cataract their ticks, old time weeping clocks with ebony beards, clocks with no hands for ever drumming out time without ever knowing what time it is. His sixty-six singers are all set at different hours. Lord Cut-Glass lives in a house and a life at siege. Any minute or dark day now, the unknown enemy will loot and savage downhill, but they will not catch him napping. Sixty-six different times in his fish-slimy kitchen ping, strike, tick, chime, and tock.

the secret of realizing the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment of existence is: to live dangerously! Build your cities on the slopes of Vesuvius! Send your ships out into uncharted seas! Live in conflict with your equals and with yourselves! Be robbers and ravagers as long as you cannot be rulers and owners, you men of knowledge!…(283).

Each time Vesuvius erupted, it covered its slopes with a deep layer of a remarkable natural fertilizer called potash, and as a result the mountain supported dozens of species of fruit and vegetables which grew nowhere else in all Italy, a culinary advantage which more than compensated for the area's occasional dangers. In the case of apricots, the varieties included the firm-fleshed Cafona, the juicy Palummella, the bittersweet Boccuccia liscia, the peachlike Pellecchiella and the spiky-skinned but incomparably succulent Spinosa.

What about light then? All things, once seen, they didn't just die, that couldn't be. It must be then that somewhere, searching the world, perhaps in the dripping multiboxed honeycombs where light was an amber sap stored by pollen-fired bees, or in the thirty thousand lenses of the moon dragonfly's gemmed skull you might find all the colors and sights of the world in any one year. Or pour one single drop of this dandelion wine beneath a microscope and perhaps the entire world of July Fourth would firework out in Vesuvius showers.

I'm pretty nifty at thinking on my feet, even when I'm actually sitting down with a renter in my embrace, but this fellow's sudden appearance had me more than a little stumped

If I was to establish a system, it would be, that Mountains are produced by Volcanoes, and not Volcanoes by Mountains.

May not subterraneous fire be considered as the great plough (if I may be allowed the expression) which Nature makes use of to turn up the bowels of the earth?

If there was a volcano under their feet, a Vesuvius that could erupt and bury this modern-day Pompeii at any moment, the best thing to do was dance on it.

Chartres Cathedral’ after Corot, of the ‘Fountains of Saint-Cloud’ after Hubert Robert, and of ‘Vesuvius’ after Turner,

The imagination circuit is taught to respond to the most minimal of cues. A book is an arrangement of twenty-six phonetic symbols, ten numerals, and about eight punctuation marks, and people can cast their eyes over these and envision the eruption of Mount Vesuvius or the Battle of Waterloo. But it's no longer necessary for teachers and parents to build these circuits. Now there are professionally produced shows with great actors, very convincing sets, sound, music. Now there's the information highway. We don't need the circuits any more than we need to know how to ride horses. Those of us who had imagination circuits built can look in someone's face and see stories there; to everyone else, a face will just be a face.

Mr. Nash’s travels on the Continent with the painter William Henry Teale, a journey which gave us not only the former’s Travels, but the latter’s grand canvases of sunsets at Vesuvius.

Somewhere, a book said once, all the talk ever talked, all the songs ever sung, still lived, had vibrated way out in space and if you could travel to Far Centauri you could hear George Washington talking in his sleep or Caesar surprised at the knife in his back. So much for sounds. What about light then? All things, once seen, they didn't just die, that couldn't be. It must be then that somewhere, searching the world, perhaps in the dripping multiboxed honeycombs where light was an amber sap stored by pollen-fired bees, or in the thirty thousand lenses of the noon dragonfly's gemmed skull you might find all the colors and sights of the world in any one year. Or pour one single drop of this dandelion wine beneath a microscope and perhaps the entire world of July Fourth would firework out in Vesuvius showers.

here is Vesuvius which reminds you every day that the greatest undertaking of powerful men, the most splendid work, can be reduced to nothing in a few seconds by the fire, and the earthquake, and the ash, and the sea.

I'll put my hand in no man's hand,' said Mr. Micawber, gasping, puffing, and sobbing, to that degree that he was like a man fighting with cold water, 'until I have—blown to fragments—the—a—detestable—serpent—HEEP! I'll partake of no one's hospitality, until I have—a—moved Mount Vesuvius—to eruption—on—a—the abandoned rascal—HEEP! Refreshment—a—underneath this roof—particularly punch—would—a—choke me—unless—I had—previously—choked the eyes—out of the head—a—of—interminable cheat, and liar—HEEP! I—a—I'll know nobody—and—a—say nothing—and—a—live nowhere—until I have crushed—to—a—undiscoverable atoms—the—transcendent and immortal hypocrite and perjurer—HEEP!

Mount Vesuvius has always been my domain. The hottest hells of the earth cannot touch our kind. Know true darkness by how it embraces your fire, your blood, or both, and beware the bright light of day. “Thank you, Father.

At times I see them as if I were walking through the streets of Pompeii before the eruption of Vesuvius. This is one of the historian's delights and, even more, his sorrow. If we see someone doing something for the last time, even just eating a piece of bread, this activity becomes wondrously profound. We participate in the transmutation of the ephemeral into the sacramental. We have inklings of eras during which such a sight was an everyday occurrence.

You still waste time with those things, Lenù? We are flying over a ball of fire. The part that has cooled floats on lava. On that part we construct buildings, the bridges, and the streets, and every so often the lava comes out of Vesuvius or causes an earthquake that destroys everything. There are microbes everywhere that make us sick and die. There are wars. There is a poverty that makes us cruel. Every second something might happen that will cause you such suffering that you'll never have enough tears. And what are you doing? A theology course in which you struggle to understand what the Holy Spirit is? Forget it, it was the Devil who invented the world, not the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

Do I think it was inherent nobility that brought us out here?” He shook his head. “Maybe. I don’t call it nobility, though. I think it’s our innate human need to champion the underdog. We are constant optimists. We’re the emotional descendents of the caveman who stood defiant in the front of the wooly mammoth. We rebuild cities at the base of Vesuvius, get back on the bicycle when we fall off, whack that hornet’s nest every spring. Humans cheer for the couldn’t be, believe in the shouldn’t be. We love causes; the harder, the more lost they are, the more we love them. Is that nobility?Maybe. Maybe it’s a pernicious genetic defect that makes our species susceptible to shared delusion. Whatever it is, it keeps life interesting.

The imagination circuit is taught to respond to the most minimal of cues. A book is an arrangement of 26 phonetic symbols, 10 numbers, and about 8 punctuation marks, and people can cast their eyes over these and envision the eruption of Mount Vesuvius or the Battle of Waterloo.

This led to a discussion of whether volcanoes were really the fires from Vulcan’s forge or some sort of natural phenomenon, like storms and floods. I was of the latter opinion, because Vulcan is reputed to be the greatest of smiths and I doubt he would let his fires get out of control.

There was hope for peace, but there will be no peace here. Not soon. There was hope for quiet, but there will be no quiet here. Not in this generation. The foundations of the home we founded are somewhat shaky, and repeating earthquakes rattle it. So what we really have in this land is an ongoing adventure. An odyssey. The Jewish state does not resemble any other nation. What this nation has to offer is not security or well-being or peace of mind. What it has to offer is the intensity of life on the edge. The adrenaline rush of living dangerously, living lustfully, living to the extreme. If a Vesuvius-like volcano were to erupt tonight and end our Pompeii, this is what it will petrify: a living people. People that have come from death and were surrounded by death but who nevertheless put up a spectacular spectacle of life. People who danced the dance of life to the very end.

Isn't that the essence of literature?...Our ability to identify with characters, no matter that they're separated from us by thousands of miles and hundreds of lifetimes. We may have no Mount Vesuvius looming over us. It may not be lava and ashes we fear. But we look at these forms, and we know what they felt.

Perhaps it was a lost opportunity. There’s always a special thrill to the forbidden, or so they say.

I’d seen a thousand lifetimes come and go, but had never truly lived.

All thinking people are in constant need of more books.

We are so stricken We are so stricken that we think we're dying when the street casts an evil word at us. The street does not know it, but it cannot stand such a weight; it is not used to seeing a Vesuvius of pain break out. Its memories of primeval times are obliterated, since the light became artificial and angels only play with birds and flowers or smile in a child's dream

When I’m with you, it’s like I’ve been seeing black-and-white and you’re the only spot of color; like I’m drowning and falling and gasping for breath all at once, and I feel so unbelievably happy.

And there’s no holding back that lava flow. Like Mount Vesuvius, I blow. All the tears I’ve never cried, all the grief I never expressed, all the fury and the sorrow come pouring out until I’m sobbing like a very small girl, wailing while their hands stroke me and pet my head, while arms hold me solid and voices whisper, “Go ahead and cry; we’ve got you.” I’ve been so lonely for such a very long time. We’ve got you.

to substitute for the bulk of it what was art still, to introduce, as it might be, several ‘thicknesses’ of art; instead of photographs of Chartres Cathedral, of the Fountains of Saint-Cloud, or of Vesuvius she would inquire of Swann whether some great painter had not made pictures of them, and preferred to give me photographs of ‘Chartres Cathedral’ after Corot, of the ‘Fountains of Saint-Cloud’ after Hubert Robert, and of ‘Vesuvius’ after Turner, which were a stage higher in the scale of art.

The men also had more trouble keeping their work secret. It was easier for women, but the men all wanted to brag about going back to the past. Of course, they were forbidden by all sorts of contractual arrangements, but contracts could be forgotten after a few drinks in a bar. That was why Kramer had informed them all about the existence of several specially burned nav wafers. These wafers had entered the mythology of the company, including their names: Tunguska, Vesuvius, Tokyo. The Vesuvius wafer put you on the Bay of Naples at 7:00 a.m. on August 24, A.D. 79, just before burning ash killed everyone. Tunguska left you in Siberia in 1908, just before the giant meteor struck, causing a shock wave that killed every living thing for hundreds of miles. Tokyo put you in that city in 1923, just before the earthquake flattened it. The idea was if word of the project became public, you might end up with the wrong wafer on your next trip out. None of the military types were quite sure whether any of this was true, or just company mythology. Which was just how Kramer liked it.

Where, where all the summer dogs leaping like dolphins in the wind-braided and unbraided tides of what? Where lightning smell of Green Machine or trolley? Did the wine remember? It did not? Or seemed not, anyway. Somewhere, a book said once, all the talk ever talked, all the songs ever sung, still lived, had vibrated way out in space and if you could travel to Far Centauri you could hear George Washington talking in his sleep or Caesar surprised at the knife in his back. So much for sounds. What about light then? All things, once seen, they didn't just die, that couldn't be. It must be then that somewhere, searching the world, perhaps in the dripping multiboxed honeycombs where light was an amber sap stored by pollen-fired bees, or in the thirty thousand lenses of the noon dragonfly's hemmed skull you might find all the colors and sights of the world in any one year. Or pour one single drop of this dandelion wine beneath a microscope and perhaps the entire world of July Fourth would firework out in Vesuvius showers. This he would have to believe. And yet... looking here at this bottle which by its number signalized the day when Colonel Freeleigh had stumbled and fallen six feet into the earth, Douglas could not find so much as a gram of dark sediment, not a speck of the great flouring buffalo dust, not a flake of sulphur from the guns at Shiloh...

Here’s what happens when a single mom meets New York City’s hottest fireman… “Then…seductively…as if he received instruction not from the FDNY’s training school but at Chippendale’s…he slowly inches each suspender off his bare shoulders.” “You must know that exhilarating feeling of a man’s body on top of yours, all that power and muscle pressing you into the bed, the glorious taste of his tongue in your mouth, the manly scent that washes over you and makes you want to melt underneath him.” “Let’s not forget about his nine inches of shapely fireman hose dangling so close in front of my face the scent launches me into a blissful fever.” “Every place he touches contradicts his chosen profession, because instead of putting out a fire he surely starts one.” “I’m so darn helpless in the arms of this powerful, young, ripped personification of New York’s Bravest that I feel myself about to erupt in the most earth shattering explosion since Mount Vesuvius last announced her presence.” “I wonder if he could be enticed to show us a few maneuvers on the brass pole.” “He orchestrates his own personal opera, inspiring high notes with kisses and licks along my elongated nipples, and deep moans with hands that caress my belly.” “We are drawn uncontrollably to each other and have no power to resist, only the tremendous desire to experience everything in its most intense form.

A fair questioin. You've been to Naples. Imagine it five hundred years ago. Would it have made a difference?" "I've never been to Naples, Mr. Stone. But yeah, anywhere would have been totally different. It's not about Italy. It's about isolation and freedom and wanting more than you have." "True.True. But...I was so sure.Didn't you talk about Vesuvius when we read The Last Days of Pompeii?" "I think you might be confusing me with someone else." "No,no.I'm quite sure it was you. Wasn't it?" "No.It wasn't." "Oh,now,Ella. I distinctly remember something about the cleansing aspects of fire...Oh." "Wrong aspects, Mr. Stone." "Right,right. Of course. My mistake. Okay. No harm done. So,about islands...

The décor makes Miriam want to dry heave – it's all down-home country fun with a curious fixation on roosters. Katey hangs her keys on a wooden rooster whose feet are little hooks. She takes a cookie out of a ceramic jar shaped like a rooster. Embroidered rooster pillows. A rooster rug by the door. Miriam tries to bite back the words but they're like butterflies that duck the swooping net. "You sure do love cock," she says. Katey blanches, shocked. Blood draining from her face. "Sorry," Miriam says. "Couldn't help myself. It's like a sickness." But then the teacher quivers and shakes and erupts like Vesuvius, her sudden and uncontrolled laughter swiftly drowning out worry. "I guess I do love…" she says, tears streaming from her eyes. "Cock!

The firepower uncovered in March 2005 in Sant’Anastasia, a town at the foot of Vesuvius, was stunning. The discovery came about partly by chance, and partly by the lack of discipline of the arms traffickers: customers and drivers started fighting on the street because they couldn’t agree on the price. When the carabinieri arrived, they removed the interior panels of the truck parked near the brawl, discovering one of the largest mobile depots they had ever seen. Uzis with four magazines, seven clips, and 112 380-caliber bullets, Russian and Czech machine guns able to fire 950 shots a minute. (Nine hundred fifty shots a minute was the firing power of American helicopters in Vietnam.) Weapons for ripping apart tanks and entire divisions of men, not for Camorra family fights on the slopes of Mount Vesuvius. Almost new, well-oiled, rifle numbers still intact, just in from Kraków.

Time passes, and as the hot midday sun and cool mountain nights alternately bake and freeze the blackened landscape of Vesuvius, something remarkable happens. Gradually, the streams of cold lava are colonized by a lichen, stereocaulon vesuvianim. This lichen is so tiny that it is almost invisible to the naked eye, but as it grows, it turns the lava from black to silvery gray. Where the lichen has gone, other plants can follow- first mugwort, valerian, and Mediterranean scrub, but later ilex and birch trees, along with dozens of species of apricot. Meanwhile, the clinkers and ash that covered the landscape like so much grubby gray snow are slowly, inexorably, working their way into the fields and the vineyards, crumbling as they do so, adding their richness to the thick black soil, and an incomparable flavor to tomatoes, zucchini, eggplants, fruit and all the other produce which grows there.

Preparatory men. I welcome all signs that a more manly, a warlike, age is about to begin, an age which, above all, will give honor to valor once again. For this age shall prepare the way for one yet higher, and it shall gather the strength which this higher age will need one day - this age which is to carry heroism into the pursuit of knowledge and wage wars for the sake of thoughts and their consequences. To this end we now need many preparatory valorous men who cannot leap into being out of nothing - any more than out of the sand and slime of our present civilisation and metropolitanism: men who are bent on seeking for that aspect in all things which must be overcome; men characterised by cheerfulness, patience, unpretentiousness, and contempt for all great vanities, as well as by magnanimity in victory and forbearance regarding the small vanities of the vanquished; men possessed of keen and free judgement concerning all victors and the share of chance in every victory and every fame; men who have their own festivals, their own weekdays, their own periods of mourning, who are accustomed to command with assurance and are no less ready to obey when necessary, in both cases equally proud and serving their own cause; men who are in greater danger, more fruitful, and happier! For, believe me, the secret of the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment of existence is: to live dangerously! Build your cities under Vesuvius! Send your ships into uncharted seas! Live at war with your peers and yourselves! Be robbers and conquerors, as long as you cannot be rulers and owners, you lovers of knowledge! Soon the age will be past when you could be satisfied to live like shy deer, hidden in the woods! At long last the pursuit of knowledge will reach out for its due: it will want to rule and own, and you with it!

What a lovely day again; were it a new-made world, and made for a summer-house to the angels, and this morning the first of its throwing open to them, a fairer day could not dawn upon that world. Here's food for thought, had Ahab time to think; but Ahab never thinks; he only feels, feels, feels; that's tingling enough for mortal man! to think's audacity. God only has that right and privilege. Thinking is, or ought to be, a coolness and a calmness; and our poor hearts throb, and our poor brains beat too much for that. And yet, I've sometimes thought my brain was very calm—frozen calm, this old skull cracks so, like a glass in which the contents turned to ice, and shiver it. And still this hair is growing now; this moment growing, and heat must breed it; but no, it's like that sort of common grass that will grow anywhere, between the earthy clefts of Greenland ice or in Vesuvius lava. How the wild winds blow it; they whip it about me as the torn shreds of split sails lash the tossed ship they cling to. A vile wind that has no doubt blown ere this through prison corridors and cells, and wards of hospitals, and ventilated them, and now comes blowing hither as innocent as fleeces. Out upon it!—it's tainted. Were I the wind, I'd blow no more on such a wicked, miserable world. I'd crawl somewhere to a cave, and slink there. And yet, 'tis a noble and heroic thing, the wind! who ever conquered it? In every fight it has the last and bitterest blow. Run tilting at it, and you but run through it. Ha! a coward wind that strikes stark naked men, but will not stand to receive a single blow. Even Ahab is a braver thing—a nobler thing that that. Would now the wind but had a body; but all the things that most exasperate and outrage mortal man, all these things are bodiless, but only bodiless as objects, not as agents. There's a most special, a most cunning, oh, a most malicious difference! And yet, I say again, and swear it now, that there's something all glorious and gracious in the wind. These warm Trade Winds, at least, that in the clear heavens blow straight on, in strong and steadfast, vigorous mildness; and veer not from their mark, however the baser currents of the sea may turn and tack, and mightiest Mississippies of the land swift and swerve about, uncertain where to go at last. And by the eternal Poles! these same Trades that so directly blow my good ship on; these Trades, or something like them—something so unchangeable, and full as strong, blow my keeled soul along!

How about we meet in the Vesuvius?’ I suggested. ‘That spieler in Greek Street? Thought it closed down.’ ‘The new owner kept it open.’ ‘Why did he do that?’ ‘Because the V is a place of great cultural significance.’ ‘It’s a shithole.’ ‘Can’t it be both?’ I asked.

Vesuvius

Pliny was persuaded to explore a peculiar cloud formation that appeared to be coming from the summit of the local mountain, Vesuvius. He was duly rowed ashore, visited a local village to calm the panicked inhabitants—and was promptly caught up in a massive eruption. He died of asphyxiation by volcanic gases on August 24, leaving behind him a vast reputation and, as memorial, a single word in the lexicon of modern vulcanology, Plinian. A Plinian eruption is now defined as an almighty, explosive eruption that all but destroys the entire volcano from which it emanates. And the most devastating Plinian event of the modern era occurred 1,804 years, almost to the day, after Pliny the Elder’s death: at Krakatoa.)

found myself lost in thought. What could we learn from the tragedy of Pompeii? At any moment disaster can come upon anyone. In our complacency, we fail to grasp the impermanence of all that is material. I thought of the bubonic plague that had ravaged Europe, the atomic bomb that leveled Hiroshima, the earthquakes and fires that had destroyed cities in America. Through the history of mankind, the powers of nature take everything away from us. Why put off seeking the eternal jewel of enlightenment? Now is the time. As Mount Vesuvius had erupted, leaving a civilization in ashes, there had erupted from my heart an exclusive commitment to the path of spirituality, to leave all else in the ashes of my past.

In fact, a marriage was normally contracted, as the Romans put it, ‘by practice’: that is, in our terms, ‘by cohabitation’. If you lived together for a year, you were married. It

Buried Cities During the Roman Empire, wealthy Romans took vacations in the cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum. The people in these towns did not know that nearby Mount Vesuvius doomed them. On August 24 in the year A.D. 79, the top blew off the mountain. Hot rock and ash buried Pompeii and Herculaneum. An estimated five thousand people died when their houses collapsed or they choked to death on the ash. After the Roman Empire ended, the people in neighboring cities forgot Pompeii and Herculaneum. In the sixteenth century, an architect named Domenico Fontana found evidence that cities were buried under 20 feet (6 m) of earth. It was another two hundred years before anyone began digging. In the 1800s, archaeologists were stunned to discover the perfectly preserved forms of people who had died trying to flee the volcano. They also uncovered graceful courtyards and beautiful homes with elegant tile floors and statues. These discoveries helped scientists learn what the daily life of the ancient Romans might have been like. In 2002, they found that the port area along the Gulf of Naples had houses built on stilts. Still more mysteries wait to be uncovered.

Rumbling Mountains Four active volcanoes shake the southern Apennines. One of these, Mount Vesuvius, lies on the shore of the Bay of Naples. The people who lived near it two thousand years ago didn’t know it was a volcano. Then, in A.D. 79, Vesuvius suddenly blew its top and hot ash filled the sky, burying the city of Pompeii and neighboring towns. Over the centuries, Vesuvius has erupted again from time to time, often with little warning. Mount Etna, on the island of Sicily, is more than three times higher than Vesuvius. It is one of the world’s most active volcanoes, producing frequent lava flows. Italy’s other two active volcanoes, Stromboli and Vulcano, belong to a group of islands called the Aeolians, off the northern coast of Sicily. Earthquakes also strike Italy. In 1693, an estimated one hundred thousand people died in an earthquake in Sicily. The most deadly recent quake in Italy occurred near Naples in 1980. It killed three thousand people.

Naples and Pompeii Today we took the express train south to Naples. The guide on our city tour pointed out some of the magnificent cathedrals. We also explored the National Archaeological Museum. It contains some of the finest treasures in the world. It has coins, paintings, household items, and other artifacts from nearby Pompeii and Herculaneum. In A.D. 79 when Mt. Vesuvius erupted, these ancient cities were covered with a thick layer of hot ash and pumice stone. Thousands of people died. When archaeologists excavated the city more than 200 years ago, they found intact houses, temples, and shops. They even unearthed a bakery with bread still in the oven!

Here indeed was the great defect of the Greek mind: it was not disciplined; it lacked limiting and steadying traditions; it moved freely in an uncharted field, and ran too readily to theories and conclusions. So Greek philosophy leaped on to heights unreached again, while Greek science limped behind. Our modern danger is precisely opposite; inductive data fall upon us from all sides like the lava of Vesuvius; we suffocate with uncoördinated facts; our minds are overwhelmed with science breeding and multiplying into specialistic chaos for want of synthetic thought and a unifying philosophy. We are all mere fragments of what a man might be.

It’s not on any map, but it’s there. It’s invisible, but there it is. A barrier that makes the memory of the Berlin Wall look ridiculous: raised to separate those who have from those who need, it divides the globe into north and south, and draws borders within each country and within each city. When the south of the world commits the affront of scaling the walls and venturing where it shouldn’t, the north reminds it, with truncheons, of its proper place. And the same thing happens to those who attempt to leave the zones of the damned in each country and each city. Football, mirror of everything, reflects this reality. In the middle of the 1980s, when Napoli started playing the best football in Italy thanks to the magical influx of Maradona, fans in the north of the country reacted by unsheathing the old weapons of scorn. Neapolitans, usurpers of prohibited glory, were snatching trophies from the ever powerful, and it was time to punish the insolence of the intruding scum from the south. In the stadiums of Milan and Turin, banners insulted: ‘Neapolitans, welcome to Italy.’ Or they evoked cruelty: ‘Vesuvius, we’re counting on you.’ And chants that were the children of fear and the grandchildren of racism resounded more loudly than ever: What a stench, the dogs are running, all because the Neapolitans are coming. Oh cholerics buried by quake, you’ve never seen soap, not even a cake, Napoli shit, Napoli cholera, you’re the shame of all Italia.

I saw the Mountain erupt in snow and Rain, all the Time.

Manibus date lilia plenis. Give lilies with full hands.

Mors ultima linea rerum est. Death is everything’s final limit.

Built in the early days after the Romans colonized Campania, the structure was vastly older than Rome’s famous Coliseum.

he would not love her, not with the sort of passion to be found in the myths of old. Marriage was about duty and loyalty. Love was something else altogether.

My old friend Pliny, not long before Vesuvius put an end to him, wrote that the ostrich hides its head in a bush when attacked and thinks its whole body is concealed,” said Martial. “See how the attendants have placed bits of shrubbery all around the arena, so that the bird may demonstrate its foolish behavior?

Mimosas bloomed in the shadow of Lyme’s very own Vesuvius, the conical hill called Golden Cap.

There is only one world-view that is worthy of us, and which has already been discussed as the Choice of Achiles—better a short life, full of deeds and glory, than a long life without substance. The danger is so great, for every individual, every class, every people, that to cherish any illusion whatsoever is deplorable. Time cannot be stopped; there is no possibility for prudent retreat or wise renunciation. Only dreamers believe there is a way out. Optimism is cowardice. We are born into this time and must courageously follow the path to the end as destiny demands. There is no other way. Our duty is to hold on to the lost post, without hope, without rescue, like the Roman soldier whose bones were found in front of a door in Pompeii, who, during the eruption of Vesuvius, died at his post because they forgot to relieve him. That is greatness. . . . The honorable end is the one thing that can not be taken from a man.

I was sitting on Mount Vesuvius. And my ass was about to get Pompeii-ed.

It was her smile that took me captive the day we met, and never once let me go. There was an authentic quality to her smile that made people stop and look; a basic human truth that seemed to emanate from deep within her and naturally find its way upward and out. Like the magma flow from Vesuvius, there was simply no stopping Cathy's smile. It could freeze people where they stood and hold them there, sometimes forever. That's what happened to me anyway.

A vampire’s strength can cause catastrophic property damage. While many believe Pompeii was destroyed by Mount Vesuvius, the disaster was the result of a very heated dispute between two Sicilian vampires over a cannoli recipe. Even as vampires, Sicilians take their cannoli very seriously.” --“Vampire Might,” Dexter Bloodgood’s Survival Guide for Modern Vampires, 19th Edition

They were like two landowners in Pompeii arguing over who had the better view of Vesuvius.

A Doorway Opens October 13 AT ITS HEART, I think, religion is mystical. Moses with his flocks in Midian, Buddha under the Bo tree, Jesus up to his knees in the waters of Jordan: each of them responds to something for which words like shalom, oneness, God even, are only pallid, alphabetic souvenirs. “I have seen things,” Aquinas told a friend, “that make all my writings seem like straw.” Religion as institution, as ethics, as dogma, as social action—all of this comes later and in the long run maybe counts for less. Religions start, as Frost said poems do, with a lump in the throat, to put it mildly, or with the bush going up in flames, the rain of flowers, the dove coming down out of the sky. As for the man in the street, any street, wherever his own religion is a matter of more than custom, it is likely to be because, however dimly, a doorway opened in the air once to him too, a word was spoken, and, however shakily, he responded. The debris of his life continues to accumulate, the Vesuvius of the years scatters its ashes deep and much gets buried alive, but even under many layers the tell-tale heart can go on beating still. Where it beats strong, there starts pulsing out from it a kind of life that is marked by, above all things perhaps, compassion: that sometimes fatal capacity for feeling what it is like to live inside another’s skin and for knowing that there can never really be peace and joy for any until there is peace and joy finally for all. Where it stops beating altogether, little is left religiously speaking but a good man, not perhaps in Mark Twain’s “the worst sense of the word” but surely in the grayest and saddest: the good man whose goodness has become cheerless and finicky, a technique for working off his own guilts, a gift with no love in it which neither deceives nor benefits any for long.

He laughed, lifted his head, and kissed her. “You can do anything you damn well please, just so long as you do it with me.” She stretched out over him so they were touching, toes to lips. Kissed him, softly, gently, loving each and every jolt and twitch of his body against hers and the deep, pleasure-filled sighs that followed. “That’s a deal I can definitely live with for as long as you can put up with me.” “Ah, ligos Vesuvius. That will be for always.

appears this way in graffiti from the city of Pompeii, which was preserved to an extraordinary degree when Mt. Vesuvius erupted in AD 79. “Corus licks cunt” (Corus cunnum lingit) and “Jucundus licks the cunt of Rustica” (Iucundus cunum lingit Rusticae), for example, appear on Pompeian apartment buildings.

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curiosity. In August of 79 A.D., while commanding a fleet in the Bay of Naples, the Roman statesman and author witnessed a volcano erupting nearby and went ahsore to get a closer look. Bad move:he landed barely two miles from Pompeii, the eruption was that of Vesuvius, and within forty-eight hours the poisonous gases it spewed into the atmosphere had killed him'.

She traced a pattern across the upper parts of her breasts that erupted above the halter top like a Vesuvius of flesh.

To our far left was the little island of Capri, and to the right, around the bay, Vesuvius smouldered away in the distance, rising green and blue above the horizon with the sprawling city of Naples around its base.

His reputation is based largely on his thirty-seven-volume Natural History, an immense masterpiece in which, among countless other delights, is the first use of the word from which we derive today’s encyclopedia. It was during the late summer of A.D. 79, while pursuing his official task of investigating piracy in the Bay of Naples, that Pliny was persuaded to explore a peculiar cloud formation that appeared to be coming from the summit of the local mountain, Vesuvius. He was duly rowed ashore, visited a local village to calm the panicked inhabitants—and was promptly caught up in a massive eruption. He died of asphyxiation by volcanic gases on August 24, leaving behind him a vast reputation and, as memorial, a single word in the lexicon of modern vulcanology, Plinian. A Plinian eruption is now defined as an almighty, explosive eruption that all but destroys the entire volcano from which it emanates. And the most devastating Plinian event of the modern era occurred 1,804 years, almost to the day, after Pliny the Elder’s death: at Krakatoa.) Pepper has a confused reputation.

No one knows for sure who first invented glass. The earliest and most famous origin story comes from Pliny the Elder, the Roman soldier-intellectual who died in the eruption of Vesuvius in ad 79. The tale goes that many centuries earlier, Phoenician sailors had landed on a beach in what is now Israel. The Phoenicians, the great traders of the ancient era, were importing blocks of natron, an early form of soap rich in sodium (natron is why sodium’s chemical symbol is Na). Before turning in for the night, the Phoenicians lit a fire on the beach, and in the absence of anywhere else to rest their pots, they perched them on some of the natron blocks. As they lit their fire and heated the blocks of natron, something extraordinary happened. Pliny writes: “Upon its being subjected to the action of the fire, in combination with the sand of the seashore, they beheld transparent streams flowing forth of a liquid hitherto unknown: this, it is said, was the origin of glass.”[5

worship of even the very great is finally useless, Emerson says: It is one central fire, which, flaming now out of the lips of Etna, lightens the capes of Sicily, and, now out of the throat of Vesuvius, illuminates the towers and vineyards of Naples. It is one light which beams out of a thousand stars. It is one soul which animates all men.13 Emerson’s audience on that last day of August was not the assembly of judges, professors, ministers, school-board members, and other persons who had been institutionalized. It was, as it would henceforward be, the single hearer, the solitary reader, the friend—unknown but always singular—who felt and still may feel personally addressed and shaken by the collar when encountering Emerson’s startling observation that meek young persons “grow up in libraries, believing it their duty to accept the views which Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon have given, forgetful that Cicero, Locke and Bacon were only young men in libraries when they wrote those books.”14

The next pair is inspired by my hometown of San Francisco, where I often searched for rare spices and teas in Chinatown. My Chinese tea collection begins with a dark chocolate truffle infused with Lapsang Souchong tea. Cultivated in the Wuyi mountain region in China, the tea leaves are dried over pinewood fires, which give the leaves a smoky, aromatic flavor." Finding Lauro in the crowd, Celina echoed his description. With a smile tugging at her lips, she added, "You might find it reminiscent of the rich earth around Vesuvius, moist with morning dew." Bringing his hand to his lips, Lauro sent her a happy kiss across the crowd. "Also from the Wuyi Mountains of northern Fujian comes oolong tea, which can be fruity, green, or sweet. This oolong is a sweet, roasted woody version.

Live At Pompeii had turned out to be a surprisingly good attempt to film our live set a year or so before. We had been approached by the director Adrian Maben, whose idea was to shoot us playing in the empty amphitheatre beneath Vesuvius. Adrian described the concept of the movie as ‘an anti-Woodstock film, where there would be nobody present, and the music and the silence and the empty amphitheatre would mean as much as, if not more than, a crowd of thousands’. Opening and closing the set with ‘Echoes’, we played as if to an audience, intercut with shots of bubbling, steaming and flowing lava, or of the band stalking across the volcanic landscape. At a time when rock films were either straight concert footage or attempts to copy A Hard Day’s Night, the idea was appealing.

Had you been born in a society that treated women as the equals of men, it would never occur to you that Miss Carter shouldn’t lead a dig or that men would balk at her orders.” “We have free will, but we are not free from original sin,” Mr. Taylor said.

curse Lady Emily Hargreaves and her life and mind and memory and liver and lungs mixed up together, and her words, thoughts and memory; thus may she be unable to speak what things are concealed, nor be able to communicate anything she finds. I bind her tongue,

Lucky, I think, are those men with a god-given gift for doing what deserves to be written about or writing what deserves to be read – and very lucky are those who can do both. Through his own books and yours, my uncle will be one of these. Pliny the Younger to Tacitus, Letter 6.16