Nostalgia

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• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  we listen to a steady sound, we take it in in discrete pulses of recognition, calling it successively 'the same! the same! the same!' The case stands no otherwise with time. After a small number of beats our impression of the amount we have told off becomes quite vague. Our only way of knowing it accurately is by counting, or noticing the clock, or through some other symbolic conception.[537] When the times exceed hours or days, the conception is absolutely symbolic. We think of the amount we mean either solely as a name , or by running over a few salient dates therein, with no pretence of imagining the full durations that lie between them. No one has anything like a perception of the greater length of the time between now and the first century than of that between now and the tenth. To an historian, it is true, the longer interval will suggest a host of additional dates and events, and so appear a more multitudinous thing. And for the same reason most people will think they directly perceive the length of the past fortnight to exceed that of the past week. But there is properly no comparative time intuition in these cases at all. It is but dates and events, representing time; their abundance symbolizing its length. I am sure that this is so, even where the times compared are no more than an hour or so in length. It is the same with Spaces of many miles, which we always compare with each other by the numbers which measure them.[538] From this we pass naturally to speak of certain familiar variations in our estimation of lengths of time. In general, a time filled with varied and interesting experiences seems short in passing, but long as we look back. On the other hand, a tract of time empty of experiences seems long in passing, but in retrospect short . A week of travel and sight-seeing may subtend an angle more like three weeks in the memory; and a month of sickness hardly yields more memories than a day. The length in retrospect depends obviously on the multitudinousness of the memories which the time affords. Many objects, events, changes, many subdivisions, immediately widen the view as we look back. Emptiness, monotony, familiarity, make it shrivel up. In Von Holtei's 'Vagabonds' one Anton is described as revisiting his native village. "Seven years," he exclaims, "seven years since I ran away! More like seventy it seems, so much has happened. I cannot think of it all without becoming dizzy—at any rate not now. And yet again, when I look at the village, at the church-tower, it seems as if I could hardly have been seven days away." Prof. Lazarus[539] (from whom I borrow this quotation), thus explains both of these contrasted illusions by our principle of the awakened memories being multitudinous or few: "The circle of experiences, widely extended, rich in variety, which he had in view on the day of

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  his leaving the village rises now in his mind as its image lies before him. And with it—in rapid succession and violent motion, not in chronologic order, or from chronologic motives, but suggesting each other by all sorts of connections—arise massive images of all his rich vagabondage and roving life. They roll and wave confusedly together, first perhaps one from the first year, then from the sixth, soon from the second, again from the fifth, the first, etc., until it seems as if seventy years must have been there, and he reels with the fulness of his vision. . . . Then the inner eye turns away from all this past. The outer one turns to the village, especially to the church-tower. The sight of it calls back the old sight of it, so that the consciousness is filled with that alone, or almost alone. The one vision compares itself with the other, and looks so near, so unchanged, that it seems as if only a week of time could have come between." The same space of time seems shorter as we grow older —that is, the days, the months, and the years do so; whether the hours do so is doubtful, and the minutes and seconds to all appearance remain about the same. "Whoever counts many lustra in his memory need only question himself to find that the last of these, the past five years, have sped much more quickly than the preceding periods of equal amount. Let any one remember his last eight or ten school years: it is the space of a century. Compare with them the last eight or ten years of life: it is the space of an hour." So writes Prof. Paul Janet,[540] and gives a solution which can hardly be said to diminish the mystery. There is a law, he says, by which the apparent length of an interval at a given epoch of a man's life is proportional to the total length of the life itself. A child of 10 feels a year as 1/10 of his whole life—a man of 50 as 1/50, the whole life meanwhile apparently preserving a constant length. This formula roughly expresses the phenomena, it is true, but cannot possibly be an elementary psychic law; and it is certain that, in great part at least, the foreshortening of the years as we grow older is due to the monotony of memory's content, and the consequent simplification of the backward-glancing view. In youth we may have an absolutely new experience, subjective or objective, every hour of the day. Apprehension is vivid, retentiveness strong, and our recollections of that time, like those of a time spent in rapid and interesting travel, are of something intricate, multitudinous, and long-drawn-out. But as each passing year converts some of this experience into automatic routine which we hardly note at all, the days and the weeks smooth themselves out in recollection to contentless units, and the years grow hollow and collapse. So much

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  She was rejoicing over Kitty and Levin; going back in thought to her own wedding, she glanced at the radiant figure of Stepan Arkadyevitch, forgot all the present, and remembered only her own innocent love. She recalled not herself only, but all her women-friends, and acquaintances. She thought of them on the one day of their triumph, when they had stood like Kitty under the wedding crown, with love and hope and dread in their hearts, renouncing the past, and stepping forward into the mysterious future. Among the brides that came back to her memory, she thought too of her darling Anna, of whose proposed divorce she had just been hearing. And she had stood just as innocent in orange flowers and bridal veil. And now? 'It's terribly strange,' she said to herself. It was not merely the sisters, the women-friends and female relations of the bride who were following every detail of the ceremony. Women who were quite strangers, mere spectators, were watching it excitedly, holding their breath, in fear of losing a single movement or expression of the bride and bridegroom, and angrily not answering, often not hearing, the remarks of the callous men, who kept making joking or irrelevant observations. 'Why has she been crying? Is she being married against her will?' 'Against her will to a fine fellow like that? A prince, isn't he?' 'Is that her sister in the white satin? Just listen how the deacon booms out, "and fearing her husband."' 'Are the choristers from Tchudovo?' 'No, from the Synod.' 'I asked the footman. He says he's going to take her home to his country place at once. Awfully rich, they say. That's why she's being married to him.' 'No, they're a well-matched pair.' 'I say, Marya Vassilievna, you were making out those fly-away crinolines were not being worn. Just look at her in the puce dress—an ambassador's wife they say she is—how her skirt bounces out from side to side!' 'What a pretty dear the bride is—like a lamb decked with flowers! Well, say what you will, we women feel for our sister.' Such were the comments in the crowd of gazing women who had succeeded in slipping in at the church doors. VI W HEN the ceremony of plighting troth was over, the beadle spread before the lectern in the middle of the church a piece of pink silken stuff, the choir sang a complicated and elaborate psalm, in which the bass and tenor sang responses to one another, and the priest turning round pointed the bridal pair to the pink silk rug. Though both had often heard a great deal about the saying that the one who steps first on the rug will be the head of the house, neither Levin nor Kitty were capable of recollecting it, as they took the few steps towards it.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  At that time I could still have been admired, I had beauty left me still,' Darya Alexandrovna pursued her thoughts, and she would have liked to look at herself in the looking-glass. She had a travelling looking-glass in her handbag, and she wanted to take it out; but looking at the backs of the coachman and the swaying counting-house clerk, she felt that she would be ashamed if either of them were to look round, and she did not take out the glass. But without looking in the glass, she thought that even now it was not too late; and she thought of Sergey Ivanovitch, who was always particularly attentive to her, of Stiva's good-hearted friend, Turovtsin, who had helped her nurse her children through the scarlatina, and was in love with her. And there was someone else, a quite young man, who— her husband had told her it as a joke—thought her more beautiful than either of her sisters. And the most passionate and impossible romances rose before Darya Alexandrovna's imagination. 'Anna did quite right, and certainly I shall never reproach her for it. She is happy, she makes another person happy, and she's not broken down as I am, but most likely just as she always was, bright, clever, open to every impression,' thought Darya Alexandrovna,—and a sly smile curved her lips, for, as she pondered on Anna's love-affair, Darya Alexandrovna constructed on parallel lines an almost identical love-affair for herself, with an imaginary composite figure, the ideal man who was in love with her. She, like Anna, confessed the whole affair to her husband. And the amazement and perplexity of Stepan Arkadyevitch at this avowal made her smile. In such day-dreams she reached the turning of the high-road that led to Vozdvizhenskoe. XVII T HE coachman pulled up his four horses and looked round to the right, to a field of rye, where some peasants were sitting on a cart. The counting-house clerk was just going to jump down, but on second thoughts he shouted peremptorily to the peasants instead, and beckoned to them to come up. The wind, that seemed to blow as they drove, dropped when the carriage stood still; gadflies settled on the steaming horses that angrily shook them off. The metallic clank of a whet-stone against a scythe, that came to them from the cart, ceased. One of the peasants got up and came towards the carrige. 'Well, you are slow!' the counting-house clerk shouted angrily to the peasant who was stepping slowly with his bare feet over the ruts of the rough dry road. 'Come along, do!' A curly-headed old man with a bit of bast tied round his hair, and his bent back dark with perspiration, came towards the carriage, quickening his steps, and took hold of the mudguard with his sunburnt hand. 'Vozdvizhenskoe, the manor-house? the count's?' he repeated; 'Go on to the end of this track. Then turn to the left.

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  When, from the form and color of a currant-jelly, we think of its taste, or, when tasting it with our eyes shut, we imagine its red tint and the brilliancy of a quivering slice, the images in our mind are brightened by repetition. Whenever we eat, or drink, or walk, or avail ourselves of any of our senses, or commence or continue any action whatever, the same thing happens. Every man and every animal thus possesses at every moment of life a certain stock of clear and easily reviving images, which had their source in the past in a confluence of numerous experiences, and are now fed by a flow of renewed experiences. When I want to go from the Tuileries to the Panthéon, or from my study to the dining-room, I foresee at every turn the colored forms which will present themselves to my sight; it is otherwise in the case of a house where I have spent two hours, or of a town where I have stayed three days; after ten years have elapsed the images will be vague, full of blanks, sometimes they will not exist, and I shall have to seek my way or shall lose myself.—This new property of images is also derived from the first. As every sensation tends to revive in its image, the sensation twice repeated will leave after it a double tendency, that is, provided the attention be as great the second time as the first; usually this is not the case, for, the novelty diminishing, the interest diminishes; but if other circumstances renew the interest, or if the will renovates the attention, the incessantly increasing tendency will incessantly increase the chances of the resurrection and integrity of the image."[587] If a phenomenon is met with, however, too often, and with too great a variety of contexts, although its image is retained and reproduced with correspondingly great facility, it fails to come up with any one particular setting, and the projection of it backwards to a particular past date consequently does not come about. We recognize but do not remember it—its associates form too confused a cloud. No one is said to remember, says Mr. Spencer, "that the object at which he looks has an opposite side; or that a certain modification of the visual impression implies a certain distance; or that the thing he sees moving about is a live animal.

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  We notice that a certain finite 'more' of them is passing or already past. To adopt Hodgson's image, the sensation is the measuring-tape, the perception the dividing-engine which stamps its length. As we listen to a steady sound, we take it in in discrete pulses of recognition, calling it successively 'the same! the same! the same!' The case stands no otherwise with time. After a small number of beats our impression of the amount we have told off becomes quite vague. Our only way of knowing it accurately is by counting, or noticing the clock, or through some other symbolic conception.[537] When the times exceed hours or days, the conception is absolutely symbolic. We think of the amount we mean either solely as a name , or by running over a few salient dates therein, with no pretence of imagining the full durations that lie between them. No one has anything like a perception of the greater length of the time between now and the first century than of that between now and the tenth. To an historian, it is true, the longer interval will suggest a host of additional dates and events, and so appear a more multitudinous thing. And for the same reason most people will think they directly perceive the length of the past fortnight to exceed that of the past week. But there is properly no comparative time intuition in these cases at all. It is but dates and events, representing time; their abundance symbolizing its length. I am sure that this is so, even where the times compared are no more than an hour or so in length. It is the same with Spaces of many miles, which we always compare with each other by the numbers which measure them.[538] From this we pass naturally to speak of certain familiar variations in our estimation of lengths of time. In general, a time filled with varied and interesting experiences seems short in passing, but long as we look back. On the other hand, a tract of time empty of experiences seems long in passing, but in retrospect short . A week of travel and sight-seeing may subtend an angle more like three weeks in the memory; and a month of sickness hardly yields more memories than a day. The length in retrospect depends obviously on the multitudinousness of the memories which the time affords. Many objects, events, changes, many subdivisions, immediately widen the view as we look back. Emptiness, monotony, familiarity, make it shrivel up. In Von Holtei's 'Vagabonds' one Anton is described as revisiting his native village. "Seven years," he exclaims, "seven years since I ran away! More like seventy it seems, so much has happened. I cannot think of it all without becoming dizzy—at any rate not now.

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  Hume's cases are rather trivial; and the things which associated sensible objects make us believe in are supposed by him to be unreal. But all the more manifest for that is the fact of their psychological influence. Who does not 'realize' more the fact of a dead or distant friend's existence, at the moment when a portrait, letter, garment or other material reminder of him is found? The whole notion of him then grows pungent and speaks to us and shakes us, in a manner unknown at other times. In children's minds, fancies and realities live side by side. But however lively their fancies may be, they still gain help from association with reality. The imaginative child identifies its dramatis personæ with some doll or other material object, and this evidently solidifies belief, little as it may resemble what it is held to stand for. A thing not too interesting by its own real qualities generally does the best service here. The most useful doll I ever saw was a large cucumber in the hands of a little Amazonian-Indian girl; she nursed it and washed it and rocked it to sleep in a, hammock, and talked to it all day long—there was no part in life which the cucumber did not play. Says Mr. Tylor:

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  A flavor may fairly shake us by the ghosts of 'banquet halls deserted,' which it suddenly calls up; or a smell may make us feel almost sick with the waft it brings over our memory of 'gardens that are ruins, and pleasure-houses that are dust.' "In the Pyrenees," says M. Guyau, "after a summer-day's tramp carried to the extreme of fatigue, I met a shepherd and asked him for some milk. He went to fetch from his hut, under which a brook ran, a jar of milk plunged in the water and kept at a coldness which was almost icy. In drinking this fresh milk into which all the mountain had put its perfume, and of which each savory swallow seemed to give new life, I certainly experienced a series of feelings which the word agreeable is insufficient to designate. It was like a pastoral symphony, apprehended by the taste instead of by the ear" (quoted by F. Paulhan from 'Les Problèmes de l'Æsthétique Contemporaine, p. 63).—Compare the dithyrambic about whiskey of Col. R. Ingersoll, to which the presidential campaign of 1888 gave such notoriety: "I send you some of the most wonderful whiskey that ever drove the skeleton from a feast or painted landscapes in the brain of man. It is the mingled souls of wheat and corn. In it you will find the sunshine and shadow that chase each other over the billowy fields, the breath of June, the carol of the lark, the dews of the night, the wealth of summer, and autumn's rich content—all golden with imprisoned light. Drink it, and you will hear the voice of men and maidens singing the 'Harvest Home,' mingled with the laughter of children. Drink it, and you wilt feel within your blood the star-lit dawns, the dreamy, tawny dusks of many perfect days. For forty years this liquid joy has been within the happy staves of oak, longing to touch the lips of man."—It is in this way that I should reply to Mr. Gurney's criticism on my theory. My "view," this writer says (Mind, IX. 425), "goes far to confound the two things which in my opinion it is the prime necessity of musical psychology to distinguish—the effect chiefly sensuous of mere streams or masses of finely colored sound, and the distinctive musical emotion to which the form of a sequence of sound, its melodic and harmonic individuality, even realized in complete silence, is the vital and essential object. It is with the former of these two very different things that the physical reactions, the stirring of the hair—the tingling and the shiver—are by far most markedly connected. . . . If I may speak of myself, there is plenty of music from which I have received as much emotion in silent representation as when presented by the finest orchestra; but it is with the latter condition that I almost exclusively associate the cutaneous tingling and hair-stirring.

• From The Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Usable Trim, Scraps, and Bones (2006)

  The remnants of the KGB seem too preoccupied with stealing the silver and pilfering what's left of their former empire to actually whack anybody, so there's no help there either. As the modern-day ranks of the Five Families increasingly emerge from the shallow end of the gene pool, we see fewer and fewer instinctive funnymen like Gotti or Sammy Gravano (or even that kooky, kuh-razy Brit comedy duo, the Kray twins), and it gets harder and harder to imagine a modern-day Cosa Nostra killer with the wit, charm, and cold competence of The Godfather's Clemenza, instructing his accomplice after murdering an incompetent and possibly treacherous coworker, "Leave the gun. Take the cannolis." As John Gotti said, complaining (on tape, naturally), about people talking too much: From now on, I'm telling you that if a guy just so mentions "La," and he goes . . . I heard nine months of tapes of my life (in court). I was actually sick and I don't wanna get sick. Not sick for me, sick for "this thing of ours," sick how naive we were five years ago. I'm sick we were so fucking naive. I empathize with John. His underboss, Sammy, to whom he made the above comments, turned cooperating witness and put John in the can for life without. The government generously rewarded Sammy by forgiving him his part in nineteen brutal murders, a small price to pay for his testimony and for a very revealing, very funny book. For a while, I had an ex-mobster friend named Joe "Dogs," who after his best pal tried to kill him, also became a government witness. He called from time to time, late at night, wanting to talk about nothing in particular: the city, restaurants he used to be able to go to. He liked to gossip about recent arrests of old friends, wonder aloud about book deals—as he too has a second career as a writer. I think it's the New York accent he missed most, that he couldn't talk with anyone where he was now the way he used to talk when he was a functionary for the Gambinos. He missed the good old days. I know how he felt. ADVANCED COURSES I haven't seen much of America. I don't know much about my own country, but I'm learning fast. In between the airports, minibars, and newsrooms, the hideous sprawl of industrial parks, chain hotels, and generic food that make up the thirty- city journeys I've been on to promote my books, I've begun to glimpse the America they once wrote sappy songs about: the purple mountains, twisting rivers, mill towns, wheat fields, and wide open spaces.

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  2Raftery stepped quietly into his horse-box and Jim with great deftness secured the halter, then he touched his cap and hurried away to his third-class compartment, for Stephen herself would travel with Raftery on this last journey back to the fields of Morton. Sitting down on the seat reserved for a groom she opened the little wooden window into the box, whereupon Raftery’s muzzle came up and his face looked out of the window. She fondled the soft, grey plush of his muzzle. Presently she took a carrot from her pocket, but the carrot was rather hard now for his teeth, so she bit off small pieces and these she gave him in the palm of her hand; then she watched him eat them uncomfortably, slowly, because he was old, and this seemed so strange, for old age and Raftery went very ill together. Her mind slipped back and back over the years until it recaptured the coming of Raftery—grey-coated and slender, and his eyes as soft as an Irish morning, and his courage as bright as an Irish sunrise, and his heart as young as the wild, eternally young heart of Ireland. She remembered what they had said to each other. Raftery had said: ‘I will carry you bravely, I will, serve you all the days of my life.’ She had answered: ‘I will care for you night and day, Raftery—all the days of your life.’ She remembered their first run with hounds together—she a youngster of twelve, he a youngster of five. Great deeds they had done on that day together, at least they had seemed like great deeds to them—she had had a kind of fire in her heart as she galloped astride of Raftery. She remembered her father, his protective back, so broad, so kind, so patiently protective; and towards the end it had stooped a little as though out of kindness it carried a burden. Now she knew whose burden that back had been bearing so that it stooped a little. He had been very proud of the fine Irish horse, very proud of his small and courageous rider: ‘Steady, Stephen!’ but his eyes had been bright like Raftery’s. ‘Steady on, Stephen, we’re coming to a stiff one!’ but once they were over he had turned round and smiled, as he had done in the days when the impudent Collins had stretched his inadequate legs to their utmost to keep up with the pace of the hunters. Long ago, it all seemed a long time ago. A long road it seemed, leading where? She wondered. Her father had gone away into its shadows, and now after him, limping a little, went Raftery; Raftery with hollows above his eyes and down his grey neck that had once been so firm; Raftery whose splendid white teeth were now yellowed and too feeble to bite up his carrot.

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  Stephen glanced through the window. Mary was in the garden still admiring her brave little cherry-tree; in a minute or two she would feed the pigeons—yes, she was starting to cross the lawn to the shed in which she kept pigeon-mixture—but presently she would be coming in. Stephen sat down and began to think quickly. Martin Hallam—he must be about thirty-nine. He had fought in the war and been badly wounded—she had thought of him during that terrible advance, the smitten trees had been a reminder. . . . He must often have been very near her then; he was very near now, just out at Passy, and he wanted to see her; he offered his friendship. She closed her eyes the better to consider, but now her mind must conjure up pictures. A very young man at the Antrims’ dance—oh, but very young—with a bony face that glowed when he talked of the beauty of trees, of their goodness . . . a tall, loose-limbed young man who slouched when he walked, as though from much riding. The hills . . . winter hills rust-coloured by bracken . . . Martin touching the ancient thorns with kind fingers. ‘Look, Stephen—the courage of these old fellows!’ How clearly she remembered his actual words after all these years, and her own she remembered: ‘You’re the only real friend I’ve ever had except Father—our friendship’s so wonderful somehow. . . .’ And his answer: ‘I know, a wonderful friendship.’ A great sense of companionship, of comfort—it had been so good to have him beside her; she had liked his quiet and careful voice, and his thoughtful blue eyes that moved rather slowly. He had filled a real need that had always been hers and still was, a need for the friendship of men—how very completely Martin had filled it, until. . . . But she resolutely closed her mind, refusing to visualize that last picture. He knew now that it had been a ghastly mistake—he understood—he practically said so. Could they take up their friendship where they had left it? If only they could . . . She got up abruptly and went to the telephone on her desk. Glancing at his letter, she rang up a number. ‘Hallo-yes?’ She recognized his voice at once. ‘Is that you, Martin? It’s Stephen speaking.’ ‘Stephen . . . oh, I’m so glad! But where on earth are you?’ ‘At my house in Paris—35, Rue Jacob.’ ‘But I don’t understand, I thought . . .’ ‘Yes, I know, but I’ve lived here for ages—since before the war. I’ve just got your letter, sent back from England. Funny, isn’t it? Why not come to dinner to-night if you’re free—eight o’clock.’ ‘I say! May I really?’ ‘Of course . . . come and dine with my friend and me.’ ‘What number?’ ‘Thirty-five—35, Rue Jacob.’ ‘I’ll be there on the actual stroke of eight!’ ‘That’s right—good-bye, Martin.’ ‘Good-bye, and thanks, Stephen.’

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  Stephen’s life in London had been one long endeavour, for work to her had become a narcotic. Puddle it was who had found the flat with the casement windows that looked on the river, and Puddle it was who now kept the accounts, paid the rent, settled bills and managed the servants; all these details Stephen calmly ignored and the faithful Puddle allowed her to do so. Like an ageing and anxious Vestal Virgin she tended the holy fire of inspiration, feeding the flame with suitable food—good grilled meat, light puddings and much fresh fruit, varied by little painstaking surprises from Jackson’s or Fortnum and Mason. For Stephen’s appetite was not what it had been in the vigorous days of Morton; now there were times when she could not eat, or if she must eat she did so protesting, fidgeting to go back to her desk. At such times Puddle would steal into the study with a tin of Brand’s Essence—she had even been known to feed the recalcitrant author piecemeal, until Stephen must laugh and gobble up the jelly for the sake of getting on with her writing. Only one duty apart from her work had Stephen never for a moment neglected, and that was the care and the welfare of Raftery. The cob had been sold, and her father’s chestnut she had given away to Colonel Antrim, who had sworn not to let the horse out of his hands for the sake of his life-long friend, Sir Philip—but Raftery she had brought up to London. She herself had found and rented his stable with comfortable rooms above for Jim, the groom she had taken from Morton. Every morning she rode very early in the Park, which seemed a futile and dreary business, but now only thus could the horse and his owner contrive to be together for a little. Sometimes she fancied that Raftery sighed as she cantered him round and round the Row, and then she would stoop down and speak to him softly: ‘My Raftery, I know, it’s not Castle Morton or the hills or the big, green Severn Valley—but I love you.’

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  Sometimes when Stephen was busy with her work, Puddle would make her way there all alone. Then she and Mademoiselle would get talking about Stephen’s childhood, about her future, but guardedly, for Puddle must be careful to give nothing away to the kind, simple woman. As for Mademoiselle, she too must be careful to accept all and ask no questions. Yet in spite of the inevitable gaps and restraints, a real sympathy sprang up between them, for each sensed in the other a valuable ally who would fight a good fight on behalf of Stephen. And now Stephen would quite often send her car to take the blind Julie for a drive beyond Paris. Julie would sniff the air and tell Burton that through smelling their greenness she could see the trees; he would listen to her broken and halting English with a smile—they were a queer lot these French. Or perhaps he would drive the other Mademoiselle up to Montmartre for early Mass on a Sunday. She belonged to something to do with a heart; it all seemed rather uncanny to Burton. He thought of the Vicar who had played such fine cricket, and suddenly felt very homesick for Morton. Fruit would find its way to the little apartment, together with cakes and large marrons glacés. Then Mademoiselle Duphot would become frankly greedy, eating sweets in bed while she studied her booklets on the holy and very austere Thérèse, who had certainly not eaten marrons glacés. Thus the spring, that gentle yet fateful spring of 1914, slipped into the summer. With the budding of flowers and the singing of birds it slipped quietly on towards great disaster; while Stephen, whose book was now nearing completion, worked harder than ever in Paris. CHAPTER 341W ar. The incredible yet long predicted had come to pass. People woke in the mornings with a sense of disaster, but these were the old who, having known war, remembered. The young men of France, of Germany, of Russia, of the whole world, looked round them amazed and bewildered; yet with something that stung as it leapt in their veins, filling them with a strange excitement—the bitter and ruthless potion of war that spurred and lashed at their manhood. They hurried through the streets of Paris, these young men; they collected in bars and cafés; they stood gaping at the ominous government placards summoning their youth and strength to the colours. They talked fast, very fast, they gesticulated: ‘C’est la guerre! C’est la guerre!’ they kept repeating. Then they answered each other: ‘Oui, c’est la guerre.’ And true to her traditions the beautiful city sought to hide stark ugliness under beauty, and she decked herself as though for a wedding; her flags streamed out on the breeze in their thousands. With the paraphernalia and pageantry of glory she sought to disguise the true meaning of war.

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  2Raftery stepped quietly into his horse-box and Jim with great deftness secured the halter, then he touched his cap and hurried away to his third-class compartment, for Stephen herself would travel with Raftery on this last journey back to the fields of Morton. Sitting down on the seat reserved for a groom she opened the little wooden window into the box, whereupon Raftery’s muzzle came up and his face looked out of the window. She fondled the soft, grey plush of his muzzle. Presently she took a carrot from her pocket, but the carrot was rather hard now for his teeth, so she bit off small pieces and these she gave him in the palm of her hand; then she watched him eat them uncomfortably, slowly, because he was old, and this seemed so strange, for old age and Raftery went very ill together. Her mind slipped back and back over the years until it recaptured the coming of Raftery—grey-coated and slender, and his eyes as soft as an Irish morning, and his courage as bright as an Irish sunrise, and his heart as young as the wild, eternally young heart of Ireland. She remembered what they had said to each other. Raftery had said: ‘I will carry you bravely, I will, serve you all the days of my life.’ She had answered: ‘I will care for you night and day, Raftery—all the days of your life.’ She remembered their first run with hounds together—she a youngster of twelve, he a youngster of five. Great deeds they had done on that day together, at least they had seemed like great deeds to them—she had had a kind of fire in her heart as she galloped astride of Raftery. She remembered her father, his protective back, so broad, so kind, so patiently protective; and towards the end it had stooped a little as though out of kindness it carried a burden. Now she knew whose burden that back had been bearing so that it stooped a little. He had been very proud of the fine Irish horse, very proud of his small and courageous rider: ‘Steady, Stephen!’ but his eyes had been bright like Raftery’s. ‘Steady on, Stephen, we’re coming to a stiff one!’ but once they were over he had turned round and smiled, as he had done in the days when the impudent Collins had stretched his inadequate legs to their utmost to keep up with the pace of the hunters. Long ago, it all seemed a long time ago. A long road it seemed, leading where? She wondered. Her father had gone away into its shadows, and now after him, limping a little, went Raftery; Raftery with hollows above his eyes and down his grey neck that had once been so firm; Raftery whose splendid white teeth were now yellowed and too feeble to bite up his carrot.

• From The Decameron (1353)

  The chief reason for the contrast lies elsewhere, in the fact that the lieta brigata inhabits an unreal world, the world of the artist as distinct from the world of man, and its members are, collectively, the personified abstractions of certain cherished ideals, doubtless associated in the mind of the author with the courtly Neapolitan society in which he had spent the years of his adolescence and early manhood, and to which in later life he was wont to look back with a profound sense of nostalgia. Whatever the frame’s personal overtones, it is clear that the society it depicts is aristocratic and élitist, and that the culture and refinement it embodies are far removed from the practical, workaday world with which Boccaccio is largely concerned in the novelle. This tonal antithesis between the world of the storytellers and the world of the narratives serves to highlight their separate, contrasting realities. But what the two worlds have in common is their persistent emphasis on the role of intelligence in human affairs. Of the eight days to which a single narrative topic is assigned, three are devoted specifically to stories concerned with quickness of wit or resourcefulness. The topic for the Sixth Day is ‘those who, on being provoked by some verbal pleasantry, have returned like for like, or who, by a prompt retort or shrewd manoeuvre, have avoided danger, discomfort or ridicule’. The tricks played by women upon their husbands form the subject-matter of the Seventh Day, whilst the Eighth Day is given over to tales about ‘tricks that people in general, men and women alike, are forever playing upon one another’. This last topic is one which could cover a large number of the remaining stories in the Decameron, and tales of verbal pleasantries are by no means confined to the Sixth Day, so that, viewed in its entirety, the Decameron is abundantly stocked with illustrations of human ingenuity. There is nothing unusual in this. Other collections of short stories, like the anonymous Novellino that preceded the Decameron and Franco Sacchetti’s Trecentonovelle that followed it, could be described in similar terms, and indeed it would be a dull series of narratives that did not accord an important role to the workings of people’s intelligence. What is interesting about Boccaccio’s treatment of the theme is his elevation of intelligence to a position in the scale of human values which places it on a par with the highest of the traditional virtues. This celebration of intelligence for its own sake is largely responsible for the ambiguous moral tone of the Decameron, a feature which forms a notorious stumbling-block for those critics and commentators who seek to extract from the work a coherent and consistent system of ethics. 56

• From The Decameron (1353)

  Naples was at that time a flourishing intellectual centre, attracting poets, philosophers, artists and men of letters from all over Europe, especially from France and northern Italy. King Robert the Wise, who occupied the throne from 1309 to 1343, was the most powerful ruler in the Italy of his day, and an enlightened patron and practitioner of the arts. Dante had expressed a poor opinion of the Angevin monarch in the early years of his reign, dubbing him the king who was fit only for writing sermons. But Boccaccio was later to describe him as a second Solomon, and one of the leading Florentine chroniclers of the period, Giovanni Villani, wrote that he was ‘the wisest of the Christians of the last five hundred years’. The language of Robert’s court being French, the influence of French culture was all-pervasive. The ‘six wasted years’ of Boccaccio’s apprenticeship as a minor banking official were wasted only in the sense that they temporarily prevented him from pursuing the career as a scholar and poet for which he had always considered himself instinctively suited from early childhood. The Neapolitan branch of the Bardi bank was situated in the Ruga Cambiorum (‘Exchange Street’), in a quarter of the city that offered him the opportunity of daily contact with various aspects and personalities of a dynamic business and commercial world that is reflected in much of his later writing, in particular in many of the stories of the Decameron. His duties would have taken him regularly, for instance, through those areas of the city that he describes in such graphic detail in the famous story of Andreuccio of Perugia (II, 5). As a bank teller and bank messenger, he had regular dealings with a broad cross-section of the trading and seafaring classes that constituted the core of a thriving commercial society in what was regarded as one of the most important centres of economic activity in medieval Europe. At the same time, because of his father’s high standing with the Angevin court, the young Boccaccio was enabled to mix freely with the Neapolitan nobility. Many years afterwards, in a letter written to a friend in 1363, he recalled with deep nostalgia this period of his life when he had entertained in splendid style and with true Florentine hospitality the sons of the aristocracy, who ‘were not ashamed to come and visit me in my house’. He was thus familiar with the life-style of a sophisticated courtly society, and his keen observation of the refined manners and sentiments of that milieu is reflected in many of his writings. The world of the storytellers in the Decameron, for all its heightened, ‘literary’ and deliberately unreal quality, is an idealized image of a society in which Boccaccio himself participated, albeit as a foreigner and an outsider, during the formative years of his life in Naples.

• From The Decameron (1353)

  Those two extended episodes may be regarded as trial runs for a project of far more ambitious proportions, for which he must already have begun to gather the formidable amount of narrative raw material he would require, some of it being pressed into service in two of the questioni, as well as in another episode of the Filocolo. As for the actual design of the Decameron, there are many other significant pointers in the earlier works. One instance is the passage in the Fiammetta in which the narrator/protagonist reminisces nostalgically about excursions undertaken with her young Neapolitan fellow-patricians to Baiae, a location with strong classical associations where the remains of the ancient Roman Baths of Venus, the Terme di Venere, are still in evidence. There the hotter part of the day would be devoted, by the ladies themselves or in the company of young men (o le donne per sé, o mescolate co’ giovani), to amorous discussions (amorosi ragionamenti), with music and dancing and singing as their other diversions. And similar scenes are portrayed, both in the Amorosa visione and in one of the author’s best-known sonnets, beginning Intorn’ad una fonte, in un pratello di verdi erbette pieno e di bei fiori, sedeano tre angliolette, i loro amori forse narrando. 7 The choice of verb here (narrando) would seem to be significant, but more importantly the passage is a good example of a recurrent leitmotif in Boccaccio’s work: the locus amœnus inhabited by nymph-like maidens who talk of love. And it was perhaps inevitable that just such a setting should eventually form the backdrop to the hundred tales. All that was lacking was a suitable pretext to lend an air of realism to the circumstances in which the stories were claimed to have been told and, from this point of view, the public calamity of 1348 was for Boccaccio an event that had a positive aspect. For it enabled him not only to make it seem entirely natural that the stories were told in the way he pretends, but to apply his considerable descriptive and rhetorical skills to the structurally vital account of the plague and the ruinous social upheaval it produced, both in Florence and elsewhere in Europe. Following the practice he had adopted earlier in the Filocolo, the Filostrato and the Teseida, Boccaccio gave his collection of tales a Greek title, meaning ‘Ten Days’ and referring to the ten separate days within a period of two weeks during which the stories were supposed to have been told. The tradition of hellenizing titles, which originated with Virgil, is associated with the epic, and the Decameron is often characterized as the epic of the Florentine merchant class, which, by the middle of the fourteenth century, had asserted itself as the dominant social force of medieval Italy.

• From The Decameron (1353)

  When one turns to the stories themselves, the unreality or artificiality of the frame becomes even more apparent. For although they, too, are exquisitely constructed literary artefacts, their events unfold within the orbit of common human experience, and they positively swarm with individuals who, however extraordinary or outrageous the situations in which they may have their being, are almost always convincing in purely psychological terms. This palpable contrast between the characters of the frame and the characters of the stories is only marginally due to differences (which in any case are relatively slight) in the manner of their presentation. The chief reason for the contrast lies elsewhere, in the fact that the lieta brigata inhabits an unreal world, the world of the artist as distinct from the world of man, and its members are, collectively, the personified abstractions of certain cherished ideals, doubtless associated in the mind of the author with the courtly Neapolitan society in which he had spent the years of his adolescence and early manhood, and to which in later life he was wont to look back with a profound sense of nostalgia. Whatever the frame’s personal overtones, it is clear that the society it depicts is aristocratic and élitist, and that the culture and refinement it embodies are far removed from the practical, workaday world with which Boccaccio is largely concerned in the novelle. This tonal antithesis between the world of the storytellers and the world of the narratives serves to highlight their separate, contrasting realities. But what the two worlds have in common is their persistent emphasis on the role of intelligence in human affairs. Of the eight days to which a single narrative topic is assigned, three are devoted specifically to stories concerned with quickness of wit or resourcefulness. The topic for the Sixth Day is ‘those who, on being provoked by some verbal pleasantry, have returned like for like, or who, by a prompt retort or shrewd manoeuvre, have avoided danger, discomfort or ridicule’. The tricks played by women upon their husbands form the subject-matter of the Seventh Day, whilst the Eighth Day is given over to tales about ‘tricks that people in general, men and women alike, are forever playing upon one another’. This last topic is one which could cover a large number of the remaining stories in the Decameron, and tales of verbal pleasantries are by no means confined to the Sixth Day, so that, viewed in its entirety, the Decameron is abundantly stocked with illustrations of human ingenuity.

• From The Decameron (1353)

  As for the actual design of the Decameron, there are many other significant pointers in the earlier works. One instance is the passage in the Fiammetta in which the narrator/protagonist reminisces nostalgically about excursions undertaken with her young Neapolitan fellow-patricians to Baiae, a location with strong classical associations where the remains of the ancient Roman Baths of Venus, the Terme di Venere, are still in evidence. There the hotter part of the day would be devoted, by the ladies themselves or in the company of young men (o le donne per sé, o mescolate co’ giovani), to amorous discussions (amorosi ragionamenti), with music and dancing and singing as their other diversions. And similar scenes are portrayed, both in the Amorosa visione and in one of the author’s best-known sonnets, beginning Intorn’ad una fonte, in un pratello di verdi erbette pieno e di bei fiori, sedeano tre angliolette, i loro amori forse narrando.7 The choice of verb here (narrando) would seem to be significant, but more importantly the passage is a good example of a recurrent leitmotif in Boccaccio’s work: the locus amœnus inhabited by nymph-like maidens who talk of love. And it was perhaps inevitable that just such a setting should eventually form the backdrop to the hundred tales. All that was lacking was a suitable pretext to lend an air of realism to the circumstances in which the stories were claimed to have been told and, from this point of view, the public calamity of 1348 was for Boccaccio an event that had a positive aspect. For it enabled him not only to make it seem entirely natural that the stories were told in the way he pretends, but to apply his considerable descriptive and rhetorical skills to the structurally vital account of the plague and the ruinous social upheaval it produced, both in Florence and elsewhere in Europe. Following the practice he had adopted earlier in the Filocolo, the Filostrato and the Teseida, Boccaccio gave his collection of tales a Greek title, meaning ‘Ten Days’ and referring to the ten separate days within a period of two weeks during which the stories were supposed to have been told. The tradition of hellenizing titles, which originated with Virgil, is associated with the epic, and the Decameron is often characterized as the epic of the Florentine merchant class, which, by the middle of the fourteenth century, had asserted itself as the dominant social force of medieval Italy. But more specifically, the title of Boccaccio’s vernacular masterpiece is modelled upon a work of a very different kind, written a thousand years earlier by St Ambrose: the series of commentaries on Old Testament narratives known as the Hexaemeron. The contrast in subject matter between the two works could hardly be more pronounced, and it lends to the title of Boccaccio’s book a subtle irony, almost certainly intentional in origin.

• From The Decameron (1353)

  The language of Robert’s court being French, the influence of French culture was all-pervasive. The ‘six wasted years’ of Boccaccio’s apprenticeship as a minor banking official were wasted only in the sense that they temporarily prevented him from pursuing the career as a scholar and poet for which he had always considered himself instinctively suited from early childhood. The Neapolitan branch of the Bardi bank was situated in the Ruga Cambiorum (‘Exchange Street’), in a quarter of the city that offered him the opportunity of daily contact with various aspects and personalities of a dynamic business and commercial world that is reflected in much of his later writing, in particular in many of the stories of the Decameron. His duties would have taken him regularly, for instance, through those areas of the city that he describes in such graphic detail in the famous story of Andreuccio of Perugia (II, 5). As a bank teller and bank messenger, he had regular dealings with a broad cross-section of the trading and seafaring classes that constituted the core of a thriving commercial society in what was regarded as one of the most important centres of economic activity in medieval Europe. At the same time, because of his father’s high standing with the Angevin court, the young Boccaccio was enabled to mix freely with the Neapolitan nobility. Many years afterwards, in a letter written to a friend in 1363, he recalled with deep nostalgia this period of his life when he had entertained in splendid style and with true Florentine hospitality the sons of the aristocracy, who ‘were not ashamed to come and visit me in my house’. He was thus familiar with the life-style of a sophisticated courtly society, and his keen observation of the refined manners and sentiments of that milieu is reflected in many of his writings. The world of the storytellers in the Decameron, for all its heightened, ‘literary’ and deliberately unreal quality, is an idealized image of a society in which Boccaccio himself participated, albeit as a foreigner and an outsider, during the formative years of his life in Naples. Even more important from the point of view of his future development as a writer were the numerous contacts he established in those years with the outstanding scholars and men of letters who had been attracted to Naples by the renown of its learned sovereign and patron of literature and the arts. Among those who guided and encouraged Boccaccio in his innate vocation for the study and practice of poetry was Paolo da Perugia, the curator of the Royal Library, with its rich collection of material in the areas of philosophy, mythology, medicine and theology. Paolo’s encyclopaedic compendium of ancient myths, the Collectiones, was specifically acknowledged by Boccaccio as the inspiring force for his own immensely influential Latin work on the same subject, Genealogia deorum gentilium (Genealogy of the Gentile Gods), composed towards the end of his life.