Do you know, they say that all the gold in the world drifts very gradually back to India.
--"Carlyle" in "The Offshore Pirate" (first published 1920), The Collected Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald
Once in the dear, dead days beyond recall,
When on the world the mists began to fall
Out of the dreams that rose in happy throng,
Low to our hearts love sang an old sweet song,
And in the dusk where fell the firelight gleam,
Softly it wove itself into our dream...
Just a song at twilight,
When the lights are low;
And the flick'ring shadows,
Softly come and go,
Tho' the heart be weary,
Sad the day and long,
Still to us at twilight,
Comes love's old song,
Comes love's old sweet song.
Even today we hear love's song of yore,
Deep in our hearts it dwells forevermore,
Footsteps may falter, weary grow the way,
Still we can hear it at the close of day.
So 'til the end when life's dim shadows fall,
Love will be found the sweetest song of all....
--Words by Clifton Bingham (1859-1913); music by James Lynam Molloy (1837-1909). This 1884 song was wildly popular in the late 1800s. Among other places, it features in the Shirley Temple/Lionel Barrymore movie The Little Colonel.
Just B Cuz at flickr found this old photo. "This has the names Flora and Sikes on the back written in pencil. I do
not know who took it but it is one of my all time favorite photos, I
got it at a flea market. There are so many details of this picture that
I love. On the back is written also "Love's Old Sweet Song" . Perfect!"
.
I have known a few spider curators in my time, and they can on occasion be troublesome. For more than fifteen years I was the curator of mammals at the Australian Museum in Sydney, and my office was located between that of the nation's foremost snake expert and the museum's curator of spiders. Accidents do happen in museums, and I have on occasion found myself sitting at my desk not suspecting that a live snake lurked in my filing cabinet. Yet it was the rather eccentric habits of the curator of spiders that most unnerved me. I don't count myself as a great arachnophobe, but on occasion*, when dashing out of my office door on some urgent errand and bumping into the curator, whose hands were full of deadly Sydney funnel-web spiders, I admit to being discomforted**.
He was a delightful fellow to be sure-- bearded, gentle, and erudite-- but I dreaded visiting his office, for aquariums containing live spiders had been crammed into every corner, and the walkways between them were so narrow that the room seemed transformed into a den of oversized, hairy-legged monstrosities. Worst of all, he was so fond of his charges that whenever I crossed his threshold he would invariably reach into an aquarium and enthusiastically wave his latest acquisition in my face.
.....
Until recently the goliath tarantula of Amazonia was believed to be the largest spider on earth. Then someone collected an enormous spider in the remote rain forests of southeastern Peru. Its body was almost four inches long, and its legs spanned almost ten inches. It is said by those familiar with these near-mythical beasts that up to fifty share a single burrow, and that they cooperate in the hunt. Hillyard's clinical description of this new and as yet unnamed discovery (though it has been called araños pollo, chicken spider) has embedded in it the stuff of nightmares. I can imagine the scientist intent on studying them struggling through precipitous country and an endless tangle of roots, vines, and thickets as he forces his way toward their habitat. And then, in a sudden silence, he hears the drumming of countless hairy legs on dry leaves as the colony erupts from their abode. Though just how the spiders "cooperate in prey capture to overcome large animals" is perhaps best left unimagined.
--Tim Flannery (1956- ), in a review of Paul Hillyard's book The Private Life of Spiders, published in the New York Review of Books, 1 May 2008.
*Third use of "on occasion" in one paragraph (I'm just saying).
I can't understand why a person will take a year to write a novel when he can easily buy one for a few dollars.
--Fred Allen (stage name of John Florence Sullivan) (1894-1956)
Peking is one of the jewel cities of the world. Except for Paris and (by hearsay) Vienna as they once were, there is no city in the world that is quite so nearly ideal, in regard to nature, culture, charm, and mode of living, as Peking....
Peking is like a grand old person, with a grand old personality. For cities are like persons, with their different personalities. Some are mean and provincial, curious, and inquisitive; others are generous, magnanimous, big-hearted, and cosmopolitan. Peking is magnanimous. Peking is big. She harbors the old and the modern, being unmoved herself.
Peking is a like a grand old tree, whose roots stretch deep into the earth and draw sustenance from it. Living under its shade and subsisting upon its trunk and branches are millions of insects.... How can a Peking resident describe Peking, so old and so grand?
One never feels that one knows Peking. After living there for ten years, one discovers in an alley an old crank, and regrets not having met him earlier; or a lovely old gentleman painter with a big, bare belly sitting under a great locust tree, fanning himself with a palm-leaf fan and dreaming his hours away; or an old shuttlecock player who can make the shuttlecock travel inch by inch on his head and drop flat on the sole of this shoe at the back; or a society of sword fencers; or a children's school of dramatics; or a ricksha coolie who turns out to be a member of a Manchu princely family; or a former magistrate of imperial times. How dare one say that one knows Peking?
"Peking is a jewel city, a jewel city such as the eyes of man have not seen before. It is a jewel city of gold and purple and royal blue roofs, of palaces and pavilions and lakes and parks and princes' gardens. It is a jewel set with the purple sides of Western Hills and the blue girdle of the Jade Fountain stream and centuries-old cedars looking down on human being at the Central Park, the Temple of Heaven, and the Temple of Agriculture. In the city are nine parks and three imperial lakes, known as the "Three Seas," now thrown open to the public. And Peking has such a blue sky and such a beautiful moon, such rainy Summers, such cool, crisp Autumns, and such dry, clear Winters!
Peking is like a king's dream, with its palaces, princes' gardens, hundred-foot boulevards, art museums, colleges, universities, hospitals, temples, pagodas, and streets of art shops and second-hand book shops. Peking is like a gourmet's paradise. It has centuries-old restaurants, with old, smoky signboards, and wonderful waiters with shaved heads and towels across their shoulders, whose courtesy is perfect, since they were trained in the tradition of the imperial times and catered to high mandarin officials. It is a place for the rich and poor, where every neighborhood shop extends credit to a poor resident, where peddlers sell delicacies cheaply, and where you can loll at a tea restaurant and kill an entire afternoon over a pot of tea.
Peking is the shoppers' heave, being rich in China's old handicrafts-- books, prints, paintings, curios, embroidery, jade, cloisonnés, lanterns. It is a place where you can shop at home, for dealers come to your doors with their wares, and in the early morning the alleys are filled with the most charming musical cries of hawkers.
Peking has quiet. 
It is a city of homes, where every house has a courtyard, and every courtyard has a jar of goldfish and a pomegranate tree, where vegetables are fresh, and pears are pears and persimmons are persimmons. It is the ideal city, where there is space for everyone to breathe in, where rural quiet is matched with city comforts, where streets and alleys and canals are so arranged that one can find room for an orchard or a garden and glimpse the Western Hills while picking cabbage in the morning hours-- a stone's throw from a big department store.
It has variety-- variety of men. It has laws and breakers of laws, police and accomplices of police, thieves and protectors of thieves, beggars and kings of beggars. It has saints, sinners, Mohammedans, Tibetan "devil-expellers," fortune tellers, boxers, monks, prostitutes, Russian and Chinese taxi dancers, Japanese and Korean smugglers, painters, philosophers, poets, collectors of curios, young college students, and movie fans. It has political scoundrels, retired old magistrates, New Life followers, theosophists, wives of former Manchu officials, now serving as maids.
It has color-- color of the old and color of the new. It has the color of imperial grandeur, of historic age and of Mongolian plains. Mongolian and Chinese traders come with their camel caravans from Kalgan and Nankow and pass through its historic gates. It has miles upon miles of city walls, forty or fifty broad at the gates. It has gate towers and drum towers, w
hich announce the evenings for the residents. It has temples, old gardens, and pagodas, where every stone and every tree and every bridge have a history and a legend....
Of all the things that make Peking the ideal city to live in, I would single out three: first its architecture; second, its mode of living; and, third, its common people....
As the Chinese conception of architectural beauty is serenity, rather than sublimity, and as the palace roofs are of the low and broad sweeping type, and as nobody other than the emperor was allowed to have houses with more than one story, the total effect is one of tremendous spaciousness....
But what makes Peking so charming is the mode of life, organized so that one can have peace and quiet, while living close to a busy street. Living is cheap and life is enjoyable for all. While officials and rich men can dine in big restaurants, a poor ricksha coolie can buy, with two coppers, a perfect assortment of oil, salt, pepper, and vinegar for his cooking purposes, with a few leaves of some spicy plant to boot....
The greatest charm of Peking is, however, the common people....
--Lin Yutang 林語堂 (1895-1976) in With Love and Irony (New York, John Day Company, 1934)
In 1930 Beijing had an estimated population of 1,520,000, with a population density of 93 people per square kilometer. In 2000 it had an estimated population of 11,140,000 and a population density of 680 people per square kilometer. This year, 2008, the population is 15,000,000.
Mao had the city walls torn down in the early 1960s.
国在山河破
The sad truth is that little has been written in French that even the French will read for a generation. They are a nation with a thin literary heritage and virtually no literary present. Their contribution to the world's library in the past 30 years has been cartoon books which they consider art and literary criticism which is unreasonable. We have the French to thank for deconstruction. They are good at criticism. They have pathetically declined from being a second-rate nation to being the shrill, pinched, finger-pointing nag of Europe.
--A.A. Gill (1954- ) in a newspaper article ca 1995
Wasn't it MacEvilly, the archbishop of Tuam, who wouldn't allow the parish priest of Ballintubber to continue roofing the abbey church for fear of the fairies?
--Frank O'Connor in Irish Miles (1947), Macmillan, London.
This archbishop, John MacEvilly, was a real person, a brilliant, active, political, and learned man.
The abbey at Ballintubber was founded by King Cathal O'Connor in 1216 and was burned in 1653 by Cromwell's troops. It was finally restored in 1966. Actor Pierce Brosnan was married there.
Even if the stores closed at midnight, there would still always be people coming in to buy. So there's a moment when you just have to say stop. The customers just have to be organized.
--Union delegate Marcelle Rohr, who works at the Paris department store Printemps, quoted in an article on the possible extension of department store hours to 8 p.m., in Le Parisien, 31 March 2008
Même si on fermait à minuit, il y aurait toujours des gens pour venir faire des achats. Alors il arrive un moment où il faut s'arrêter. Les clients n'ont qu'à s'organiser.
I would go day after day to read among the ruins of the big house beside the road. It was quiet and mysterious. The weeds had made a riot of the garden, but roses still flowered. All I knew about the big house was that at some time during the "Trouble" the owners were turned out and the place fired by the Irregulars. There was not far from the house, in a shrubbery, the remains of an ancient wall and tower, all that was left of a fortress. The place had evidently been occupied for centuries.
The dead house began to fascinate me. I would prowl about in the ruins looking at the blackened walls and the faded wall-paper, the places where pictures had hung, the staring windows, doors which led nowhere, stairs that ended in mid-air; and I would wonder what kind of people lived there and what they had done to deserve this.
I asked questions about it and bit by bit pieced together its history; and in the story of that piece of land was also the history of Ireland.
When in the year A.D. 1171 Henry II became Ireland's first absentee landlord, he left behind him a Norman baron (Welsh on his mother's side, like so many of the original invaders) in possession of his estate. The six-foot thick boundary wall in the shrubbery is all that remains of the castle built by this settler.
This Norman family settled down and developed along that line of least resistance which had it not violently conflicted with the ideas of England's rulers might have solved the "Irish Question" centuries ago. In the course of a few generations this family became, to all appearances, Irish. It spoke Irish, intermarried with Irish families, observed the Brehon law, adopted the Irish system of fosterage, and changed its name to-- say-- MacFerris. Such union between the English and the Irish was hateful to Westminster. Such families were known as the "degenerate English." The Statute of Kilkenny was launched against them in 1367, forbidding them on pain of high treason to intermarry with the Irish, speak Irish, or adopt the speech or dress or customs of the Irish. The MacFerris family, however, managed to weather the storms of three centuries, until a bright light of burning in the sky announced the arrival of Cromwell on his war of extermination. Then the MacFerris family was driven into the hills. That was in the year A.D. 1653.
The new owner of the estate was one of Cromwell's Puritan followers, a soldier named-- say-- Buckley. He took the MacFerris demesne, built himself a suitable house, and established himself on the land. He weathered the Stuart storms as successfully as his predecessor had weathered those of Plantagenet times.
The Georgian age found these Buckleys no longer humble ex-service men of Cromwell's but distinguished country gentlemen with Gainsboroughs and Romneys on their walls, good wine in the cellar, and a stable full of noble horses. The house of their ancestors had made way for an austere square mansion with a portico upheld by Corinthian columns. They were, by comparison with others, good landlords and well liked. They disappeared for long periods into England, where their rents were sent to them. Here the process of Irishing which had penalized the Plantagenet settlers was a kind of social charm. The Buckleys when in England were considered to be delightfully Irish. They were expected to do and say funny things and to be generally a bit mad. But they could not speak Gaelic and they were staunch Protestants. (When they returned to Ireland their tenants thought of them as English.)
They sent sons into the Army and the Church. A Buckley distinguished himself in the Crimea. Another became an English bishop. In Victoria's reign-- so glorious and well-fed for England, so miserable and starved for Ireland-- the Buckleys heard the first faint rumble of rebellion, but they rode to hounds right through it. They served in the South African War, and a Buckley commanded an English yeomanry regiment during the war with Germany.
This was the Colonel Buckley who had come over to see his agent in 1922. He discovered that the warning rumble of Fenianism through which his great-grandfather and his father had hunted now swept with the force of a gale throughout Ireland The young men of his estate seemed to belong to a secret society. He saw strange slogans chalked up on the walls. His tenants had the appearance of spies. One night, he was sitting at dinner in the big Georgian room, congratulating himself perhaps, that the good deeds of his ancestors had preserved his Irish fortunes, when there was a tramp of feet as a band of Irregulars walked in, tough young men with caps pulled over their eyes. He had time to notice among them the sons of one or two of his tenants.
"You've got your rosary?" one began from force of habit; then, remembering that the Colonel was a Protestant he smiled grimly and said: "Come now to the top of the hill."
The Buckleys, like most of the unfortunate Anglo-Irish, may at times have been stupid but they were never cowardly. The Colonel, knowing at once that he was to be murdered, and knowing too that argument was pointless, asked to be allowed to find a hat. They marched him to the top of his own hill in the dark. Here a huge young man stood over him.
"Who does that demesne belong to, Colonel Buckley?" he asked.
"It belongs to me," said the Colonel.
"Oh; it does?" replied the young man with deep irony. "Well, now, take a good look at me while you can! that demesne belonged to me before you came over with Cromwell. My name's MacFerris! Now down with ye on your knees...."
But the Colonel was not shot. At the last moment the men, bcoming alarmed by a scouting-party of Free State troops, fled, leaving the middle-aged Anglo-Irishman kneeling on hte grass without the slightest idea that Cromwellian had met Plantagenet. As the Colonel rose he looked down and saw that his house was on fire. He then and there swore never to set foot on Irish soil; and he kept his vow. He retired to an English cathedral city.
So I go day after day to read among the ruins of the house beside the road. There is something as inevitable as Greek tragedy in the thought of a MacFerris, probably a farm-labourer, swooping down with the indignation of centuries behind him to snatch a brief vengeance at the pistol's point. If this long memory is not nationalism what is it?
There is not a great estate in Ireland owned by one of Cromwell's settlers which had not always had a ghostly other owner in the memory of the common people.
--H.V. Morton (1892-1979), In Search of Ireland (1930). Methuen & Co. London.
This story is still going on. Here is one old Irish estate which was repurchased by descendants of the original family.
A certain Irish Capuchin, Father Donovan of Cork, was a chaplain of a noble French family in Paris when the Revolution broke out. His friends fled, and he, as having been concerned with aristocrats, was thrown into prison. One morning, after he had spent the night preparing a number of his fellow-prisoners for death, he was suddenly called out with a batch of condemned and trundeled off to the guillotine. Just as he was about to get his foot on the ladder, an officer of the French guard called out in Irish: "Are there any Gaels among you?" "Seven," answered Father Donovan, in the same language. "Then let there not be any fear on you," shouted the officer, and the seven were saved.
--Seumas MacManus (1869-1960), The Story of the Irish Race, p. 476. New York: Devin Adair Co. 1921.
This story is not as farfetched as it might seem. Many Irishmen went to the Continent to be educated during the 1700s, a time when the British had imposed draconian Penal Laws in Ireland that subjugated the native population. Many Irish soldiers served and lived in Spain, Austria and France during these years.
