The Lonely
Lone and forgotten
through a long sleeping,
in the heart of age
a child woke weeping.
No invisible mother
was nigh him there
laughing and nodding
from earth and air.
No elfin comrades
came at his call
and the earth and the air
were blank as a wall.
The darkness thickened
upon him creeping,
in the heart of age
a child lay weeping.
--Æ (pseudonym of George William Russel) (1867-1935), "The Lonely"
I took Scully's course because I was too intimidated to take a history course in the History department. I was shocked to see only a dozen students at the final exam; everyone else in the crowded Law School auditorium was just visiting. Somehow he made great architecture important and accessible.
--A classmate on the Yale listserv, on legendary lecturer Vincent Scully (1920- ), the architectural historian who is "maybe the greatest lecturer Yale has ever seen."
(To me it's no accident that he's Irish. The name Scully comes from Ó Scalaidhe, derived from sceulaidhe, a hereditary story-teller, and I suspect that "sceulaidhe" in turn is related to the Viking word skald, or bard; the Scullys were found in the neighborhood of the Vikings during the long Norse occupation of Ireland's coasts. The gift of gab, quoi.)
When the man of God had leisure to read his holy books, the fly would trot up and down his codex: and should some one call him, or he had to go about other business, he would instruct the fly to sit down upon the line at which he had halted, and keep his place until he should return to continue his interrupted reading: which the fly infallibly would do.
--Story told of Saint Colman mac Duach of Ireland, "Saint Colman and the Cock, the Mouse, and the Fly," from John Colgan (d. ca 1657), Acta Sanctorum Hiberniae [Acts of the Saints of Ireland] (folio, 1645) 1.244a, as cited in Plummer (ed.) Vitae Sanctorum Hiberniae (Oxford, 1910), p. cxliv. I believe the source of this English version of the story is Helen Waddell's Beasts and Saints (London, 1934, repub. 1996).
Quotation found online in sidebar in The Continuum Encyclopedia of Animal Symbolism in Art by Hope R. Werness (pub 2004)
There are a lot of countries investing in making universities stronger,
especially in Asia...And now Saudi Arabia, with its
very huge investment to build a university of science and technology.
There will be more competition for American universities. Europe, I
think, has fallen by the wayside.
--President Richard Levin (1947- ) of Yale University in an interview with Matthew Kaminski, in the Wall Street Journal online "Opinion: The Weekend Interview," 6 June 2009
The last O'Sullivan Mor* died at Tomies in 1762. He left an illegitimate son, whose grandson is a fisherman at Killarney. This grandson told me that when a gossoon [boy] some thirty years ago, he went to see his grandfather lying dead at Tomies. He saw not only his departed ancestor, but also a great pile of old papers, "maybe three feet high, mostly written on skins in Latin and Irish; and faith I was in dread they might fall into the hands of the Mahonys or some other new people in the country, and they might get more of the old O'Sullivan estates, so I burned them all myself!--[R. O'C]**
--In The Last Colonel of the Irish Brigade [1892] by Mrs Morgan John O'Connell, p. 53
* The clan chieftain of the elder branch of the O'Sullivan sept, a great Irish family related to the MacCarthys of Kerry
**Ross O'Connell
As readers of the volume of letters began to note the unusually amorous tone in some of her brother-in-law's missives to younger men, Alice Gibbens James, steadfast and loyal to the end, wrote to her son: "People are putting a vile interpretation on those silly letters to young men. -- Poor dear Uncle Henry."
--From a review by Colm Tóibín of Alice in Jamesland: The Story of Alice Howe Gibbens James (2009), by Susan E. Gunter. Published in the New York Review of Books, 11 June 2009. Alice Gibbens James was the wife of William James (1842-1910) and sister-in-law of Henry James (1843-1916) and Alice James (1848-1892). Above: a portrait of Henry James by Max Beerbohm.
We men are very simple people: if we like what we see, we're coming over there. If we don't want anything from you, we're not coming over there.
... He doesn't care anything about your personality or what you do for a living; your friends mean nothing to him, and whether you know Jesus is irrelevant. He just wants to know if he might be able to sleep with you, and he's talking to you to determine exactly how much he has to invest to get what he wants.
--Steve Harvey (1957-) in Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Man
Ronald Spiers, former ambassador to Turkey and Pakistan, remembers a conversation with a Navy admiral, who told him that after retiring he'd like to serve as ambassador to Spain. To which Spiers, a lifelong diplomat, responded that upon retiring he would like to command the Sixth Fleet. "He didn't think it was funny," Spiers says. The admiral did, in fact, become ambassador to Spain. Spiers did not become an admiral.
--"Embassy Envy" by Christopher Beam in Slate, 29 May 2009. Photo: one of the reception rooms in the U.S. ambassador's residence in Paris.
The gentlemen and inhabitants of this country are all of them remarkable for their hospitality to strangers, generosity and courteous carriage, which characters, should I refuse them, must be attributed to the highest ingratitude ; and lastly, there are few among them but whose breeding and parts, and I might say learning also, are eminently more conspicuous than in many other places in this kingdom; notwithstanding, Ireland may vie in this respect with most of the civilized countries of Europe. It is well known that classical reading extends itself even to a fault among the lower and poorer kind in this country, many of whom, to the taking them off from more useful works, have greater knowledge in this way than some of the better sort.
The common people are extremely hospitable and courteous to strangers. Many of them speak Latin fluently, and I accidentally arrived at a little hut in a very obscure part of this country where I saw some poor lads reading Homer, their master having been a mendicant scholar at an English grammar school at Tralee.
--Dr. Charles Smith, traveling in County Kerry, Ireland, in 1751. Cited in The Last Colonel of the Irish Brigade: Count O'Connell and the Old Irish Life at Home and Abroad, 1745-1833, by Mrs. Morgan John O'Connell, 1892.
The largest genetic study of African populations reveals a greater diversity among the continent's cultural groups than previously known....the new research shows that "no single African population is representative of the diversity of the continent," says study coauthor Sarah Tishkoff of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.
Tishkoff and her colleagues analyzed particular DNA sequences... from more than 3000 people from 121 different populations scattered throughout Africa....
To reach remote groups, such as the Pygmies of Cameroon and the hunter-gatherers of Tanzania, researchers drove off-road and set up makeshift labs with equipment powered by their car battery.
"This is by far the most in-depth analysis in terms of populations analyzed," comments evolutionary geneticist Mark Stoneking of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany.
..."We knew that African populations were diverse in culture, art, religious ideas," says Roy King of Stanford University School of Medicine. "Now we see that genetic diversity goes along these same lines"....
It turns out that the San bushmen of southern Africa have the most distinct, and therefore oldest, genetic sequences, the team reports....
Genetic information from African-Americans living in three U.S. cities and an additional state was also collected and analyzed. On average, African-Americans inherited 71 percent of their DNA from western Africa, 8 percent from other locations in Africa and 13 percent from Europe, the team says. Most of the African-Americans in the study had mixed ancestry from different regions of western Africa, which made tracing ancestry to particular ethnic groups difficult....
The researchers are quick to point out that the data set is incomplete. "We analyzed 121 populations out of a possible 2000," Tishkoff says....
--Science News, article by Solmaz Barazesh, 23 May 2009
