Tag: Note-Books

Four Notes on the World from Samuel Butler’s Note-Books

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  1. The world is a gambling-table so arranged that all who enter the casino must play and all must lose more or less heavily in the long run, though they win occasionally by the way.
  2. We play out our days as we play out cards, taking them as they come, not knowing what they will be, hoping for a lucky card and sometimes getting one, often getting just the wrong one.
  3. The world may not be particularly wise – still, we know of nothing wiser.
  4. The world will always be governed by self-interest.  We should not try to stop this, we should try to make the self-interest of cads a little more coincident with that of decent people.

—From Samuel Butler’s Note-Books.

 

Six Figments from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Note-Books

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  1. A blind man on a dark night carried a torch, in order that people might see him, and not run against him, and direct him how to avoid dangers.
  2. To picture a child’s (one of four or five years old) reminiscences at sunset of a long summer’s day,–his first awakening, his studies, his sports, his little fits of passion, perhaps a whipping, etc.
  3. The blind man’s walk.
  4. To picture a virtuous family, the different members examples of virtuous dispositions in their way; then introduce a vicious person, and trace out the relations that arise between him and them, and the manner in which all are affected.
  5. A man to flatter himself with the idea that he would not be guilty of some certain wickedness,–as, for instance, to yield to the personal temptations of the Devil,–yet to find, ultimately, that he was at that very time committing that same wickedness.
  6. What would a man do, if he were compelled to live always in the sultry heat of society, and could never bathe himself in cool solitude?

Notations from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s American Note-Books.

 

“You’ve Got Worms” and Other Images from Anton Chekhov’s Note-Books

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* * * * *

The French say: “Laid comme un chenille”—as ugly as a caterpillar.

* * * * *

People are bachelors or old maids because they rouse no interest, not even a physical one.

* * * * *

The children growing up talked at meals about religion and laughed at fasts, monks, etc. The old mother at first lost her temper, then, evidently getting used to it, only smiled, but at last she told the children that they had convinced her, that she is now of their opinion. The children felt awkward and could not imagine what their old mother would do without her religion.

* * * * *

There is no national science, just as there is no national multiplication table; what is national is no longer science.

* * * * *

The dog walked in the street and was ashamed of its crooked legs.

* * * * *

The difference between man and woman: a woman, as she grows old gives herself up more and more to female affairs; a man, as he grows old, withdraws himself more and more from female affairs.

* * * * *

That sudden and ill-timed love-affair may be compared to this: you take boys somewhere for a walk; the walk is jolly and interesting—and suddenly one of them gorges himself with oil paint.

* * * * *

The character in the play says to every one: “You’ve got worms.” He cures his daughter of the worms, and she turns yellow.

* * * * *

–From Anton Chekhov’s Note-Books.

Eight Notes from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Note-Books

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  1. Would it not be wiser for people to rejoice at all that they now sorrow for, and vice versa? To put on bridal garments at funerals, and mourning at weddings? For their friends to condole with them when they attained riches and honor, as only so much care added?
  2. If in a village it were a custom to hang a funeral garland or other token of death on a house where some one had died, and there to let it remain till a death occurred elsewhere, and then to hang that same garland over the other house, it would have, methinks, a strong effect.
  3. No fountain so small but that Heaven may be imaged in its bosom.
  4. Fame! Some very humble persons in a town may be said to possess it,–as, the penny-post, the town-crier, the constable,–and they are known to everybody; while many richer, more intellectual, worthier persons are unknown by the majority of their fellow-citizens. Something analogous in the world at large.
  5. The ideas of people in general are not raised higher than the roofs of the houses. All their interests extend over the earth’s surface in a layer of that thickness. The meeting-house steeple reaches out of their sphere.
  6. Nobody will use other people’s experience, nor have any of his own till it is too late to use it.
  7. Two lovers to plan the building of a pleasure-house on a certain spot of ground, but various seeming accidents prevent it. Once they find a group of miserable children there; once it is the scene where crime is plotted; at last the dead body of one of the lovers or of a dear friend is found there; and, instead of a pleasure-house, they build a marble tomb. The moral,–that there is no place on earth fit for the site of a pleasure-house, because there is no spot that may not have been saddened by human grief, stained by crime, or hallowed by death. It might be three friends who plan it, instead of two lovers; and the dearest one dies.
  8. Comfort for childless people. A married couple with ten children have been the means of bringing about ten funerals.

Notations from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s American Note-Books.

Seven Notes on Humanity from Samuel Butler’s Note-Books

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  1. We are like billiard balls in a game played by unskilful players, continually being nearly sent into a pocket, but hardly ever getting right into one, except by a fluke.
  2. We are like thistle-down blown about by the wind – up and down, here and there – but not one in a thousand ever getting beyond seed-hood.
  3. A man is a passing mood coming and going in the mind of his country; he is the twitching of a nerve, a smile, a frown, a thought of shame or honour, as it may happen.
  4. How loosely our thoughts must hang together when the whiff of a smell, a band playing in the street, a face seen in the fire, or on the gnarled stem of a tree, will lead them into such vagaries at a moment’s warning.
  5. When I was a boy at school at Shrewsbury, old Mrs. Brown used to keep a tray of spoiled tarts which she sold cheaper.  They most of them looked pretty right till you handled them.  We are all spoiled tarts.
  6. He is a poor creature who does not believe himself to be better than the whole world else.  No matter how ill we may be, or how low we may have fallen, we would not change identity with any other person.  Hence our self-conceit sustains and always must sustain us till death takes us and our conceit together so that we need no more sustaining.
  7. Man must always be a consuming fire or be consumed.  As for hell, we are in a burning fiery furnace all our lives – for what is life but a process of combustion?

—From Samuel Butler’s Note-Books.

Eight Notes on “Life” from Samuel Butler’s Note-Books

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  1. The beginning of life is the beginning of an illusion to the effect that there is such a thing as free will and that there is such another thing as necessity – the recognition of the fact that there is an “I can” and an “I cannot,” an “I may” and an “I must.”
  2. Life is not so much a riddle to be read as a Gordian knot that will get cut sooner or later.
  3. Life is the distribution of an error – or errors.
  4. Life is a superstition.  But superstitions are not without their value.  The snail’s shell is a superstition, slugs have no shells and thrive just as well.  But a snail without a shell would not be a slug unless it had also the slug’s indifference to a shell.
  5. Life is one long process of getting tired.
  6. Life is the art of drawing sufficient conclusions from insufficient premises.
  7. Life is eight parts cards and two parts play, the unseen world is made manifest to us in the play.
  8. Life is like music, it must be composed by ear, feeling and instinct, not by rule.  Nevertheless one had better know the rules, for they sometimes guide in doubtful cases – though not often.

—From Samuel Butler’s Note-Books.

 

Six Ideas and Images from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Note-Books

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  1. In an old London newspaper, 1678, there is an advertisement, among other goods at auction, of a black girl, about fifteen years old, to be sold.
  2. We sometimes congratulate ourselves at the moment of waking from a troubled dream: it may be so the moment after death.
  3. The race of mankind to be swept away, leaving all their cities and works. Then another human pair to be placed in the world, with native intelligence like Adam and Eve, but knowing nothing of their predecessors or of their own nature and destiny. They, perhaps, to be described as working out this knowledge by their sympathy with what they saw, and by their own feelings.
  4. A singular fact, that, when man is a brute, he is the most sensual and loathsome of all brutes.
  5. A snake taken into a man’s stomach and nourished there from fifteen years to thirty-five, tormenting him most horribly. A type of envy or some other evil passion.
  6. A sketch illustrating the imperfect compensations which time makes for its devastations on the person,–giving a wreath of laurel while it causes baldness, honors for infirmities, wealth for a broken constitution,–and at last, when a man has everything that seems desirable, death seizes him. To contrast the man who has thus reached the summit of ambition with the ambitious youth.

Notations from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s American Note-Books.

Seven Entries from Anton Chekhov’s Note-Books

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Mankind has conceived history as a series of battles; hitherto it has considered fighting as the main thing in life.

Solomon made a great mistake when he asked for wisdom.

Ordinary hypocrites pretend to be doves; political and literary hypocrites pretend to be eagles. But don’t be disconcerted by their aquiline appearance. They are not eagles, but rats or dogs.

Those who are more stupid and more dirty than we are called the people. The administration classifies the population into taxpayers and non-taxpayers. But neither classification will do; we are all the people and all the best we are doing is the people’s work.

If the Prince of Monaco has a roulette table, surely convicts may play at cards.

Aliosha: “My mind, mother, is weakened by illness and I am now like a child: now I pray to God, now I cry, now I am happy.”

Why did Hamlet trouble about ghosts after death, when life itself is haunted by ghosts so much more terrible?

Notations from Anton Chekhov’s Note-books.

 

Eight Ideas from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Note-Books

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  1. A man, perhaps with a persuasion that he shall make his fortune by some singular means, and with an eager longing so to do, while digging or boring for water, to strike upon a salt-spring.
  2. To have one event operate in several places,–as, for example, if a man’s head were to be cut off in one town, men’s heads to drop off in several towns.
  3. Follow out the fantasy of a man taking his life by instalments, instead of at one payment,–say ten years of life alternately with ten years of suspended animation.
  4. Sentiments in a foreign language, which merely convey the sentiment without retaining to the reader any graces of style or harmony of sound, have somewhat of the charm of thoughts in one’s own mind that have not yet been put into words. No possible words that we might adapt to them could realize the unshaped beauty that they appear to possess. This is the reason that translations are never satisfactory,–and less so, I should think, to one who cannot than to one who can pronounce the language.
  5. A person to be writing a tale, and to find that it shapes itself against his intentions; that the characters act otherwise than he thought; that unforeseen events occur; and a catastrophe comes which he strives in vain to avert. It might shadow forth his own fate,–he having made himself one of the personages.
  6. It is a singular thing, that, at the distance, say, of five feet, the work of the greatest dunce looks just as well as that of the greatest genius,–that little space being all the distance between genius and stupidity.
  7. Mrs. Sigourney says, after Coleridge, that “poetry has been its own exceeding great reward.” For the writing, perhaps; but would it be so for the reading?
  8. Four precepts: To break off customs; to shake off spirits ill-disposed; to meditate on youth; to do nothing against one’s genius.

—Notations from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s American Note-Books. (See also: Ten ideas and then Twenty ideas from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Note-Books).

Hawthorne Anecdote

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I was sent for to the police court the other morning, in the case of an American sailor accused of robbing a shipmate at sea. A large room, with a great coal-fire burning on one side, and above it the portrait of Mr. Rushton, deceased, a magistrate of many years’ continuance. A long table, with chairs, and a witness-box. One of the borough magistrates, a merchant of the city, sat at the head of the table, with paper and pen and ink before him; but the real judge was the clerk of the court, whose professional knowledge and experience governed all the proceedings. In the short time while I was waiting, two cases were tried, in the first of which the prisoner was discharged. The second case was of a woman,—a thin, sallow, hard-looking, careworn, rather young woman,—for stealing a pair of slippers out of a shop: The trial occupied five minutes or less, and she was sentenced to twenty-one days’ imprisonment,—whereupon, without speaking, she looked up wildly first into one policeman’s face, then into another’s, at the same time wringing her hands with no theatric gesture, but because her torment took this outward shape,—and was led away. The Yankee sailor was then brought up,—an intelligent, but ruffian-like fellow,—and as the case was out of the jurisdiction of the English magistrates, and as it was not worth while to get him sent over to America for trial, he was forthwith discharged. He stole a comforter.

If mankind were all intellect, they would be continually changing, so that one age would be entirely unlike another. The great conservative is the heart, which remains the same in all ages; so that commonplaces of a thousand years’ standing are as effective as ever.

–From the January 6th, 1854 entry of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s English note-books.

Twenty Ideas from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Note-Books

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1. A hint of a story,–some incident which should bring on a general war; and the chief actor in the incident to have something corresponding to the mischief he had caused.

2. A sketch to be given of a modern reformer,–a type of the extreme doctrines on the subject of slaves, cold water, and other such topics. He goes about the streets haranguing most eloquently, and is on the point of making many converts, when his labors are suddenly interrupted by the appearance of the keeper of a mad-house, whence he has escaped. Much may be made of this idea.

3. A change from a gay young girl to an old woman; the melancholy events, the effects of which have clustered around her character, and gradually imbued it with their influence, till she becomes a lover of sick-chambers, taking pleasure in receiving dying breaths and in laying out the dead; also having her mind full of funeral reminiscences, and possessing more acquaintances beneath the burial turf than above it.

4. A well-concerted train of events to be thrown into confusion by some misplaced circumstance, unsuspected till the catastrophe, yet exerting its influence from beginning to end.

5. On the common, at dusk, after a salute from two field-pieces, the smoke lay long and heavily on the ground, without much spreading beyond the original space over which it had gushed from the guns. It was about the height of a man. The evening clear, but with an autumnal chill.

6. The world is so sad and solemn, that things meant in jest are liable, by an overpowering influence, to become dreadful earnest,–gayly dressed fantasies turning to ghostly and black-clad images of themselves.

7. A story, the hero of which is to be represented as naturally capable of deep and strong passion, and looking forward to the time when he shall feel passionate love, which is to be the great event of his existence. But it so chances that he never falls in love, and although he gives up the expectation of so doing, and marries calmly, yet it is somewhat sadly, with sentiments merely of esteem for his bride. The lady might be one who had loved him early in life, but whom then, in his expectation of passionate love, he had scorned.

8. The scene of a story or sketch to be laid within the light of a street-lantern; the time, when the lamp is near going out; and the catastrophe to be simultaneous with the last flickering gleam.

9. The peculiar weariness and depression of spirits which is felt after a day wasted in turning over a magazine or other light miscellany, different from the state of the mind after severe study; because there has been no excitement, no difficulties to be overcome, but the spirits have evaporated insensibly.

10. To represent the process by which sober truth gradually strips off all the beautiful draperies with which imagination has enveloped a beloved object, till from an angel she turns out to be a merely ordinary woman. This to be done without caricature, perhaps with a quiet humor interfused, but the prevailing impression to be a sad one. The story might consist of the various alterations in the feelings of the absent lover, caused by successive events that display the true character of his mistress; and the catastrophe should take place at their meeting, when he finds himself equally disappointed in her person; or the whole spirit of the thing may here be reproduced.

11. Two persons might be bitter enemies through life, and mutually cause the ruin of one another, and of all that were dear to them. Finally, meeting at the funeral of a grandchild, the offspring of a son and daughter married without their consent,–and who, as well as the child, had been the victims of their hatred,–they might discover that the supposed ground of the quarrel was altogether a mistake, and then be wofully reconciled.

12. Two persons, by mutual agreement, to make their wills in each other’s favor, then to wait impatiently for one another’s death, and both to be informed of the desired event at the same time. Both, in most joyous sorrow, hasten to be present at the funeral, meet, and find themselves both hoaxed.

13. The story of a man, cold and hard-hearted, and acknowledging no brotherhood with mankind. At his death they might try to dig him a grave, but, at a little space beneath the ground, strike upon a rock, as if the earth refused to receive the unnatural son into her bosom. Then they would put him into an old sepulchre, where the coffins and corpses were all turned to dust, and so he would be alone. Then the body would petrify; and he having died in some characteristic act and expression, he would seem, through endless ages of death, to repel society as in life, and no one would be buried in that tomb forever.

14. Canon transformed to church-bells.

15. A person, even before middle age, may become musty and faded among the people with whom he has grown up from childhood; but, by migrating to a new place, he appears fresh with the effect of youth, which may be communicated from the impressions of others to his own feelings.

16. In an old house, a mysterious knocking might be heard on the wall, where had formerly been a door-way, now bricked up.

17. It might be stated, as the closing circumstance of a tale, that the body of one of the characters had been petrified, and still existed in that state.

18. A young man to win the love of a girl, without any serious intentions, and to find that in that love, which might have been the greatest blessing of his life, he had conjured up a spirit of mischief which pursued him throughout his whole career,–and this without any revengeful purposes on the part of the deserted girl.

19. Two lovers, or other persons, on the most private business, to appoint a meeting in what they supposed to be a place of the utmost solitude, and to find it thronged with people.

20. Some treasure or other thing to be buried, and a tree planted directly over the spot, so as to embrace it with its roots.

From Nathaniel Hawthorne’s American Note-Books.