My mother’s mother, toughened by the farm, hardened by infants’ burials, used a knife and swung an axe as if her woman’s arm wielded a man’s hard will. Inured to life and death alike, “What ails you now?” she’d say ungently to the sick. She fed them, too, roughly but well, and took the blood away— and washed the dead, if there was that to do.
LOQUITUR: En Betrans de Born. Dante Alighieri put this man in hell for that he was a stirrer-up of strife. Eccovi! Judge ye! Have I dug him up again?
The scene is his castle, Altaforte. “Papiols” is his jongleur. “The Leopard,” the device of Richard (Cœur de Lion).
I
Damn it all! all this our South stinks peace. You whoreson dog, Papiols, come! Let’s to music! I have no life save when the swords clash. But ah! when I see the standards gold, vair, purple, opposing
The day was cloudy. No one could come to a decision; a light wind was blowing. ‘Not a north-easter, the sirocco,’ someone said. A few slender cypresses nailed to the slope, and, beyond, the sea grey with shining pools. The soldiers presented arms as it began to drizzle. ‘Not a north-easter, the sirocco,’ was the only decision heard. And yet we knew that by the following dawn nothing would be left to us, neither the woman drinking sleep at our side
Cervantes was asleep when he wrote Don Quixote. Joyce slept during the Wandering Rocks section of Ulysses. Homer nodded and occasionally slept during the greater part of the Iliad; he was awake however when he wrote the Odyssey. Proust snored his way through The Captive, as have legions of his readers after him. Melville was asleep at the wheel for much of Moby-Dick. Fitzgerald slept through Tender Is the Night, which is perhaps not so surprising, but the fact that Mann slumbered on the very slopes of The Magic Mountain is quite extraordinary—that he wrote it, even more so. Kafka, of course, never slept, even while not writing or on bank holidays.
My gentle friend! I hold no creed so false As that which dares to teach that we are born For battle only, and that in this life The soul, if it would burn with starlike power, Must needs forsooth be kindled by the sparks Struck from the shock of clashing human hearts. There is a wisdom that grows up in strife, And one—I like it best—that sits at home
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