« Je n’ai fait celle-ci plus longue que parce que je n’ai pas eu le loisir de la faire plus courte. » — Blaise Pascal, Lettres provinciales (1657)
“I’ve made this [letter] longer only because I haven’t had time to make it shorter.” — Blaise Pascal
« Je n’ai fait celle-ci plus longue que parce que je n’ai pas eu le loisir de la faire plus courte. » — Blaise Pascal, Lettres provinciales (1657)
“I’ve made this [letter] longer only because I haven’t had time to make it shorter.” — Blaise Pascal
“People from a planet without flowers would think we must be mad with joy the whole time to have such things about us.” — Iris Murdoch (1919–1999)
Post-Performative Post-Scriptum
Floras Freude means (I hope) “Flora’s Joy” in German.
• …ποντίων τε κυμάτων ἀνήριθμον γέλασμα… — Αἰσχύλος, Προμηθεὺς δεσμώτης (c. 479-24 B.C.)
• …of ocean-waves the multitudinous laughter… Prometheus Bound by Aeschylus* at Perseus
• …ever-glittering laughter of the far-thrown waves… (my translation)
See also:
γέλασμα, a laugh, κυμάτων ἀνήριθμον γέλασμα, Keble’s “the many-twinkling smile of Ocean, ” Aesch. — Liddell and Scott
Keble was not a sacred but, in the best sense of the word, a secular poet. It is not David only, but the Sibyl, whose accents we catch in his inspirations. The “sword in myrtle drest” of Harmodius and Aristogeiton, “the many-twinkling smile of ocean” from Æschylus, are images as familiar to him as “Bethlehem’s glade” or “Carmel’s haunted strand.” Not George Herbert, or Cowper, but Wordsworth, Scott, and perhaps more than all, Southey, are the English poets that kindled his flame, and coloured his diction. — John Keble at Penny’s Poetry Pages
One day Mr Gordon had accidentally come in, and found no one there but Upton and Eric; they were standing very harmlessly by the window, with Upton’s arm resting kindly on Eric’s shoulder, as they watched with admiration the network of rippled sunbeams that flashed over the sea. Upton had just been telling Eric the splendid phrase, “anerhithmon gelasma pontou”, which he had stumbled upon in an Aeschylus lesson that morning, and they were trying which would hit on the best rendering of it. Eric stuck up for the literal sublimity of “the innumerable laughter of the sea,” while Upton was trying to win him over to “the many-twinkling smile of ocean.” They were enjoying the discussion, and each stoutly maintaining his own rendering, when Mr Gordon entered. — quote from Frederic W. Farrar’s Eric, or Little by Little (1858) at Sententiae Antiquae
*Or possibly his son Euphorion.
• εἰ πάντα τὰ ὄντα καπνὸς γένοιτο, ῥῖνες ἂν διαγνοῖεν. — Ἡράκλειτος ὁ Ἐφέσιος
• • Si toutes choses devenaient fumée, on connaîtrait par les narines. — Héraclite d’Ephèse
• • • If all things were turned to smoke, the nostrils would tell them apart. — Heraclitus of Ephesos, quoted in Aristotle’s De sensu, 5, 443a 23
“I once received a letter from an eminent logician, Mrs. Christine Ladd-Franklin, saying that she was a solipsist, and was surprised that there were no others.” — Bertrand Russell, Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits (1948)
Peri-Performative Post-Scriptum
The title of this post is, of course, a radical reference to core Jethro Tull album Aladdin Sane (1973).
“Ich habe unter meinen Papieren ein Blatt gefunden,” sagte Goethe, “wo ich die Baukunst eine erstarrte Musik nenne.” — Gespräche mit Goethe, Johann Peter Eckermann (1836)
• “I have found a sheet among my papers,” said Goethe, “where I call architecture a frozen music.” — Conversations with Goethe
N.B. The aphorism “Architecture is frozen music” has also sometimes been attributed to Friedrich von Schelling (1775-1854) and Ganopati Sthapat (1927-2011).
Peri-Performative Post-Scriptum
The toxic title of this paronomastic post is a key reference to core Beatles album Please Please Me (1963).
“Film is one of the three universal languages. The other two: mathematics and music.” — Frank Capra (1897-1991)
“Physics is mathematical not because we know so much about the physical world, but because we know so little; it is only its mathematical properties that we can discover.” — Bertrand Russell, An Outline of Philosophy (1927), ch. 15, “The Nature of our Knowledge of Physics”
“Bells are like cats and mirrors — they’re always queer, and it doesn’t do to think too much about them.” — Dorothy L. Sayers, The Nine Tailors (1934)
• «Планета есть колыбель разума, но нельзя вечно жить в колыбели.» — Константин Эдуардович Циолковский (1911)
• “Planet is the cradle of mind, but one cannot live in the cradle forever.” — Konstantin Tsiolkovsky