May 31, 2009: Turgenev on the cause of misfortune - 0 Comments

"For example, if any misfortune were mentioned, lightning starting a village fire, floods washing away a mill, or a peasant chopping off his hand, whatever it might be, with concentrated fury he would insist: 'what is her name?' The 'her' referred to teh woman who was the cause of the misfortune, since, in his view, if only you probed inoto any misfortune, you would find a woman at the bottom of it."
- Turgenev (trans Alec Brown), Rudin, 1855.

May 30, 2009: Hodge quotes somebody else - 0 Comments

"There are but two places into the whole universe of God from which infants are excluded. The one is hell; the other is the Baptist Church."

- quoted by Charles Hodge, 'The Church Membership of Infants", 1858

May 29, 2009: Field on Donkeys - 0 Comments

"They are not silent like workhorses
Who are happy or indifferent about the plow and the wagon;
Donkeys don't submit like that
For they are sensitive
And cry continually under their burdens
. . .
And if I tried to explain to them
Why work is not only necessary but good,
I am afraid that they would never understand
And kick me with their back legs
As commentary on my wisdom."

Edward Field, Stand Up, Friend, With Me, 1963.

May 10, 2009: Three Drunkards on Democracy - 0 Comments

"Democracy! Democracy! Country A or B is merely a division made for the sake of convenience in naming various parts of the earth. These names were not meant to build walls among its inhabitants. Democracy creates a single, large, complete circle embracing the entire earth by bringing together the wisdom and love of the people of the world."

May 6, 2009: Coffeen on Monologues and Conversations - 0 Comments

"What I enjoy is the monologue and the conversation. In the monologue, someone holds forth, generously bestowing the audience with his or her spin on things. The more monologues the better, especially if they are strange and beautiful.

Conversations, too, make my heart go pitter patter. In a conversation — a good conversation —, the participants try together to push, pull, fold, spin ideas into strange and beautiful shapes, a collaborative monologue, if you will."

- Daniel Coffeen, An Emphatic Umph, 2009

May 6, 2009: Small on the loss of primative cultures - 0 Comments

"No one knows how many San still practice hunting and gathering, but clearly the traditional way of living is, for the most part, no more. . . Some might feel a sense of loss for the San way of life, but that would be unfair. All societies change, absorbing the ways of others, and who are we to say that the San must hold on to a lifestyle just because we think it provides clues to the past?
People are not museums."

- Meredith Small, Our Babies, Ourselves, 1998.

May 4, 2009: Preemie sideshow! - 0 Comments

"In 1896, Martin Conoey designed the incubator, a device developed to aid premature babies. . . In a bizarre combination of medicine and sideshow, Cooney gathered hundreds of premature babies (they were easy to obtain because doctors assumed premature infants would die), put them into incubators, and exhibited them at various expositions and fairs in America and Europe."

- Meredith Small, Our Babies, Ourselves, 1998.

May 3, 2009: Donne on God's creation of the cure, but not the illness - 0 Comments

"I know thou hast made the matter, and the man, and the art; and I go not from thee when I go to the physician. Thou didst not make clothes before there was a shame of the nakedness of the body, but thou didst make physic before there was any grudging of any sickness; for thou didst imprint a medicinal virtue in many simples, even from the beginning; didst thou mean that we should be sick when thou didst so? when thou madest them? No more than thou didst mean, that we should sin, when thou madest us: thou foresawest both, but causedst neither."


May 2, 2009: Mandeville on the proof of the True Cross - 0 Comments

"And that was the very cross assayed; for they found three crosses, one of our Lord, and two of the two thieves; and Saint Helen proved them by a dead body that arose from death to life, when that it was laid on it, that our Lord died on."


- John Mandeville, The Travels of John Mandeville, 1351.