the

New Cavalier Reading Society

presents…

•SOLVM•SAPIENTEM• •ESSE•LIBERVM•

Uncopyright © 2017 by Joshua Humphreys

The first volume of the Commonplace Book of Joshua Humphreys

was first printed in two volumes, in 2010 and 2011.

It is probably for the best if you use this work only for private study and reference, as a lot of what it contains is still under copyright, and the author (compiler) of this

volume wishes very much not to go to jail.

So, without further ado.

No rights reserved, bitches.

This book is not sold. If you have a copy of it then you must have

been a very good person, must’ve you.

All of it may be reprinted, in part or whole, because all of it, part or whole is already reprinted and—

Oh no, I’ve gone cross-eyed.

ISBN: 978-1-973-95339-5

J O S H V A H V M P H R E Y S .COM

T h e

C o m m o n p l a c e B o o k

of J O S H V A H V M P H R E Y S.

being:

A modern Guide to right Feeling & audacious Thinking, and a Noble Recorde for our Time of

the Loft Caufes & Forbidden Loyalties of Hiftorie AND

a most noble guide to keeping one conversant with all that is beautiful and sublime

in the intellectual and moral world.

Volume I.

The following is a collection accrued largely over 36 months of reading. Bored with the official histories taught at university, I looked elsewhere for an education. In the novels, histories, poems, plays and essays of a diverse set of men I found it. The seventh page of this volume marks its true commencement.

Currents of thought are no doubt evident. Foci may by the end appear laboured. They are and have been my intellectual preoccupations since first I realised that my fifteen years of schooling had been a subtle but total inculcation.

The professional teacher-economists of today would find in the thoughts herein expressed only antediluvian bagatelles. To me they are very much alive. If I master them it will serve as my career. If they me, my ruin. A man must grow insane with the objectivity which the following pages give.

My educators will reveal themselves through frequency; a progression is surely present. From page 51 to page 117 is the accumulated reading of a calendar year—the wide and free studies followed once released from the stipulations of tertiary education. Some are the single aphorism thought exceptional within a multi-volume work. Some are tracts whose excision would leave their original texts insubstantial. All hopefully are worth something in a world that has all but lost the ability to conceive of things other than how they shall soon be.

J.H. Dec 2011

1

Wonder is the effect of ignorance. JOHNSON

Every man who wishes to rise superior to the lower animals should strive his hardest to avoid living all his days in silent obscurity, like the beasts of the field, creatures which go with their faces to the ground and are the slaves of their bellies. We human beings have mental as well as physical powers; the mind, which we share with gods, is the ruling element in us, while the chief function of the body, which we have in common with the beasts, is to obey. Surely, therefore, it is our intellectual rather than our physical powers that we should use in the pursuit of fame. Since only a short span of life has been vouchsafed us, we must make ourselves remembered as long as may be by those who come after us. Wealth and beauty can give only a fleeting perishable fame, but intellectual excellence is a glorious and everlasting possession.

SALLUST

Il n’avait plus d’opinions, il avait des sympathies.

HUGO Not to know what happened before you were born is to be a child forever. For what is the time of a man, except it be interwoven with that memory of ancient things of a superior age?

CICERO

Only a few prefer liberty. The majority seek nothing more than fair masters. SALLUST Everything will pass, and the world will perish, but the Ninth Symphony will remain. BAKUNIN A period of law and order as long as the one our generation had behind it brought a real craving for the extraordinary.

JÜNGER

Le travail est la loi; qui le repousse ennui, l’aura supplice. Tu ne veux pas être ouvrier, tu seras esclave.

HUGO

2

Freedom is always the freedom of dissenters. LUXEMBOURG

As was true in the early years of the republic, the country is governed by a commercial oligarchy. And the citizen who cannot afford the luxury of a contrary opinion learns of necessity to dance the beggar’s waltz.

LAPHAM

It may be that the present tendencies toward centralisation are too strong to be resisted until they have led to disaster, and that, as happened in the fifth century, the whole system must break down, with all the inevitable results of anarchy and poverty, before human beings can acquire that degree of personal freedom without which life loses its savour.

RUSSELL Legislators, politicians, lawyers, ministers, and officeholders, serve the State chiefly with their heads; and, as they rarely make any moral distinctions, they are as likely to serve the Devil, without intending it, as God. A very few, as heroes, patriots, martyrs, reformers in the great sense, and men, serve the State with their consciences also, and so necessarily resist it for the most part; and they are commonly treated by it as enemies.

THOREAU

The destruction of the past, or rather of the social mechanisms that one’s contemporary experience to that of earlier generations, is one of the most characteristic and eerie phenomena of the late twentieth century. Most young men and women at the century’s end grow up in a sort of permanent present lacking any organic relation to the public past of the times they live in. This makes historians, whose business it is to remember what others forget, more essential at the end of the second millennium than ever before. At the end of this century it has for the first time become possible to see what a world may be like in which the past, including the past in the present, has lost its role, in which the old maps and charts which guided human beings, singly and collectively, through life no longer represent the landscape through which we move, the sea on which we sail. In which we do not know where our journey is taking us, or even ought to take us.

HOBSBAWM

That culture, joy and goodliness Be th’ equal right of all: That Greed no more shall those oppress. Who by the wayside fall.

O’DOWD 3

There is but one road to excellence, even for the genius of a Handel or a Mozart—unremitted application.

THAYER

You can live to be a hundred if you give up all the things that make you want to live to be a hundred.

ALLEN

Tornate all’antico e sarà un progresso. Let us return to the past and that will be progress.

VERDI Peut-on être un saint sans Dieu. C’est le seul problem concret que je conaisse aujourd’hui.

CAMUS The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting. KUNDERA

An old Armenian on his deathbed: ‘Remember to defend the Jews.’ ‘Why Jews?’ ‘Because if they’re gone, we’ll be next.’

War and culture, those are the two poles of Europe, her heaven and hell, her glory and shame, and they cannot be separated from one another. When one comes to an end the other will end also and one cannot end without the other. KUNDERA There are many things more horrible than bloodshed, and slavery is one of them. PEARSE

Once you start choosing, things become beautiful.

4

The general tendency of things throughout the world is to render mediocrity the ascendant power among mankind.

In this age, the mere example of non-conformity, the mere refusal to bend the knee to custom, is itself a service.

We should think we’d done wonders if we had made ourselves all alike. MILL

“Liberals” are men and women who tend to believe that the human being is perfectible and social progress predictable and that the instrument for effecting the two is reason; that truths are transitory and empirically determined; that equality is desirable and attainable through the action of state power; that social and individual differences, if they are not rational, are objectionable, and should be scientifically eliminated; that all peoples and societies should strive to organise themselves upon a rationalist and scientific paradigm.

BUCKLEY

The mass crushes beneath it everything that is different, everything that is excellent, individual, qualified and select. Anybody who is not like everybody, who does not think like everybody, runs the risk of being eliminated.

Human society is always aristocratic by its very essence, to the extreme that it is a society in the measure that it is aristocratic, and ceases to be such when it ceases to be aristocratic.

ORTEGA Y GASSET

A SOVIET STORY My grandfather grew up in a village where he cultivated the land

with his brother and their children. His neighbour, Petya, was a ne’er-do-well, who slept on the porch of his ramshackle hut and spent his evenings drinking and beating his miserable wife. He would watch in disdain as we sweated in the hot sun building a new barn or brought home a new cow. During hard times, Petya would appear at our door asking for a handout. In 1929, Petya appeared at my grandfather’s door accompanied by a handful of thugs, sporting a military uniform and cap bearing a red star, and declared: “In the name of Soviet power, I order you to hand over all your property and land to the collective.”

This is why my grandfather hated communism and Soviet power all his life.

5

BERLIN

The Hedgehog and the Fox There is a line among the fragments of the Greek poet Archilochus which

says: ‘The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.’ There exists a great chasm between those, on one side, who relate

everything to a single central vision, one system, less or more coherent or articulate, in terms of which they understand, think and feel – a single, universal, organising principle in terms of which alone all that they are and say has significance – and, on the other side, those who pursue many ends, often unrelated and even contradictory, connected, if at all, only in some de facto way, for some psychological or physiological cause, related to no moral or aesthetic principle.

Without insisting on a rigid classification, we may, without too much fear of contradiction, say that, in this sense, Dante belongs to the first category, Shakespeare to the second; Plato, Lucretius, Pascal, Hegel, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Ibsen, Proust are, in varying degrees, hedgehogs; Herodotus, Aristotle, Montaigne, Erasmus, Molière, Goethe, Pushkin, Balzac, Joyce are foxes.

What is Government? PROUDHON

To be governed is to be watched over, inspected, spied on, directed, legislated at, regulated, docketed, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, assessed, weighed, censored, ordered about, by men who have neither the right, nor the knowledge, nor the virtue. … To be governed is to be at every operation, at every transaction, noted, registered, enrolled, taxed, stamped, measured, numbered, assessed, licensed, authorized, admonished, forbidden, reformed, corrected, punished. It is, under the pretext of public utility, and in the name of the general interest, to be placed under contribution, trained, ransomed, exploited, monopolized, extorted, squeezed, mystified, robbed; then, at the slightest resistance, the first word of complaint, to be repressed, fined, despised, harassed, tracked, abused, clubbed, disarmed, choked, imprisoned, judged, condemned, shot, deported, sacrificed, sold, betrayed; and, to crown all, mocked, ridiculed, outraged, dishonoured. That is government; that is its justice; that is its morality.

6

7

An intellectual is anybody who has found something more interesting than sex. HUXLEY

The effect of daily newspapers on their readers is to affirm them as a complacent, prejudiced and unthinking mass.

ELIOT Education should remain a privilege. Great and fine things can never be common. Dass Jedermann lesen lernen darf, verdirbt auf die Dauer nicht allein das Schreiben, sondern auch das Denken.

NIETZSCHE Being aristocratic, modern art compels the masses to recognise themselves for what they are—the inert matter of the historical process.

ORTEGA Y GASSET You can have an affection for a murderer or a sodomite, but you cannot have an affection for a man whose breath stinks. ORWELL ‘The only use I’ve got for schools now is to fit people to read advertisements.’ An insane life in a utopia or the life of a primitive in an Indian village. A population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude.

HUXLEY

The right to be unhappy rather than to enjoy the drug-induced love of servitude. To extend privileges is to destroy their value. Universal slow suicide is called life.

NIETSZCHE

8

Verily it is the sorest of all human sorrows to abound in knowledge and yet have no power. HERODOTUS

There is no reason for studying philosophy except that to certain temperaments it is an agreeable way of passing time.

HUME Art is the tree of life. Science is the tree of death.

BLAKE

La continuité dégoûte en tout. Le froid est agréable pour se chauffer. PASCAL It ain’t what a man don’t know as makes him a fool, but what he does know ain’t so. JOSH BILLINGS

Instead of diversity of opinion, they prefer rival orthodoxies. WAUGH

Rulers can impose many prohibitions, provided that the people on whom they are imposed have been given sufficiently lively and interesting orgies.

HUXLEY

The restraint of a traditional culture tempers and directs creative impulses. Freedom produces sterility.

WAUGH

THE ACCURSED QUESTIONS — PROKLATYE VOPROSY —

— DIE VERDAMMTEN FRAGEN —

Those central and moral questions of which every honest man, in particular every writer, must sooner or later become aware, and then, be faced with the choice of either entering the struggle or turning his back upon his fellow men, conscious of his responsibility for what he’s doing.

9

BERTRAND RUSSELL

Powerlessness makes people feel that nothing is worth doing and comfort makes the painfulness of this feeling just bearable.

What science has done is to increase the proportion of your life in which you are a cog.

Men are born ignorant, not stupid; they’re made stupid by education.

The fact that all things pass is not in itself grounds for pessimism. If they were succeeded by worse things that would be a ground, but if they’re succeeded by better things, that is reason for optimism.

There can be no value in the whole unless there is value in the parts.

Bit by bit, and step by step, the world has been marching towards the realisation of Orwell’s nightmare; but because the march has been gradual, people have not realised how far it has taken them on this fatal road.

Perhaps a well-ordered prison is all that the human race deserves.

Boredom as a factor in human behaviour has received, in my opinion, far less attention than it deserves.

We are now descendants, not heirs. Some discontinuity must intervene in order that man may renew his feeling of peril, the substance of his life.

ORTEGA Y GASSET

The only striking effect of having taught everybody to read and write is that the human beings of lowest intelligence are now vocal instead of being dumb, as they were in the past. By the year 2000 the six-hour day will be everywhere the rule. HUXLEY Oh Swift! If fame be life thou canst not wholly die.

PARNELL

What we become depends on what we read after all the professors have finished with us. The greatest university of all is a collection of books.

CARLYLE Empty-headed people are all indiscreet because they have no thoughts that are worth keeping to themselves.

BALZAC

10

RAND Introduction to Hugo’s Ninety-Three

Modern readers should be cautioned that a first encounter with Hugo might be shocking to them: it is like emerging from a murky underground, filled with the moans of festering half-corpses, into a blinding burst of sunlight.

Do not look for “the folks next door”—you are about to meet a race of giants, who might have and ought to have been your neighbours.

Do not say that the actions of these giants are "impossible’’ because they are heroic, noble, intelligent, beautiful—remember that the cowardly, the depraved, the mindless, the ugly are not all that is possible to man.

Do not say that "life is not like that"—ask yourself: whose life? This warning is made necessary by the fact that the philosophical and

cultural disintegration of our age—which is bringing men’s intellect down to the concrete-bound, range-of-the-moment perspective of a savage—has brought literature to the stage where the concept of "abstract universality" is now taken to mean "statistical majority." To approach Hugo with such intellectual equipment and such a criterion is worse than futile. To criticize Hugo for the fact that his novels do not deal with the daily commonplaces of average lives, is like criticizing a surgeon for the fact that he does not spend his time peeling potatoes. To regard as Hugo’s failure the fact that his characters are "larger than life" is like regarding as an airplane’s failure the fact that it flies.

Until all teachers are geniuses and enthusiasts nobody will learn anything except what they teach themselves.

Christianity made us barbarians of the soul, and now science is making us barbarians of the intellect.

HUXLEY It is for the most realistic reasons, as well as those of principle, that we must resist every single accretion of power by the state, even while guarding our rhetoric against such exaggerations as equating social security with slavery.

BUCKLEY

I am persuaded that there is absolutely no limit to the absurdities that can, by government action, come to be generally believed. The discovery that man can be scientifically manipulated, and that governments can turn large masses this way or that as they choose, is one of the causes of our misfortunes. RUSSELL

11

Prefer disorderly resistance to decline rather than comfortable accommodation to it. Individual liberty is the true modern liberty. Political liberty is its guarantee; consequently, political liberty is indispensable. But to ask the peoples of our day to sacrifice, like those of the past, the whole of their individual liberty to political liberty, is the surest means of detaching them from the former and, once this result has been achieved, it would be only too easy to deprive them of the latter.

CONSTANT To know only one’s own tradition is not to know even that.

OAKESHOTT

They never fail who die

In a great cause: the block may soak their gore: Their heads may sodden in the sun; their limbs Be strung to city gates and castle walls— But still their Spirit walks abroad. Though years Elapse, and others share as dark a doom, They but augment the deep and sweeping thoughts Which overpower all others, and conduct The world at last to Freedom. BYRON

Now wits gain praise by copying other wits, As one hog lives on what another shits.

POPE

Long time ago good. Now heap shit. HEMINGWAY

First say to yourself what you would be, and then do what you have to do. EPICTETUS

A novelist has no business with types. They are the property of economists and politicians and advertisers and the other professional bores of our period.

WAUGH

12

It is essential, when travelling, to feel that you belong to a superior civilisation, and the lands of the Arabs lavishly grant opportunities to nourish this conviction.

BURGESS Most of us fear the deadening of the body and would make use of every means possible to avoid falling into that condition; but the deadening of the soul concerns us not a bit. It is more necessary for the soul to be cured than the body, for it is better to die than to live badly.

EPICTETUS

It has been the experience of a middle-aged Englishman to be born into one of the most beautiful countries in the world and watch it change year by year into one of the ugliest.

WAUGH

Waugh preferred elegant scorn to reason. He despised so many things, turning his despications into exquisite pieces of verbal craft, that it could not but be evident that he was attempting to make a virtue of ineradicable pig-headedness.

BURGESS

The principle of preservation must be recognised while there is still something left to preserve.

WAUGH

A city that has fallen on unfavourable fortunes is made by its weakness too sensitive and delicate to endure frank speaking.

PLUTARCH Man’s capacity for suffering keeps pretty regular pace with the discoveries that ameliorate it and for every new thing found there is one good use and uncounted misuses.

WAUGH

The moment we are really impartial to it we know why people are partial to it. CHESTERTON

13

Paradife Loft. A

P O E M IN

T W E L V E B O O K S

The Author

J O H N M I L T O N .

Of Man’s first disobedience, and the fruit Of that forbidden tree whose mortal taste Brought death into the World, and all our woe, With loss of Eden, till one greater Man Restore us, and regain the blissful seat, Sing, Heavenly Muse. To do aught good never will be our task, but ever to do ill our sole delight,

as being the contrary to his high will whom we resist. Is this the region, this the soil, the clime, said then the lost Archangel,

this the seat that we must change for Heaven?—this mournful gloom for that celestial light? Be it so, since he who now is sovereign can dispose and bid what shall be right: farthest from him is best whom reason hath equalled, force hath made supreme above his equals. Farewell, happy fields, where joy for ever dwells! Hail, horrors! hail, infernal world! and thou, profoundest Hell, receive thy new possessor—one who brings a mind not to be changed by place or time.

The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven. What matter where, if I be still the same, and what I should be, all but less than he whom thunder hath made greater? Here at least we shall be free; th’ Almighty hath not built here for his envy, will not drive us hence: here we may reign secure; and, in my choice, to reign is worth ambition, though in Hell: better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven.

But wherefore let we then our faithful friends, th’ associates and co-partners of our loss, lie thus astonished on th’ oblivious pool, and call them not to share with us their part in this unhappy mansion, or once more with rallied arms to try what may be yet regained in Heaven, or what more lost in Hell?

14

Have ye chosen this place after the toil of battle to repose your wearied virtue, for the ease you find to slumber here, as in the vales of Heaven? or in this abject posture have ye sworn to adore the Conqueror?

Who overcomes by force hath overcome but half his foe. No deep within her gulf can hold immortal vigour, though oppressed and

fallen, I give not Heaven for lost. Where there is, then, no good for which to strive, no strife can grow up

there from faction: for none sure will claim in Hell precedence; none whose portion is so small of present pain that with ambitious mind will covet more.

15

For, while they sit contriving, shall the rest— millions that stand in arms, and longing wait the signal to ascend—sit lingering here, Heaven’s fugitives, and for their dwelling-place accept this dark opprobrious den of shame, the prison of his tyranny who reigns by our delay.

Suppose he should relent and publish grace to all, on promise made of

new subjection; with what eyes could we stand in his presence humble, and receive strict laws imposed, to celebrate his throne with warbled hymns, and to his Godhead sing forced hallelujahs, while he lordly sits our envied sovereign, and his altar breathes ambrosial odours and ambrosial flowers, our servile offerings? This must be our task in Heaven, this our delight. How wearisome eternity so spent in worship paid to whom we hate! Let us seek our own good from ourselves, and from our own live to ourselves, though in this vast recess, free and to none accountable, preferring hard liberty before the easy yoke of servile pomp.

MAMMON Ingrate, he had of me all he could have; I made him just and right,

sufficient to have stood, though free to fall. such I created all the ethereal Powers and Spirits, both them who stood, and them who fail’d; freely they stood who stood, and fell who fell. not free, what proof could they have given sincere of true allegiance, constant faith or love, where only what they needs must do appear’d, not what they would? what praise could they receive?

GOD Knowledge of good bought dear by knowing ill. One fatal tree there stands, of knowledge called, forbidden them to taste:

Knowledge forbidden suspicious, reasonless. Why should their Lord envy them that? Can it be sin to know? can it be death? And do they only stand by ignorance? Is that their happy state, the proof of their obedience and their faith? O fair foundation laid whereon to build their ruin! hence I will excite their minds with more desire to know, and to reject envious commands, invented with designs to keep them low, whom knowledge might exalt equal with Gods: aspiring to be such, they taste and die.

SATAN How can hearts, not free, be tried whether they serve willing or no? This is servitude, to serve the unwise, or him who hath rebelled against

his worthier.

16

True ease in writing comes from art, not chance, As those move easiest who have learned to dance.

POPE Men are we and must grieve when even the shade of that which once was great is passed away.

WORDSWORTH The self conquest of the writer who is not a man of action is style.

YEATS The danger now is, not that people should obstinately refuse to allow anything but their old routine to pass for reason and the will of God, but either that they should allow some novelty or other to pass for these too easily, or else that they should underrate the importance of them altogether, and think it enough to follow action for its own sake, without troubling themselves to make reason and the will of God prevail therein.

ARNOLD The world has never seen a poet or a novelist who had more good ideas than he could get upon paper in three hour’s work a day.

MENCKEN

His wisdom did his happiness destroy, Aiming to know that world he shou’d enjoy.

All this with indignation have I hurled At the pretending part of the proud world, Who, swollen with selfish vanity, devise False freedoms, holy cheats, and formal lies Over their fellow slaves to tyrannize.

ROCHESTER

A dead thing can go with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it. CHESTERTON

A style is not good unless it is an intimate and almost involuntary expression of the personality of the writer, and then only if the writer’s personality is worth expressing.

RUSSELL 17

To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it. CHESTERTON

Vice is at its peak. Set sail, O writer of satire, spread your canvas wide. JUVENAL

I remind myself that I must take some work as the whole end of life and not think as others do of becoming well off and living pleasantly.

Whatever the great poets had affirmed in their finest moments was the nearest we could come to an authoritative religion.

YEATS

NIETZSCHE

Everywhere the mediocre are combining in order to make themselves master! Universal suffrage—the system through which the lowest natures prescribe

themselves as laws for the higher. The values of the weak prevail because the strong have taken them over as

devices of leadership. They vomit their bile and call it a newspaper. Only there, where the state ceases, does the man who is not superfluous begin. He who climbs upon the highest mountain laughs at all tragedies, real or imaginary. Ihr sagt mir: ‘das Leben ist schwer zu tragen.’ Aber wozu hattet ihr

Vormittags euren Stolz und Abends eure Ergebung? Life is a fountain of delight; but where the rabble also drinks all wells are poisoned.

Reading is thinking with someone else’s head instead of one’s own. Only read for a limited and definite time exclusively the works of great minds, those who surpass other men of all times and countries and whom the voice of fame points to as such. These alone really educate and instruct.

Remember that the man who writes for fools always finds a large public. SCHOPENHAUER

What a treat it is to meet creatures who have only dancing and nonsense and finery on their minds!

NIETZSCHE

Whatever is to come cannot outweigh the importance to man of what has gone before. BUCKLEY

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19

F I G V R E S O F S T Y L E ; M O S -

T L Y T A K E N F R O M

R H E T O R I C - A A D H E R E N N -

I V M X C B.C.

ANAPHORA

Repetition of the same word or group of words at the beginning of successive clauses, sentences, or lines.

This royal throne of kings, this sceptred isle, This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars, This other Eden, demi-paradise This fortress built by Nature for herself Against infection and the hand of war.

Richard II You dare behold the light of day.? You dare look these people in the face.? You dare present yourself in the forum?

Crassus to Brutus We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds. We shall fight in the fields; and in the streets; we shall fight in the hills. We shall never surrender.

EPISTROPHE Repetition of the last word of successive phrases.

When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child.

Paul, 1 Corinthians 13:11 Now I want you to remember that no bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country.

Patton

20

Hourly joys be still upon you! Juno sings her blessings on you. Scarcity and want shall shun you, Ceres’ blessing so is on you.

Shakespeare, The Tempest We are born to sorrow, pass our time in sorrow, end our days in sorrow.

INTERLACEMENT The union of anaphora and epistrophe.

Against yourself you are calling him, against the laws you are calling him, against the democratic constitution you are calling him.

Aeschines Who are they who have often broken treaties? The Carthaginians. Who are they who have waged war with severest cruelty? The Carthaginians.

ANTITITHESIS Style is built on contraries. Two contrasting ideas are intentionally juxtaposed; a contrasting of opposing ideas in adjacent phrases, clauses, or sentences.

Serenity now; insanity later. Lloyd Braun

We find ourselves rich in goods but ragged in spirit, reaching with magnificent precision for the moon but falling into raucous discord on earth. We are caught in war, wanting peace. We’re torn by division, wanting unity.

Nixon Not that I loved Caesar less; but that I loved Rome more.

Shakespeare It has been my experience that folks who have no vices have very few virtues. Lincoln

APOSTROPHE Turning one’s speech from one audience to another. Most often, apostrophe occurs when one addresses oneself to an abstraction, to an inanimate object, or to the absent.

O, pardon me, thou bleeding piece of earth, That I am meek and gentle with these butchers. Thou art the ruins of the noblest man That ever lived in the tide of times.

Shakespeare, Julius Caesar

21

COLON A sentence member, brief and complete, which does not express an entire thought but is in turn supplemented by another colon. Most complete in threes (a Tricolon).

You were helping your enemy, you were hurting your friend, and you were not consulting your own best friends.

ISOCOLON A figure composed of cola of virtually equal number of syllables. One does not count them, but experience and practice bring instincts that can produce a colon of equal length to the one before it.

The father was meeting death in battle; the son was planning marriage at his home. These omens wrought grievous disasters.

COMMA/PHRASE

A short clause, something less than a colon, sometimes single words, and set apart by pauses in speech.

By your vigour, voice, looks you have terrified your adversaries. You have destroyed your enemies by jealousy, injuries, influence, perfidy.

ANTANACLASIS The repetition of a word or phrase whose meaning changes in the second instance.

Your argument is sound, all sound. Benjamin Franklin

If you aren’t fired with enthusiasm, you will be fired with enthusiasm. Vince Lombardi

While we live, let us live.

PERIOD The periodic sentence is characterized by the suspension of the completion of sense until its end. Usually, this entitles favouring the end position for the verb. In this instance, sing.

Of man’s first disobedience and the fruit Of that forbidden tree whose mortal taste Brought death into the world and all our woe, With loss if Eden, till one greater Man Restore us; and regain the blissful seat, Sing Heav’nly Muse… Milton, Paradise Lost

22

Out of the bosom of the Air, Out of the c!oud-fo!ds of her garment shaken, Over the woodlands brown and bare, Over the harvest-fields forsaken, Silent and soft, and slow, Descends the snow.

Longfellow’s Snowflakes

HYPOPHORA Asking of our adversaries or ourselves, what the adversaries can say in their favour, or what can be said against us. Then subjoin what ought or ought not to be said, which will be favourable to us and prejudicial to the opposition. Result should be to make it obvious that of all the possibilities nothing preferable to the thing done could have been done.

I ask therefore from what source has the defendant become so wealthy? Has an ample patrimony been left to him? But his father’s goods were sold. Now what should I have done when I was surrounded by so great a force of Gauls? Fight? But then our advance would have been with a small band.

HOMEOIOPTOTON In the same sentence two or more words appear in the same case with like terminations.

Am I to praise a man abounding in good luck but lacking in virtue?

HOMOEOTELEUTON Occurs when word endings of indeclinable words are similar.

You dare to act dishonourably, you strive to talk despicably; You live hatefully, you sin zealously, you speak offensively. He is esteemed eloquent which can invent wittily, remember perfectly, dispose orderly, figure diversely, pronounce aptly, confirm strongly, and conclude directly.

Peacham

The two preceding should be combined as often as possible. Declinable words (verbs) should have like case endings

and those lacking cases with like terminations.

METANOIA Retracts what has been said and replaces it with something more suitable. Doing so, you make a boring thought more striking.

I desire not your love, but your submissive obedience. 23

SURRENDER We yield and submit the whole matter to another’s will.

Because all things are taken away, only is left unto me my body and mind. These things, which only are left unto me of many, I grant then to you and to your power.

CLIMAX Generally, the arrangement of words, phrases, or clauses in an order of increasing importance, often in parallel structure. More specifically, climax is the repetition of the last word of one clause or sentence at the beginning of the next, through several clauses or sentences.

What remnant of the hope of liberty survives if those men may do what they please, if they can do what they may, if they dare do what they can, if they do what they dare and if you approve what they do?

Tribulation worketh patience; and patience trial; and trial hope; and hope confoundeth not, because the charity of God is poured forth in our hearts, by the Holy Ghost, who is given to us.

St. Paul

PARALIPSIS Stating and drawing attention to something in the very act of pretending to pass it over. Creates suspicion. Makes listeners take things for granted also. It does not insist directly on a statement that is refutable.

It would be unseemly for me to dwell on Senator Kennedy’s drinking problem, and too many have already sensationalized his womanising.

I will not even mention the fact that you betrayed us in the Roman people by aiding Catiline.

Cicero

DISJUNCTION A single subject governs several verbs or verbal constructions. Here, Roman people.

By the Roman people Numantia was destroyed, Carthage razed, Corinth demolished.

CONJUNCTION Verb holding a sentence together with a previous and succeeding phrase. Suited to brevity so is to be used more frequently.

Either with disease physical beauty fades, or with age.

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ADJUNCTION

The verb holding a sentence together is placed not in the middle but at the beginning or the end.

Beginning: Fades beauty with disease or age. End: Either with disease or age physical beauty fades.

REDUPLICATION Repetition of one more words for the purpose of amplification or appeal to pity. Reiteration of the same word makes a deep impression upon the hearer.

You are promoting riots Gracchus; civil and internal riots. You were not moved when his mother embraced your knees? You were not moved? War it is that you are bringing into Attica, Aeschines, an Amphictyonic war.

Demosthenes, De corona 143

METABASIS A transitional statement in which one explains what has been and what will be said.

I have spoken of his notable enterprises in France, and now I will rehearse his worthy acts done in England. As I have spoken of his sad adversity and misery, so will I now speak of his happy prosperity. I have spoken of manners; now it remains that I speak concerning doctrine. You have heard how he promised, and now I will tell you how he performed.

RECIPROCAL CHANGE Two discrepant thoughts are so expressed by transposition that the latter follows from the former, although contradictory to it. Repetition of words, in successive clauses, in reverse grammatical order.

You must eat to live, not live to eat.

I do not write poems, because I cannot write the sort I wish, and I do not with to write the sort I can.

Integrity without knowledge is weak and useless, and knowledge without integrity is dangerous and dreadful.

Samuel Johnson

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REASONING BY CONTRARIES

We use opposite statements, using one so as to neatly and directly prove the other.

Now how should you expect one who has ever been hostile to his own interests to be friendly to another’s? Do we fear to fight them on level plain when we have hurled them down from the hills?

ASYNDETON The omission of conjunctions between clauses, often resulting in a hurried rhythm or vehement effect. Gives the effect of unpremeditated multiplicity, of an extemporaneous rather than a labored account. This figure has animation and great force.

Indulge your father, obey your relatives, gratify your friends, submit to the laws. Through your ill-will, your injuries, your might, your treachery, you have destroyed the enemy.

SYNONYMY/INTERPRETATION A figure which does not duplicate the same word by repeating it, but replaces the word that has been used by another of the same meaning.

You have overturned the republic from its roots; you have demolished the state from its foundations. You have impiously beaten your father; you have criminally laid hands upon your parent.

ELIMINATION

We eliminate the several ways by which something could have been brought about until all are discarded except the one which we are insisting on. Furnishes strong support to conjectural arguments.

You either made purchased, or stole the bomb. Since you lack the intelligence to make it and the funds to purchase it, it can only be that you have stolen it.

APOSIOPESIS

Breaking off suddenly so that a suspicion, unexpressed, becomes more telling than a detailed explanation would have been.

The contest between you and me is unequal because so far as concerns me, the Roman people— I am unwilling to say it, lest by chance some one think me proud.

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POLYSYNDETON The use of a conjunction between each word, phrase, or clause; structurally the opposite of asyndeton. In a skilled hand, a shift from polysyndeton to asyndeton can be very impressive:

Behold, the LORD maketh the earth empty, and maketh it waste, and turneth it upside down, and scattereth abroad the inhabitants thereof. And it shall be, as with the people, so with the priest; as with the servant, so with his master; as with the maid, so with her mistress; as with the buyer, so with the seller; as with the lender, so with the borrower; as with the taker of usury, so with the giver of usury to him. Isaiah 24:1-2

HYPERBATON

Upset the word order. If a transposition does not obscure thought it can be very useful in periods. Should achieve a poetic rhythm for perfect fullness and the highest finish.

Why should their liberty than ours be more? Some rise by sin and some by virtue fall. Bloody thou art; bloody will be thy end.

Shakespeare And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made.

Yeats Uneasy lies the head which wears a crown.

Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part 2