Here are the quotations for next week, January 19th to 25th:
. ...(he) said to me: "Serve Caesar. You are not canvas I can cut to
advantage at present. But if you serve Caesar you will be obeying at least
some sort of law." He talked as though I were a barbarian. Weak as I was, I
could have snapped his back with my bare hands. I told him so. "I don't
doubt it," he said. "But that is neither here nor there...what concerns you
now is that, by taking service, you will be rid from the fear that has
ridden you all your life"...
2. '...We saw the twinkle of night-fires all along the guard towers, and the
line of the black catapults growing smaller and smaller in the distance. All
these things we knew till we were weary; but that night they seemed very
strange to us, because the next day we knew we were to be their masters.'...
3. '...this time he conformed to the man, with inimitable judgement and
temper. He allowed himself to be played into the shadow or the sun, as the
delighted audience demanded. He raged enormously, he feigned defeat; he
despaired in statuesque abandon, and thence flashed into fresh paroxysms of
wrath, but always with the detachment of the true artist who knows he is but
the vessel of an emotion whence others, not he, must drink..."
The sources of this week's extracts (January 12th to 18th) are as follows:
1. (...'He told me' he said suddenly, ' that my home address was Jerusalem.
You heard that ? ...) This is from 'The Village that voted the Earth was
Flat' in 'A Diversity of Creatures'.
2. (...'If you don't stop, I shall come into your house - in this car - and
drive upstairs and - kill you !'... ) This is from 'The Vortex' in 'A
Diversity of Creatures'.
3. (...I thought of the blowing up of Hell Gate; of the geysers in
Yellowstone Park; of Jonah and his whale; but the lively original, as I
watched it foreshortened from above, exceeded all these things.) This is
from 'My Sunday at Home' in 'The Day's Work'.
Good wishes to all
John R
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