As we continue to read Wind in the Willows for family book time, I continue to be astonished by some of the writing in this children’s book. The opening of tonight’s chapter was especially poignant for me:

IX. WAYFARERS ALL

The Water Rat was restless, and he did not exactly know why. To all appearance the summer’s pomp was still at fullest height, and although in the tilled acres green had given way to gold, though rowans were reddening, and the woods were dashed here and there with a tawny fierceness, yet light and warmth and colour were still present in undiminished measure, clean of any chilly premonitions of the passing year. But the constant chorus of the orchards and hedges had shrunk to a casual evensong from a few yet unwearied performers; the robin was beginning to assert himself once more; and there was a feeling in the air of change and departure. The cuckoo, of course, had long been silent; but many another feathered friend, for months a part of the familiar landscape and its small society, was missing too and it seemed that the ranks thinned steadily day by day. Rat, ever observant of all winged movement, saw that it was taking daily a southing tendency; and even as he lay in bed at night he thought he could make out, passing in the darkness overhead, the beat and quiver of impatient pinions, obedient to the peremptory call.

Nature’s Grand Hotel has its Season, like the others. As the guests one by one pack, pay, and depart, and the seats at the table-d’hote shrink pitifully at each succeeding meal; as suites of rooms are closed, carpets taken up, and waiters sent away; those boarders who are staying on, en pension, until the next year’s full re-opening, cannot help being somewhat affected by all these flittings and farewells, this eager discussion of plans, routes, and fresh quarters, this daily shrinkage in the stream of comradeship. One gets unsettled, depressed, and inclined to be querulous. Why this craving for change? Why not stay on quietly here, like us, and be jolly? You don’t know this hotel out of the season, and what fun we have among ourselves, we fellows who remain and see the whole interesting year out. All very true, no doubt the others always reply; we quite envy you—and some other year perhaps—but just now we have engagements—and there’s the bus at the door—our time is up! So they depart, with a smile and a nod, and we miss them, and feel resentful. The Rat was a self-sufficing sort of animal, rooted to the land, and, whoever went, he stayed; still, he could not help noticing what was in the air, and feeling some of its influence in his bones.

Neil Gaimon slightly misquoted the opening line of Douglas Adams’s The Long Dark Tea Time of the Soul in twitter this afternoon. Yes, the 140-character limit imposes itself in all sorts of ways, which is why blogs aren’t yet obsolete.

Because the line is one of the best opening lines of any book I’ve read, and because the book itself is one of my favorites, I thought I’d give a longer quotation of the opening of the book, hopefully accurate:

It can hardly be a coincidence that no language on Earth has ever produced the expression "as pretty as an airport."

Airports are ugly. Some are very ugly. Some attain a degree of ugliness that can only be the result of a special effort. This ugliness arises because airports are full of people who are tired, cross, and have just discovered that their luggage has landed in Murmansk (Murmansk airport is the only known exception to this otherwise infallible rule), and architects have on the whole tried to reflect this in their designs.

They have sought to highlight the tiredness and crossness motif with brutal shapes and nerve jangling colours, to make effortless the business of separating the traveller for ever from his or her luggage or loved ones, to confuse the traveller with arrows that appear to point at the windows, distant tie racks, or the current position of Ursa Minor in the night sky, and wherever possible to expose the plumbing on the grounds that it is functional, and conceal the location of the departure gates, presumably on the grounds that they are not.

Caught in the middle of a sea of hazy light and a sea of hazy noise, Kate Schechter stood and doubted.

All the way out of London to Heathrow she had suffered from doubt. She was not a superstitious person, or even a religious person. She was simply someone who was not at all sure she should be flying to Norway. But she was finding it increasingly easy to believe that God, if there was a God, and if it was remotely possible that any godlike being who could order the disposition of particles at the creation of the Universe would also be interested in directing traffic on the M4, did not want her to fly to Norway either. All the trouble with the tickets, finding a next-door neighbour to look after the cat, then finding the cat so it could be looked after by the next-door neighbour, the sudden leak in the roof, the missing wallet, the weather, the unexpected death of the next-door neighbour, the pregnancy of the cat — it all had the semblance of an orchestrated campaign of obstruction which had begun to assume godlike proportions.

Even the taxi-driver — when she had eventually found a taxi — had said, "Norway? What you want to go there for?" And when she hadn’t instantly said, "’The aurora borealis!" or "Fjords!" but had looked doubtful for a moment and bitten her lip, he had said, "I know, I bet it’s some bloke dragging you out there. Tell you what, tell him to stuff it. Go to Tenerife."

There was an idea.

Tenerife.

Or even, she dared to think for a fleeting second, home.

She had stared dumbly out of the taxi window at the angry tangles of traffic and thought that however cold and miserable the weather was here, that was nothing to what it would be like in Norway.

Or, indeed, at home. Home would be about as icebound as Norway right now. Icebound, and punctuated with geysers of steam bursting out of the ground, catching in the frigid air and dissipating between the glacial cliff faces of Sixth Avenue.

A quick glance at the itinerary Kate had pursued in the course of her thirty years would reveal her without any doubt to be a New Yorker. For though she had lived in the city very little, most of her life had been spent at a constant distance from it. Los Angeles, San Francisco, Europe, and a period of distracted wandering around South America five years ago following the loss of her newly maimed husband, Luke, in a New York taxi-hailing accident.

If I were still an active programmer, I’d try to automate this:

Amazon.com has thousands of public-domain books for the Kindle. They are garbage. They are poorly formatted and riddled with typos. They were all computer generated, never proofed by human beings.

Project Gutenberg has most of those same titles, formatted better (though not perfectly) and proofread by human eyes.

But Amazon has user reviews and ratings, and I can list their public-domain books by popularity.

So I’m using Amazon to assemble my reading list, which I then download from Gutenberg.

I’m sure the program to automate this is straightforward.

In The War That Killed Achilles, author Caroline Alexander makes the same comparison I think of every time I read Book I of the Iliad.

First she quotes Achilles’s speech to Agamemnon. She quotes her favorite translation, by Richmond Lattimore. I will instead use my own favorite translation, by Stanley Lombardo:

Achilles looked [Agamemnon] up and down and said:

"You sorry, profiteering excuse for a commander!  
How are you going to get any Greek warrior
To follow you into battle again?
You know, I don’t have any quarrel with the Trojans,
They didn’t do anything to me to make me
Come over here and fight, didn’t run off my cattle or horses
Or ruin my farmland back home in Phthia, not with all
The shadowy mountains and moaning seas between.
It’s for you, dogface, for your precious pleasure —
And Menelaus’ honor — that we came here,
A fact you don’t have the decency even to mention!
And now you’re threatening to take away the prize
That I sweated for and the Greeks gave me.
I never get a prize equal to yours when the army
Captures one of the Trojan strongholds.
No, I do all the dirty work with my own hands,
And when the battle’s over and we divide the loot
You get the lion’s share and I go back to the ships
With some pitiful little thing, so worn out from fighting
I don’t have the strength left even to complain.
Well, I’m going back to Phthia now. Far better
To head home with my curved ships than stay here,
Unhonored myself and piling up a fortune for you."

Alexander comments:

It is a great gauntlet-throwing speech, particularly remarkable for occurring at the very outset of the epic. What Achilles is challenging is the bedrock assumption of military service — that the individual warrior submit his freedom, his destiny, his very life to a cause in which he may have no personal stake. In modern times, the speech finds its counterpart in Muhammad Ali’s famous refusal to fight in Vietnam:

I ain’t got no quarrel with the Viet Cong… No Viet Cong ever called me nigger… I am not going 10,000 miles to help murder, kill and burn other people to simply help continue the domination of white slavemasters over dark people.

Like Ali’s, Achilles’ words are particularly dangerous in that one can assume he is speaking aloud words that other, less charismatic men had long thought.

From The War That Killed Achilles: The True Story of Homer’s Iliad and the Trojan War by Caroline Alexander:

When the Roman Empire split in the sixth century A.D., knowledge of Greek, which flourished in Byzantium, or the Eastern Empire, all but vanished in the West. The Iliad itself was forgotten, and in its stead stories about the war at Troy flourished, which, along with romantic sagas about Alexander the Great, formed the most popular "classical" material of the Middle Ages. The primary sources for these post-Homeric renderings of the matter of Troy, as the body of romance came to be called, were the Latin prose works of Dictys of Crete and Dares of Phrygia, dated to the third and fifth or sixth centuries A.D., respectively—both of whom were fancifully believed to have been eyewitnesses to the Great War at Troy. In these Latin renderings, Achilles, the complex hero of Homer’s Iliad, stripped of his defining speeches, devolved into a brutal, if heroically brave, action figure. In the hands of medieval writers, sentiment hardened further against him. The twelfth-century Roman de Troie takes pains, in thirty thousand lines of French verse, to ensure that Achilles is depicted as in all ways inferior, even in martial prowess, to the noble Trojan hero Hektor. Such interpretive touches would remain potent down the ages, arguably into the present time.…

But as knowledge of Homer was disseminated by English translations, as well as by knowledge of the original Greek, the perception of the Iliad’s central hero, Achilles, shifted, and so accordingly did the perceived meaning of the epic. Not only had Achilles been tarnished by the medieval lays, but from the time of Augustan England of the eighteenth century, he was further diminished by the ascendancy of another ancient epic: Virgil’s Aeneid, which related the deeds and fate of the Roman hero pius Aeneas—Aeneas the pious, the virtuous, dutiful, in thrall to the imperial destiny of his country. In contrast to this paragon of fascism, Achilles, who asserts his character in the Iliad’s opening action by publicly challenging his commander in chief’s competence and indeed the very purpose of the war, was deemed a highly undesirable heroic model. Thus, while the Iliad’s poetry and tragic vision were much extolled, the epic’s blunter message tended to be overlooked. Centuries earlier, tragedians and historians of the classical era had matter-of-factly understood the war at Troy to have been a catastrophe…

But now, later ages marshaled the Iliad’s heroic battles and heroes’ high words to instruct the nation’s young manhood on the desirability of dying well for their country. The dangerous example of Achilles’ contemptuous defiance of his inept commanding officer was defused by a tired witticism—that shining Achilles had been "sulking in his tent."  

See also Literature and the Economics of Liberty by Paul Cantor and Stephen Cox

This is Sherlock Holmes, explaining the reason for his disguise:

I left the house a little after eight o’clock this morning in the character of a groom out of work. There is a wonderful sympathy and freemasonry among horsey men. Be one of them, and you will know all that there is to know. (“A Scandal in Bohemia”)

One of the many things I love about reading on my Kindle is that I can point to a word on the screen and immediately see how the New Oxford American Dictionary defines the term. (This turns out to be the same dictionary that comes bundled with Mac OS X, so I get the same definitions on both platforms.)

“Instinctive sympathy or fellow feeling between people with something in common.” I had no idea that “freemasonry” had this secondary meaning. I love it. I’ll try to slip it into casual conversation at some point.

From The Adventures of Jimmy Skunk (1918) by Thornton W. Burgess:

XIII: JIMMY SKUNK EXPLAINS

You’ll find this true where’er you go
That those prepared few troubles know.

“To begin with, I am not such a very big fellow, am I?” said Jimmy.

“Ah reckons Ah knows a right smart lot of folks bigger than yo’, Brer Skunk,” replied Unc’ Billy, with a grin. You know Jimmy Skunk really is a little fellow compared with some of his neighbors.

“And I haven’t very long claws or very big teeth, have I?” continued Jimmy.

“Ah reckons mine are about as long and about as big,” returned Unc’ Billy, looking more puzzled than ever.

“But you never see anybody bothering me, do you?” went on Jimmy.

“No,” replied Unc’ Billy.

“And it’s the same way with Prickly Porky the Porcupine. You never see anybody bothering him or offering to do him any harm, do you?” persisted Jimmy.

“No,” replied Unc’ Billy once more.

“Why?” demanded Jimmy.

Unc’ Billy grinned broadly. “Ah reckons, Brer Skunk,” said he, “that there isn’t anybody wants to go fo’ to meddle with yo’ and Brer Porky. Ah reckons most folks knows what would happen if they did, and that yo’ and Brer Porky are folks it’s a sight mo’ comfortable to leave alone. Leastways, Ah does. Ah ain’t aiming fo’ trouble with either of yo’. That li’l bag of scent yo’ carry is cert’nly most powerful, Brer Skunk, and Ah isn’t hankering to brush against those little spears Brer Porky is so free with. Ah knows when Ah’s well off, and Ah reckons most folks feel the same way.”

Jimmy Skunk chuckled. “One more question, Unc’ Billy,” said he. “Did you ever know me to pick a quarrel and use that bag of scent without being attacked?”

Unc’ Billy considered for a few minutes. “Ah can’t say Ah ever did,” he replied.

“And you never knew Prickly Porky to go hunting trouble either,” declared Jimmy. “We don’t either of us go hunting trouble, and trouble never comes hunting us, and the reason is that we both are always prepared for trouble and everybody knows it. Buster Bear could squash me by just stepping on me, but he doesn’t try it. You notice he always is very polite when we meet. Prickly Porky and I are armed for defence, but we never use our weapons for offence. Nobody bothers us, and we bother nobody. That’s the beauty of being prepared.”

Unc’ Billy thought it over for a few minutes. Then he sighed and sighed again.

“Ah reckons yo’ and Brer Porky are about the luckiest people Ah knows,” said he. “Yes, Sah, Ah reckons yo’ is just that. Ah don’t fear anybody mah own size, but Ah cert’nly does have some mighty scary times when Ah meets some people Ah might mention. Ah wish Ol’ Mother Nature had done gone and given me something fo’ to make people as scary of me as they are of yo’. Ah cert’nly believes in preparedness after seein’ yo’, Brer Skunk. Ah cert’nly does just that very thing. Have yo’ found any nice fresh aiggs lately?”

My friend Carolyn just won the grand prize for the GreatSchools Bedtime Story Contest:

The grand-prize winner of the GreatSchools Bedtime Story Contest is equal parts quirky and quaint.

The bath was too hot. The yellow duckies squirted icky water. And her favorite tiger towel was still in the laundry.

Annie had had enough.

She wrapped herself in a frayed blue towel, curled up into a ball on the bathmat, and went away.

She went away to the Middle of Nowhere.

It was nice in the Middle of Nowhere. Soft. Dark. A little moist. But nice.

Annie was listening to the sound of her heartbeat in the Middle of Nowhere when from far away she heard a voice.

A shrill, scratchy sort of voice. It reminded her of her mother.

“Annie!” the shrill, scratchy voice shouted. It grew louder. It sounded like it was on top of her.

“Annie!”

“Annie’s not here!” Annie shouted back. “She’s gone far away.”

The shrill, scratchy voice was silent. Then it said, “Oh.”

The “oh” was soft and just a little bit scratchy. It reminded Annie of her mother when she read a bedtime story.

“Can you tell me where Annie has gone, please?”

“Far away,” Annie said. “To the Middle of Nowhere!”

“Oh!” said the voice. “And where exactly is the Middle of Nowhere?”

“It’s very far away. It’s farther than Australia and Gibraltar. You have to take 17 airplanes to get there.”

“Oh my,” said the voice. “That is far away. I wonder how Annie managed.”

“Well,” said Annie, “she does run the fastest of anyone. She got there quick as a flash.”

“Of course,” said the voice. “But what is the Middle of Nowhere like? What’s in it?”

“Oh, it’s a beautiful place,” said Annie. “There are only giraffes. And no ants and no spiders can live there.”

“Really?” asked the voice. “Just giraffes. No people?”

“No. No people,” said Annie.

“Except for Annie, right?” said the voice.

Annie thought that the soft, scratchy voice was chuckling a little bit. It reminded her of her mother when she was listening to her father tell a joke.

“Yes, except for Annie. She’s allowed there. The giraffes like her.”

“Do the giraffes play with her?”

“No. They never play with her. They only eat leaves and moo.”

“Wait … the giraffes moo? Like cows?”

“Yes. They moo all day long. They’re very noisy.”

“Wow. So do the ants and the spiders play with Annie?”

“No! Remember I told you there are no ants and spiders in the Middle of Nowhere. Just giraffes.”

“Just giraffes that moo. Yes, you did tell me that. I’m sorry,” the voice softened even more. “Well, I have an important question to ask you. If there’s no one to play with her there, why did Annie leave our cozy house to go to the Middle of Nowhere?”

“Slugs,” said Annie.

“Excuse me?” said the scratchy voice, turning a tiny bit shrill again.

“There are slugs in the Middle of Nowhere. Annie likes slugs,” said Annie.

“Annie likes slugs?” the voice said with a sigh.

“I’m a slug,” said Annie.

The voice was silent for a second. Then it said slowly, “Let me get this straight. You’re a slug?”

“Yes,” said Annie.

“From the Middle of Nowhere?”

“Yes,” said Annie.

“And you arrived here when Annie left for the Middle of Nowhere?”

“Yes!” cried Annie.

“Oh!” said the voice. “Welcome to our bathroom.”

“Thank you,” said Annie.

“Do you like it here in the bathroom?”

“Very much,” said Annie.

“Well, well,” said the voice, sounding brighter. It reminded Annie of her mother when they were out walking in the woods. “The rest of the house is even nicer. How would you like to spend the night? Since Annie’s run off to the Middle of Nowhere, there’s an empty spot in her bed. You might as well wear her pajamas too — that is, if slugs wear pajamas.”

“Slugs do,” said Annie. “And yes, I would like to spend the night. I’m quite tired.”

Annie stood up and threw off the blue towel. Annie’s mother was sitting on the bathroom floor, holding her favorite red and white striped pajamas.

“Oh!” said Annie’s mother, sounding exactly like when she opened a surprise present.

“What is it?” said Annie.

“You look just like my daughter Annie, even if you are a slug,” said Annie’s mother. “Now, come on, let’s go find Annie’s father. We’ve never put a slug to bed before, and I know he’s going to be very interested to meet you. Do you leave a trail of slime wherever you go?”

Annie giggled.

And far off, in the Middle of Nowhere, a herd of giraffes mooed.

The end.

[From chapter 8 of The Rise and Fall of Society by Frank Chodorov.]

As everyone knows, an analogy is neither evidence nor proof. And yet, since Aristotle it has been common practice among political scientists to call upon an analogy to support a theory of the origin of Government; namely, that Government grew out of the organization of the family.

There is, of course, no historical evidence of a cause-and-effect relationship between the two institutions; all that we have is an unproven hypothesis, resting on an assumed similarity between parental authority and Government authority.

The hypothesis disproves itself, however, when the biological factor in parental authority is taken into consideration. The child looks to the parent for guidance simply because of the inadequacies and insecurity of childhood, and seeks or accepts authority as a matter of necessity. Government has no such claim on its citizenry, nor is loyalty to it in any way analogous to filial devotion. Even the father-son relationship alters in character as the offspring reaches maturity and attains self-sufficiency, a relationship in which authority diminishes and disappears; the citizen’s allegiance to Government is unrelated to his age or to his ability to take care of himself.

Neat as the analogy is, it does not bear up under analysis and one must look elsewhere for some explanation of the phenomenon of Government.

Frank Chodorov was an advocate of the free market, individualism, and peace. He began as a supporter of Henry George and edited the Georgist paper the Freeman before founding his own journal which became the influential Human Events. He later founded another version of the Freeman for the Foundation for Economic Education and lectured at the Freedom School in Colorado.

…and it’s not even romantic:

And Ruth said, Entreat me not to leave thee, or to return from following after thee: for whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge: thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God: Where thou diest, will I die, and there will I be buried: the LORD do so to me, and more also, if ought but death part thee and me. (Ruth 1:16–17)

That’s probably my favorite passage in the Bible, the widowed Ruth refusing to abandon her widowed mother-in-law.

The same book also contains what might be the sexiest scene in the Bible (outside the Song of Songs):

And when Boaz had eaten and drunk, and his heart was merry, he went to lie down at the end of the heap of corn: and she came softly, and uncovered his feet, and laid her down.

And it came to pass at midnight, that the man was afraid, and turned himself: and, behold, a woman lay at his feet. And he said, Who art thou? And she answered, I am Ruth thine handmaid: spread therefore thy skirt over thine handmaid… (Ruth 3:7–9)

Benjamin asked me to play him an audiobook this afternoon. Which one? “One with monsters.” I played him Geraldine McCaughrean’s Odysseus, but my favorite of her monsters is this one, from a chapter in Perseus called "Love at First Sight":

At the sight of the monster watching her from among the waves, Andromeda fainted. The beast was transfixed; the answer to its longings was suddenly there. It had been formed and made to hunger after Andromeda. As Poseidon took a piece of alligator, a shred of shark, a morsel of whale, a section of moray eel, and molded his ravenous vengeful monster, he poured into its sea-cold blood all the heat he had felt for Medusa, all the hunger he still felt for beauty, all the violence he normally reserved for causing tidal waves and earthquakes. So the monster thought and dreamed and pictured and bayed for Andromeda. And when it found her staked out as a gift, its ecstasy was horrible to see. It leaped and pranced in the sea, and its tongue lolled out through its thousands of teeth. Its nostrils were full of her sweet smell. It scraped its clawed fins on the shallowing seabed and stretched out its neck… (pp. 79–80)