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Commonplace BookCollected by André Bernard Defeat
But Anthony put a stop to [Cleopatra’s]
lamentation and asked for a drink of wine.
Perhaps he was thirsty; perhaps he thought it
would make a quicker release. When he had
drunk it, he gave her his advice: to see to the
security of her own affairs if she could do so
honorably, and to trust Proculeius especially
among Caesar’s friends; and not to grieve
for him at this last change, but to reckon
him happy for all the blessings he had
enjoyed; he had been a famous man, and a
man of great power; and now he had been
defeated without disgrace by a fellow
Roman.
Raphus cucullatus had become rare unto
death. But this one flesh-and-blood
individual still lived. Imagine that she was
thirty years old, or thirty-five, an ancient age
for most sorts of bird but not impossible for
a member of such a large-bodied species.
She no longer ran, she waddled. Lately she
was going blind. Her digestive system was
balky. In the dark of an early morning in
1667, say, during a rainstorm, she took cover
beneath a cold stone ledge at the base of
one of the Black River cliffs. She drew her
head down against her body, fluffed her
feathers for warmth, squinted in patient misery.
She waited. She didn’t know it, nor did
anyone else, but she was the only dodo on
Earth. When the storm passed, she never
opened her eyes. This is extinction.
The United States might leave Vietnam, but
the Vietnam War would never leave the
United States. The soldiers would bring it
back with them like an addiction. The
civilians may neglect or try to ignore it, but
those who have seen combat must find a reason
for that killing; they must put it in some
relation to their normal experience and to
their role as citizens.
Should the vertebrates fail to intimidate me
into ceding my garden to the forest, a dozen
different insect species, each with its own
distinctive preferences, tactics, and disguises,
will march on my plants in a series of waves
beginning in April and not relenting till
frost. First the cutworms, who saw off the
seedlings at ground level. Then the aphids,
specs of pale green that cluster on the
undersides of leaves, sucking the vital fluids
from young plants until they turn a last-gasp
yellow. Next come the loathsome slugs:
naked bullets of flesh—evicted snails—that
hide from the light of day, emerging at
sunset to cruise the garden along their own
avenues of slime. The cabbage loopers are
the paratroopers of the vegetable patch:
their eggs are dropped on the cole crops by
troop transports disguised as innocuous
white butterflies. Last to arrive is the vast
and far-flung beetle family—Colorado
potato beetles, blister beetles, flea beetles,
bean leaf beetles, cucumber beetles,
Japanese beetles, Mexican bean beetles—who mount a massive airborne invasion
beginning in midsummer.
Who would not have jumped for joy, in
1940, at the thought of seeing SS officers
kicked and humiliated? But when the thing
becomes possible, it is merely pathetic and
disgusting. It is said that when Mussolini’s
corpse was exhibited in public, an old
woman drew a revolver and fired five shots
into it, exclaiming, “Those are for my five
sons!” It is the kind of story that the newspapers
make up, but it might be true. I wonder
how much satisfaction she got out of those
five shots, which, doubtless, she had
dreamed years earlier of firing. The
condition of her being able to get close
enough to Mussolini to shoot at him was
that he should be a corpse.
I should repel my readers, from a mere incapacity
of believing me, were I to tell them
what tobacco has been to me, the drudging
service which I have paid, the slavery which I
have vowed to it. Here, when I have resolved
to quit it, a feeling as of ingratitude has
started up; how it has put on personal claims,
and made the demands of a friend upon me.
. . . How a pipe was ever in my midnight path
before me, till the vision forced me to realise
it,—how then its ascending vapours curled,
its fragrance lulled, and the thousand
delicious ministerings conversant about it,
employing every faculty, extracted the sense
of pain. How from illuminating it came to
darken, from a quick solace it turned to a
negative relief, thence to a restlessness and
dissatisfaction, thence to a positive misery.
How, even now, when the whole secret stands
confessed in all its dreadful truth before me,
I feel myself linked to it beyond the power of
revocation.
“Your name?” asks Victor. The man now has
his hand to his tie, at which Victor has been
looking all the while. Victor repeats the
name to his assistant, lisping it slowly. The
assistant looks at the list and finds no such
name. “You have no reservation?” says Victor
now, with the tone in which he might say,
“Where did you steal that watch?”
“Reservation?” says the man. “Yes,
reservation,” answers Victor. . . . An invisible
wrestling match starts, the man pushing
back the lapels of his coat, putting his hands
in all of his pockets and taking them out
again, looking into the faces of bystanders
for support and pointing at empty tables
inside the room. In such cases Victor takes
the list of reservations from his assistant,
drums on the edge of it with the end of his
golden pencil and looks past the man’s ear
into faraway space.
Every being, which during its natural lifetime
produces several eggs or seeds, must suffer
destruction during some period of its life,
and during some season or occasional year,
otherwise, on the principle of geometrical
increase, its numbers would quickly become
so inordinately great that no country could
support the product. Hence, as more individuals
are produced than can possibly survive,
there must in every case be a struggle for
existence, either one individual with another
of the same species, or with the individuals of
distinct species, or with the physical
conditions of life.
One of Longstreet’s Deep South veterans
put it strongest, dropping back toward the
tail of the column as he struggled to keep
up, tattered and barefoot, yet still with some
vestige of the raucous sense of humor that
had brought him this far along the four-year
road he had traveled. “My shoes are gone;
my clothes are almost gone, I’m weary, I’m
sick, I’m hungry. My family has been killed
or scattered, and may now be wandering
helpless and unprotected.” He shook his
head. “I would die; yes, I would die willingly,
he said, “because I love my country. But if
this war is ever over, I’ll be damned if I ever
love another country!”
"This is a sharp medicine, but a sure remedy for all evils."
The art of will-making chiefly consists in
baffling the importunity of expectation.
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