A book is a mirror

via "Reading: An essay" by W.H. Auden

A book is a mirror: if an ass peers into it, you can't expect an apostle to look out.

- C.G. Lightenberg

Bring order into this multitudinous chaos . . .

From Virginia Woolf's essay, How Should One Read a Book?

But to enjoy freedom, if the platitude is pardonable, we have of course to control ourselves. We must not squander our powers, helplessly and ignorantly, squirting half the house in order to water a single rose-bush; we must train them, exactly and powerfully, here on the very spot. This, it may be, is one of the first difficulties that faces us in a library. What is "the very spot"? There may well seem to be nothing but a conglomeration and huddle of confusion. Poems and novels, histories and memoirs, dictionaries and blue-books; books written in all languages by men and women of all tempers, races, and ages jostle each other on the shelf. And outside the donkey brays, the women gossip at the pump, the colts gallop across the fields. Where are we to begin? How are we to bring order into this multitudinous chaos and so get the deepest and widest pleasure from what we read?

Babies possess certain moral foundations

A very interesting article in the May 3rd, 2010 New York Times, Moral Life of Babies by Paul Bloom. This is a tricky field (cognitive development of very young children) and it is easy to both misread experiments and over-extrapolate the possible implications. Tentative though the findings have to be, they are none-the-less intriguing.

Morality, then, is a synthesis of the biological and the cultural, of the unlearned, the discovered and the invented. Babies possess certain moral foundations - the capacity and willingness to judge the actions of others, some sense of justice, gut responses to altruism and nastiness. Regardless of how smart we are, if we didn't start with this basic apparatus, we would be nothing more than amoral agents, ruthlessly driven to pursue our self-interest. But our capacities as babies are sharply limited. It is the insights of rational individuals that make a truly universal and unselfish morality something that our species can aspire to.

I become a thousand people

From Aidan Chambers' Booktalk: Occasional Writing on Literature and Children.

There is a phrase of C.S. Lewis's that sums this up. Through literature, he wrote, 'I become a thousand [people] and yet remain myself.'

Plain speaking in the 1700's

From one of Isaac Watts' ABC books.

He that ne'er learns his A B C,
For ever will a blockhead be;
But he that learns these letters fair,
Shall have a Coach to take the Air.

What's that? All gas and gaiters

From Jeeves in the Morning by P.G. Wodehouse.

Wooster refers at one point to "everything is once more gas and gaiters" to mean that everything is in good shape. Still, where did the term come from. When I lived in England in the sixties there was a TV show starring Derek Nimmo as a clergyman and titled "All Gas and Gaiters."

Michael Quinion explains fully here. The origin is in Dickens:

But the original is in Charles Dickens's Nicholas Nickleby of 1839, in which a mad old gentleman who has been paying his addresses to Mrs Nickleby arrives precipitously down the chimney of an upstairs chamber dressed only in his underwear. Then Miss La Creevy comes into the room, whom the old man immediately mistakes for Mrs Nickleby:

"Aha!" cried the old gentleman, folding his hands, and squeezing them with great force against each other. "I see her now; I see her now! My love, my life, my bride, my peerless beauty. She is come at last - at last - and all is gas and gaiters!"

Further:

Despite its being nonsense (or possibly because it was), all is gas and gaiters became a well-known interjection. The original sense - as you will realise - was of a most satisfactory state of affairs. This is how nineteenth-century speakers used it and also clearly what Wodehouse meant by it. But another sense grew up in the twentieth century in which gaiters referred to the senior clergy - such as bishops and archbishops - because of their traditional dress that included those garments, and gas alluded to their supposedly meaningless eloquence. So all gas and gaiters has come to mean mere verbiage.

The First of May

illustration by Blanche Fisher Wright

The First of May
Folksaying

The fair maid who, the first of May,
Goes to the fields at break of day,
And washes in dew from the hawthorn-tree,
Will ever after handsome be.