Here, for your amusement in these grim times, are some quotations from a book I have only just begun to read, so they all come from Chapter #1. I am so impressed and amused that I cannot help but believe that the whole book is going to be both fascinating and – a giggle! Here’s the first extract:
Biography has become neurosis-conscious. Freud is a great man. But it is dangerous when a great is too easily half-understood. The Freudian high explosives have been worked into firecrackers for the simple to burn their fingers. It has become too easy to make a noise and a bad smell with materials compounded by the great discoverer for the blasting of tunnels. Biography is obviously the best playground for the dilettante of psychoanalysis. The older biographers lacked this knot-hole into the subconscious. They judged their heroes only by the conscious. The subconscious dethrones the conscious. Great men are being reappraised by their endocrine balances rather than by their performances. Poor Shelly! Poor Byron! Poor Wagner! Poor Chopin! Poor Heine! Poor Mark Twain! Poor Henry James! Poor Melville! Poor Dostoevsky! Poor Tolstoy! And even poor Jesus! There are still a lot left – the surface is hardly scratched. But even before the great ones give out, the “damaged” ones make good reading: P. T. Barnum, Brigham Young – even Al Capone and Pancho Villa.
I started reading this last night in the pub as I supped my pint (Butcombe bitter, naturally) before picking up my fish and chip supper. My chuckles began to cause consternation amongst the regulars in the Saloon Bar where I am not known for a sense of humor – particularly if they make a noise when I’m reading! Here’s another bit, soaked in sardonic irony:
Nature seems to have intended that her creatures feed upon one another. At any rate, she has so designed her cycles that the only forms of life that are parasitic directly upon Mother Earth herself are a proportion of the vegetable kingdom that dig their roots into the sod for its nitrogenous juices and spread their broad chlorophyllic leaves to the sun and air. But these – unless too unpalatable or poisonous – are devoured by the beasts and by man; and the latter, in their turn, by other beasts and by bacteria. In the Garden of Eden perhaps things may have been so ordered that the mutual devouring was postponed until death, by the natural course of old age, had returned each creature’s store of nutriment to the general stock. Chemically this might have been possible, and life maintained. But on a crowded planet, the habit of eating one another – dead or alive – has become a general custom, instinctively and dispassionately indulged in. There is probably as little conscious cruelty in the lion that devours a missionary as there is in the kind-hearted old gentleman who dines upon a chicken pie, or in the staphylococcus that is raising a boil on the old gentleman’s neck. Broadly speaking, the lion is parasitic on the missionary, as the old gentleman is on the chicken pie, and the staphylococcus on the old gentleman.
And finally, there is this:
A friend of ours is a professional writer. By this, we mean a person who makes his living by writing in the same way that a bricklayer makes his living by laying bricks, or a plumber supports himself by sweating joints. Writing, of course, like speech, is a method of expressing ideas or telling tales. It is also a means of conveying to others emotions, conceptions, or original comprehensions which might instruct, amuse, delight or elevate. This kind of writing used to be called art. And once – when only the intelligent could read –writing also needed to be intelligent and artistic. In our day, however, all kinds of people can read: college professors and charwomen, doctors and lawyers, bartenders, ministers of the gospel and trained nurses.
OK, OK, I here you, enough of the quotes and tell us who wrote it! Well, a rather witty fellow called Hans Zinsser who, with a name like that should have been working in Vienna perhaps but instead was a ‘Noo Yawker’ born and bred and died from 1878 to 1940. I have owned a copy of his book, from which the quotes are taken, for just over 10 years but somehow, for some reason, I have never quite got around to reading the damn thing. I only bought it for the reason I buy a lot of my books – the oddness of its title which is: Rats, Lice and History. If it goes on the way it starts I think I’m going to enjoy it!
