Emerson: Enchanted Library

In a library we are surrounded by many hundreds of dear friends, but they are imprisoned by an enchanter in these paper and leathern boxes; and though they know us, and have been waiting two, ten, or twenty centuries for us,—some of them,—and are eager to give us a sign, and unbosom themselves, it is the law of their limbo that they must not speak until spoken to; and as the enchanter has dressed them, like battalions of infantry, in coat and jacket of one cut, by the thousand and ten thousand, your chance of hitting on the right one is to be computed by the arithmetical rule of Permutation and Combination,—not a choice out of three caskets, but out of half a million caskets all alike. But it happens in our experience, that in this lottery there are at least fifty or a hundred blanks to a prize. It seems, then, as if some charitable soul, after losing a great deal of time among the false books, and alighting upon a few true ones which made him happy and wise, would do a right act in naming those which have been bridges or ships to carry him safely over dark morasses and barren oceans, into the heart of sacred cities, into palaces and temples. This would be best done by those great masters of books who from time to time appear,—the Fabricii, the Seldens, Magliabecchis, Scaligers, Mirandolas, Bayles, Johnsons, whose eyes sweep the whole horizon of learning. But private readers, reading purely for love of the book, would serve us by leaving each the shortest note of what he found.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Books” in Society and Solitude: Twelve Chapters

And so we have the book blog. :)

Reading Austen in the 70s

From Margaret Drabble’s introduction to Lady Susan, The Watsons, and Sanditon:

We may tend to think Elizabeth Bennet a sensible girl not to mind getting her skirts muddy, and the Darcy and Bingley women ridiculous for noticing, but eighteenth-century mud was doubtless much more substantial than our own, and long skirts picked it up more, as those who now wear long skirts again will surely have noticed…. The Austen family wore pattens when young, to negotiate the country lanes round Steventon, a practice which seemed as archaic and vulgar to Jane Austen’s nephew, as the wearing of clogs would have seemed to us now, had not a freak of fashion brought them very nosily back again in 1972.

I confess I did wear clogs in the 70’s, though I preferred pants to maxi-skirts. I wonder what cultural trends we could relate to Jane Austen today? Perhaps laptops are today’s writing desks, and instead of daily letter-writing today’s young ladies check Facebook.

The Life of Matvei Kozhemyakin: The Passage of Time

He opened a book he had borrowed from Posulov and stared with distrust at the even lines of print:

“They all promised to cling to one another, to help one another at all times, to rescue one another from danger, to sacrifice their lives for one another if necessary and to avenge the death of any of their number.”

Kozhemyakin drew the lamp nearer without taking his eyes off the book.

“So sacred was this vow that a father would take vengeance on his own son to fulfil the demands of the blood-contract made with the brotherhood.”

He closed the book for a second, then re-opened it cautiously at the first page, put his elbows on the table and began to read. He read as long as his eyes could see, and when at last he raised his head he discovered that the room was light and the trees in the orchard had thrown off the heavy robes of night.

Surprised, he got up and walked about the room, smiling to himself and shaking his weary head.

So that’s what books are for, he thought. So that you don’t notice the passage of time.

Snatches of what he had read floated through his mind like clouds, changing colour and shape, merging, separating, vanishing. He made no effort to hold on to them, so astonished was he by the magic force that could make him forget himself so utterly.

A little later he undressed, lay down and feel fast asleep.

Next morning, as he was washing himself in the kitchen, he said to Shakir:

“Tell anyone who asks for me that I’m not at home.”

“Even Nikon?”

Kozhemyakin considered.

“Yes, even Nikon. Anyone at all. I shall be very busy.”

After breakfast he seated himself by the window and opened the book again.

Reading came to be essential to him It was as if he had been going down a long pathway through open fields and had been stared at from all sides by hostile eyes which seemed to be demanding something of him; he longed to hide from them but there was nowhere to hide; and now he had found a sequestered niche from which he could not get so much as a glimpse of the irritating life around him, a niche in which he could live without noticing the dull monotonous passage of time. He read slowly, going again and again over the lines that pleased him most, and whenever he approached the end of a book he would anxiously finger the diminishing pages that remained….

“…I want some more history,” he said to Posulov.

“There is no more history.”

“What do you mean?” asked the startled and incredulous Kozhemyakin.

“I haven’t got any more books on history.”

“Then get some. When you go to Vorgorod for goods I’ll give you some money to buy books. Serious ones. Ask somebody what to buy.”

So accustomed had he become to reading that he could not get through the day without it, and if he had no new book he would re-read old ones. Amazed by the strength of his passion he said to himself:

Fancy that! I used to look down on people who had a passion for cards and other things, but look at me now….

When Posulov returned and brought him a big box of new books he was overjoyed. He instantly cut the pages of all of them and arranged them in two high stacks on the floor beside his desk; from them he selected Solovyov’s History, put it on his desk, opened it at the first page and walked up and down in front of it for some time, postponing the pleasure of beginning.

Soon he was again reading all day long; reading until his eyes ached, jealously guarding his solitude, going nowhere, taking no interest in anything, hardly bothering to glance at the hands of the clock that noted the passage of time on the yellow fly-spotted face.

—Maxim Gorky, The Life of Matvei Kozhemyakin

The Life of Matvei Kozhemyakin: Sweet Tranquility

Peace emanated from the pines, standing straight as candles, their trunks decked with the gold and amber of hardened resin, their boughs shedding the blessing of sweet shade upon the earth, their crowns blazing like emerald flames in the sunlight. Through the billowing green foliage gleamed the gold of the chapel domes, the silver of the river and the yellow of the sand. Apple- and pear-trees, lavishly hung with fruit, stepped in solemn procession down the hill-side, and everything was wrapped in the sweet tranquility of a beautiful dream.

—Maxim Gorky, The Life of Matvei Kozhemyakin

This is one of many beautiful descriptions of the scenery in The Life of Matvei Kozhemyakin. It’s a sad story, but Gorky’s appreciation of nature and the seasons inserts some much-needed beauty into the book.

The Life of Matvei Kozhemyakin: Books

She talked a lot and willingly, and the most important thing he gathered from it all (and this raised him considerably in his own eyes) was that everything she said came from books; all her knowledge had been acquired by reading.

“As soon as you’re well you must get me books,” he insisted.

“Yes, indeed. I’m glad you want to read.”

“So am I.”

Mentally he added: Soon I’ll get to know as much as you do.

It was pleasant to realize that her superiority to him came only from books.

She kept saying over and over again that people must be taught, that then they would be come better and live like human beings. She told him about people who devoted their whole lives to trying to make others upright and to cultivate in them a respect for knowledge. And for this they were thrown into jail and exiled to Siberia.

—Maxim Gorky, The Life of Matvei Kozhemyakin

The Life of Matvei Kozhemyakin: First Lesson

“What is learning?”

The quietness with which the question was put made the boy’s heart contract with a foretaste of mystery, and be edged nearer to his teacher trustfully.

“Learning,” said the deacon, stroking his pupil’s hair, “is the means by which we acquaint our minds with events in the past, with life in the present, and with human dreams for the future. Learning, then, binds one man to another; in other words, it is a link connecting him with the world as a whole. Now let’s see what that means.

“What are words? Words are the body of the human mind, just as these bodies, yours and mine, are the vesture of the soul, no more and no less. Further: take a book, any book; it is written by a man who lived, let’s say, a hundred years ago and left for our edification all the treasure the man’s soul accumulated in the course of a lifetime. And so we might say: books contain the souls of people who lived before our day or are still living; a book is, as it were, a man’s account to the world at large of his deeds; it is the life record of a human soul. Is that clear?”

—Maxim Gorky, The Life of Matvei Kozhemyakin

Our Mutual Friend: Inner City School

The school at which young Charley Hexam had first learned from a book—the streets being, for pupils of his degree, the great Preparatory Establishment in which very much that is never unlearned is learned without and before book—was a miserable loft in an unsavoury yard. Its atmosphere was oppressive and disagreeable; it was crowded, noisy, and confusing; half the pupils dropped asleep, or fell into a state of waking stupefaction; the other half kept them in either condition by maintaining a monotonous droning noise, as if they were performing, out of time and tune, on a ruder sort of bagpipe. The teachers, animated solely by good intentions, had no idea of execution, and a lamentable jumble was the upshot of their kind endeavours.

It was a school for all ages, and for both sexes. The latter were kept apart, and the former were partitioned off into square assortments. But, all the place was pervaded by a grimly ludicrous pretence that every pupil was childish and innocent. This pretence, much favoured by the lady-visitors, led to the ghastliest absurdities. Young women old in the vices of the commonest and worst life, were expected to profess themselves enthralled by the good child's book, the Adventures of Little Margery, who resided in the village cottage by the mill; severely reproved and morally squashed the miller, when she was five and he was fifty; divided her porridge with singing birds; denied herself a new nankeen bonnet, on the ground that the turnips did not wear nankeen bonnets, neither did the sheep who ate them; who plaited straw and delivered the dreariest orations to all comers, at all sorts of unseasonable times. So, unwieldy young dredgers and hulking mudlarks were referred to the experiences of Thomas Twopence, who, having resolved not to rob (under circumstances of uncommon atrocity) his particular friend and benefactor, of eighteenpence, presently came into supernatural possession of three and sixpence, and lived a shining light ever afterwards. (Note, that the benefactor came to no good.) Several swaggering sinners had written their own biographies in the same strain; it always appearing from the lessons of those very boastful persons, that you were to do good, not because it WAS good, but because you were to make a good thing of it. Contrariwise, the adult pupils were taught to read (if they could learn) out of the New Testament; and by dint of stumbling over the syllables and keeping their bewildered eyes on the particular syllables coming round to their turn, were as absolutely ignorant of the sublime history, as if they had never seen or heard of it. An exceedingly and confoundingly perplexing jumble of a school, in fact, where black spirits and grey, red spirits and white, jumbled jumbled jumbled jumbled, jumbled every night. And particularly every Sunday night. For then, an inclined plane of unfortunate infants would be handed over to the prosiest and worst of all the teachers with good intentions, whom nobody older would endure. Who, taking his stand on the floor before them as chief executioner, would be attended by a conventional volunteer boy as executioner's assistant. When and where it first became the conventional system that a weary or inattentive infant in a class must have its face smoothed downward with a hot hand, or when and where the conventional volunteer boy first beheld such system in operation, and became inflamed with a sacred zeal to administer it, matters not. It was the function of the chief executioner to hold forth, and it was the function of the acolyte to dart at sleeping infants, yawning infants, restless infants, whimpering infants, and smooth their wretched faces; sometimes with one hand, as if he were anointing them for a whisker; sometimes with both hands, applied after the fashion of blinkers. And so the jumble would be in action in this department for a mortal hour; the exponent drawling on to My Dearert Childerrenerr, let us say, for example, about the beautiful coming to the Sepulchre; and repeating the word Sepulchre (commonly used among infants) five hundred times, and never once hinting what it meant; the conventional boy smoothing away right and left, as an infallible commentary; the whole hot-bed of flushed and exhausted infants exchanging measles, rashes, whooping-cough, fever, and stomach disorders, as if they were assembled in High Market for the purpose.

Even in this temple of good intentions, an exceptionally sharp boy exceptionally determined to learn, could learn something, and, having learned it, could impart it much better than the teachers; as being more knowing than they, and not at the disadvantage in which they stood towards the shrewder pupils. In this way it had come about that Charley Hexam had risen in the jumble, taught in the jumble, and been received from the jumble into a better school.

–Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend

Our Mutual Friend: The 1%

Georgiana had by this time seen a good deal of the house and its frequenters. As there was a certain handsome room with a billiard table in it—on the ground floor, eating out a backyard—which might have been Mr Lammle's office, or library, but was called by neither name, but simply Mr Lammle's room, so it would have been hard for stronger female heads than Georgiana's to determine whether its frequenters were men of pleasure or men of business. Between the room and the men there were strong points of general resemblance. Both were too gaudy, too slangey, too odorous of cigars, and too much given to horseflesh; the latter characteristic being exemplified in the room by its decorations, and in the men by their conversation. High-stepping horses seemed necessary to all Mr Lammle's friends—as necessary as their transaction of business together in a gipsy way at untimely hours of the morning and evening, and in rushes and snatches. There were friends who seemed to be always coming and going across the Channel, on errands about the Bourse, and Greek and Spanish and India and Mexican and par and premium and discount and three quarters and seven eighths. There were other friends who seemed to be always lolling and lounging in and out of the City, on questions of the Bourse, and Greek and Spanish and India and Mexican and par and premium and discount and three quarters and seven eighths. They were all feverish, boastful, and indefinably loose; and they all ate and drank a great deal; and made bets in eating and drinking. They all spoke of sums of money, and only mentioned the sums and left the money to be understood; as 'five and forty thousand Tom,' or 'Two hundred and twenty-two on every individual share in the lot Joe.' They seemed to divide the world into two classes of people; people who were making enormous fortunes, and people who were being enormously ruined. They were always in a hurry, and yet seemed to have nothing tangible to do; except a few of them (these, mostly asthmatic and thick-lipped) who were for ever demonstrating to the rest, with gold pencil-cases which they could hardly hold because of the big rings on their forefingers, how money was to be made. Lastly, they all swore at their grooms, and the grooms were not quite as respectful or complete as other men's grooms; seeming somehow to fall short of the groom point as their masters fell short of the gentleman point.

–Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend

Editor and Editrix, a love story

1935 saw the start of a new quarterly, The Amateur Musician, edited and published by a Miss Elizabeth Voss. When I wrote an article on The Recorder or English Flute for the third issue I did not know that I should become co-editor by No. 8, and marry my co-editor before No. 15, but that is how it happened!

–Edgar Hunt, The Recorder and its Music

Our Mutual Friend: Mr. Wegg reads to Mr. Boffin

'Hem!' began Wegg, 'This, Mr Boffin and Lady, is the first chapter of the first wollume of the Decline and Fall off—' here he looked hard at the book, and stopped.

'What's the matter, Wegg?'

'Why, it comes into my mind, do you know, sir,' said Wegg with an air of insinuating frankness (having first again looked hard at the book), 'that you made a little mistake this morning, which I had meant to set you right in, only something put it out of my head. I think you said Rooshan Empire, sir?'

'It is Rooshan; ain't it, Wegg?'

'No, sir. Roman. Roman.'

'What's the difference, Wegg?'

'The difference, sir?' Mr Wegg was faltering and in danger of breaking down, when a bright thought flashed upon him. 'The difference, sir? There you place me in a difficulty, Mr Boffin. Suffice it to observe, that the difference is best postponed to some other occasion when Mrs Boffin does not honour us with her company. In Mrs Boffin's presence, sir, we had better drop it.'

Mr Wegg thus came out of his disadvantage with quite a chivalrous air, and not only that, but by dint of repeating with a manly delicacy, 'In Mrs Boffin's presence, sir, we had better drop it!' turned the disadvantage on Boffin, who felt that he had committed himself in a very painful manner.

Then, Mr Wegg, in a dry unflinching way, entered on his task; going straight across country at everything that came before him; taking all the hard words, biographical and geographical; getting rather shaken by Hadrian, Trajan, and the Antonines; stumbling at Polybius (pronounced Polly Beeious, and supposed by Mr Boffin to be a Roman virgin, and by Mrs Boffin to be responsible for that necessity of dropping it); heavily unseated by Titus Antoninus Pius; up again and galloping smoothly with Augustus; finally, getting over the ground well with Commodus: who, under the appellation of Commodious, was held by Mr Boffin to have been quite unworthy of his English origin, and 'not to have acted up to his name' in his government of the Roman people. With the death of this personage, Mr Wegg terminated his first reading; long before which consummation several total eclipses of Mrs Boffin's candle behind her black velvet disc, would have been very alarming, but for being regularly accompanied by a potent smell of burnt pens when her feathers took fire, which acted as a restorative and woke her. Mr Wegg, having read on by rote and attached as few ideas as possible to the text, came out of the encounter fresh; but, Mr Boffin, who had soon laid down his unfinished pipe, and had ever since sat intently staring with his eyes and mind at the confounding enormities of the Romans, was so severely punished that he could hardly wish his literary friend Good-night, and articulate 'Tomorrow.'

'Commodious,' gasped Mr Boffin, staring at the moon, after letting Wegg out at the gate and fastening it: 'Commodious fights in that wild-beast-show, seven hundred and thirty-five times, in one character only! As if that wasn't stunning enough, a hundred lions is turned into the same wild-beast-show all at once! As if that wasn't stunning enough, Commodious, in another character, kills 'em all off in a hundred goes! As if that wasn't stunning enough, Vittle-us (and well named too) eats six millions' worth, English money, in seven months! Wegg takes it easy, but upon-my-soul to a old bird like myself these are scarers. And even now that Commodious is strangled, I don't see a way to our bettering ourselves.' Mr Boffin added as he turned his pensive steps towards the Bower and shook his head, 'I didn't think this morning there was half so many Scarers in Print. But I'm in for it now!'

—Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend

Catching Fire: The double-edged chef’s knife

In Victorian England, the aesthetic writer John Ruskin argued that household labor was divided harmoniously and that women were superior to men. He credited women with greater organizational skills than men and explained that women were therefore better at managing households. But to philosopher John Stuart Mill, it was obvious that women were treated unfairly. Ruskin’s gallantry, he said, was “an empty compliment … since there is no other situation in life in which it is the established order, and considered quite natural and suitable, that the better should obey the worse. If this piece of talk is good for anything, it is only as an admission by men, of the corrupting influence of power.”

Mill’s accusation that Victorian British men used power to their own advantage might be applied equally well to all nonindustrial societies. The women living on Vanatinai had as much control over their lives as in any society. They were not regarded as inferior to men, and in the public realm they were not subject to male authority. But even when they were tired and men were relaxing, they still had to cook. [Anthropologist] Maria Lepowsky does not report what would have happened if a woman had refused to cook, but among hunter-gatherers who are similarly egalitarian, husbands are liable to beat wives if the evening meal is merely late or poorly cooked. When there is a conflict, most women have no choice: they have to cook, because cultural rules, ultimately enforced by men for their own benefit, demand it

The idea that cooking led to our pair-bonds suggests a worldwide irony. Cooking brought huge nutritional benefits. But for women, the adoptions of cooking has also led to a major increase in their vulnerability to male authority. Men were the greater beneficiaries. Cooking freed women’s time and fed their children, but it also trapped women into a newly subservient role enforced by male-dominated culture. Cooking created and perpetuated a novel system of male cultural superiority. It is not a pretty picture.

—Richard Wrangham, Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human

This is one of the most depressing chapters I’ve read in a while. Up until this point I was enjoying the idea that cooking made us human, that it shaped our bodies and brains to be what they are today. But the idea that cooking also made us patriarchal is decidedly uncomfortable, especially since I am on the receiving end of that patriarchy. I am fortunate to live in a time and place where I don’t need a husband to guard my food (or books!) from marauders, but men still do make most of the decisions in the world, and let’s just say that there is some room for improvement there. I can only hope that we will continue to evolve in the direction of equality so that we can all enjoy being human.

Catching Fire: Men, Women, and Cooking

This may explain why I’m not keen on either marriage or cooking:

Relying on cooked food creates opportunities for cooperation, but just as important, it exposes cooks to being exploited. Cooking takes time, so lone cooks cannot easily guard their wares from determined thieves such as hungry males without their own food. Pair-bonds solve the problem. Having a husband ensures that a woman’s gathered foods will not be taken by others; having a wife ensures the man will have an evening meal. According to this idea, cooking created a simple marriage system; or perhaps it solidified a preexisting version of married life that could have been prompted by hunting or sexual competition. Either way, the result was a primitive protection racket in which husbands used their bonds with other men in the community to protect their wives from being robbed, and women returned the favour by preparing their husbands’ meals. The many beneficial aspects of the household, such as provisioning by males, increases in labor efficiency, and creating of a social network for child-rearing, were additions consequent to solving the more basic problem: females needed male protection, specifically because of cooking. A male used his social power both to ensure that a female did not lose her food, and to guarantee his own meal by assigning to work of cooking to the female.

—Richard Wrangham, Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human

A while back I read a book that argued that our bodies our designed to run. This book argues that our bodies are designed to eat cooked food. Both theories seem to be correct, but it’s the cooking that would have made the running possible. Cooking dramatically increases the energy we can get from food, and this allowed our early ancestors to downsize their jaws and intestines in favour of growing bigger brains. It also cuts down on chewing time (our primate cousins spend much of the day just chewing raw food) which frees up time for chasing animals across the veldt. Of course one must cook on the ground, and it may be fire that encouraged us to leave the trees in the first place by making it safe to live on the ground full-time. From there it was just an evolutionary hop, skip, and jump to standing, walking, and running.

The trade-off for the technological miracle of cooking seems to be the subjugation of half of the species. Women are responsible for daily household cooking in nearly every culture ever studied, past and present, even though there is no biological reason for it. The division of labour in this case seems to be, as Wrangham so aptly puts it, a protection racket. “Cook for me and there won’t be any trouble.” Apparently it was an offer our foremothers could not refuse, and to this day women in every society are burdened with the vast majority of the cooking and other household work. What is amazing is that after nearly 2 million years of evolution, in every culture from the Kalahari to downtown Tokyo, women still know it’s a raw deal. Perhaps it’s time to renegotiate?

The Classics: A Keen and Lasting Pleasure

Why does the great and universal fame of classical authors continue? The answer is that the fame of classical authors is entirely independent of the majority. Do you suppose that if the fame of Shakespeare depended on the man in the street it would survive a fortnight? The fame of classical authors is originally made, and it is maintained, by a passionate few. Even when a first-class author has enjoyed immense success during his lifetime, the majority have never appreciated him so sincerely as they have appreciated second-rate men. He has always been reinforced by the ardour of the passionate few. And in the case of an author who has emerged into glory after his death the happy sequel has been due solely to the obstinate perseverance of the few. They could not leave him alone; they would not. They kept on savouring him, and talking about him, and buying him, and they generally behaved with such eager zeal, and they were so authoritative and sure of themselves, that at last the majority grew accustomed to the sound of his name and placidly agreed to the proposition that he was a genius; the majority really did not care very much either way. And it is by the passionate few that the renown of genius is kept alive from one generation to another….

The passionate few only have their way by reason of the fact that they are genuinely interested in literature, that literature matters to them. They conquer by their obstinacy alone, by their eternal repetition of the same statements. Do you suppose they could prove to the man in the street that Shakespeare was a great artist? The said man would not even understand the terms they employed. But when he is told ten thousand times, and generation after generation, that Shakespeare was a great artist, the said man believes—not by reason, but by faith. And he too repeats that Shakespeare was a great artist, and he buys the complete works of Shakespeare and puts them on his shelves, and he goes to see the marvellous stage-effects which accompany King Lear or Hamlet, and comes back religiously convinced that Shakespeare was a great artist. All because the passionate few could not keep their admiration of Shakespeare to themselves. This is not cynicism; but truth. And it is important that those who wish to form their literary taste should grasp it. What causes the passionate few to make such a fuss about literature? There can be only one reply. They find a keen and lasting pleasure in literature.

—Arnold Bennett, Literary Taste: How to Form It

via Surviving Transition

Umberto Eco: Murmuring Books

Until then I had thought each book spoke of the things, human or divine, that lie outside books. Now I realized that not infrequently books speak of books: it is as if they spoke among themselves. In the light of this reflection, the library seemed all the more disturbing to me. It was then the place of a long, centuries-old murmuring, an imperceptible dialogue between one parchment and another, a living thing, a receptacle of powers not to be ruled by a human mind, a treasure of secrets emanated by many minds, surviving the death of those who had produced them or had been their conveyors.

—Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose

via Booklover

Jorge Luis Borges: Paradise

via book lovers never go to bed alone

Polyglot: Wrestling with Words

Kató Lomb describes some of the difficulties of being a simultaneous translator:

When a speaker recites intricately polished, long sentences from his script and we have to improvise, then a wrestling match between speaker and interpreter ensues. All we can do is wrestle in the Greco-Roman style while the speaker does so in a "catch-as-catch-can" way. In this struggle, we are always defeated.

… Anyway, only the speaker is allowed to stop. (“A profound mind, searching for the most suitable form to express his thoughts!”) If it is the interpreter who falls silent, then the sudden silence will awake even the delegates peacefully  napping in their headphones. (“There are amateurs sitting in the booths; they don’t know the terms.”)

—Kató Lomb, Polyglot: How I Learn Languages [Download PDF]

Polyglot: Some things need no translation

I had been sitting alone and bored for hours when a pretty, smiling little Mongolian woman stepped inside my compartment. Unfortunately, it soon  turned out that she didn’t speak a word in any other language apart from her
mother tongue. My knowledge of Mongolian was restricted to only bayartai (goodbye), which I didn’t consider suitable to start a conversation.

So we looked sadly at each other for a while. Then my companion took out some provisions from her wicker basket and offered me some. The delicious cookies established my good opinion of Mongolian cuisine more eloquently
than any speech. She must have surmised as I turned the pastry in my hand—it resembled our cottage-cheese turnover—that I was racking my brains about how to make it. And that was when the pantomime began. Until the train reached  its  destination,  we  exchanged  recipes  for  hours, without exchanging—or being able to exchange—a word. I seem to have correctly “translated” the cooking techniques expressing slicing, breading, thickening, folding, filling, stirring, kneading, cutting, and tenderizing because the meals I learned from this Mongolian woman have since become frequent dishes of my cooking repertoire. And I sometimes imagine with a pleasant feeling that somewhere in Ulanbator a  bunch  of  Mongolian  children  might  be  devouring  their plates of fried chicken to my health.

—Kató Lomb, Polyglot: How I Learn Languages [Download PDF]

This reminds me of when my great-aunt came to visit. She didn’t understand any English but greatly enjoyed watching Wok with Yan every day. I never did ask if she prepared any Chinese stir-fries after she returned home…

Polyglot: Travelling in America

Author’s note: I interrupt myself here to give some practical advice to those preparing to go to America. On the train, in the hotel lounge, or at the breakfast table, those sitting next to you will ask you the same questions. First question: “Where are you from?” Second: “What do you do?” Third: “What do you drive?” When I was a novice traveler, I admitted that I usually took the bus. People were so astonished that I changed my answer. I now say, “I don’t think you know the make—it’s an Ikarus.” “Is it a big car?” they would ask. “Is it bigger than a Chevrolet?” “Much bigger!” I would reply with a quick flip of the wrist. [Ikarus is a Hungarian bus manufacturer.]

—Kató Lomb, Polyglot: How I Learn Languages [Download PDF]

Tolstoy and the Purple Chair: Books are Experience

Books are experience, the words of authors proving the solace of love, the fulfillment of family, the torment of war, and the wisdom of memory. Joy and tears, pleasure and pain: everything came to me while I read in my purple chair. I had never sat so still, and yet experienced so much.

—Nina Sankovitch, Tolstoy and the Purple Chair

Canterbury Tales: A Clerk from Oxford

A clerk from Oxford was with us also,
Who'd turned to getting knowledge, long ago.
As meagre was his horse as is a rake,
Nor he himself too fat, I'll undertake,
But he looked hollow and went soberly.
Right threadbare was his overcoat; for he
Had got him yet no churchly benefice,
Nor was so worldly as to gain office.
For he would rather have at his bed's head
Some twenty books, all bound in black and red,
Of Aristotle and his philosophy
Than rich robes, fiddle, or gay psaltery.
Yet, and for all he was philosopher,
He had but little gold within his coffer;
But all that he might borrow from a friend
On books and learning he would swiftly spend,
And then he'd pray right busily for the souls
Of those who gave him wherewithal for schools.
Of study took he utmost care and heed.
Not one word spoke he more than was his need;
And that was said in fullest reverence
And short and quick and full of high good sense.
Pregnant of moral virtue was his speech;
And gladly would he learn and gladly teach.

—Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, Prologue (287-310)