Post Captain (Aubrey & Maturin, #2)

by Patrick O'Brian

Compulsion is the death of friendship, joy.’

I find it quite a help in translation to understand the text, sir; I always prefer it.

‘No, Doctor,’ said he, leaning back from the board, ‘you may struggle and wruggle as you please, but I have him pinned. It is mate in three.’ ‘It is muchwhat like,’ said Stephen. ‘Must I resign?’ ‘I think you must.

be won; a losing fight against ill-health – poverty for nearly all. Life is a long disease with only one termination and its last years are appalling: weak, racked by the stone, rheumatismal pains, senses going, friends, family, occupation gone, a man must pray for imbecility or a heart of stone. All under sentence of death, often ignominious, frequently agonizing: and then the unspeakable levity with which the faint chance of happiness is thrown away for some jealousy, tiff, sullenness, private vanity, mistaken sense of honour, that deadly, weak and silly notion.

A foolish German had said that man thought in words. It was totally false; a pernicious doctrine; the thought flashed into being in a hundred simultaneous forms, with a thousand associations, and the speaking mind selected one, forming it grossly into the inadequate symbols of words, inadequate because common to disparate situations – admitted to be inadequate for vast regions of expression, since for them there were the parallel languages of music and painting. Words were not called for in many or indeed most forms of thought: Mozart certainly thought in terms of music. He himself at this moment was thinking in terms of scent.