Jim > Recent Status Updates

[Angkor Wat:] The experience had been too huge and, because of the millions of carvings—most of which I scarcely noticed—too intensely intricate. We were suffering from stupendousness-overload and, as usual, it was about a thousand degrees centigrade and humid as an old pond.

We have a word for government which signifies in addition to a whole range of other things a path, but not just an ordinary path—the path that certain animals take when they leap in a zigzag fashion ... which is a particular kind of straight line.

The days came with fog. The nights were nights and nothing else. The days didn't change from one to the other, the golden sun blasting away and then dying out. The days would not move. They stood like grey stones. Time passed slowly.

We all live temporary lives... We think that just for now things are going badly, that we have to adapt just for now, and even humiliate ourselves, but that all this is temporary. Real life will start some day. We prepare to die with the complaint that we've never really lived.

Father Brown wore a [clerical] collar for the same reason he wore rumpled clothes and a blank expression—because one does not expect shrewd knowledge of the world from a priest, just as one does not expect it from a moon-faced dumpling of a man.

While things were in this state between us, the famous case of The Yellow Room took place. It was this case that was to rank him as the leading newspaper reporter, and to obtain for him the reputation of being the greatest detective in the world.

[Commodus] gave advance warning of his future cruelty in his 12th year, at Centumcellae. For when he happened to have taken a bath in tepid water, he ordered the bath-keeper to be cast into the furnace.

[Favoritus] was wrong to concede to Hadrian, his friends charged him, over a word which reputable authors had used. 'You don't give me good advice, my friends ... when you don't allow me to believe the man who possesses thirty legions to be more learned than anyone else!'

To think of all that a harmless-looking discovery in chemistry may lead to!

Chesterton's tales have the hard intent and the soft, ever-shifting outline of an Aristophean fantasy, the high-flown bombast and quiet irony of Rabelais, the energy in scenes and words and characters which Shakespeare and Dickens could generate. But the surrealist, nightmare quality of his tales is more akin to Kafka's than to any other....

[The breasts of the Goddess Chamunda] droop like those of an old woman. And yet she offers milk from her withered breasts to the children who line up before her. Can you see how the right leg has festered as though afflicted with leprosy? Her belly has caved in from hunger, and scorpions have stung her there. Enduring all these ills and pains, she offers milk from her sagging breasts to mankind.

Blackie was the first dog to teach him that animals can converse with humans. Not just conversing—he had also learned they can be companions who understand your sorrows.... He took great pleasure writing in his books about dogs and goats and ponies, and, yes, birds too, who understood the sorrows of children—because the various sorrows associated with human life have already been generated in childhood.

No Harry, Harry—'tis no land of thine.
Thy place is filled, thy scepter wrung from thee,
Thy balm washed off wherewith thou wast anointed.
No bending knee will call thee Caesar now,
No humble suitors press to speak for right,
No, not a man comes for redress of thee—
For how can I help them and not myself?

There was something strange about the city but he was unable to work out what. Then it came to him. There were no trees or pigeons or gardens. Yet all around were the sounds of leaves rustling and the beating of wings, the cooing of departed birds. He was so shocked that he stood at a street corner, listening.

Poets speak of the Fountain of Youth; it does exist; it gushes up from the earth at every step we take. And one passes by without drinking of it!

With an athletic stride, the young man, whose name was Harold Harker, crested the rise of turf ... and saw a strange sight. He did not see it very clearly; for the dusk was darkening every minute under stormy clouds; but it seemed to him, by a sort of momentary illusion, like a dream of days long past or a drama played by ghosts, out of another age in history.

And so the two Father Browns chase each other round the world forever; the first a shameless criminal fleeing from justice; the second a martyr broken by slander, in a halo of rehabilitation. But neither of them is like the real Father Brown, who is not broken at all, but goes stumping with his stout umbrella through life, liking most of the people in it; accepting the world as his companion, but never as his judge.

A more insignificant or banal scene you really couldn't imagine, and yet I immediately thought of the most unspeakable horror in the world. Yes. Horror isn't at its most intense in things of night and fear. It's when you are staring in full sunlight at some mundane thing, a shop window, an unknown face, between the branches of a tree....

All he knew was that there was no going back. The whole horde of people and things pursuing him, the lost years and the entire middle-class establlshment, fused in his visionary consciousness into a concrete, nightmarish shape.

Montaigne, in true Socratic fashion, was not encouraging the reader to [think that witches do not exist]. Here as elsewhere in the Essays, Montaigne gives the uimpression of wanting readers to draw conclusions which are never explicit in the text. The difficulty for us, four hundred years later, lies in deciding what he expected contemporaries to read between the lines.

Though he dine off ten dozen oysters, or fill the bathtub
With expensive essence, the man who deserves to die
Is already dead in his soul.

But here in Rome we must toe
The line of fashion, living beyond our means, and
Often on borrowed credit: every man jack of us
Is keeping up with his neighbours.

Their life and the language they spoke tasted to me of the planet itself, of the human herd, of a world not infinite but unfinished, of undifferentiated, confused life, of blind, structureless matter, of a silent firmament: a taste, as they say, of ashes.

Ship me somewheres east of Suez
Where the best is like the worst
Where there aren't no Ten Commandments,
An' a man can raise a thirst. (Kipling)

King Leopold II never saw a drop of blood spilled in anger. He never set foot in the Congo. There is something very modern about that, too, as there is about the bomber pilot in the stratosphere, above the clouds, who never hears screams or sees shattered homes or torn flesh.

King Leopold II never saw a drop of blood spilled in anger. He never set foot in the Congo. There is something very modern about that, too, as there is about the bomber pilot in the stratosphere, above the clouds, who never hears screams or sees shattered homes or torn flesh.

A girl of your sophisticated tastes he used to say to me all of the time. It's so unfair. How I hate that word. It means shallow and superficial and God knows there's no one in the world who's more a slave to her passions than I am. Complicated, or rather what the French mean by "compliqué" would be closer.

I remember all this part so very clearly. And I remember a little later wondering why things always turn out to be diametrically opposed to what you expect them to be. It's no good even trying to predict what this opposite will be because it always fools you and turns out to be the opposite of THAT, if you see what I mean. If you think this is geometrically impossible all I can say is you don"t know my life.

Alan Turing held a great and burning dislike for committee meetings such as this, resenting the fact that the decisions were made not because of a clear understanding of his ideas, but for political and administrative reasons.