Twelve hundred years had not yet passed, when the land extended and the peoples multiplied. The land was bellowing like a bull, the god got disturbed with their uproar. Enlil heard their noise and addressed the great gods: “The noise of mankind has become too intense for me, with their uproar I am deprived of sleep.”

Atrahasis Epic (OBV) 2.1-21

It takes the language of the Old Testament, the Book of Kings perhaps, to depict the details of Saddam Hussein’s end in their full, almost mythic, dimensions. Thus:

It was the morning of the Sabbath, before the sun rose. And they brought him into the city, even unto the place of execution.

And they bound his hands and his feet as was the custom among them in the way of execution. And they reviled him saying, how are the mighty fallen, and may you be cursed by the Lord.

And they placed the rope about his neck and they reviled him again, praising the names and titles of his enemies, and saying, may God curse you, may you go down to hell.

And he replied, saying, Is this your manhood? This is a gallows of shame.

And again they spoke unto him, saying, prepare to meet God. And he prayed to God, saying, there is no God but the Lord.

And so they hanged him. And a great shout went up in the place of execution and in the streets and in the markets. It was the morning of the Sabbath, as the sun rose over the walls of Babylon.

Execution of Saddam Hussein, in Paul Kriwaczek, Babylon: Mesopotamia and the Birth of Civilization

‘Honour and obedience: and the proper physical feelings,’ he said. ‘To me that is marriage. Nothing  else.’ 

‘But what are the proper physical feelings but love?’ asked Hannele.  ‘No,’ he said. ‘A woman wants you to adore her,  and be in love with her — and I shan’t. I will not do it again, if I live a monk for the rest of my days. I will neither adore you nor be in love with you.’ 

‘You won’t get a chance, thank you. And what do you call the proper physical feelings, if you are not  in love? I think you want something vile.’ 

‘If a woman honours me — absolutely from the  bottom of her nature honours me — and obeys me  because of that, I take it, my desire for her goes very much deeper than if I was in love with her, or if I adored her.’ 

‘It’s the same thing. If you love, then everything is there — all the lot: your honour and obedience  and everything. And if love isn’t there, nothing is there,’ she said. 

‘That isn’t true,’ he replied. ‘A woman may love you, she may adore you, but she’ll never honour  you nor obey you. The most loving and adoring woman today could any minute start and make a doll of her husband — could start any  minute and make a doll of him. And the doll would  be her hero: and her hero would be no more than her doll. My wife might have done it. She did do it,  in her mind. She had her doll of me right enough.  Why, I heard her talk about me to other women.  And her doll was a great deal sillier than the one you made. But it’s all the same. If a woman loves you, she’ll make a doll out of you. She’ll never be satisfied till she’s made your doll. And when she’s  got your doll, that’s all she wants. And that’s what  love means. And so, I won’t be loved. And I won’t love. I won’t have anybody loving me. It is an insult.  I feel I’ve been insulted for forty years: by love, and the women who’ve loved me. I won’t be loved. And I won’t love. I’ll be honoured and I’ll be obeyed: or nothing.’ 

‘Then it’ll most probably be nothing,’ said  Hannele sarcastically. ‘For I assure you I’ve nothing but love to offer.’ 

‘Then you can keep it,’ he said.

D. H. Lawrence, The Captain’s Doll

I have once phrased it differently: a woman won’t rest till she’s got the man sitting on the sofa in front of the TV where she can keep an eye on him; that’s where she wants him; that’s all he is allowed; and then she will complain that he is so dull, always sleeping in front of the TV.

All our troubles, says somebody wise, come upon us because we cannot be alone. We must all be able to be alone, otherwise we are just victims.

D. H. Lawrence

All world’s troubles come mainly from people’s inability to sit quietly with a book.

Bertrand Russell

Julius Langbehn’s 1891 book Rembrandt As An Educator was not much about Rembrandt, really. Mostly it was about Langbehn’s dissatisfaction with modernity.

It has gradually become an open secret that the contemporary spiritual life of the German people is in a state of decay; according to some, even of rapid decay. Science everywhere has dissipated into specialization; in the field of literature epoch making individuals are missing. Without question, the democratizing, leveling, atomistic tendency expresses itself in all this.

Langbehn went on for many pages complaining about “today’s people” being small (as always, it seems to me), boring ditto), unconnected to their past (what constitutes connection the the past?), or soil (what is that?) and all things that presumably made them so (democracy, science, technology, Jews).

You may be excused if you scratched your head trying to figure out what it means. Why is specialization in science a dissipation? And what exactly are epoch making writers — and how many of them has Germany had in each decade now as opposed to the (“glorious”) past? What tendency does he mean (atomizing?) and in what exactly does it express itself?

It’s clear that Langbehn is profoundly dissatisfied, but with what? With “modernity” or with his life? It is a tough claim to blame his dissatisfaction on modernity: it would take a deep study and a lot of evidence to show that the past was actually somehow “spiritually” better; and even then we would have to take it on faith that if placed in whatever past he chose as better he would indeed feel more happy. My guess is he wouldn’t.

But for all its theoretical vagueness and intellectual bunk, the book was a runaway success. Readers responded to Langbehn’s heart-felt and powerfully expressed frustration. Of course, readers often get caught up in writers’ emotional displays; but perhaps they also felt some vague frustration and the book helped them identify it.

What was this frustration? Was is it the rapid economic and technological change, leading to disorienting change in hierarchies and relationships, leaving them uncertain of their place in the world? Or was it just the normal, everyday dissatisfaction of ordinary life as we have lived it for millenia, a life of mild misery and boredom, but unalloyed by the palliative of broadcast media (as today) and chancing upon that rate book that gave it a moving expression?

the quotation is taken from Anne Applebaum, Twilight of Democracy

“One summer, I was young and happy, in ‘fifty one. Neither before nor after, just that summer. It may have been by grace and favor of the place I live in, a town like a pomegranate split in two, close to the sea, yet pastoral, one half clinging to a cliff-face, the other scattered at its foot.”

An old man, haunted by imminence of death, harks back to his youth in a small Sicilian town where he was a school teacher. He has fallen in love with one of his 18-year old students. She is a local beauty and pursued by many eligible young men. Instead, the teacher finds solace with Cecilia, who is neither. Its a story of the lies we tell ourselves and others in pursuit of love. The town where it happens, Modica, the town like a split pomegranate, is one of the personages of the tale, and it, too, must be bid adieu:

“So then, to Modica, a long farewell! And to the corner of the Ionian isle in which she lies; to her elegance; her country ways. To the portals of her churches with their surging tides of steps. To the gentle warmth of her courtyards, her benevolent carob trees. To her stone walls, shining as words of God. To the easygoing speech of her people. To her festivals and her funerals. To the wheat of her fields and the honey of her bees.”

Gesulado Bufalino, Blind Argus

Perhaps Andrew Edwards got bored and frustrated translating Luque’s dull Sicilan journal and decided to redo it, better. He did. This book is a delight. Especially the Taormina section. It tells the story of a house called Fontana Vecchia, but now better known as the House of Writers. D. H. Lawrence spent three happy years here:

Do you imagine the balcony at night? The Plough pitching headlong into the sea at left, terribly falling, and Taormina, in the rift on the right, fuming tremulously between the jaws of darkness.

Perhaps the three happiest of his life, before his restlessness drove him on, this time to Ceylon. It was a difficult departure. He returned to its memory over and over again:

Ah dark garden, dark garden, with your olives and your vine, your medlars and mulberries and many almond trees, your steep terraces lodged high up above the sea, I am leaving you, slinking out. Out between the rosemary hedges, out of the gate onto the cruel steep stony road. So under the dark, big eucalyptus trees, over the stream and up towards the village. There. I have got so far.

Later, Truman Capote lived there (“before dawn, when drooping stars drift at the bedroom window fat as owls…”) then someone else then someone else, until Agg, an English music critic and an admirer of D. H. Lawrence quit Britain in order to move in there, with copy of D. H. Lawrence’s letters. Soon, this normally profound sleeper, found it difficult to get a good night’s rest. He found himself awoken for no good reason. Then he began to experience the eerie sensation that the air was stirring around him and that he was not alone in the house. Then he heard foosteps and muffled voices.

Consulting a local medium, a certain Senior Adolfo, he learned that the house was haunted by a man, a man with a beard.

Of course! D. H. Lawrence returning the the place where he had been happiest on earth.

Ognuno sta solo sul cuor della terra
trafitto da un raggio di sole:
ed è subito sera.

Salvatore Quasimodo

Five nights in a row I dreamt about you. Out of the blue, unexpectedly, out of nowhere. I had practically forgotten and now suddenly we were together, doing things, plotting, managing others so that our plans would work. Then I would wake and remember while brewing my coffee and then taking it by the window, in silence, watching the rain. Five nights. Night after night. Intense, long, complicated dreams. And then the dreams stopped. Just stopped: gone as suddenly as they appeared. And, along with them, you, too, slipped into the past, just like a passerby in dusk slinks into the night. To be replaced by other dreams, long, intense, interesting, complicated; and no mention of you at all.