To thine own self be true

(Montag reading from Dickens’ David Copperfield)

“There can be no disparity in marriage like unsuitability of mind and purpose.

I had endeavoured to adapt Dora to myself and found it impracticable. It remained for me to adapt myself to Dora, to share with her what I could and be happy.

It made my second year much happier than my first, and, what was better still, made Dora’s life all sunshine.

But as that year wore on, Dora was not strong. I had hoped that lighter hands than mine
would help to mould her character and that a baby’s smile upon her breast might change my child-wife to a woman. It was not to be.

My pretty Dora. We thought she would be running about as she used to do in a few days.
But they said wait a few days more and then, wait a few days more, and still she neither ran nor walked.

I began to carry her downstairs every morning and upstairs every night. But sometimes when I took her up, I felt that she was lighter in my arms.

A dead, blank feeling came upon me, as if I were approaching some frozen region, yet unseen, that numbed my life.

I avoided direct recognition of this feeling by any name, over any communing with myself
until one night when it was very strong upon me and my aunt had left her with her parting cry, ‘Oh, good-bye, little blossom.’

I sat down at my desk, alone, and tried to think. Oh, what a fatal name it was, and how the blossom withered in its bloom up in the tree.”

18.5 minute gap in Nixon tapes.
7 hour gap in Trump’s White House call logs.

(from 1967 to 2022)

Greatest luck I ever had.

(like something The Incredible String Band might have written in the late ’60s?)

The above 1971 list suggests what were once considered classics that olde school readers might have taken out from libraries and actually read. But by 1971, some 51 years ago, I recall only the following books were still being read or taught in Canada:

Moby Dick (university)                                                                                                                            A Tale of Two Cities                                                                                                                            Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde                                                                                                              Huckleberry Finn                                                                                                                           Frankenstein                                                                                                                                          Jane Eyre                                                                                                                                               Julius Caesar                                                                                                                                            Alice in Wonderland                                                                                                                      Macbeth                                                                                                                                         Romeo and Juliet                                                                                                                               Hamlet (issue 99, not listed here)                                                                                               Great Expectations (issue 43, not listed here).

Indeed, today, the three main classics still standing in high school would be 3 of the Shakespeare plays:

Romeo and Juliet                                                                                                                              Macbeth                                                                                                                                                  Hamlet.

Only Shakespeare has survived whereas other former literary giants (like Dickens and Twain) have not.

In any case, kids today not only do not generally read print novels or full-length books as they once did, they also no longer have much or any contact with major writers of Western civilization or classic works.

every time our limitless-spending, wastrel PM gives out more, seemingly endless billions without a second thought? Is anyone going to be on the hook for this spendthrift’s economic munificence down the road?

(The suspenseful 1940 AA Best Picture, his first shot in America by legendary director Alfred Hitchcock starring Joan Fontaine and Laurence Olivier with Judith Anderson as Mrs. Danvers–above right–and George Sanders as the evil ‘cousin’ of Rebecca)

(from the Premiere Collection of early Hitchcock)

Nothing like a truckload of Gothic mystery and romance from the pen of Daphne du Maurier complete with the mysterious ambiguous death of Rebecca with her husband implicated. Good look, script, musical score, and black-and-white atmosphere. Hitchcock would later return to du Maurier for The Birds.

“Culture, the acquainting ourselves with the best that has been known and said in the world, and thus with the history of the human spirit.”

Why would anyone bother with/settle for less?

“Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, Or what’s a heaven for?”           –Robert Browning

Again, why would anyone settle for the conventional/for less/for the lowest common denominator?

Kenney, Trudeau, Putin, Trump.