Click on the title
for the essay in full.
To “The Umbrella Man”:
Arthur Koestler, on the attitude of himself and his companions
in Cloudcuckooland, up to the shock of September 1939, when they finally
realized that the time of postponements and appeasements had finally passed:
They had lived so long under the
sign of the Umbrella,
that they found it difficult to
believe
that the age of the Sword had come.
-- The Scum of the Earth
(1941, 2nd. edn. 1955)
[Anyone who is inclined to see a parallel with certain quite current events, is free to do so.]
To “De Amore”:
Marriage is a duel to the death,
which no man of honour should decline.
-- G.K. Chesterton, Manalive
(1912)
Man to Matrimony:
Are you satisfaktionsfähig ?
Matrimony:
Aye; and there is little
else that is, here below.
The enigma of a
woman’s heart,
finally espied by a Private Eye,
for less than the
price of a Valentine …
This Rose
To “Minimalism in Physics”:
On the extra profusion of different string theories, a
mathematician remarks dryly,
It was hardly an idea calculated to
appeal to a man with a taste for desert landscapes … There are more than 10^500 versions of string theory lounging indolently about.
-- David Berlinski, The Deniable Darwin (2009), p.
532-3
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