saperlipopette

An excerpt from a list of 137 optional appellations sent to Harvard University alumni, this missive requests that the institution’s prestigious patricians of old select their “preferred title” for the school’s upcoming 2010 Directory (from Harper’s):

Abbot

Archbishop

Baroness

Bhikkhu

Bishop

Cantor

Captain

Chief

Count

Datuk Haji

Her Excellency

His Highness

His Majesty King

Imam

Khawaja

Madame

Madam Justice

Maestro

Mademoiselle

Monsignor

The Most Honourable

The Right Honourable Sir

President

Princess

Reverend Monsignor

Sheikh

Sheriff

Tan Sri

The Venerable

— It’s like we bring a new pair of eyes and ears, a new mind, an entirely different person, he opined, to anything we experience for a second time.

— Sure, sure; I hear you, she replied. I know what you mean, kind of. Except … Except there has to be some sort of common agency that passes from each person as it transforms into a new one, right? I mean, how else could we know we’re encountering something for a second time?

— An author asked me a question the other day, and now I’m putting it to you: “How long is it since you’ve seen the sun rise?”

— Melas Kholê

Oh, how lonesome it is, to be that one from whom no person shall ever wish to receive a visit.

Thousands of years ago, it was even believed that my visitations, which were never held to be anything but maleficent, were occasioned in persons exhibiting an excess of black bile.

I’d imagine that those who currently practice medicine have long since been disabused of so preposterous an idea.

Yet, despite its being wholly misinformed, the notion of black bile’s relation to changes in the human temperament has been stuck with me from what seems like time immemorial.

But hey, it’s only a name, right? Well, I guess it must be, for if I become manifest in a given person, the unlucky soul will soon find himself incapacitated, despairing, wishing only that his old Self might return to him and rescue him from a state of anguish and torment so horrific that, until this moment, he’d never once in his life contemplated the possibility that such depths of misery might even exist.

Bits of information gleaned from Harper’s “Index” and “Findings”:

— Number of states where it is currently legal for schools to use corporal punishment on disabled students : 20

— Chances that an American child currently held in an urban juvenile detention center has a mental illness : 2 in 3

— Last year that the U.S. divorce rate was as high as in 2008 : 1970

— Percentage of U.S. women today who are “always, frequently or sometimes” embarrassed by their feet : 57

— Percentage of all U.S. health-care spending that goes to treating conditions caused by obesity : 9

— Biologists concluded that dogs arose, 16,000 years ago, among several hundred tame wolves living south of the Yangtze River, and that these original dogs likely were bred to be eaten.

— East Asians, in observing the faces of Western Caucasians, frequently mistake disgust for anger.

— Circadian-rhythm disruption was reported among binge-drinking hamsters.

— Physicians were afraid to ask the mentally ill to stop smoking.

— … scientists found that lobsters are repelled by the stench of their own dead.

— Titus the Gorilla King died in Rwanda.

“To be or not… To be: That is the question!”

— Un philosophe français dont je ne peux pas me souvenir du nom.

— gpoyw

— takin’ a walk with satchmo.

— only somewhat gratuitous, since you can see neither one of our visages.

Miserable are those days on which one is resigned to the odious undertaking of searching for stimulation. For how can he seek in any other manner than a miserable one the zealous enthusiasm that should compel his search in the first place?

Everyone knows that the search is not about what you’re after but how you get to what you’re after.

But what if what you’re after is just the ability to once again enjoy being after something?

L’autre soir, je me suis trouvé en face d’un chat.

Mesdames et messieurs, je dois vous dire que ce chat-là,

Il me parlait! Il me parlait! Voilà ce qu’il m’a dit:

It will happen to you as well, my friend,

Your journey will turn into a calm and quiet,

Blithe and serene slink into senescence.

“The Depot Tavern was presided over by the head of a twelve-point buck, whose look of resignation implied understanding of the fact that his antlers would never again be shed or renewed, a fate tempered by a festoon of Christmas tree bulbs which were, momentarily, seasonal, though he wore them with great forbearance whatever the solstice.”

— The Recognitions

— Sometimes I hear people express frustration when for one reason or another they end up “settling” for something, as though whatever is being settled for were, by virtue of the fact that it’s being settled for, beneath that person, not good enough for him, holding him back or away from the richer/better version of that by which he has unfortunately allowed himself to be mired down.

— Yeah I hear people talk about this every now and again. I think people in this situation like to retain the idea that something perfect will still always be out there, waiting for them, even if they may wind up being too lazy to actually go find it; so what they do, they convince themselves that they’re acting sensibly by choosing to stick with what they’ve got, which also allows them to feel as though they’re exercising complete freedom of choice and at the same time leaves intact that notion that there still exists for them a potentially realizable ideal situation that they’ve just consciously given up in favor a simpler, stabler, and more conventional one.