Hope revives within me. I shall recover, and my dream of glory be fulfilled. Nelson will yet be an admiral.
-Horatio Nelson
Targeted ambition.
From:
Sugden, John. Nelson: A Dream of Glory, 1758-1797. United States, Henry Holt and Company, 2004.
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Haven’t posted a Four Panel Fridays in ages. C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien’s friendship revived it, for this week anyway…
Hendrix, John. The Mythmakers: The Remarkable Fellowship of C.S. Lewis & J.R.R. Tolkien (A Graphic Novel). United States, Abrams Fanfare, 2024.
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For man is never truly himself except when he is actively creating something
Go! Create!
As read from John Hendrix’s The Mythmakers. The best type of book – part prose biography, part comic, part picture book.
Doubles as a commonplace book, chock full of fantastic quotes.
Picture books are underrated.
Hendrix, John. The Mythmakers: The Remarkable Fellowship of C.S. Lewis & J.R.R. Tolkien (A Graphic Novel). United States, Abrams Fanfare, 2024. pg 101
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I live on the Maine coast, to the east of Penobscot Bay. Formerly, this coast was not in the path of hurricanes, or if it was we didn’t seem to know it, but times change and we must change with them. My house is equipped with three small, old-fashioned radios, two of them battery sets, one a tiny plug-in bedside model on which my wife sometimes manages to get the Giants after I have turned in. We do not have television, and because of this curious omission we are looked upon as eccentrics, possibly radicals.
– E.B. White
That from the essay “The Eye of Edna”. A reflection on an approaching storm and the impact of communication technology.
White, E. B.. Essays of E. B. White. United States, HarperCollins, 2014. pg 30
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Of course there are, occasionally, clever antitheses, antitheses that draw fine distinctions or tell you something that you did not know already. Oscar Wilde was the master of these, with lines like, ‘The well-bred contradict other people. The wise contradict themselves’. But we can’t all be Oscar Wilde, and it would be interminably dull if we were. The world would degenerate into one permanent epigram.
Mark Forsyth’s The Elements of Eloquence is eloquent and full of surprise. The world degenerating into one permanent epigram isn’t a phrase I’d expect to see in a “writing” book.
Forsyth, Mark. The Elements of Eloquence: How to Turn the Perfect English Phrase. United Kingdom, Icon Books, Limited, 2014. pg. 19
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Her egg is so richly brown, so wondrously beautiful as to defy description. Every fall, when the first pullet egg turns up on the range, I bring it into the living room and enshrine it in a black duckshead pottery ashtray, where it remains until Halloween, a symbol of fertility, admired by all.
– E.B. White
E.B. White is much more than Charlotte’s Web. His essay’s rip. Mesmerize.
How many writers lull you into reading a three page essay about brown eggs vs white eggs?
White, E. B.. Essays of E. B. White. United States, HarperCollins, 2014. pg 75
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You can spend all day trying to think of some universal truth to set down on paper, and some poets try that. Shakespeare knew that it’s much easier to string together some words beginning with the same letter. It doesn’t matter what it’s about. It can be the exact depth in the sea to which a chap’s corpse has sunk; hardly a matter of universal interest, but if you say, ‘Full fathom five thy father lies’, you will be considered the greatest poet who ever lived. Express precisely the same thought any other way — e.g. ‘your father’s corpse is 9.144 meters below sea level’ — and you’re just a coastguard with bad news.
Alliteration is always alluring…
That from:
Forsyth, Mark. The Elements of Eloquence: How to Turn the Perfect English Phrase. United Kingdom, Icon Books, Limited, 2014. pg. 10
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‘I have lived among the Gods.’
Harkness, Sarah. Literature for the People: How The Pioneering Macmillan Brothers Built a Publishing Powerhouse. United Kingdom, Pan Macmillan, 2024.
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‘Few men of our time have made a better use of a fortune of which they were the architects, or have been less spoilt by prosperity.’
That from the introduction of Sarah Harkness’ tome on the Macmillan brothers. Two pages in and I’m hyped. That’s what an introduction should do, right? It should act as the book’s hypeman!
Book introductions are underrated.
Harkness, Sarah. Literature for the People: How The Pioneering Macmillan Brothers Built a Publishing Powerhouse. United Kingdom, Pan Macmillan, 2024.
