The crown of literature

“The crown of literature is poetry. It is its end and aim. It is the sublimest activity of the human mind. It is the achievement of beauty. The writer of prose can only step aside when the poet passes; he makes the best of us look like a piece of cheese.”

—W. Somerset Maugham, Cakes and Ale, 1930.

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Chance

“The creature who grows in consciousness has as his supreme teacher Chance.”

—Louis-Ferdinand C’line, The Life and Work of Ignaz Philip Semmelweis, 1924, translated from the French by Robert Allerton Parker, 1937.

The Diamond Sutra

“By the 2nd century [the Chinese] already had the necessary tools for putting together printed material: paper, which they recently had discovered through experimentation with wood products; ink, which they had used for more than twenty-five centuries; and the final piece of the printing puzzle, surfaces bearing texts carved in relief. . . .

Some of these texts were sculpted into pillars of marble; they usually were Buddhist precepts. Pilgrims wanting to copy their wisdom merely applied wet sheets of paper, daubing the pillar’s surface with ink to make the relief characters stand out on their crude copies. Other relief carvings were religious seals. Their use, which had become extremely popular, led the Chinese to experiment with inks, and a high-quality, fast-drying product was in use by the 4th century.

Over the next 150 years marble pillars and seals gave way to wooden blocks. Easier to carve and more manageable to handle, wooden blocks could accomodate type of almost any height and width, and the wood’s natural porosity was superior for absorbing and transferring ink to paper. . . .

The oldest existing works printed by this method include . . . the first known book, The Diamond Sutra, a collection of Buddhist maxims and scriptural narratives, printed in China in 868.”

Charles Panati, The Browser’s Book of Beginnings, 1984.

compounded shadows

“[Yakov] watched the light and dark change. The morning dark was different from the night dark. The morning dark had a little freshness, a little anticipation in it, though what he anticipated he could not say. The night dark was heavy with thickened and compounded shadows. In the morning the shadows unfurled until only one was left, that which lingered in the cell all day. It was gone for a minute near eleven he guessed, when a beam of sunlight, on days the sun appeared, touched the corroded inner wall a foot above his mattress, a beam of golden light gone in a few minutes. Once kissed it on the wall. Once he licked it with his tongue.”

—Bernard Malamud, The Fixer, 1966.

thoughtless thought

“Sometimes Yakov lost sight of the words. They were black birds with white wings, white birds with black wings. He was falling in thoughtless thought, a stupefying whiteness.”

—Bernard Malamud, The Fixer, 1966.

The “Yellow Kid”

“The modern comic strip started out as ammunition in a newspaper war between giants of the American press during the late 19th century.

The first full-color comic strip appeared in January 1894 in the New York World, owned by Joseph Pulitzer. The first regular weekly fully-color comic supplement, similar to today’s Sunday funnies, appeared two years later, in William Randolph Hearst’s rival New York paper, the Morning Journal. . . .

The Morning Journal started another feature, the “Yellow Kid,” the first continuous comic character in the United States. . . . The “Yellow Kid” was in many ways a pioneer . . . and it came to introduce the speech ballon inside the strip, usually placed above the characters’ heads.”

—Charles Panati, The Browser’s Book of Beginnings, 1984.

the Roman gazette

“The first regular organ for spreading the news dates to the Roman gazette Acta Diurna (Action Journal), which began dailly publication in 59 B.C.

Posted throughout the city in places where the population congregated, the paper was begun by Julius Caesar and was not all that different from today’s tabloids; it printed social and political news, details of criminal trials and executions, announcements of births, marriages, and deaths, and even highlights of sporting and theatrical events at the Circus Maximus and Coloseum.”

—Charles Panati, The Browser’s Book of Beginnings, 1984.

an Akkadian word list

“The earliest preserved dictionary is an Akkadian word list from central Mesopotamia dating from 600 B.C. About this time the Western-style dictionary was emerging from the labors of Greek philosophers, who had begun to analyze speech patterns and language, establishing the roots of grammar and syntax.”

—Charles Panati, The Browser’s Book of Beginnings, 1984.

a book

“In Babylonia and Assyria a book consisted of a numbered collection of rectagular clay tablets, inscribed with cuneiform and packaged in a labeled container. A scholar needed several library scribes to help him cart a book from its shelf to a reading table.”

—Charles Panati, The Browser’s Book of Beginnings, 1984.