Cecilia the White

“And just as these philosophers will write
To prove that heaven is swift and round and burning,
Just so was fair Cecilia the White,
As swift and ceaseless, turning and returning
To works of mercy, and round in her discerning
Of charity, and so I read her name.”

—Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, translated by Neville Coghill, 1952.

The Philosopher’s Stone

“Two mysterious processes—the rubefaction and albefaction of waters, i.e. reddening and whitening or clarifying a liquid . . . are referred to in medieval textbooks of alchemy. . . .

It was part of the theory that when the ingredients began to turn yellow they were on the verge of becoming the Philosopher’s Stone, by which all could be turned to gold. The Philosopher’s Stone was held to be heavy, sweet-smelling, constant and pink, and to exist in powder form as well. . . .”

—Neville Coghill, endnotes from his translation of Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, 1952.

the color of constancy in love

“Blue for Chaucer’s age was the color of constancy in love and green of lightness in love. This is echoed in ‘Greenlseeves is my delight’ and elsewhere.”

—Neville Coghill, endnote from his translation of Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, 1952.

just a week ago

My brothers Jim and Bruce, and the famous Jay Joyner, at Atlantic Beach just a week ago.

Zen To Go

I love quote books, probably because of ADD, the Attention Deficit Disorder which affects so many of my generation. I was born in, or I should say “was brought to you by” 1958, for this was my first sentence fragment. I like to thumb through magazines, and books, from the back to the front and my eye tends to only stop on bite-size chunks. So quote books are, for me, just the thing for leisurely intellectual entertainment.

The first quote book that completely arrested my attention (the cover design by Paula Scher features a tasty looking yin-yang pretzel) was Zen To Go, edited by Jon Winokur. This little book managed to influence my thinking and my teaching profoundly and probably for all time. I began to collect quote books, such as another great Winokur collection, The Portable Curmudgeon, and dozens of ‘gift books’ from the Peter Pauper Press that I found in thrift stores, and classics like the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations.

orange stands for power and happiness

“In China, orange stands for power and happiness, where it is also the auspicious hue of celestial fruit and the color of pride, hospitality, marriage, ambition, [and] benevolence.”

—Alexander Theroux, The Secondary Colors, 1996.

‘Applesins’

“Curiously, ‘Applesins,’ slyly like Apfelsine, the German word for orange, is the slang word for orange in Anthony Burgess’s novel A Clockwork Orange.”

—Alexander Theroux, The Secondary Colors, 1996.

citrinacioun

“For centuries orange . . . was not the name of a color, in fact. Chaucer describes Chaunticleer: ‘His colour was betwixe yelow and reed.’ . . . And in “The Canon Yeoman’s Tale,” Chaucer uses the term citrinacioun, turning to citron. . . . Chaucer knew the color; he simply did not have a word for it.”

—Alexander Theroux, The Secondary Colors, 1996.

electrum

“There is evidence that the Minoan Cretans and the Egyptians employed bars of gold of regular weight for [trading] in the area afterwards covered by Greek trade. But neither they nor any other of the peoples of the Near East developed the idea of stamping their metal to make coins; that was an invention of the Greeks. . . .

Ionian merchants [in Asia Minor] found a commodity which answered their purposes . . . in a more precious metal than bronze—electrum, a natural alloy of gold and silver obtained from the beds of some rivers near at hand—and made this the basis of their standard of values. . . .

[A] novel feature soon appeared on the lumps of electrum which were passed for purposes of trade, in the form of distinctive stamps impressed upon them; at first these were little more than punch-marks on the surface, but gradually became a design, into which one side of the lump of metal was moulded.”

—J.G. Milne, Greek Coinage, Oxford University Press, 1931.

bathed in a faint, purple light

“What he saw, not only of reality but even in his imagination, was often blurred by fever, but within that vague dimness his cancer appeared to him as a flourishing bed of yellow hyacinths or possibly chrysanthemums bathed in a faint, purple light.”

—Kenzaburo O’, The Day He Himself Shall Wipe My Tears Away, translated by John Nathan, 1977.