Anthracite.
A hard, jet black, metallic-looking flammable rock that is the highest-ranking coal, the only version that can rightly be considered properly metamorphic.
—Simon Winchester, The Map that Changed the World: William Smith and the Birth of Modern Geology, 2001.
Chalk.
A soft, porous, and fine-grained limestone, characteristically white in color, most memorably found in the cliffs of southern Kent—“the white cliffs of Dover.”
—Simon Winchester, The Map that Changed the World: William Smith and the Birth of Modern Geology, 2001.
Iron pyrite.
A metallic-looking sulfide of iron, known jocularly as fool’s gold.
—Simon Winchester, The Map that Changed the World: William Smith and the Birth of Modern Geology, 2001. This guy is so jocular!
Limonite.
A yellow-brown inferior iron ore, often found in large earthy masses in a variety of forms.
—Simon Winchester, The Map that Changed the World: William Smith and the Birth of Modern Geology, 2001.
Creole.
Creole historically meant someone born in the New World, and in Louisiana it could refer to the offspring of French planters as well as the children of newly arrived slaves. Creole has also come to mean something entirely new, or a surprising mixture of ingredients, and can be applied to a style of cuisine, to music, clothing, architecture, literature, language, to a mode of behavior, or to a person of a certain color or social status. It has been said to be an impure state of being, but also the purest state possible.
As a social process, scholars and politicians have taken to calling creolization a way in which things or people of historically unrelated backgrounds and history come into contact and change over time.
—Roger D. Abrahams, Blues for New Orleans: Mardis Gras and America’s Creole Soul, 2006.
Jesus guards her with the spiritual light of his eyes
“According to Felipe Garcia Villamil, a leading priest of the Kongo religion in Cuba, an initiate’s possession is genuine when only the whites of the eyes show. Bembe sculpture captures this state by showing ‘eyes that roll up.’. . . Just as the white eyes relate spiritual people to Bembe sculpture, so the famous New Orleans faith healer Mother Catherine Seals . . . before she died in 1930 made herself a spectacular robe beaded with the image of Jesus armed with a similar optic. Jesus guards her with the spiritual light of his eyes. They blaze with whiteness, like the white porcelain eyes found in Bembe figures.”
—Roger D. Abrahams, Blues for New Orleans: Mardis Gras and America’s Creole Soul, 2006.
[Grendel]
“For the monster [Grendel] was relentless, the dark death-shadow, against warriors old and young, lay in wait and ambushed them.”
—from Beowulf, prose translation by E. Talbot Donaldson, 1966. This monster is a bitch.
the ancient wealth
“‘Now quickly go to look at the hoard under the gray stone, . . . now that the worm lies sleeping from sore wounds, bereft of his treasure. Be quick now, so that I may see the ancient wealth, the golden things, may clearly look on the bright curious gems, so that . . . because of the treasure’s richness, I may the more easily leave life and nation I have long held.’”
—from Beowulf, prose translation by E. Talbot Donaldson, 1966.
The fire-dragon
“The fire-dragon was grimly terrible with his many colors, burned by the flames; he was fifty feet long in the place where he lay.”
—from Beowulf, prose translation by E. Talbot Donaldson, 1966. This reminds me, Lindsay’s wire-haired fox terriers caught and eviscerated a huge rat last night!
there hath past away a glory from the earth
“The rainbow comes and goes,
And lovely is the Rose,
The Moon doth with delight
Look round her when the heavens are bare;
Waters on a starry night
Are beautiful and fair;
The sunshine is a glorious birth;
But yet I know, where’er I go,
That there hath past away a glory from the earth.”
—William Wordsworth, Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood. Found in Poets & Poems, Goldstone & Cummings, 1967.