A Walled Garden

“The hazards of war landed me among the crags of occupied Crete with a band of Cretan guerillas and a captive German general whom we had waylaid and carried off into the mountains three days before. The German garrison of the island were in hot, but luckily temporarily misdirected, chase. It was a time of anxiety and danger; and for our captive, of hardship and distress. During a lull in the pursuit, we woke up among the rocks just as the dawn was breaking over the crest of Mount Ida. We had been toiling over it, through snow and then rain, for the last two days. Looking across the valley at this flashing mountain-crest, the general murmured to himself: "Vides ut alta stet nive candidum Soracte..." It was one of the ones I knew! I continued from where he had broken off: nec iam sustineant onus silvae laborantes geluque flumina constiterint acuto," and so on, through the remaining five stanzas to the end. The general's blue eyes had swiveled away from the mountain-top to mine - and when I'd finished , after a long silence, he said: "Ach so, Herr Major!" It was very strange. As though, for a long moment, the war had ceased to exist. We had both drunk at the same fountains long before: and things were different between us for the rest of our time together.”

— Patrick Leigh Fermor, A Time of Gifts

“"Meanwhile the victorious Hannibal was surrounded by his officers offering their congratulations and urging him to take some rest during the remainder of the day and the ensuing night, and to allow his tired troops to do the same; Maharbal, however, the commander of his cavalry, was convinced that there was not a moment to be lost. 'Sir,' he said, 'if you want to know the true significance of this battle let me tell you that within five days you will take your dinner, in triumph, on the Capitol. I will go first with my horsemen. The first knowledge of our coming will be the sight of us at the gates of Rome. You have but to follow.' To Hannibal this seemed too sanguine a hope, a project too great to be, in the circumstances, wholly conceivable. 'I complement your zeal, ' he said to Maharbal; 'but I need time to weigh the plan which you propose.' 'Assuredly' Maharbal replied, 'no one man has been blessed with all God's gifts. You know, Hannibal, how to win a fight; you do not know how to use your victory.' It is generally believed that that day's delay was the salvation of the city and of the Empire.”

— Livy, The War with Hannibal

“306 Greek ideal. — What did the Greeks admire in Odysseus? Above all, his capacity for lying, and for cunning and terrible retribution; his being equal to contingencies; when need be, appearing nobler than the noblest; the ability to be whatever he chose; heroic perseverence; having all means at his command; possession of intellect — his intellect is the admiration of the gods, they smile when they think of it — : all this is the Greek ideal! The most remarkable thing about it is that the antithesis of appearance and being is not felt at all and is thus of no significance morally. Have there ever been such consummate actors!”

— Nietzsche

“'Go to many dances?' 'Not one' 'What shows did you go to?' 'I didn't go to any shows' 'Hunt?' 'No.' 'Slept with any nice girls?' 'No, I didn't. Sorry to dissapoint you.' 'What the hell did you do, then?' 'Oh, I just walked about on some hills.' 'Good God,' he said, 'Chaps like you don't deserve leave.'”

— Robert Graves - Goodbye to all that

“"King Albert I has been badly treated by historians, who have too readily embraced the propaganda of his enemies - that he was 'a boorish man, with only one eye and a look that made you sick... a miser who kept his money to himself and gave nothing to the empire except for children of which he had many.' Certainly, Albert lacked an eye. In 1295 his physicians had mistaken an illness for poisioning and to expel the imagined fluid they had suspended him upside-down from the ceiling. The consequent compression to his skull had robbed him of an eyeball. Albert was a prolific father too, siring no less than twenty-one children.”

— The Hadsburgs - Martyn Rady

“"Vasudeva listened with great attention; he heard all about his origin and childhood, about his studies, his seekings, his pleasures and needs. It was one of the ferryman's greatest virtues that, unlike most people, he knew how to listen. Without his saying a word, the speaker felt that Vasudeva took in every word, quietly, expectantly, that he missed nothing. He did not await anything with impatience and gave neither praise nor blame - he only listened. Siddhartha felt how wonderful it was to have such a listener who could be absorbed in his own life, his own strivings, his own sorrows."”

— Siddhartha - Hermann Hesse

“On Saturday morning, 26 October, the hunt met at Sagamore Hill, and after the traditional stirrup cup set off over particularly rough country. High timber obstacles of five teet or more followed one upon another at a frequency of six to the mile. Some of these barriers were post-and-rail fences, as stiff as steel and deadly dangerous: even Filemaker, America's best jumper, began to hang back nervously. Roosevelt, riding a large, coarse stallion, led from the start. Careless of accidents which dislocated the huntmaster's knee, smashed another rider's ribs, and took half the skin off his brother-in-law's face," he galloped in front for fully three miles. Eventually his exhausted horse began to go lame; at about the five-mile mark it tripped over a wall and pitched over into a pile of stones. Roosevelt's face smashed against something sharp, and his left arm, only recently knit after the roundup fracture, snapped beneath the elbow. Yet he was back in the saddle as soon as the horse was up, and rushed on one-armed, determined not to miss the death. After five or six further jumps the bones of his broken arm slipped past one other, and it dangled beside him like a length of liverwurst; but this, and the blood pouring down his face, did not deter him from pounding across fifteen more fields. He had the satisfaction of finishing the hunt within a hundred yards of the other riders, and returned to Sagamore Hill looking "pretty gay... like the walls of a slaughter-house." Baby Lee, who was waiting at the stable for him, ran away screaming from the bloody monster, and he pursued her, chortling. Washed clean that night, his cut face plastered and his arm in splints, he presided over the Hunt Ball as laird of Sagamore. Edith Carow was his guest, and took her first cool survey of her future home. At midnight, Theodore Roosevelt turned twenty-seven. With his daughter asleep upstairs, his house full of music and laughter, and Edith at his side, he could abandon himself to bliss rendered piquant by pain. Later he wrote to Lodge: "I don't grudge the broken arm a bit... I'm always ready to pay the piper when I've had a good dance; and every now and then I like to drink the wine of life with brandy in it.”

— Edmund Morris - The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt

“So Athens came to flourish - and to make manifest how important it is for everyone in a city to have an equal voice, not just on one level but on all. For while the Athenians, while subjects of a tyrant, had been no more proficient in battle than any of their neighbours, they emerged as supreme by far once liberated from tyranny. This is proof enough that the downtrodden will never willingly pull their weight, since their labours are all in the service of a master - wheras free men, because they have a stake in their own exertions, will set to them with enthusiasm"”

— Herodotus, The Histories

“"On the Contrary"”

— Henrik Ibsen, His last words, said to his maid who insisted his health was improving.

“To err is human, to repent divine; to persist devilish”

— ben