While writing this cheery post, my heart began to sing; and I felt like increasing the lightheartedness by letting the world know the song that I was singing. To my dismay, I discovered that the lyrics to Loudon Wainwright III’s immortal “Suicide Song” aren’t available anywhere on the Internet.
Milinda’s Questions
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Category Archives: Quotations
What I do in my spare time
The details of why I came to prepare the following aren’t worth going into. Suffice it to say that it was motivated by extreme boredom at work a couple of weeks ago — while I was scoring a math test, in fact. It’s my own version, slightly rewritten and edited, of the […]
Noted and quoted
Agree or disagree, this is eloquent:
What makes the American left silly? Things that in a vacuum should be logical impossibilities are frighteningly common in lefty political scenes. The word “oppression†escaping, for any reason, the mouths of kids whose parents are paying 20 grand for them to go to private colleges. Academics in Priuses using […]
Losing Members
The following story occurs in Book I of Hiuen Tsiang’s Buddhist Records of the Western World, and deserves to be recorded:
A former king of this country worshipped the Triple Gem. Wishing to pay homage to the sacred relics of the outer world, he intrusted the affairs of the empire to his younger brother on […]
You got to give it up
An interesting sentence in this review by Julian Barnes of a recently published volume of some of Flaubert’s correspondence and journals:
Three years before Madame Bovary appeared, [Flaubert] bade farewell . . . to “the personal, the intimate, to everything connected with meâ€. His “old project†of one day writing his memoirs was now officially […]
Still a goodie, from 02/09/2005
Briefly noted: This essay by Gertrude Himmelfarb on Lionel Trilling contains a useful implicit definition:
He was not a “public intellectual” in our present sense, commenting on whatever made the headlines.
The American Declaration of Independence
When first I took up my abode in the woods, that is, began to spend my nights as well as days there, which, by accident, was on Independence Day, or the Fourth of July, 1845, my house was not finished for winter, but was merely a defence against the rain, without plastering or chimney, the […]
