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Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)

"When I ask for a garment of a particular form, my tailoress tells me gravely, “They do not make them so now,” not emphasizing the “They” at all, as if she quoted an authority as impersonal as the Fates, and I find it difficult to get made what I want, simply because she cannot believe that I mean what I say, that I am so rash. When I hear this oracular sentence, I am for a moment absorbed in thought, emphasizing to myself each word separately that I may come at the meaning of it, that I may find out by what degree of consanguinity They are related to me, and what authority they may have in an affair which affects me so nearly; and, finally, I am inclined to answer her with equal mystery, and without any more emphasis of the “they,”—“It is true, they did not make them so recently, but they do now.” Of what use this measuring of me if she does not measure my character, but only the breadth of my shoulders, as it were a peg to hang the coat on? We worship not the Graces, nor the Parcæ, but Fashion. She spins and weaves and cuts with full authority. The head monkey at Paris puts on a traveller’s cap, and all the monkeys in America do the same. I sometimes despair of getting anything quite simple and honest done in this world by the help of men. They would have to be passed through a powerful press first, to squeeze their old notions out of them, so that they would not soon get upon their legs again, and then there would be some one in the company with a maggot in his head, hatched from an egg deposited there nobody knows when, for not even fire kills these things, and you would have lost your labor. Nevertheless, we will not forget that some Egyptian wheat was handed down to us by a mummy."

Dieck, Charles. Verse von Adolf Holst, Bilder von Paula Jordan.

Guckt hinein ! Schaut der Tiere Kinderlein !

Rotes Kreuz. Blank - Stuttgart.

Zweitausend Jahre deutsche Kultur. Festzug am Tag der Deutschen Kunst zu München 1938.

A tiny vial for water or soil worn as a pilgrim’s badge, 15th cent. French.

The Lake Isle of Innisfree by W.B. Yeats (1888)

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree, And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made: Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee, And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow, Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings; There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow, And evening full of the linnet’s wings.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore; While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey, I hear it in the deep heart’s core.

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"The layering of scale practiced by Milton, Julian, and Blake in order to generate motion in the reader is a frequent strategy of pastoral poets. In pastoral, a lake can appear in a heart, as it does in W. B. Yeats’s early and perhaps most often memorized poem.

The revelation of the roadway and grey pavements as the present place of that resolution to move—to arise—feels like both an afterthought and a surprise at the end of the poem. The strongly ductile spatiality of the poem seems to congeal into a propositional space of ductus-building, as if we’d pursued that building to its source. Here the “I” is revealed, like the Wizard of Oz’s man behind the curtain, in a continuous present that makes the future possible by generating the ductile push toward it. The heart is where Innisfree has been constructed, wattle by wattle. The poem is a little snow globe we can carry around with us, like a medieval vial badge that preserves a little dirt or water from a shrine so that a place can accompany the pilgrim home through the magic of synecdoche. We can carry the poem in memory and make the pilgrimage to the hermitage on Innisfree by means of incantation, by saying so when we recite the poem."

John Gower shooting the world. (Vox Clamantis)