Christmas Every Day

One of the my favourite poets is C.P. Cavafy, a gay Greek-Egyptian civil servant of the early 20th century. In this poem he honours the Spartan infantry who in 480 BC made a stand against an overwhelmingly superior Persian invasion force, before a treacherous local guide, Ephialtis, showed the enemy a way to attack the defenders from behind. Cavafy uses that example to praise all those who, in different ways, imitate the Spartans in their daily lives.

Honour to those who in the life they lead
define and guard a Thermopylae.
Never betraying what is right,
consistent and just in all they do
but showing pity also, and compassion;
generous when they are rich, and when they are poor,
still generous in small ways,
still helping as much as they can;
always speaking the truth,
yet without hating those who lie.
 
And even more honor is due to them
when they foresee (as many do foresee)
that in the end Ephialtis will make his appearance,
that the Medes will break through after all.

My father gave me three excellent pieces of advice: 1. Never trust a man in a ready-made bow tie. A man who cannot concentrate long enough to fasten a bow tie is never going to be a well of nuanced or intriguing conversation. 2. One Vodka Martini is not enough, two is plenty and three is too many. 3. Live your life with passion, or there is no point. You might as well drink three Vodka Martinis with a man sporting clip-on neckwear.

— Sandi Toksvig

From the great David Warren (of davidwarrenonline.com):

Love is, I hold, the great teacher; but pain is the great teaching assistant.

We pause in our exploration of all things Christmassy to recommend this wonderful new work. Don’t be the only work at work, home, or anarchist collective not to have a copy.

No man was ever wise by chance.
Seneca

With the thermometer at 30 below zero and the wind behind him, a man walking on Main Street in Winnipeg knows which side of him is which.

We can no longer communicate with the apes by direct language, nor can we understand, without special study, their modes of communication which we have long since replaced by more elaborate forms. But it is at least presumable that they could still detect in our speech, at least when it is public and elaborate, the underlying tone values with which it began. Thus if we could take a gibbon ape to a college public lecture, he would not understand it, but he would “get a good deal of it.” This is all the students get anyway.

You know, many a man realizes late in life that if when he was a boy he had known what he knows now, instead of being what he is he might be what he won’t; but how few boys stop to think that if they knew what they don’t know instead of being what they will be, they wouldn’t be?

It is difficult to be funny and great at the same time. Aristophanes and Molière and Mark Twain must sit below Aristotle and Bossuet and Emerson.

Editor’s note: I would like to say that Emerson is greatly over-rated and that I translated a book by Bossuet for my Master’s thesis. He too is over-rated.

Life, we learn too late, is in the living, in the tissue of every day and hour.