I Found a Penny Today, So Here's a Thought

"Schoolmasters ... are like animal tamers; the latter think it is important for lions to jump through hoops, the former spend all their time getting children to remember that the late lamented Hannibal lost his left eye in the Pontine swamps; the one turns the king of the desert into a circus clown, the other a divine flower into a bunch of parsley."
—Gustav Meyrink, The White Dominican

"Nowadays everyone thinks they can organize; that shows how wrong it must be.  What is right is always the opposite of what the herd does."
—Gustav Meyrink, The Green Face

"Our teachers are like sorcerer's apprentices, who spend all their time deforming the mind, until the heart dies of thirst.  When they have accomplished that, they declare their students ready to go out into the world."
—Gustav Meyrink, The White Dominican

"All things are possible, and the longer they are in coming, the more probable they are."
—Gustav Meyrink, The Green Face

"People under seventy and over seven are very unreliable if they are not cats."
—Leonora Carrington, The Hearing Trumpet

"All complaints about the supposed injustice of fate were silenced by the knowledge that we all follow the road we have chosen."
—Gustav Meyrink, The Green Face

"If we look at reality for more than an instant, if we look at the human beings passing us on the street, it’s not bearable."
—playwright Wallace Shawn

"Take life less seriously and dreams more so, then things will improve, then the dream can become your leader instead of, as now, going around as a garish clown in the motley shreds of our daytime memories."
—Gustav Meyrink, The White Dominican

"There is no law on earth that does not evoke the Eumenides [the Furies]."
—Petit-Senn, Le Portefeuille, qtd. in Malpertuis by Jean Ray

"Our shadows: the bond that ties us to the earth, the black ghost that emanates from us, revealing the death within us, where light strikes our bodies!"
—Gustav Meyrink, The White Dominican

"Sometimes you can fan the flame of your thoughts so vigorously that they give off a spray of sparks that fly to the brain of the person standing next to you."
—Gustav Meyrink, The Golem

Older and older men are starting families, and when we see white-haired grandfatherly types out and about with their newborns, we can't help but to see classic archetypes at play: Father Time and Baby New Year.  Here they are as depicted in Life magazine, 1902:

Each single action here on earth
Accords with nature's rule;
"I am the author of this act"—
Thus speaks the self-deceiving fool.
—Gustav Meyrink, The White Dominican

A hand without fingerprints
still leaves a smudge
—Geof Huth

"Something that appears unusual today might be an everyday event tomorrow."
—Gustav Meyrink, The White Dominican

• to promote yourself
• of freedom
• of song
• of roses
• of great variety
• of the tempest's power
• for threshing
• of vacations
• of the least bird movement
• of transition
• of the insectivora
• for proverbial meteorology
• of patriotism and revolutions
• when the wooden spoon begins to get busy
• of the ruby
• when things really heat up in Copenhagen
• when fuchsias come into their own

"Memories that come back to life are like ghosts; they emerge, as if from a tiny point, then swell until they suddenly take on a spatial presence of greater beauty and immediacy than they ever had before."
—Gustav Meyrink, Walpurgisnacht

• the taste of yeast
• the world
• Paris
• the moon
• the human figure
• the sense of accomplishment
• Yahweh
• thy destiny
• the excellence of Italian cookery
• the beauty of a rose
• a blue-sided, white-capped mountain, reflected in a broad, placid, shimmering lake, and framed between fleeting clouds, graceful trees and verdant lawn

This quotation . . .


. . . reminds us of this illustration from Harper's magazine, 1912:

"The Fall did not begin with eating the apple, that is base superstition.  It was hanging pictures in houses that did it!  Scarcely has the plasterer made the wall sheer and smooth than the Devil appears in the guise of an 'artist' and paints you a 'hole' in it with a view into the distance.  From there it's only one step to the bottomless pit where you're hanging in full fish and soup on the dining-room wall yourself next to Isidor the Handsome or some other crowned idiot with a pear-shaped head and a Cro-Magnon jaw, watching yourself eat."
—Gustav Meyrink, The Green Face