WORK

“I had expected to arrive in rain, and at Holyhead, indeed, a fine, warm drizzle was falling, but when we got out on the channel the sun broke through again. It was evening. The sea was calm, an oiled, taut meniscus, mauve-tinted and curiously high and curved. From the forward lounge where I sat the prow seemed to rise and rise, as if the whole ship were straining to take to the air. The sky before us was a smear of crimson on the palest of pale blue and silvery green. I held my face up to the calm sea-light, entranced, expectant, grinning like a loon. I confess I was not entirely sober, I had already broken into my allowance of duty-free booze, and the skin at my temples and around my eyes was tightening alarmingly. It was not just the drink, though, that was making me happy, but the tenderness of things, the simple goodness of the world. This sunset, for instance, how lavishly it was laid on, the clouds, the light on the sea, that heartbreaking, blue-green distance, laid on, all of it, as if to console some lost, suffering wayfarer. I have never really got used to being on this earth. Sometimes I think our presence here is due to a cosmic blunder, that we were meant for another planet altogether, with other arrangements, and other laws, and other, grimmer skies. I try to imagine it, our true place, off on the far side of the galaxy, whirling and whirling. And the ones who were meant for here, are they out there, baffled and homesick, like us? No, they would have become extinct long ago. How could they survive, these gentle earthlings, in a world that was made to contain us?”

—John Banville
—from The Book of Evidence

WORD(S)

esprit de l’escalier /eh-SPREE duh LE-scalyay/. noun. A retort that occurs too late to use it. Literally “staircase wit,” referring to the remark that occurs as one is heading down the stairs, post-engagement. The overdue riposte that causes one to slap one’s own forehead. AKA “afterwit.”

“l’homme sensible, comme moi, tout entier à ce qu’on lui objecte, perd la tête et ne se retrouve qu’au bas de l’escalier”
“a sensitive man like me, overwhelmed by the argument levelled against him, loses his head – and doesn’t get it back again till he’s at the bottom of the stairs” (Denis Diderot)

“This mixture of clairvoyance and spleen, esprit de l’escalier, noble inspirations, poetry and nonsense.” (Saul Bellow)

In The King’s English, the Fowler brothers note:

“The French have had the wit to pack into the words esprit d’escalier the common experience that one’s happiest retorts occur to one only when the chance of uttering them is gone, the door is closed, and one’s feet are on the staircase. That is well worth introducing to an English audience; the only question is whether it is of any use to translate it without explanation. No one will know what spirit of the staircase is who is not already familiar with esprit d’escalier; and even he who is may not recognize it in disguise, seeing that esprit does not mean spirit (which suggests a goblin lurking in the hall clock), but wit.”

WEB

1. “She, along with her frequent collaborator […] had students read a short story—Elizabeth George’s ”Lusting for Jenny, Inverted“ […] in one of two formats: a pocket paperback or a Kindle e-book. When Mangen tested the readers’ comprehension, she found that the medium mattered a lot.” — “Being a Better Online Reader”.

2. "“My daughter recently passed away after a long battle in the children’s hospital. Since she was in the hospital her whole life we never were able to get a photo without all her tubes. Can someone remove the tubes from this photo?”" — An online community responds with an outpouring of support.

3. With no semblance of a process, the governor of North Carolina appoints a (self-published, deeply under-qualified) poet laureate without any process whatsoever, defends her as not being of the “cultural elite,” and then she resigns. I feel bad for the poet. She should have just said no.

4. A feel-good video: paralyzed dogs in wheelchairs playing fetch.

5. Today in 64 AD, the great fire of Rome raged, during which legend would have the famously brutal Nero fiddling. A difficult feat since the violin wouldn’t be invented for 1450 or so years. But in choosing Christians as the scapegoat, a fire of persecution was lit that continued for centuries.

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