Category: Lit & Crit

“The dead men looked wonderfully beautiful. The night was shining gently down, softening them into new ivory. Turks were white-skinned on their clothed parts, much whiter than the Arabs; and these soldiers had been very young. Close round them lapped the dark wormwood, now heavy with dew, in which the ends of the moonbeams sparkled like sea-spray. The corpses seemed flung so pitifully on the ground, huddled anyhow in low heaps. Surely if straightened they would be comfortable at last. So I put them all in order, one by one, very wearied myself, and longing to be of these quiet ones, not of the restless, noisy, aching mob up the valley, quarrelling over the plunder, boasting of their speed and strength to endure God knew how many toils and pains of this sort; with death, whether we won or lost, waiting to end the history.” – T. E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom

“Will not perfection, even in the least of things, entail the ending of this world? Are we ripe for that? When I am angry I pray God to swing our globe into the fiery sun, and prevent the sorrows of the not-yet-born: but when I am content, I want to lie for ever in the shade, till I become a shade myself.” – T. E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom

“Palestine became a land of milk and honey to those who had spent forty years in Sinai: Damascus had the name of an earthly paradise to the tribes which could enter it only after weeks and weeks of painful marching across the flint-stones of this northern desert: and likewise the Kaseim of Arfaja in which we spent that night, after five days across the blazing Houl in the teeth of a sand-storm, looked fresh and countryfied. They were raised only a few feet above the Bisaita, and from them valleys seemed to run down towards the east into a huge depression where lay the well we wanted: but now that we had crossed the desert and reached the Sirhan safely, the terror of thirst had passed and we knew fatigue to be our chief ill. So we agreed to camp for the night where we were, and to make beacon fires for the slave of Nuri Shaalan, who had disappeared from our caravan to-day. We were not greatly perturbed about him. He knew the country and his camel was under him. It might be that he had intentionally taken the direct way to Jauf, Nuri’s capital, to earn the reward of first news that we came with gifts. However it was, he did not come that night, nor next day; and when, months after, I asked Nuri of him, he replied that his dried body had lately been found, lying beside his unplundered camel far out in the wilderness. He must have lost himself in the sand-haze and wandered till his camel broke down; and there died of thirst and heat. Not a long death—even for the very strongest a second day in summer was all—but very painful; for thirst was an active malady; a fear and panic which tore at the brain and reduced the bravest man to a stumbling babbling maniac in an hour or two: and then the sun killed him.” – T. E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom

“Arabs of means rode none but she-camels, since they went smoother under the saddle than males, and were better tempered and less noisy: also, they were patient and would endure to march long after they were worn out, indeed until they tottered with exhaustion and fell in their tracks and died: whereas the coarser males grew angry, flung themselves down when tired, and from sheer rage would die there unnecessarily.” – T. E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom

“The Bedu were odd people. For an Englishman, sojourning with them was unsatisfactory unless he had patience wide and deep as the sea. They were absolute slaves of their appetite, with no stamina of mind, drunkards for coffee, milk or water, gluttons for stewed meat, shameless beggars of tobacco. They dreamed for weeks before and after their rare sexual exercises, and spent the intervening days titillating themselves and their hearers with bawdy tales. Had the circumstances of their lives given them opportunity they would have been sheer sensualists. Their strength was the strength of men geographically beyond temptation: the poverty of Arabia made them simple, continent, enduring. If forced into civilized life they would have succumbed like any savage race to its diseases, meanness, luxury, cruelty, crooked dealing, artifice; and, like savages, they would have suffered them exaggeratedly for lack of inoculation. If they suspected that we wanted to drive them either they were mulish or they went away. If we comprehended them, and gave time and trouble to make things tempting to them, then they would go to great pains for our pleasure. Whether the results achieved were worth the effort, no man could tell. Englishmen, accustomed to greater returns, would not, and, indeed, could not, have spent the time, thought and tact lavished every day by sheikhs and emirs for such meagre ends. Arab processes were clear, Arab minds moved logically as our own, with nothing radically incomprehensible or different, except the premiss: there was no excuse or reason, except our laziness and ignorance, whereby we could call them inscrutable or Oriental, or leave them misunderstood. They would follow us, if we endured with them, and played the game according to their rules. The pity was, that we often began to do so, and broke down with exasperation and threw them over, blaming them for what was a fault in our own selves. Such strictures like a general’s complaint of bad troops, were in reality a confession of our faulty foresight, often made falsely out of mock modesty to show that, though mistaken, we had at least the wit to know our fault.” – T. E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom

“Shepherds were a class apart. For the ordinary Arab the hearth was a university, about which their world passed and where they heard the best talk, the news of their tribe, its poems, histories, love tales, lawsuits and bargainings. By such constant sharing in the hearth councils they grew up masters of expression, dialecticians, orators, able to sit with dignity in any gathering and never at a loss for moving words. The shepherds missed the whole of this. From infancy they followed their calling, which took them in all seasons and weathers, day and night, into the hills and condemned them to loneliness and brute company. In the wilderness, among the dry bones of nature, they grew up natural, knowing nothing of man and his affairs; hardly sane in ordinary talk; but very wise in plants, wild animals, and the habits of their own goats and sheep, whose milk was their chief sustenance. With manhood they became sullen, while a few turned dangerously savage, more animal than man, haunting the flocks, and finding the satisfaction of their adult appetites in them, to the exclusion of more licit affections.” – T. E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom

“Nine-tenths of tactics were certain enough to be teachable in schools; but the irrational tenth was like the kingfisher flashing across the pool, and in it lay the test of generals. It could be ensued only by instinct (sharpened by thought practising the stroke) until at the crisis it came naturally, a reflex.” – T. E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom

“War upon rebellion was messy and slow, like eating soup with a knife.” – T. E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom

“At last we camped, and when the camels were unloaded and driven out to pasture, I lay down under the rocks and rested. My body was very sore with headache and high fever, the accompaniments of a sharp attack of dysentery which had troubled me along the march and had laid me out twice that day in short fainting fits, when the more difficult parts of the climb had asked too much of my strength. Dysentery of this Arabian coast sort used to fall like a hammer blow, and crush its victims for a few hours, after which the extreme effects passed off; but it left men curiously tired, and subject for some weeks to sudden breaks of nerve. My followers had been quarrelling all day; and while I was lying near the rocks a shot was fired. I paid no attention; for there were hares and birds in the valley; but a little later Suleiman roused me and made me follow him across the valley to an opposite bay in the rocks, where one of the Ageyl, a Boreida man, was lying stone dead with a bullet through his temples. The shot must have been fired from close by; because the skin was burnt about one wound. The remaining Ageyl were running frantically about; and when I asked what it was Ali, their head man, said that Hamed the Moor had done the murder. I suspected Suleiman, because of the feud between the Atban and Ageyl which had burned up in Yenbo and Wejh; but Ali assured me that Suleiman had been with him three hundred yards further up the valley gathering sticks when the shot was fired. I sent all out to search for Hamed, and crawled back to the baggage, feeling that it need not have happened this day of all days when I was in pain. As I lay there I heard a rustle, and opened my eyes slowly upon Hamed’s back as he stooped over his saddle-bags, which lay just beyond my rock. I covered him with a pistol and then spoke. He had put down his rifle to lift the gear; and was at my mercy till the others came. We held a court at once; and after a while Hamed confessed that, he and Salem having had words, he had seen red and shot him suddenly. Our inquiry ended. The Ageyl, as relatives of the dead man, demanded blood for blood. The others supported them; and I tried vainly to talk the gentle Ali round. My head was aching with fever and I could not think; but hardly even in health, with all eloquence, could I have begged Hamed off; for Salem had been a friendly fellow and his sudden murder a wanton crime. Then rose up the horror which would make civilized man shun justice like a plague if he had not the needy to serve him as hangmen for wages. There were other Moroccans in our army; and to let the Ageyl kill one in feud meant reprisals by which our unity would have been endangered. It must be a formal execution, and at last, desperately, I told Hamed that he must die for punishment, and laid the burden of his killing on myself. Perhaps they would count me not qualified for feud. At least no revenge could lie against my followers; for I was a stranger and kinless. I made him enter a narrow gully of the spur, a dank twilight place overgrown with weeds. Its sandy bed had been pitted by trickles of water down the cliffs in the late rain. At the end it shrank to a crack a few inches wide. The walls were vertical. I stood in the entrance and gave him a few moments’ delay which he spent crying on the ground. Then I made him rise and shot him through the chest. He fell down on the weeds shrieking, with the blood coming out in spurts over his clothes, and jerked about till he rolled nearly to where I was. I fired again, but was shaking so that I only broke his wrist. He went on calling out, less loudly, now lying on his back with his feet towards me, and I leant forward and shot him for the last time in the thick of his neck under the jaw. His body shivered a little, and I called the Ageyl, who buried him in the gully where he was. Afterwards the wakeful night dragged over me, till, hours before dawn, I had the men up and made them load, in my longing to be set free of Wadi Kitan. They had to lift me into the saddle.” – T. E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom

“Even in situations of poetry the French remained incorrigible prose-writers, seeing by the directly-thrown light of reason and understanding, not through the half-closed eye, mistily, by things’ essential radiance.” – T. E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom

“Your good and my good, perhaps they are different, and either forced good or forced evil will make a people cry with pain. Does the ore admire the flame which transforms it?” – T. E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom

“Men have looked upon the desert as barren land, the free holding of whoever chose; but in fact each hill and valley in it had a man who was its acknowledged owner and would quickly assert the right of his family or clan to it, against aggression. Even the wells and trees had their masters, who allowed men to make firewood of the one and drink of the other freely, as much as was required for their need, but who would instantly check anyone trying to turn the property to account and to exploit it or its products among others for private benefit. The desert was held in a crazed communism by which Nature and the elements were for the free use of every known friendly person for his own purposes and no more. Logical outcomes were the reduction of this licence to privilege by the men of the desert, and their hardness to strangers unprovided with introduction or guarantee, since the common security lay in the common responsibility of kinsmen.” – T. E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom

“All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes, to make it possible.” – T. E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom

“When we achieved and the new world dawned, the old men came out again and took our victory to re-make in the likeness of the former world they knew. Youth could win, but had not learned to keep: and was pitiably weak against age. We stammered that we had worked for a new heaven and a new earth, and they thanked us kindly and made their peace.” – T. E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom

“You, reading this, you’re here, alive, because your parents synced and you showed up. That’s it. Even if they planned for a child, it was still a raffle draw. A hand went in a bowl and picked you. The tree shook and a fruit fell down. If it pains you to read, then cry. It’s deeper for your mum because she probably pushed so hard her body gasped, only for your ungrateful head to come out of it.” – Eloghosa Osunde, “Good Boy”

“I’m not the kind of guy who believes in hell, or in a god who imagines a lake of fire. I just can’t see it—you have a mind that’s wider than the sky and that is what you use it to picture? To me, that sounds too petty, too human, too undivine to be real. People sell all kinds of gods all the time. I know the One that moves me and it’s not the one I was raised on. To me, you can’t say you’re love, choose to roast people for eternity, and then pretend it breaks your heart. Pick a side.” – Eloghosa Osunde, “Good Boy”

“There be three kinds of unhappy men: He that hath knowledge and teacheth not ; He that teacheth and liveth not thereafter; He that knoweth not and doth not enquire to understand.” – Sir Edward Coke, Commentary on Littleton

“There is no knowledge (seemeth it at the first of never so little moment) but it will stand the diligent student in stead at one time or other.” – Sir Edward Coke, Commentary on Littleton

“Pedantry is a useless display of learning, or perhaps a display of useless learning—at any rate, the term involves the double idea of display or affectation and uselessness.” – John Marshall Gest, The Lawyer in Literature

“Now, if a man wants to have his estate properly settled, it is absolutely necessary for him to die. It is not enough for him to disappear, no matter for how long, if he neglects this simple preliminary. When he comes back unexpectedly, and makes himself generally disagreeable, his return to the scene of his former activities will disarrange the most careful administration, and even if his supposed death was mourned, his reappearance will be even more sincerely lamented.” – John Marshall Gest, The Lawyer in Literature

“That every man must work out his own damnation, is not merely a profound theological dogma and a practical rule of life, but also a fundamental canon of literary art.” – John Marshall Gest, The Lawyer in Literature

“Poets should always study law, as [Sir Walter] Scott did, but if more of them did so, there would be less poetry written.” – John Marshall Gest, The Lawyer in Literature

“The clergy live by our sins, the medical faculty by our diseases, and the law gentry by our misfortunes.” – Sir Walter Scott, Antiquary

“Law’s like laudanum, it’s much more easy to use it as a quack does, than to learn to apply it like a physician.” – Sir Walter Scott, Guy Mannering

“Women play an important role in Judges, to an extent not seen in the Bible since the early chapters of Exodus. While they barely appear in Joshua, in Judges they are present in every major narrative save that of Ehud. And the way they are painted seems to act as a moral barometer for the state of Israelite society as it was conceived of by the writers. Some female characters show strength and independence (Achsah, Deborah, Jael, and Abimelech’s killer), but others appear as the victims of violence within and beyond the patriarchal system (Jephthah’s daughter, the concubine of Gibeah, and the Benjaminite women at the end of the book—all of whom are unnamed), and even as the enemy or corrupt figures (Delilah and the Levite’s mother). These narratives do not merely reflect a patriarchal society. More often than not, they serve to set the male characters in relief, demonstrating the shortcomings of the leaders in Judges. Achsah is not shy about asserting her rights; Deborah has the self-assurance that Barak does not; Jael succeeds in the absence of her husband; Jephthah’s nameless daughter survives in cultural memory despite her early end; Delilah outsmarts the superhumanly strong Samson; and the numberless female victims in the last three chapters of the book serve to indict first a single Levite, then the tribe of Benjamin, and finally the entire people, for their crimes of abandonment, murder, rape, and abduction. If Samson and his ilk symbolize a badly faltering Israel, the female characters in the book function to sharply etch the consequences of the people’s actions.” – Everett Fox, The Early Prophets

“Ridicule is stronger than argument, caricature more powerful than a bald recital of sober facts.” – John Marshall Gest, The Lawyer in Literature

“We are not very much to blame for our bad marriages. We live amid hallucinations, and this especial trap is laid to trip up our feet with and all are tripped up first or last.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson, Conduct of Life

“When Daniel Quilp was found drowned, and the coroner’s jury found it a case of suicide, he was buried with a stake through his heart, in the centre of four lonely roads. This was a very old custom in England, but there seems to be no legal authority for it. Perhaps the place was so selected that, by the continual passage of the living, the burial-place might be trodden down and forgotten. It has been suggested that the stake was driven through the heart to keep the ghost from walking.” – John Marshall Gest, The Lawyer in Literature

“The Family is an institution that’s allowed to be bigger and more important than the people it’s meant to protect. It’s meant to be everything, to everyone, all at once: a sanctuary, a home, a source of moral authority, a replacement for social infrastructure when the state fails. The harsher and more alienating the outside world gets, the more important The Family becomes as an idea—whether or not you’re part of one. Family is meant to be a refuge from structural violence and a reason to survive it. So what do we do with the fact that family isn’t always the safest place for everyone? What happens when the home that was supposed to be a refuge turns into a trap?” – Laurie Penny, “ ‘Encanto’ is a Beautiful, Brilliant, Broken Mess.”

“Sex and drugs and violence are simple, but working through generational pain is the real grown-up shit.” – Laurie Penny, “ ‘Encanto’ is a Beautiful, Brilliant, Broken Mess.”