Commonplace Books

There is much to cull from reading. Writers often kept Commonplace Books ,in which they recorded what they found striking or needing further explanation. There are a multitude of such things in Clive James’ Cultural Amnesia. He obviously notes everything down, as I have for years. He picks up on Jorge Luis Borges defending himself from accusations of kow-towing to the military regime’s by saying, No leo los diarios! I don’t read the papers! He recalls Cocteau with this cautionary tale: ‘There was once a chameleon whose owner, to keep it warm, put it on a gaudy Scottish plaid. The chameleon died of fatigue.’

You can pick this stuff up anywhere.

The departing British Prime Minister is reported to have said, ‘I don’t regard any sex as pleasant.’ But then Isaac Babel claimed that he had made love to the ‘understandably unbalanced wife of Yezhov [the Nasty who headed the old Soviet Secret Police] and almost everyone who slept with either of the Yezhovs was shot in early 1940.’

I think there is a lesson in those two statements, but I don’t know what it is. For those of you who wonder, there is the Lewis Carroll defense. Children some to those who know ‘the simple art of giving them their whole attention.’ That one happens to be true, and all too few do.

I close with a wonder from the excellent Juan Ribeyro: ‘a new President has been elected. He doesn’t smoke, drink, gamble or womanize.’ This is worrying: ‘It would terrify me to be governed by a man who was won a prize for virtue.’