Watchers at the Pond (2)

Franklin Russell. New York: Time Incorporated. 1961.

Why read it? Describes the changes in the pond during the cycle of the seasons.

Sample quotes and ideas:

“The differences between plant and animal among this microlife were incomprehensible and contradictory and seemed to indicate only one fact: the origins of this life went back to a creature that was neither plant or animal.” p. 85.

“The red-tailed hawk: His scream in the hot sky gripped the senses, and the vertical fall of his body terrified the forest.” p. 87.

“The hunters could easily misjudge the dynamic instinct to live of their defenseless prey.” p. 95.

“All pond creatures had particular enemies who perpetually haunted their lives.” p. 103.

“In an hour, one bladderwort caught five hundred thousand creatures.” p. 111.

“The worm gulped down the rotifer, and the frog swallowed the worm; the kingfisher killed the frog, and the hunt passed endlessly from creature to creature.” p. 114.

“In death there was life.” p. 116.

“The bat calls bounced off all flying insects and the reflected sounds informed the bats of distance, directions and speeds.” p. 156.

“The bats’ crazy zigzagging flight branched from mosquito to moth in blind destruction of flying life.” p. 156.

“The bats lived in an almost completely dark world of echo.” p. 156.

To be continued.

Watchers at the Pond (1)

Franklin Russell. New York: Time Incorporated. 1961.

Why read it? Describes the changes in the pond during the cycle of the seasons.

Sample quotes and ideas:

“This book will show you that the world you live in is a rich and wonderful place and it will show you how little we know about it.” Gerald Durrell. xvii.

“These creatures had neither the time nor the instinct to know all the incredible pond.” p. 11.

“The hunted hare knew fear in all the pond’s seasons, but his life was only a fraction of this complex cosmos.” p. 11.

“About five hundred million earthworms were asleep around the pond.” p. 15.

“When the flies began emerging from their sleep, the pond would sound to the roar, rasp, whine, screech, drone and rumble of their wings.” p. 21.

“Nowhere did the snow disclose its real structure, which was founded on one constant mathematical fact: Every particle of it was formed on some variation of six…and whatever the complexity of a flake each was a perfectly symmetrical unit.” p. 39.

“In a hollow tree filled with rotten wood, thirty-eight thousand drowsy fertilized mosquitoes began stirring.” p. 55.

“The diversity of life in this miniature universe seemed infinite.” p. 61.

To be continued.

Roughing It (6). Mark Twain.

New York: Literary Classics of the United States, Inc. 1872 (1984).

Why read it? Twain records a journey from St. Louis across the plains to Nevada, a visit to the Mormons, and life and adventures in Virginia City, San Francisco, and the Sandwich Islands. Filled with tall tales, vivid descriptions, narratives of adventure and character sketches.

Sample Ideas and Quotes:

[Capt. Ned Blakely]: “…steadfastly believed that the first and last aim and object of the law and lawyers was to defeat justice.” p. 792.

“Mrs. F. was an able Romanticist of the ineffable school—I know no other name to apply to a school whose heroines are all dainty and all perfect.” p. 798.

Jim Blaine: “But mind you, there ain’t anything ever reely lost; everything that people can’t understand and don’t see the reason of does good if you only hold on and give it a fair shake; Prov’dence don’t fire no blank ca’tridges, boys.” p. 818.

“…the eternal spring of San Francisco….” p. 837.

“…and glancing furtively in at home lights and fireside gatherings, out of the night shadows.” p. 850.

“…the thoughts of one whose dreams were all of the past, whose life was a failure, a tired man, burdened with the present, and indifferent to the future; a man without ties, hopes, interests, waiting for rest and the end.” p. 854.

“…snore like a steamboat….” p. 859.

“…long, long before the missionaries braved a thousand privations to come and make them [Hawaiians] permanently miserable by telling them how beautiful and how blissful a place heaven is, and how nearly impossible it is to get there.” p. 877.

“I found home a dreary place after my long absence; for half the children I had known were now wearing whiskers…and few of the grown people I had been acquainted with remained at their hearthstones prosperous and happy—some of them had wandered to other scenes, some were in jail, and the rest had been hanged.” p. 960.

Comment: Van Wyck Brooks in The Ordeal of Mark Twain, said that Mark Twain could have been America’s Shakespeare, but he enjoyed the prosperity he commanded by turning to comedy. RayS.

Roughing It (5). Mark Twain.

New York: Literary Classics of the United States, Inc. 1872 (1984).

Why read it? Twain records a journey from St. Louis across the plains to Nevada, a visit to the Mormons, and life and adventures in Virginia City, San Francisco, and the Sandwich Islands. Filled with tall tales, vivid descriptions, narratives of adventure and character sketches.

Sample Ideas and Quotes:

“…whenever he [Capt. John] met a man, woman or child, in camp, in a desert, he either knew such parties personally or had been acquainted with a relative of the same.” p. 710.

“It is a pity that Adam could not have gone straight out of Eden into a quartz mill, in order to understand the full force of his doom to ‘earn his bread by the sweat of his brow.’ ” p. 714.

[Watch out for the pun in this one.] “A white man cannot drink the water of Mono Lake, for it is nearly pure lye…. Said that the Indians in the vicinity drink it sometimes. Not improbable, for they are among the purest liars I ever saw.” p. 724.

Buck and the Preacher:

Buck: “Are you the duck that runs the gospel-mill next door?”

Buck: “…you are the head clerk of the doxology works next door.”

Preacher: “I am the shepherd in charge of the flock whose fold is next door.”

Preacher: “the spiritual advisor of the little company of believers whose sanctuary adjoins these premises.

Buck: “You see, one of the boys has gone up the flume….”

Preacher: “Ah—has departed to the mysterious country from whose bourne no traveler returns.”

Buck: “Now if we can get you to help plant him….”

Preacher: “Preach the funeral discourse…assist at the obsequies?” pp. 775 – 777.

To be concluded.

Roughing It (4). Mark Twain.

New York: Literary Classics of the United States, Inc. 1872 (1984).

Why read it? Twain records a journey from St. Louis across the plains to Nevada, a visit to the Mormons, and life and adventures in Virginia City, San Francisco, and the Sandwich Islands. Filled with tall tales, vivid descriptions, narratives of adventure and character sketches.

Sample Ideas and Quotes:

“A member of the Nevada legislature] proposed to save three dollars a day by dispensing with the chaplain [for the legislature]; yet that short-sighted man needed the chaplain more than any other member, perhaps, for he generally sat with his feet on the desk, eating raw turnips, during the morning prayer.” p. 667.

“His one striking peculiarity was his…fashion of loving and using big words for their own sakes, and independent of any bearing they might have upon the thought he was proposing to convey.” p. 674.

“In truth his air was so natural and so simple that one was always catching himself accepting his stately sentences as meaning something, when they really meant nothing in the world.” p. 674.

“If a word was long and grand and resonant, that was sufficient to win the old man’s love, and he would drop that word into the most out-of-the-way place in a sentence or a subject, and be as pleased with it as if it were perfectly luminous with meaning.” p. 674.

“However, like the rest of the world, I still go on underrating men of gold ,and glorifying men of mica….” p. 781.

“After breakfast we felt better, and the zest of life soon came back.” p. 703.

“The reader cannot know what a land-slide is, unless he has lived in that country and seen the whole side of a mountain taken off some fine morning and deposited down in the valley, leaving a vast, treeless, unsightly scar upon the mountain’s front to keep the circumstance fresh in his memory.” p. 705.

“And now the General, with exultation in his face, got up and made an impassioned effort; he pounded the table, he banged the law books, he shouted, and roared, and howled, he quoted from everything and everybody, poetry, sarcasm, statistics, history, pathos, bathos, blasphemy, and wound up with a grand war-whoop for free speech, freedom of the press, free schools, the Glorious bird of America and the principles of eternal justice.” p. 707.

To be continued.

Roughing It (3). Mark Twain.

New York: Literary Classics of the United States, Inc. 1872 (1984).

Why read it? Twain records a journey from St. Louis across the plains to Nevada, a visit to the Mormons, and life and adventures in Virginia City, San Francisco, and the Sandwich Islands. Filled with tall tales, vivid descriptions, narratives of adventure and character sketches.

Sample Ideas and Quotes:

“Whenever he [Joseph Smith writing the Mormon Bible] found his speech growing too modern…he ladled in a few such scriptural phrases as ‘exceeding sore,’ ‘and it came to pass,’ etc. and made things satisfactory again.” p. 617.

“Nothing helps scenery like ham and eggs…and after these a pipe…a ‘downgrade,’ a flying coach…and a contented heart—these make happiness…what all the ages have struggled for.” p. 628.

“…the scholarly savages in The Last of the Mohicans who are fittingly associated with backwoodsmen who divide each sentence into two equal parts: one part critically grammatical, refined and choice of language, and the other part…an attempt to talk like a hunter or a mountaineer.” p. 634.

“…a Washoe wind…blows flimsy houses down, lifts shingle roofs occasionally, rolls up tin ones like sheet music, now and then blows a stage coach over and spills the passengers; and tradition says the reason there are so many bald people there, is, that the wind blows the hair off their heads while they are looking skyward after their hats.” p. 643.

“… they would take up a straw and pick their teeth like a member of Congress.” p. 646.

“Nothing could disturb the sleep that fettered us, for it had been fairly earned, and if our consciences had any sins on them they had to adjourn court for that night, anyway.” p. 650.

“I had quickly learned to tell a horse from a cow, and was full of anxiety to learn more.” p. 658.

To be continued.

Roughing It (2). Mark Twain.

New York: Literary Classics of the United States, Inc. 1872 (1984).

Why read it? Twain records a journey from St. Louis across the plains to Nevada, a visit to the Mormons, and life and adventures in Virginia City, San Francisco, and the Sandwich Islands. Filled with tall tales, vivid descriptions, narratives of adventure and character sketches.

Sample Ideas and Quotes:

“There were about eighty pony-riders in the saddle all the time, night and day, stretching in a long, scattering procession from Missouri to California, forty flying eastward, and forty toward the west, and among them making four hundred gallant horses earn a stirring livelihood and see a deal of scenery every single day in the year.” p. 576.

“In a second or two it becomes a horse and rider, rising and falling, rising and falling—sweeping toward us nearer and nearer—growing more and more distinct, more and more sharply defined—nearer and still nearer, and the flutter of the hoofs comes faintly to the ear—another instant a whoop and hurrah from our upper deck, a wave of the rider’s hand, but no reply, and man and horse burst past our excited faces, and go winging away like a belated fragment of a storm!” p. 576.

“…we had that absurd sense upon us, inseparable from travel at night in a close-curtained vehicle, the sense of remaining perfectly still in one place, notwithstanding the jolting and swaying of the vehicle, the trampling of the horses, and the grinding of the wheels.” p. 580.

“…for it was sleep set with a hair-trigger.” p. 580.

Brigham Young, reportedly: “I am not cruel, sir—I am not vindictive except when sorely outraged—but if I had caught him [the man who gave one of his 110 children a whistle], sir, so help me Joseph Smith, I would have locked him into the nursery till the brats whistled him to death.” p. 614.

Of the Mormon Bible: “…chloroform in print.” p. 617.

“If Joseph Smith composed this book [the Mormon Bible], the act was a miracle—keeping awake while he did it was, at any rate.” p. 617.

To be continued.