MUSINGS AND OPINIONS
JANUARY 1935
◆ “Her ladyship makes a lovely corpse,” said the undertaker. “Lovely in life, lovely in death, is what I always say. It’s astonishing, the beauty that death brings out. My old grandfather, who was in the same line of business, told me that, and for 50 years I’ve confirmed the truth of his words. ‘Beauty in life,’ he used to say, ‘may come from good dressing and what-not, but for beauty in death you have to fall back on character.’ If I want to size a person up, I look at them and picture them dead.” V. SACKVILLE WEST, ALL PASSION SPENT
◆ Every educated person should know what his or her insides look like. It was not until I had attended a few post-mortems that I realised (with Leonardo da Vinci, Christopher Wren and others) that even the ugliest human exteriors may contain the most beautiful viscera, and was able to console myself for the facial drabness of my neighbours in omnibuses by dissecting them in my imagination. J. B. S. HALDANE, SCIENCE AND HUMAN LIFE
◆ A hundred years from now, I dare say, some dreamy collector will pay a cool thousand for an old milk bottle, and I wish I had the equivalent for what my hotwater bag will bring in 2034! Why we should be so beguiled by the antique is a riddle that perhaps only the interior decorator can solve. CORNELIA OTIS SKINNER
◆ The filling station men have improved the manners and courtesy
of the American public more than all the colleges in the country. ROBERT A. MILIKEN, EMINENT PHYSICIST
FEBRUARY 1938
◆ As one grows older, I think one feels life more in terms of things. This sounds rather material but it isn’t. Things become so saturated with their associations that they symbolise the loveliest experiences and intimacies of life. ANNE SEDGEWICK, A PORTRAIT IN LETTERS (HOUGHTON MIFFLIN)
◆ Suppose there should suddenly be dumped into man’s conscious mind a small part of what he had forgotten: out of his past, ten million faces would surge up from darkness into a dreadful glare; a vast murmur of voices would gather out of silence and grow until it builds pandemonium in his skull. In that sea of faces he would not find the few that had been dear to him; voices he had loved would be drowned in rapid chatter. The few good books he had read would be smothered under the ten thousand bad. Worst of all, he would search in vain among the trivialities, the broken purposes, and the weak surrenders of his own past for that ideal self of which his weak memory had allowed him complacently to dream. ODELL SHEPARD, QUOTED BY BRUCE BARTON IN THE AMERICAN MAGAZINE
◆ If a nation had any sense, they would begin their wars by sending their oldest men into the trenches. They would not risk the lives of their young men except in the last extremity. In 1914, it was a dreadful thing to see regiments of lads singing ‘Tipperary’ on their way to the slaughterhouse. But the spectacle of octogenarians hobbling to the front waving their walking sticks and piping up to the tune of “We’ll never come back no more, we’ll never come back no more” – wouldn’t you cheer that enthusiastically? I should. RADIO BROADCAST BY
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW