What a tremendous affair it was, the world of Homer, with its indeterminate boundaries, vast regions, and immeasurable distances.  The Mediterranean and the Euxine were illimitable stretches of ocean waste over which years could be spent in endless wandering.  On their mysterious shores were the improbable homes of impossible peoples.  The Great Sea, the Broad Sea, the Boundless Sea; the Ethiopians, “dwelling far away, the most distant of men,” and the Cimmerians, “covered with darkness and cloud,” where “baleful night is spread over timid mortals.”  Phœnicia was a sore journey, Egypt simply unattainable, while the Pillars of Hercules marked the extreme edge of the universe.  Ulysses was nine days in sailing from Ismarus the city of the Ciconians, to the country of the Lotus-eaters—a period of time which to-day would breed anxiety in the hearts of the underwriters should it be occupied by the slowest tramp steamer in traversing the Mediterranean and Black Seas from Gibraltar to Sebastopol.

Homer’s world, restricted to less than a drummer’s circuit, was nevertheless immense, surrounded by a thin veneer of universe—the Stream of Ocean.  But how it has shrunk!  To-day, precisely charted, weighed, and measured, a thousand times larger than the world of Homer, it is become a tiny speck, gyrating to immutable law through a universe the bounds of which have been pushed incalculably back.  The light of Algol shines upon it—a light which travels at one hundred and ninety thousand miles per second, yet requires forty-seven years to reach its destination.  And the denizens of this puny ball have come to know that Algol possesses an invisible companion, three and a quarter millions of miles away, and that the twain move in their respective orbits at rates of fifty-five and twenty-six miles per second.  They also know that beyond it are great chasms of space, innumerable worlds, and vast star systems.

While much of the shrinkage to which the planet has been subjected is due to the increased knowledge of mathematics and physics, an equal, if not greater, portion may be ascribed to the perfection of the means of locomotion and communication.  The enlargement of stellar space, demonstrating with stunning force the insignificance of the earth, has been negative in its effect; but the quickening of travel and intercourse, by making the earth’s parts accessible and knitting them together, has been positive.

The advantage of the animal over the vegetable kingdom is obvious.  The cabbage, should its environment tend to become worse, must live it out, or die; the rabbit may move on in quest of a better.  But, after all, the swift-footed creatures are circumscribed in their wanderings.  The first large river almost inevitably bars their way, and certainly the first salt sea becomes an impassable obstacle.  Better locomotion may be classed as one of the prime aims of the old natural selection; for in that primordial day the race was to the swift as surely as the battle to the strong.  But man, already pre-eminent in the common domain because of other faculties, was not content with the one form of locomotion afforded by his lower limbs.  He swam in the sea, and, still better, becoming aware of the buoyant virtues of wood, learned to navigate its surface.  Likewise, from among the land animals he chose the more likely to bear him and his burdens.  The next step was the domestication of these useful aids.  Here, in its organic significance, natural selection ceased to concern itself with locomotion.  Man had displayed his impatience at her tedious methods and his own superiority in the hastening of affairs.  Thenceforth he must depend upon himself, and faster-swimming or faster-running men ceased to be bred.  The one, half-amphibian, breasting the water with muscular arms, could not hope to overtake or escape an enemy who propelled a fire-hollowed tree trunk by means of a wooden paddle; nor could the other, trusting to his own nimbleness, compete with a foe who careered wildly across the plain on the back of a half-broken stallion.

So, in that dim day, man took upon himself the task of increasing his dominion over space and time, and right nobly has he acquitted himself.  Because of it he became a road builder and a bridge builder; likewise, he wove clumsy sails of rush and matting.  At a very remote period he must also have recognized that force moves along the line of least resistance, and in virtue thereof, placed upon his craft rude keels which enabled him to beat to windward in a seaway.  As he excelled in these humble arts, just so did he add to his power over his less progressive fellows and lay the foundations for the first glimmering civilizations—crude they were beyond conception, sporadic and ephemeral, but each formed a necessary part of the groundwork upon which was to rise the mighty civilization of our latter-day world.

Divorced from the general history of man’s upward climb, it would seem incredible that so long a time should elapse between the moment of his first improvements over nature in the matter of locomotion and that of the radical changes he was ultimately to compass.  The principles which were his before history was, were his, neither more nor less, even to the present century.  He utilized improved applications, but the principles of themselves were ever the same, whether in the war chariots of Achilles and Pharaoh or the mail-coach and diligence of the European traveller, the cavalry of the Huns or of Prince Rupert, the triremes and galleys of Greece and Rome or the East India-men and clipper ships of the last century.  But when the moment came to alter the methods of travel, the change was so sweeping that it may be safely classed as a revolution.  Though the discovery of steam attaches to the honour of the last century, the potency of the new power was not felt till the beginning of this.  By 1800 small steamers were being used for coasting purposes in England; 1830 witnessed the opening of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway; while it was not until 1838 that the Atlantic was first crossed by the steamships Great Western and Sirius.  In 1869 the East was made next-door neighbour to the West.  Over almost the same ground where had toiled the caravans of a thousand generations, the Suez Canal was dug.  Clive, during his first trip, was a year and a half en route from England to India; were he alive to-day he could journey to Calcutta in twenty-two days.  After reading De Quincey’s hyperbolical description of the English mail-coach, one cannot down the desire to place that remarkable man on the pilot of the White Mail or of the Twentieth Century.

But this tremendous change in the means of locomotion meant far more than the mere rapid transit of men from place to place.  Until then, though its influence and worth cannot be overestimated, commerce had eked out a precarious and costly existence.  The fortuitous played too large a part in the trade of men.  The mischances by land and sea, the mistakes and delays, were adverse elements of no mean proportions.  But improved locomotion meant improved carrying, and commerce received an impetus as remarkable as it was unexpected.  In his fondest fancies James Watt could not have foreseen even the approximate result of his invention, the Hercules which was to spring from the puny child of his brain and hands.  An illuminating spectacle, were it possible, would be afforded by summoning him from among the Shades to a place in the engine-room of an ocean greyhound.  The humblest trimmer would treat him with the indulgence of a child; while an oiler, a greasy nimbus about his head and in his hand, as sceptre, a long-snouted can, would indeed appear to him a demigod and ruler of forces beyond his ken.

It has ever been the world’s dictum that empire and commerce go hand in hand.  In the past the one was impossible without the other.  Rome gathered to herself the wealth of the Mediterranean nations, and it was only by an unwise distribution of it that she became emasculated and lost both power and trade.  With a just system of economics it is highly probable that for centuries she could have held back the welling tide of the Germanic peoples.  When upon her ruins rose the institutions of the conquering Teutons, commerce slipped away, and with it empire.  In the present, empire and commerce have become interdependent.  Such wonders has the industrial revolution wrought in a few swift decades, and so great has been the shrinkage of the planet, that the industrial nations have long since felt the imperative demand for foreign markets.  The favoured portions of the earth are occupied.  From their seats in the temperate zones the militant commercial nations proceed to the exploitation of the tropics, and for the possession of these they rush to war hot-footed.  Like wolves at the end of a gorge, they wrangle over the fragments.  There are no more planets, no more fragments, and they are yet hungry.  There are no longer Cimmerians and Ethiopians, in wide-stretching lands, awaiting them.  On either hand they confront the naked poles, and they recoil from unnavigable space to an intenser struggle among themselves.  And all the while the planet shrinks beneath their grasp.

Of this struggle one thing may be safely predicated; a commercial power must be a sea power.  Upon the control of the sea depends the control of trade.  Carthage threatened Rome till she lost her navy; and then for thirteen days the smoke of her burning rose to the skies, and the ground was ploughed and sown with salt on the site of her most splendid edifices.  The cities of Italy were the world’s merchants till new trade routes were discovered and the dominion of the sea passed on to the west and fell into other hands.  Spain and Portugal, inaugurating an era of maritime discovery, divided the new world between them, but gave way before a breed of sea-rovers, who, after many generations of attachment to the soil, had returned to their ancient element.  With the destruction of her Armada Spain’s colossal dream of colonial empire passed away.  Against the new power Holland strove in vain, and when France acknowledged the superiority of the Briton upon the sea, she at the same time relinquished her designs upon the world.  Hampered by her feeble navy, her contest for supremacy upon the land was her last effort and with the passing of Napoleon she retired within herself to struggle with herself as best she might.  For fifty years England held undisputed sway upon the sea, controlled markets, and domineered trade, laying, during that period, the foundations of her empire.  Since then other naval powers have arisen, their attitudes bearing significantly upon the future; for they have learned that the mastery of the world belongs to the masters of the sea.

That many of the phases of this world shrinkage are pathetic, goes without question.  There is much to condemn in the rise of the economic over the imaginative spirit, much for which the energetic Philistine can never atone.  Perhaps the deepest pathos of all may be found in the spectacle of John Ruskin weeping at the profanation of the world by the vandalism of the age.  Steam launches violate the sanctity of the Venetian canals; where Xerxes bridged the Hellespont ply the filthy funnels of our modern shipping; electric cars run in the shadow of the pyramids; and it was only the other day that Lord Kitchener was in a railroad wreck near the site of ancient Luxor.  But there is always the other side.  If the economic man has defiled temples and despoiled nature, he has also preserved.  He has policed the world and parked it, reduced the dangers of life and limb, made the tenure of existence less precarious, and rendered a general relapse of society impossible.  There can never again be an intellectual holocaust, such as the burning of the Alexandrian library.  Civilizations may wax and wane, but the totality of knowledge cannot decrease.  With the possible exception of a few trade secrets, arts and sciences may be discarded, but they can never be lost.  And these things must remain true until the end of man’s time upon the earth.

Up to yesterday communication for any distance beyond the sound of the human voice or the sight of the human eye was bound up with locomotion.  A letter presupposed a carrier.  The messenger started with the message, and he could not but avail himself of the prevailing modes of travel.  If the voyage to Australia required four months, four months were required for communication; by no known means could this time be lessened.  But with the advent of the telegraph and telephone, communication and locomotion were divorced.  In a few hours, at most, there could be performed what by the old way would have required months.  In 1837 the needle telegraph was invented, and nine years later the Electric Telegraph Company was formed for the purpose of bringing it into general use.  Government postal systems also came into being, later to consolidate into an international union and to group the nations of the earth into a local neighbourhood.  The effects of all this are obvious, and no fitter illustration may be presented than the fact that to-day, in the matter of communication, the Klondike is virtually nearer to Boston than was Bunker Hill in the time of Warren.

A contemporaneous and remarkable shrinkage of a vast stretch of territory may be instanced in the Northland.  From its rise at Lake Linderman the Yukon runs twenty-five hundred miles to Bering Sea, traversing an almost unknown region, the remote recesses of which had never felt the moccasined foot of the pathfinder.  At occasional intervals men wallowed into its dismal fastnesses, or emerged gaunt and famine-worn.  But in the fall of 1896 a great gold strike was made—greater than any since the days of California and Australia; yet, so rude were the means of communication, nearly a year elapsed before the news of it reached the eager ear of the world.  Passionate pilgrims disembarked their outfits at Dyea.  Over the terrible Chilcoot Pass the trail led to the lakes, thirty miles away.  Carriage was yet in its most primitive stage, the road builder and bridge builder unheard of.  With heavy packs upon their backs men plunged waist-deep into hideous quagmires, bridged mountain torrents by felling trees across them, toiled against the precipitous slopes of the ice-worn mountains, and crossed the dizzy faces of innumerable glaciers.  When, after incalculable toil they reached the lakes, they went into the woods, sawed pine trees into lumber by hand, and built it into boats.  In these, overloaded, unseaworthy, they battled down the long chain of lakes.  Within the memory of the writer there lingers the picture of a sheltered nook on the shores of Lake Le Barge, in which half a thousand gold seekers lay storm-bound.  Day after day they struggled against the seas in the teeth of a northerly gale, and night after night returned to their camps, repulsed but not disheartened.  At the rapids they ran their boats through, hit or miss, and after infinite toil and hardship, on the breast of a jarring ice flood, arrived at the Klondike.  From the beach at Dyea to the eddy below the Barracks at Dawson, they had paid for their temerity the tax of human life demanded by the elements.  A year later, so greatly had the country shrunk, the tourist, on disembarking from the ocean steamship, took his seat in a modern railway coach.  A few hours later, at Lake Bennet, he stepped aboard a commodious river steamer.  At the rapids he rode around on a tramway to take passage on another steamer below.  And in a few hours more he was in Dawson, without having once soiled the lustre of his civilized foot-gear.  Did he wish to communicate with the outside world, he strolled into the telegraph office.  A few short months before he would have written a letter and deemed himself favoured above mortals were it delivered within the year.

From man’s drawing the world closer and closer together, his own affairs and institutions have consolidated.  Concentration may typify the chief movement of the age—concentration, classification, order; the reduction of friction between the parts of the social organism.  The urban tendency of the rural populations led to terrible congestion in the great cities.  There was stifling and impure air, and lo, rapid transit at once attacked the evil.  Every great city has become but the nucleus of a greater city which surrounds it; the one the seat of business, the other the seat of domestic happiness.  Between the two, night and morning, by electric road, steam railway, and bicycle path, ebbs and flows the middle-class population.  And in the same direction lies the remedy for the tenement evil.  In the cleansing country air the slum cannot exist.  Improvement in road-beds and the means of locomotion, a tremor of altruism, a little legislation, and the city by day will sleep in the country by night.

What a play-ball has this planet of ours become!  Steam has made its parts accessible and drawn them closer together.  The telegraph annihilates space and time.  Each morning every part knows what every other part is thinking, contemplating, or doing.  A discovery in a German laboratory is being demonstrated in San Francisco within twenty-four hours.  A book written in South Africa is published by simultaneous copyright in every English-speaking country, and on the following day is in the hands of the translators.  The death of an obscure missionary in China, or of a whisky smuggler in the South Seas, is served up, the world over, with the morning toast.  The wheat output of Argentine or the gold of Klondike is known wherever men meet and trade.  Shrinkage or centralization has been such that the humblest clerk in any metropolis may place his hand on the pulse of the world.  And because of all this, everywhere is growing order and organization.  The church, the state; men, women, and children; the criminal and the law, the honest man and the thief, industry and commerce, capital and labour, the trades and the professions, the arts and the sciences—all are organizing for pleasure, profit, policy, or intellectual pursuit.  They have come to know the strength of numbers, solidly phalanxed and driving onward with singleness of purpose.  These purposes may be various and many, but one and all, ever discovering new mutual interests and objects, obeying a law which is beyond them, these petty aggregations draw closer together, forming greater aggregations and congeries of aggregations.  And these, in turn, vaguely merging each into each, present glimmering adumbrations of the coming human solidarity which shall be man’s crowning glory.

Oakland, California.
January 1900.

Here’s Davis’s short story “Money” from Samuel Johnson Is Indignant (and also in The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis)

I don’t want any more gifts, cards, phone calls, prizes, clothes, friends, letters, books, souvenirs, pets, magazines, land, machines, houses, entertainments, honors, good news, dinners, jewels, vacations, flowers, or telegrams. I just want money.

According to the Man Booker press release,

Sir Christopher Ricks, chairman of the judges, said her “writings fling their lithe arms wide to embrace many a kind. Just how to categorise them? They have been called stories but could equally be miniatures, anecdotes, essays, jokes, parables, fables, texts, aphorisms or even apophthegms, prayers or simply observations.” Davis then is not like any other writer and she follows, and contrasts with, the previous winners of the prize -Ismail Kadaré, Chinua Achebe, Alice Munro and Philip Roth.

I love love love Davis’s work, including her essays, and am glad to see her win the money and the award. Maybe it speaks to a shift in what people are willing to accept as fiction. Or maybe not.

If you’re at all interested in Davis’s work, I highly recommend The Collected Stories,  which collects her first four volumes (read my review if you need more persuasion).

Here’s Davis reading some of her stories:

You can also read some of her work here.

the long-necked beer bottles

the wine bottles

Stand to attention all the empty bottles, yes …

the long-necked beer bottles from the antique stores,

steam off the labels and line the bottles up, the green ones
with the brown, black, yellow and clear ones.

The beer bottles whose labels have been torn off by
bleak, neurotic fingers

Is a pillow bottle a disciplinary form of some metaphor?

The bottles afloat on all the seas, those with messages in
them and those without any.

What I viewed there once, what I view again /Where the physic bottles stand

On the table’s edge,—is a suburb lane, / With a wall to my bedside hand.

Line up the bottle that killed Malcolm Lowry with the bottle
that killed Dylan Thomas ( I think that’s a record ! ).

I don’t know how many bottles of beer
I have consumed while waiting for things
to get better

line up the bottle that killed Malcolm Lowry with the bottle that killed Dylan Thomas

Lie still, sleep becalmed, sufferer with the wound
In the throat, burning and turning.

Rage, rage

and the bottles that killed all the drunken poets nobody’s heard of and the poets who spoke all their lines into their bottles

Because their words had forked no lightning

Yes, line up all the empty bottles; yes …

the bottles that killed all the drunken monkeys,
poets nobody’s heard of and the poets who spoke all their
lines into their bottles and all that weren’t smashed on frozen
roadsides, when flung from car windows.

Nevertheless, I am happy
Riding in a car with my brother
and drinking from a pint of Old Crow.
We do not have any place in mind to go,
we are just driving.

because I’m telling you now, right now…
the party’s over.

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound’s the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

From my boyish days I had always felt a great perplexity on one point in Macbeth. It was this: the knocking at the gate, which succeeds to the murder of Duncan, produced to my feelings an effect for which I never could account. The effect was, that it reflected back upon the murder a peculiar awfulness and a depth of solemnity; yet, however obstinately I endeavored with my understanding to comprehend this, for many years I never could see why it should produce such an effect.

Here I pause for one moment, to exhort the reader never to pay any attention to his understanding when it stands in opposition to any other faculty of his mind. The mere understanding, however useful and indispensable, is the meanest faculty in the human mind, and the most to be distrusted; and yet the great majority of people trust to nothing else; which may do for ordinary life, but not for philosophical purposes. Of this out of ten thousand instances that I might produce, I will cite one. Ask of any person whatsoever, who is not previously prepared for the demand by a knowledge of perspective, to draw in the rudest way the commonest appearance which depends upon the laws of that science; as for instance, to represent the effect of two walls standing at right angles to each other, or the appearance of the houses on each side of a street, as seen by a person looking down the street from one extremity. Now in all cases, unless the person has happened to observe in pictures how it is that artists produce these effects, he will be utterly unable to make the smallest approximation to it. Yet why? For he has actually seen the effect every day of his life. The reason is—that he allows his understanding to overrule his eyes. His understanding, which includes no intuitive knowledge of the laws of vision, can furnish him with no reason why a line which is known and can be proved to be a horizontal line, should not appear a horizontal line; a line that made any angle with the perpendicular less than a right angle, would seem to him to indicate that his houses were all tumbling down together. Accordingly he makes the line of his houses a horizontal line, and fails of course to produce the effect demanded. Here then is one instance out of many, in which not only the understanding is allowed to overrule the eyes, but where the understanding is positively allowed to obliterate the eyes as it were, for not only does the man believe the evidence of his understanding in opposition to that of his eyes, but, (what is monstrous!) the idiot is not aware that his eyes ever gave such evidence. He does not know that he has seen (and therefore quoad his consciousness has not seen) that which he has seen every day of his life. But to return from this digression, my understanding could furnish no reason why the knocking at the gate in Macbeth should produce any effect, direct or reflected. In fact, my understanding said positively that it could not produce any effect. But I knew better; I felt that it did; and I waited and clung to the problem until further knowledge should enable me to solve it. At length, in 1812, Mr. Williams made his début on the stage of Ratcliffe Highway, and executed those unparalleled murders which have procured for him such a brilliant and undying reputation. On which murders, by the way, I must observe, that in one respect they have had an ill effect, by making the connoisseur in murder very fastidious in his taste, and dissatisfied by anything that has been since done in that line. All other murders look pale by the deep crimson of his; and, as an amateur once said to me in a querulous tone, “There has been absolutely nothing doing since his time, or nothing that’s worth speaking of.” But this is wrong; for it is unreasonable to expect all men to be great artists, and born with the genius of Mr. Williams. Now it will be remembered that in the first of these murders, (that of the Marrs,) the same incident (of a knocking at the door soon after the work of extermination was complete) did actually occur, which the genius of Shakspeare has invented; and all good judges, and the most eminent dilettanti, acknowledged the felicity of Shakspeare’s suggestion as soon as it was actually realized. Here, then, was a fresh proof that I was right in relying on my own feeling in opposition to my understanding; and I again set myself to study the problem; at length I solved it to my own satisfaction; and my solution is this. Murder in ordinary cases, where the sympathy is wholly directed to the case of the murdered person, is an incident of coarse and vulgar horror; and for this reason, that it flings the interest exclusively upon the natural but ignoble instinct by which we cleave to life; an instinct, which, as being indispensable to the primal law of self-preservation, is the same in kind, (though different in degree,) amongst all living creatures; this instinct therefore, because it annihilates all distinctions, and degrades the greatest of men to the level of “the poor beetle that we tread on,” exhibits human nature in its most abject and humiliating attitude. Such an attitude would little suit the purposes of the poet. What then must he do? He must throw the interest on the murderer. Our sympathy must be with him; (of course I mean a sympathy of comprehension, a sympathy by which we enter into his feelings, and are made to understand them,—not a sympathy of pity or approbation.) In the murdered person all strife of thought, all flux and reflux of passion and of purpose, are crushed by one overwhelming panic; the fear of instant death smites him “with its petrific mace.” But in the murderer, such a murderer as a poet will condescend to, there must be raging some great storm of passion,—jealousy, ambition, vengeance, hatred,—which will create a hell within him; and into this hell we are to look.

[Footnote 1: It seems almost ludicrous to guard and explain my use of a word in a situation where it would naturally explain itself. But it has become necessary to do so, in consequence of the unscholarlike use of the word sympathy, at present so general, by which, instead of taking it in its proper sense, as the act of reproducing in our minds the feelings of another, whether for hatred, indignation, love, pity, or approbation, it is made a mere synonyme of the word pity; and hence, instead of saying "sympathy with another," many writers adopt the monstrous barbarism of "sympathy for another."]

In Macbeth, for the sake of gratifying his own enormous and teeming faculty of creation, Shakspeare has introduced two murderers: and, as usual in his hands, they are remarkably discriminated: but, though in Macbeth the strife of mind is greater than in his wife, the tiger spirit not so awake, and his feelings caught chiefly by contagion from her,—yet, as both were finally involved in the guilt of murder, the murderous mind of necessity is finally to be presumed in both. This was to be expressed; and on its own account, as well as to make it a more proportionable antagonist to the unoffending nature of their victim, “the gracious Duncan,” and adequately to expound “the deep damnation of his taking off,” this was to be expressed with peculiar energy. We were to be made to feel that the human nature, i.e., the divine nature of love and mercy, spread through the hearts of all creatures, and seldom utterly withdrawn from man,—was gone, vanished, extinct; and that the fiendish nature had taken its place. And, as this effect is marvellously accomplished in the dialogues andsoliloquies themselves, so it is finally consummated by the expedient under consideration; and it is to this that I now solicit the reader’s attention. If the reader has ever witnessed a wife, daughter, or sister, in a fainting fit, he may chance to have observed that the most affecting moment in such a spectacle, is that in which a sigh and a stirring announce the recommencement of suspended life. Or, if the reader has ever been present in a vast metropolis, on the day when some great national idol was carried in funeral pomp to his grave, and chancing to walk near the course through which it passed, has felt powerfully, in the silence and desertion of the streets and in the stagnation of ordinary business, the deep interest which at that moment was possessing the heart of man,—if all at once he should hear the death-like stillness broken up by the sound of wheels rattling away from the scene, and making known that the transitory vision was dissolved, he will be aware that at no moment was his sense of the complete suspension and pause in ordinary human concerns so full and affecting, as at that moment when the suspension ceases, and the goings-on of human life are suddenly resumed. All action in any direction is best expounded, measured, and made apprehensible, by reaction. Now apply this to the case in Macbeth. Here, as I have said, the retiring of the human heart and the entrance of the fiendish heart was to be expressed and made sensible. Another world has stepped in; and the murderers are taken out of the region of human things, human purposes, human desires. They are transfigured: Lady Macbeth is “unsexed;” Macbeth has forgot that he was born of woman; both are conformed to the image of devils; and the world of devils is suddenly revealed. But how shall this be conveyed and made palpable? In order that a new world may step in, this world must for a time disappear. The murderers, and the murder, must be insulated—cut off by an immeasurable gulph from the ordinary tide and succession of human affairs—locked up and sequestered in some deep recess; we must be made sensible that the world of ordinary life is suddenly arrested—laid asleep—tranced—racked into a dread armistice: time must be annihilated; relation to things without abolished; and all must pass self-withdrawn into a deep syncope and suspension of earthly passion. Hence it is, that when the deed is done, when the work of darkness is perfect, then the world of darkness passes away like a pageantry in the clouds: the knocking at the gate is heard; and it makes known audibly that the reaction has commenced: the human has made its reflux upon the fiendish; the pulses of life are beginning to beat again; and the re-establishment of the goings-on of the world in which we live, first makes us profoundly sensible of the awful parenthesis that had suspended them.

O, mighty poet! Thy works are not as those of other men, simply and merely great works of art; but are also like the phenomena of nature, like the sun and the sea, the stars and the flowers,—like frost and snow, rain and dew, hail-storm and thunder, which are to be studied with entire submission of our own faculties, and in the perfect faith that in them there can be no too much or too little, nothing useless or inert—but that, the further we press in our discoveries, the more we shall see proofs of design and self-supporting arrangement where the careless eye had seen nothing but acciden

The following morning he came down, he very calmly told Oberlin how his mother had appeared to him in the night; she had emerged from the dark churchyard wall in a white dress and had a white and a red rose pinned to her chest; she had then sunk into a corner and the roses had slowly grown over her, she had no doubt died; he had felt quite calm about this. Oberlin then remarked that when his father died he was alone in the fields and then heard a voice so that he knew his father was dead when he came back home this was indeed so. This led them further, Oberlin spoke of the mountain people, of girls who could detect water and metal under the ground, of men who had been possessed on certain peaks and wrestled with spirits; he also told of how he had once been transported into a state of somnambulism upon looking into the empty depths of a mountain pool. Lenz told him that the spirit of water had come over him, that he had then experienced something of its special essence. He continued on: the simplest, purest creatures were closest to elemental nature, the more refined a man’s mental life and feelings, the more blunted this elemental sense became; he did not consider it to be a higher plane, it lacked the requisite self-sufficiency, but he believed it must be an endless delight to feel moved by the unique life of each and every form; to have a soul for stones, metals, water and plants; to take in every being in nature into oneself as in a dream, as flowers do with air at every waxing of the moon.

From Georg Büchner’s Lenz, in translation by Richard Sieburth. Lenz (1836) is a novella or story or fragment based on the diary of J.F. Oberlin, who briefly took care of Jakob Lenz, a playwright suffering  from schizophrenia.

Theresa Levitt’s A Short Bright Flash, new in hardback from WW Norton, traces the story of scientist and engineer Augustin Fresnel, a major contributor to wave optics. Fresnel originated a lens that lighthouses adopted; the Fresnel lens is still used today.

Levitt’s book focuses on Fresnel’s mission to change some of the fundamental ways lighthouses operated and the legacy of the Fresnel lens. The book is handsome an illustrated in glorious black and white:

Here’s the publisher’s blurb:

How a scientific outsider came up with a revolutionary theory of light and saved untold numbers of lives.

Augustin Fresnel (1788–1827) shocked the scientific elite with his unique understanding of the physics of light. The lens he invented was a brilliant feat of engineering that made lighthouses blaze many times brighter, farther, and more efficiently. Battling the establishment, his own poor health, and the limited technology of the time, Fresnel was able to achieve his goal of illuminating the entire French coast. At first, the British sought to outdo the new Fresnel-equipped lighthouses as a matter of national pride. Americans, too, resisted abandoning their primitive lamps, but the superiority of the Fresnel lens could not be denied for long. Soon, from Dunkirk to Saigon, shores were brightened with it.  The Fresnel legacy played an important role in geopolitical events, including the American Civil War. No sooner were Fresnel lenses finally installed along U.S. shores than they were drafted: the Union blockaded the Confederate coast; the Confederacy set about thwarting it by dismantling and hiding or destroying the powerful new lights.

Levitt’s scientific and historical account, rich in anecdote and personality, brings to life the fascinating untold story of Augustin Fresnel and his powerful invention.