Quiz No. 99
1)
It is curious, but till that moment I had never realized what it means to destroy a healthy, conscious
man. When I saw the prisoner step aside to avoid the puddle, I saw the mystery, the unspeakable wrongness, of cutting a life
short when it is in full tide. This man was not dying, he was alive just as we were alive. All the
organs of his body were working - bowels digesting food, skin renewing itself, nails growing, tissues forming - all toiling
away in solemn foolery. His nails would still be growing when he stood on the drop, when he was falling through the air with
a tenth of a second to live. His eyes saw the yellow gravel and the grey walls, and his brain still remembered, foresaw, reasoned
- reasoned even about puddles. He and we were a party of men walking together, seeing, hearing, feeling, understanding the
same world; and in two minutes, with a sudden snap, one of us would be gone - one mind less, one world less.
Answer
2(Translation)
The workers of Paris were overwhelmed by superior strength, but they were not subdued. They have been
defeated but their enemies are vanquished. The momentary triumph of brute force has been purchased with the destruction of
all the delusions and illusions of the February revolution, the dissolution of the entire moderate republican party and the
division of the French nation into two nations, the nation of owners and the nation of workers. The tricolore republic
now displays only one colour, the colour of the defeated, the colour of blood. It has become a red republic.
None of the big republican figures, whether of the National or of the Réforme,
sided with the people. In the absence of leaders and means other than those thrown up by the rebellion itself, the people
stood up to the united forces of the bourgeoisie and army longer than any French dynast with the entire military apparatus
at its disposal was ever able to stand up to any group of the bourgeoisie allied with the people. To have the people lose
its last illusions and break completely with the past, it was necessary that the customary poetic trimmings of French uprisings
- the enthusiastic bourgeois youth, the students of the école polytechnique, the tricornes - should join
the side of the suppressers. The medical students had to deny the wounded plebeians the succour of their science. Science
does not exist for the plebeian who has committed the heinous, unutterable crime of fighting this time for his own existence
instead of for Louis Philippe or Monsieur Marrast.
Answer
3)
In a thousand years or so, when the first archaeologists from beyond the date-line unload their boat
on the sands of Southern California, they will find much the same scene as confronted the Franciscan missionaries. A dry landscape
will extend from the ocean to the mountains. Bel Air and Beverly Hills will be naked save for scrub and cactus, all their
flimsy multitude of architectural styles turned long ago to dust, while the horned toad and the turkey buzzard leave their
faint imprint on the dunes that will drift on Sunset Boulevard.
For Los Angeles, when its brief history comes to an end, will fall swiftly and silently. Too far dispersed
for effective bombardment, too unimportant strategically for the use of expensive atomic devices, it will be destroyed by
drought. Its water comes 250 miles from the Colorado River. A handful of parachutists or partisans anywhere along that vital
aqueduct can make the coastal strip uninhabitable. Bones will whiten along the Santa Fe trail as the great recession struggles
eastwards. Nature will reassert herself and the seasons gently obliterate the vast, deserted suburb. Its history will pass
from memory to legend until, centuries later, as we have supposed, the archaeologists prick their ears at the cryptic references
in the texts of the twentieth century to a cult which once flourished on this forgotten strand; of the idol Oscar - sexless
image of infertility - of the great Star Goddesses who were once noisily worshipped there in a Holy Wood.
Answer
4)
It is certain that men contract a general liking for those things which they have studied at great
cost of time and intellect, and their proficiency in which has led to their becoming distinguished and successful. It is certain
that out of this feeling arises, not only that passive blindness to their defects of which the example given by my Lord Tenterden
was quoted in the last letter, but an active disposition to advocate and defend them. If it were otherwise; if it were not
for this spirit of interest and partisanship; no single pursuit could have that attraction for its votaries which most pursuits
in course of time establish. Thus legal authorities are usually jealous of innovations on legal principles. Thus it is described
of the lawyer in the Introductory Discourse to the
Description of Utopia, that he said of a proposal against Capital Punishment, “‘this could never be so established
in England but that it must needs bring the weal-public into great jeopardy and hazard’, and as he was thus saying,
he shaked his head, and made a wry mouth, and so he held his peace”. Thus the Recorder of London, in 1811, objected
to “the capital part being taken off” from the offence of picking pockets. Thus the Lord Chancellor, in 1813,
objected to the removal of the penalty of death from the offence of stealing to the amount of five shillings from a shop.
Thus, Lord Ellenborough, in 1820, anticipated the worst effects from there being no punishment of death for stealing five
shillings worth of wet linen from a bleaching ground. Thus the Solicitor General, in 1830, advocated the punishment of death
for forgery, and “the satisfaction of thinking” in the teeth of mountains of evidence from bankers and other injured
parties (one thousand bankers alone!) “that he was deterring persons from the commission of crime, by the severity of
the law”. Thus, Mr. Justice Coleridge delivered his charge at Hertford in 1845. Thus there were in the criminal code
of England, in 1790, one hundred and sixty crimes punishable with death. Thus the lawyer has said, again and again, in his
generation, that any change in such a state of things “must needs bring the weal-public into jeopardy and hazard”.
And thus he has, all
through the dismal history, “shaked his head, and made a wry mouth, and held his peace”. Except - a glorious exception!
- when such lawyers as Bacon, More, Blackstone, Romilly, and - let us ever gratefully remember - in later times Mr. Basil
Montagu, have striven, each in his day, within the utmost limits of the endurance of the
mistaken feeling of the people or the legislature of the time, to champion and maintain the truth.
Answer
5)
In the Rue d'Anjou, not far from the Church of the Madeleine, is M. Henri Fournier's place of business.
“Paris-Automobile” - a company of which M. Fournier is the manager - has its headquarters there. Inside the gateway
is a big square court, roofed over, and on the floor of the court and on great shelves extending from the floor to the roof
are ranged motor-cars of all sizes, shapes, and colours. In the afternoon this court is full of noises - the voices of workmen,
the voices of buyers talking in half-a-dozen languages, the ringing of telephone bells, the horns sounded by the ‘chauffeurs’
as the cars come in and go out - and it is almost impossible to see M. Fournier unless one is prepared to wait two or three
hours for one's turn. But the buyers of
‘autos’ are, in one sense, people of leisure. The morning, however, is more favourable, and yesterday morning,
after two failures, I succeeded in seeing M. Fournier.
Answer
6(Translation)
Since it here is merely in respect of Art, and specially of Music, that we want to explain to ourselves
the popular dislike of the Jewish nature, even at the present day, we may completely pass over any dealing with this same
phenomenon in the field of Religion and Politics. In Religion the Jews have long ceased to be our hated foes, - thanks to
all those who within the Christian religion itself have drawn upon themselves the people's hatred. In pure Politics we have
never come to actual conflict with the Jews; we have even granted them the erection of a Jerusalemitic realm, and in this
respect we have rather had to regret that Herr v. Rothschild was too keen-witted to make himself King of the Jews, preferring,
as is well known, to remain “the Jew of the Kings.” It is another matter, where politics become a question of
Society: here the isolation of the Jews has been held by us a challenge to the exercise of human justice, for just so long
as in ourselves the thrust toward social liberation has woken into plainer consciousness. When we strove for emancipation
of the Jews, however, we virtually were more the champions of an abstract principle, than of a concrete case: just as all
our Liberalism was a not very lucid mental sport - since we went for freedom of the Folk without knowledge of that Folk itself,
nay, with a dislike of any genuine contact with it - so our eagerness to level up the rights of Jews was far rather stimulated
by a general idea, than by any real sympathy; for, with all our speaking and writing in favour of the Jews' emancipation,
we always felt instinctively repelled by any actual, operative contact with them.
Answer
7(Translation)
All day yesterday and again this morning Daudet's friends came to bid him farewell, before that bed,
now strewn with flowers, on which, for the first time in so many years of martyrdom, it can be said that he was resting.
All came, the most illustrious, such as Anatole France, and the most obscure, like myself; opponents such as Zola or Drumont;
those who had been estranged from him for a time like Drumont, asking death to shed a little of its everlasting oblivion over
their fleeting disagreements; those who had called him master coming to ask a last piece of advice, a supreme example, from
that dumb mouth, eloquent still in its silence, such as Barrès, or Hervieu, who a moment before had wept as he kissed
his dead friend on the forehead.
Meanwhile, La Gandara had been capturing those beautiful and immortal features in an admirable sketch.
And all were astonished, looking on Alphonse Daudet for a last time and for the first time seeing him free of suffering.
Answer
8)
An American in London, whether he has come here to work for Esso or to escape the draft, cannot but
be impressed and charmed by the city. The monumentality of Washington, the thriving busyness of New York, the antique intimacy
of Boston, plus a certain spacious and open feeling reminiscent of Denver and San Francisco - all
these he finds combined for his pleasure. If he is on foot, considerately designed buses and taxis offer to lift him along
a maze of streets; if he has a car, the roadways, however intimidating to a pedestrian instinctively looking in the wrong
direction, reveal themselves as paragons of clear marking and disciplined flow. This, surely, is a city, a civitas
in the root sense, a collection of citizens whose collective life and conscience is bespoken by the wealth of parks and museums,
the gracious abundance of public services. Food, for example, which in France must be won by slightly daring forays into restaurants
and épiceries that have the shuttered air of brothel-fronts, is here everywhere - fresh fruit heaped for sale
in the most densely trafficked streets, candy machines on trees, counters of meat in clothing stores. If the telephone booths
are scarcer than an American is used to, at least the ones he finds have not been vandalized. He moves through London with
no fear, as in Rome, of being cheated and with no fear, as in Paris, of being wilfully misunderstood. It is not merely the
English language that makes this ease, it is a language of social expectation and response that in his own country is a rather
harsh dialect. He finds, in London, tickets to concerts and plays easy to come by; yet when he arrives the hall is full, or
nearly. The balance between supply and demand is maintained with a reasonableness as mysterious as the opaque imbalances of
Moscow. Its central institution is, I suppose, the docile, ubiquitous queue.
Answer
9)
I took a trip to Belfast the other day on business of a kind that cannot be discussed here or elsewhere.
I was not five minutes in the train until I realized that the engine-driver belonged to the ‘full regulator, short cut-out’
school. In my own railway days I used to work the locomotive as a high-pressure simple (indeed, the design of the steam chest
made no other course possible) with cut-off as high as 60 per cent. That was before the days of the de Glehn compound or the
Walschaerts gear. (I knew Walschaerts well, he was the best of fellows and a prince among steam men.) I am not criticizing
the G.N.R. driver. He knows his ‘car’ better than I. It is true, nevertheless, that the modern low pressure cylinder
is not there for nothing. Where you have ‘hard
steaming’, short cut-off with full regulator will nearly always lead to disparity in pressure reading between boiler
and steam chest. They tell me that modern research at Dundalk has shown otherwise, but that is all my eye and Betty Martin.
At Belfast I noticed that the valve rod had lost adjustment and nobody was less surprised than myself.
I hate to see machinery tortured.
Answer
10)
An attention to the judgment of other nations is important to every government for two reasons: the
one is, that, independently of the merits of any particular plan or measure, it is desirable, on various accounts, that it
should appear to other nations as the offspring of a wise and honorable policy; the second is, that in doubtful cases, particularly
where the national councils may be warped by some strong passion or momentary interest, the presumed or known opinion of the
impartial world may be the best guide that can be followed. What has not America lost by her want of character with foreign
nations; and how many errors and follies would she not have avoided, if the justice and propriety of her measures had, in
every instance, been previously tried by the light in which they would probably appear to the unbiased part of mankind?
Answer
1)
A Hanging, George Orwell. A nice easy one to start you off. You can have a bonus of nine-tenths of a point if you knew
the title of this piece. Published in The Adelphi, in 1931, when Orwell was still Eric A. Blair. There is no other
document in existence to show that Orwell attended a hanging when he was in Burma: but if you can fake the truth as well as
this, the facts become irrelevant.
Back to Question 1
2)
The June Revolution, Karl Marx. From the Neue Rhenische Zeitung, 1848. An easy point. Like Darwin, Marx is remembered
as a great synthesizer, but, again like Darwin, the foundation of his thought was a close - indeed, intense - observation
of the world.
Back to Question 2
3)
Half in Love with Easeful Death, Evelyn Waugh. From Life magazine, 1947. I was going to say that there was a
touch of projective schadenfreude in this piece - but really it consists entirely of projective schadenfreude.
I hope Osama bin Laden doesn't while away the long daylight hours in his Afghan cavern by doing my Quiz: he might take some
note of Waugh's suggestion about the vulnerability of the Los Angeles water-supply.
Back to Question 3
4)
Capital Punishment, Charles Dickens. An easy one, again, from the Daily News, 1846. Only 120 years had to pass
before capital punishment was wholly abolished in England - perhaps the United States will have followed suit by 2127, or
even before.
Back to Question 4
5)
The Motor Derby, James Joyce. From an Irish Times article, 1903. Did this paragraph give you the impression
that Joyce cared little and knew less about automobiles? If so, give yourself a bonus of one-tenth of a point. But the article
did plant the seed for a Dubliners story, After the Race.
Back to Question 5
6)
Judaism in Music, Richard Wagner. A famous but, understandably, little-read article, which appeared in the Neue
Zeitschrift in 1850. Wagner's clotted prose-style is well captured by his translator, the heroic and tireless William
Ashton Ellis. Wagner later defended himself against the charge of catchpenny journalism by truthfully pointing out that he
had, as he knew he would, lost many friends and opportunities by this (mildly) anti-Semitic piece. These ill effects were,
happily, not permanent. Indeed, by the end of his life, almost the only friends Wagner had left were Jews.
Back to Question 6
7)
Farewells, Marcel Proust. From La Presse, 1897. A brief note of the obsequies of Alphonse, father of Proust's
most intimate friend, Léon Daudet.
Back to Question 7
8)
Notes of a Temporary Resident, John Updike. From The (late lamented) Listener, 1969. O tempora! O
mores! This piece was written in Year Five of the beneficent despotism of Harold Wilson, ten years before the inauguration
of the Thatcher tyranny which destroyed so much of the old England that Mr Updike here (unwittingly) memorializes. At least
one thing remains, however: individual Americans are better-liked in the British Isles than they are anywhere else
on the planet.
Back to Question 8
9)
For Steam Men, Myles na Gopaleen. From his regular Irish Times column, some time during the Second World War.
Myles na Gopaleen, Brian O'Nolan, Flann O'Brien - hardly names enough for one of the two or three funniest writers who ever
grasped a pint or a pen.
Back to Question 9
10)
Federalist Papers, No. 63, James Madison. From the New York Independent Journal, 1788. As we are all aware,
these documents are the constant study of the current President of the United States. We can only wonder at the
weighty considerations which must have supervened, for him to disregard them so completely. Hail to the Chief!
Back to Question 10
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Last Updated: 19 January 2007
