At one point the driver said, "For God's sakes, you're rocking the boat back there." Actually we were; the car was swaying as Dean and I both swayed to the rhythm and the IT of our final excited joy in talking and living to the blank tranced end of all innumerable riotous angelic particulars that had been lurking in our souls all our lives.
Everything in the universe has a rhythm, everything dances.
We have come more and more under the dominance of mechanics and sacrificed living humanity to the dead rhythm of the machine without most of us even being conscious of the monstrosity of the procedure. Hence we frequently deal with such matters with indifference and in cold blood as if we handled dead things and not the destinies of men.
The poet says that his science consists of {78} invention and rhythm, and this is the simple body of poetry, invention as regards the subject matter and rhythm as regards the verse, which he afterwards clothes with all the sciences. To which the painter rejoins that he is governed by the same necessities in the science of painting, that is to say, invention and measure (fancy as regards the subject matter which he must invent, and measure as regards the matters painted), so that they may be in proportion, but that he does not make use of three sciences; on the contrary it is rather the other sciences that make use of painting, as, for instance, astrology, which effects nothing without the aid of perspective, the principal link of painting,--that is, mathematical astronomy and not fallacious astrology (let those who by reason of the existence of fools make a profession of it, forgive me). The poet says he describes an object, that he represents another full of beautiful allegory; the painter says he is capable of doing the same, and in this respect he is also a poet. And if the poet says he can incite men to love, which is the most important fact among every kind of animal, the painter can do the same, all the more so because he presents the lover with the image of his beloved; and the lover often does with it what he would not do with the writer's delineation of the same charms, i.e. talk with it and kiss it; so great is the painter's influence on the minds of men that he incites them to love and {79} become enamoured of a picture which does not represent any living woman.
A supreme love, a motive that gives a sublime rhythm to a woman's life, and exalts habit into partnership with the soul's highest needs, is not to be had where and how she wills: to know that high initiation, she must often tread where it is hard to tread, and feel the chill air, and watch through darkness.--_George Eliot._
One world, one mankind cannot exist in the face of six, four or even two scales of values: We shall be torn apart by this disparity of rhythm, this disparity of vibrations.… Our 20th Century has proved to be more cruel than preceding centuries, and the first fifty years have not erased all its horrors; our world is rent asunder by those same old cave-age emotions of greed, envy, lack of control, mutual hostility which have picked up in passing respectable pseudonyms like class struggle, radical conflict, struggle of the masses, trade-union disputes. The primeval refusal to accept a compromise has been turned into a theoretical principle and is considered the virtue of orthodoxy. It demands millions of sacrifices in ceaseless civil wars, it drums into our souls that there is no such thing as unchanging, universal concepts of goodness and justice, that they are all fluctuating and inconstant.… Violence, less and less embarrassed by the limits imposed by centuries of lawfulness, is brazenly and victoriously striding across the whole world, unconcerned that its infertility has been demonstrated and proved many times in history. What is more, it is not simply crude power that triumphs abroad, but its exultant justification. The world is being inundated by the brazen conviction that power can do anything, justice nothing.… The young, at an age when they have not yet any experience other than sexual, when they do not yet have years of personal suffering and personal understanding behind them, are jubilantly repeating our depraved Russian blunders of the 19th Century, under the impression that they are discovering something new. They acclaim the latest wretched degradation on the part of the Chinese Red Guards as a joyous example. In shallow lack of understanding of the age-old essence of mankind, in the naive confidence of inexperienced hearts they cry: Let us drive away those cruel, greedy oppressors, governments, and the new ones (we), having just laid aside grenades and rifles, will be just and understanding. Far from it.… But of those who have lived more and understand, those who could oppose these young—many do not dare oppose, they even suck up, anything not to appear conservative. Another Russian phenomenon of the 19th Century which Dostoyevsky called slavery to progressive quirks.… The timid civilized world has found nothing with which to oppose the onslaught of a sudden revival of barefaced barbarity, other than concessions and smiles.… The price of cowardice will only be evil. We shall reap courage and victory only when we dare to make sacrifices. [ The Wall Street Journal , September 6, 1972, p. 14.]
Reading for the sense= (in Shakespeare's plays) =will best bring out the rhythm.
There is something marvelous in music. I might almost say that music is, in itself, a marvel. Its position is somewhere between the region of thought and that of phenomena; a glimmering medium between mind and matter, related to both and yet differing from either. Spiritual, and yet requiring rhythm; material, and yet independent of space.--_Heinrich Heine._
And then you run into Nick Dunne on Seventh Avenue as you’re buying diced cantaloupe, and pow, you are known, you are recognized, the both of you. You both find the exact same things worth remembering. (Just one olive, though.) You have the same rhythm. Click. You just know each other. All of a sudden you see reading in bed and waffles on Sunday and laughing at nothing and his mouth on yours. And it’s so far beyond fine that you know you can never go back to fine. That fast. You think: Oh, here is the rest of my life. It’s finally arrived.
He could not be captured, He could not be bought, His running was rhythm, His standing was thought; With one eye on sorrow And one eye on mirth, He galloped in heaven And gambolled on earth. And only the poet With wings to his brain Can mount him and ride him Without any rein, The stallion of heaven, The steed of the skies, The horse of the singer Who sings as he flies.
A-Z affectionately, 1 to 10 alphabetically, from here to eternity without in betweens, still looking for a custom fit in an off-the-rack world, sales talk from sales assistants when all i want to do is lower your resistance, no rhythm in cymbals no tempo in drums, love's on arrival, she comes when she comes, right on the target but wide of the mark...
"I turn on my television set. I see a young lady who goes under the guise of being a Christian, known all over the nation, dressed in skin-tight leather pants, shaking and wiggling her hips to the beat and rhythm of the music as the strobe lights beat their patterns across the stage and the band plays the contemporary rock sound which cannot be differentiated from songs by the Grateful Dead, the Beatles, or anyone else. And you may try to tell me this is of God and that it is leading people to Christ, but I know better. -- Jimmy Swaggart, hypocritical sexual pervert and TV preacher, self-described pornography addict, "Two points of view: 'Christian' rock and roll.", The Evangelist, 17(8): 49-50.
To write a sonnet you must ruthlessly strip down your words to naked, willing flesh. Then bind them to a metaphor or three, and take by force a satisfying mesh. Arrange them to your will, each foot in place. You are the master here, and they the slaves. Now whip them to maintain a constant pace and rhythm as they stand in even staves. A word that strikes no pleasure? Cast it out! What use are words that drive not to the heart? A lazy phrase? Discard it, shrug off doubt, and choose more docile words to take its part. A well-trained sonnet lives to entertain, by making love directly to the brain.
On a morning from a Bogart movie, in a country where they turned back time, You go strolling through the crowd like Peter Lorre contemplating a crime. She comes out of the sun in a silk dress running like a watercolor in the rain. Don't bother asking for explanations, she'll just tell you that she came In the Year of the Cat. She doesn't give you time for questions, as she locks up your arm in hers, And you follow 'till your sense of which direction completely disappears. By the blue-tiled walls near the market stall there's a hidden door she leads you to. These days, she say, I feel my life just like a river running through The Year of the Cat. Well, she looks at you so coolly, And her eyes shine like the moon in the sea. She comes in incense and patchouli, So you take her to find what's waiting inside The Year of the Cat. Well, morning comes and you're still with her, but the bus and the tourists are gone, And you've thrown away your choice and lost your ticket, so you have to stay on. But the drum-beat strains of the night remain in the rhythm of the new-born day. You know some time you're bound to leave her, but for now you're going to stay In the Year of the Cat. -- Al Stewart, "Year of the Cat"
Nature is ever at work building and pulling down, creating and destroying, keeping everything whirling and flowing, allowing no rest but in rhythmical motion, chasing everything in endless song out of one beautiful form into another.
We in turn / Shall one day be Time's ancients, and inspire / The wiser, higher race, which yet shall sing; / Because to sing is human, and high thought / Grows rhythmic ere its close.
The growing drama has outgrown such toys Of simulated stature, face, and speech: It also peradventure may outgrow The simulation of the painted scene, Boards, actors, prompters, gaslight, and costume, And take for a worthier stage the soul itself, Its shifting fancies and celestial lights, With all its grand orchestral silences To keep the pauses of its rhythmic sounds.
Yet the children of this world are wise in their generation; and both the politician and the priest are justified by results. The living voice has an influence over human action altogether independent of the intellectual worth of that which it utters. Many years ago, I was a guest at a great City dinner. A famous orator, endowed with a voice of rare flexibility and power; a born actor, ranging with ease through every part, from refined comedy to tragic unction, was called upon to reply to a toast. The orator was a very busy man, a charming conversationalist and by no means despised a good dinner; and, I imagine, rose without having given a thought to what he was going to say. The rhythmic roll of sound was admirable, the gestures perfect, the earnestness impressive; nothing was lacking save sense and, occasionally, grammar. When the speaker sat down the applause was terrific and one of my neighbours was especially enthusiastic. So when he had quieted down, I asked him what the orator had said. And he could not tell me.
Kaysarov recited.... Kutuzov smilingly nodded his head to the rhythm of the verses.
Fantine was beautiful, without being too conscious of it. Those rare dreamers, mysterious priests of the beautiful who silently confront everything with perfection, would have caught a glimpse in this little working-woman, through the transparency of her Parisian grace, of the ancient sacred euphony. This daughter of the shadows was thoroughbred. She was beautiful in the two ways--style and rhythm. Style is the form of the ideal; rhythm is its movement.
This being bawls and scoffs and ridicules and fights, has rags like a baby and tatters like a philosopher, fishes in the sewer, hunts in the cesspool, extracts mirth from foulness, whips up the squares with his wit, grins and bites, whistles and sings, shouts, and shrieks, tempers Alleluia with Matantur-lurette, chants every rhythm from the De Profundis to the Jack-pudding, finds without seeking, knows what he is ignorant of, is a Spartan to the point of thieving, is mad to wisdom, is lyrical to filth, would crouch down on Olympus, wallows in the dunghill and emerges from it covered with stars. The gamin of Paris is Rabelais in this youth.
The musician says that his art can be compared with that of the painter because by the art of the painter a body of many members is composed, and the spectator apprehends its grace in as many harmonious rhythms ... as there are times in which it lives and dies; and by these rhythms ... its grace plays with the soul, which dwells in the body of the spectator. But the painter replies that the body composed of human limbs does not afford the delectable harmonious rhythms in which beauty must live and die, but renders it permanent for many years, and is of such great excellence that it preserves the life of this harmony of concordant limbs which nature with all her force could not preserve.
_Disorders of Rhythm of the Heart's Action._--Under this heading may be grouped a number of conditions to which the name "functional affections of the heart" has sometimes been applied, inasmuch as the disturbances in question cannot usually be attributed to definite organic disease of the heart. We must, of course, exclude from this category the irregularity in the force and frequency of the pulse, which is commonly associated with incompetence of the mitral valve. Entry: 2
The formal change in prose can thus be assigned to no one writer, for the good reason that it presupposes a change of spoken style lying deeper than any personal influence. If we begin with the writing that is nearest living talk--the letters of Otway or Lady Rachel Russell, or the diary of Pepys (1659-1669)--that supreme disclosure of our mother-earth--or the evidence in a state trial, or the dialogue in the more natural comedies; if we then work upwards through some of the plainer kinds of authorship, like the less slangy of L'Estrange's pamphlets, or Burnet's _History of My Own Time_, a solid Whig memoir of historical value, until we reach really admirable or lasting prose like Dryden's _Preface_ to his _Fables_ (1700), or the maxims of Halifax;--if we do this, we are aware, amid all varieties, survivals and reversions, of a strong and rapid drift towards the style that we call modern. And one sign of this movement is the revulsion against any over-saturating of the working, daily language, and even of the language of appeal and eloquence, with the Latin element. In Barrow and Glanvil, descendants of Taylor and Browne, many Latinized words remain, which were soon expelled from style like foreign bodies from an organism. As in the mid-sixteenth and the mid-eighteenth century, the process is visible by which the Latin vocabulary and Latin complication of sentence first gathers strength, and then, though not without leaving its traces, is forced to ebb. The instinct of the best writers secured this result, and secured it for good and all. In Dryden's diction there is a nearly perfect balance and harmony of learned and native constituents, and a sensitive tact in Gallicizing; in his build of sentence there is the same balance between curtness or bareness and complexity or ungainly lengthiness. For ceremony and compliment he keeps a rolling period, for invective a short sharp stroke without the gloves. And he not only uses in general a sentence of moderate scale, inclining to brevity, but he finds out its harmonies; he is a seeming-careless but an absolute master of rhythm. In delusive ease he is unexcelled; and we only regret that he could not have written prose oftener instead of plays. We should thus, however, have lost their prefaces, in which the bulk and the best of Dryden's criticisms appear. From the _Essay of Dramatic Poesy_ (1668) down to the _Preface to Fables_ (1700) runs a series of essays: _On the Grounds of Criticism in Tragedy_, _On Heroic Plays_, _On Translated Verse_, _On Satire_ and many more; which form the first connected body of criticisms in the language, and are nobly written always. Dryden's prose is literature as it stands, and yet is talk, and yet again is mysteriously better than talk. The critical writings of John Dennis are but a sincere application of the rules and canons that were now becoming conventional; Rymer, though not so despicable as Macaulay said, is still more depressing than Dennis; and for any critic at once so free, so generous and so sure as Dryden we wait in vain for a century. Entry: IV
_Intermittency of the Pulse._--By this is understood a pulse in which a beat is dropped from time to time. The dropping of a beat may occur at regular intervals every two, four or six beats, &c., or occasionally at irregular intervals after a series of normal beats. On examining the heart, it is found, as a rule, that the cause of the intermission at the wrist is not actual omission of a heart-beat, but the occurrence of a hurried imperfect cardiac contraction which does not transmit a pulse-wave to the wrist. It is not characteristic of any special form of heart affection, and is rarely of serious import. It may be due to reflex digestive disturbances, or be associated with conditions of nervous breakdown and irritability, or with an atonic and relaxed condition of the heart muscle. The treatment of these disorders of rhythm of the heart will vary greatly according to the cause and is often a matter of considerable difficulty. (J. F. H. B.) Entry: 2
The religious paintings of Li Lung-mien, the grandest of Sung masters, if less forcible than those of T'ang, were unsurpassed in harmonious rhythm of design and colour. But the most characteristic painting of this period is in landscape and nature-subjects. With a passion unmatched in Europe till Wordsworth's day, the Sung artists portrayed their delight in mountains, mists, plunging torrents, the flight of the wild geese from the reed-beds, the moonlit reveries of sages in forest solitudes, the fisherman in his boat on lake or stream. To them also, steeped in the Zen philosophy of contemplation, a flowering branch was no mere subject for a decorative study, but a symbol of the infinite life of nature. A mere hint to the spectator's imagination is often all that they rely on; proof of the singular fulness and reality of the culture of the time. The art of suggestion has never been carried farther. Such traditional subjects as "Curfew from a Distant Temple" and "The Moon over Raging Waves" indicate the poetic atmosphere of this art. Ma Yuan, Hsia Kuei and the emperor Hwei-tsung are among the greatest landscape artists of this period. They belong to the South Sung school, which loved to paint the gorges and towering rock-pinnacles of the Yangtsze. The sterner, less romantic scenery of the Hwang-Ho inspired the Northern school, of which Kuo Hsi and Li Ch'eng were famous among many others. Muh Ki was one of the greatest masters of the ink sketch; Chao Tan Lin was famed for his tigers; Li Ti for his flowers as for his landscapes; Mao I for still-life: to name a few among a host. Entry: T
The most facile and brilliant of the elegiac poets and the least serious in tone and spirit is P. Ovidius Naso or Ovid (43 B.C.-A.D. 18). As an amatory poet he is the poet of pleasure and intrigue rather than of tender sentiment or absorbing passion. Though he treated his subject in relation to himself with more levity and irony than real feeling, yet by his sparkling wit and fancy he created a literature of sentiment and adventure adapted to amuse the idle and luxurious society of which the elder Julia was the centre. His power of continuous narrative is best seen in the _Metamorphoses_, written in hexameters to which he has imparted a rapidity and precision of movement more suited to romantic and picturesque narrative than the weighty self-restrained verse of Virgil. In his _Fasti_ he treats a subject of national interest; it is not, however, through the strength of Roman sentiment but through the power of vividly conceiving and narrating stories of strong human interest that the poem lives. In his latest works--the _Tristia_ and _Ex Ponto_--he imparts the interest of personal confessions to the record of a unique experience. Latin poetry is more rich in the expression of personal feeling than of dramatic realism. In Ovid we have both. We know him in the intense liveliness of his feeling and the human weakness of his nature more intimately than any other writer of antiquity, except perhaps Cicero. As Virgil marks the point of maturest excellence in poetic diction and rhythm, Ovid marks that of the greatest facility. Entry: A
The later dramatists gradually abandoned that rigorous difference which should always be preserved between the cadence of verse and prose, and the example of Ford, who endeavoured to revive the old severity of blank verse, was not followed. But just as the form was sinking into dramatic desuetude, it took new life in the direction of epic, and found its noblest proficient in the person of John Milton. The most intricate and therefore the most interesting blank verse which has been written is that of Milton in the great poems of his later life. He reduced the elisions, which had been frequent in the Elizabethan poets, to law; he admitted an extraordinary variety in the number of stresses; he deliberately inverted the rhythm in order to produce particular effects; and he multiplied at will the caesurae or breaks in a line. Such verses as Entry: BLANK
"Owing to inadequate atmospheric advantages generally, much misapprehension exists as to the definiteness with which the surface of Mars is seen under good conditions. In steady air the canals are perfectly distinct lines, not unlike the Fraunhofer ones of the Spectrum, pencil lines or gossamer filaments according to size. All the observers at Flagstaff concur in this. The photographs of them taken there also confirm it up to the limit of their ability. Careful experiments by the same observers on artificial lines show that if the canals had breaks amounting to 16 m. across, such breaks would be visible. None are; while the lines themselves are thousands of miles long and perfectly straight (_Astrophys. Journ._, Sept. 1907). Between expert observers representing the planet at the same epoch the accordance is striking; differences in drawings are differences of time and are due to seasonal and secular changes in the planet itself. These seasonal changes have been carefully followed at Flagstaff, and the law governing them detected. They are found to depend upon the melting of the polar caps. After the melting is under way the canals next the cap proceed to darken, and the darkening thence progresses regularly down the latitudes. Twice this happens every Martian year, first from one cap and then six Martian months later from the other. The action reminds one of the quickening of the Nile valley after the melting of the snows in Abyssinia; only with planet-wide rhythm. Some of the canals are paired. The phenomenon is peculiar to certain canals, for only about one-tenth of the whole number, 56 out of 585, ever show double and these do so regularly. Each double has its special width; this width between the pair being 400 m. in some cases, only 75 in others. Careful plotting has disclosed the fact that the doubles cluster round the planet's equator, rarely pass 40° Lat., and never occur at the poles, though the planet's axial tilt reveals all its latitudes to us in turn. They are thus features of those latitudes where the surface is greatest compared with the area of the polar cap, which is suggestive. Space precludes mention of many other equally striking peculiarities of the canals' positioning and development. At the junctions of the canals are small, dark round spots, which also wax and wane with the seasons. These facts and a host of others of like significance have led Lowell to the conclusion that the whole canal system is of artificial origin, first because of each appearance and secondly because of the laws governing its development. Every opposition has added to the assurance that the canals are artificial; both by disclosing their peculiarities better and better and by removing generic doubts as to the planet's habitability. The warmer temperature disclosed from Lowell's investigation on the subject, and the spectrographic detection by Slipher of water-vapour in the Martian air, are among the latest of these confirmations."--[ED.] Entry: 11