Two words on the mystery of music, from Joyce

 
From Ulysses [1]:

Braintipped, cheek touched with flame, they listened feeling that flow endearing flow over skin limbs human heart soul spine. [...]
 — Sorrow from me seemed to depart.
Through the hush of air a voice sang to them, low, not rain, not leaves in murmur, like no voice of strings of reeds or whatdoyoucallthem dulcimers, touching their still ears with words, still hearts of their each his remembered lives. Good, good to hear : sorrow from them each seemed to from both depart when first they heard.

Bloom (presumably) attempts to rationalise what he's hearing [2]:

Numbers it is. All music when you come to think. [...] you think you're listening to the etherial. But suppose you said it like : Martha, seven times nine minus x is thirtyfive thousand. Fall quite flat. It's on account of the sounds it is.

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[1] Ulysses, James Joyce (1922), p. 262 [OUP Oxford's World's Classics edition]
[2] ibid. p. 267
 

Pre-modern Policing in the UK: A glimpse

 
Following my post on the worrying direction modern UK policing is taking, I happened to flick through Henry James' English Hours, a book about his experiences in England.

Illustration by Joseph Pennell [1]

Then I found this in the introduction to the book:

England's treatment of political radicals was another example of this general equality. On the day the Queen opened Parliament, James had witnessed a demonstration in Trafalgar Square 'which might easily have given on the nerves of a sensitive police department'. But the English police were unperturbed; they allowed the demonstrators to 'sun themselves' freely. James was struck by the 'frank good sense and the frank good humour and even the frank good taste of it', as well as by

the fact that the might mob could march along and do its errand while the excellent quiet policemen — eternal, imperturbable, positive, lovable reminders of the national temperament — stood by simply to see that the channel was kept clear and comfortable.

It was political revolutionaries like this 'mighty mob' — as well as those he had witnessed in France — that James was remembering when he wrote The Princess Casamassima. [2]

Almost enough to make one slightly nostalgic, no?


Coming soon: a consideration of The Princess Casamassima.


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[1] Accompanying the essay "London" by Henry James in The Century; a popular quarterly Volume 0037 Issue 2 (Dec 1888), pp. 219-239. Available online: http://digital.library.cornell.edu/cgi/t/text/pageviewer-idx?c=cent;cc=cent;rgn=full%20text;idno=cent0037-2;didno=cent0037-2;view=image;seq=00229;node=cent0037-2:1 [Accessed: 18-Dec-2010]
[2] Introduction to English Hours, Henry James (1905), p. xxxv [ed. Alma Louise Lowe, 1960, Readers' Union reprint (not for sale to the public) Heinemann London 1962]