Morning Read: Indications of Futility
¶ Lord Chesterfield sends his son a miscellany of rules for good conduct, all of which touch, in one way or another, upon the matter of impulse control.
Horse-play, romping, frequent and loud fits of laughter, jokes, waggery, and indiscriminate familiarity, will sink both merit and knowledge into a degree of contempt.
*** A certain degree of exterior seriousness in looks and motions gives dignity, without excluding with and decent cheerfulness, which are always serious themselves. A constant smirk upon the face, and a whiffling activity of the body, are among the indications of futility. Whoever is in a hurry, shows that the thing he is about is too big for him. Haste and hurry are very different things.
¶ In Squillions, Noël Coward endures a string of duds but finds paradise in Jamaica, where neighbors include Ivor Novello. A bit of dish:
Ivor, with typical Welsh cunning, has almost achieved the impossible, which is to find in Jamaica a house with no view at all. It is a suburban villa with several tiled bathrooms (but a scarcity of water) furnished in flowered chintz and mock mahogany. You can see the sea, which is three miles away, by standing on the dining-room table. Any mountain vista is successfully obscured bfy a high hedge beloning to the people next door.
¶ It must come from reading the books out of order, but the following extract from Moby-Dick sounds rather more like Coward than Melville.
In cavalier attendance upon the school of females, you invariably see a male of full grown magnitude, but not old; who, upon any alarm, evinces his gallantry by falling in the rear and covering the flight of his ladies. In truth, this gentleman is a luxurious Ottoman, swimming about over the watery world, surroundingly accompaniesd by all the solace and endearments of the harem. The contrast between this Ottoman and his concubines is striking; because, while he is always of the largest leviathanic proportions, the ladies, even at full growth, are not much more than one third of the bulk of an average-sized male. They are comparatively delicate, indeed; I dare say, not to exceed half a dozen yards round the waist. Nevertheless, it cannot be denied, that upon the whole they are hereditarily entitled to en bon point.