The Copybook
Short passages for reading, drawn from history, legend, poetry and fiction.
Short passages for reading, drawn from history, legend, poetry and fiction.
Don Quixote seizes his chance to capture a giant for his lady-love, Dulcinea.
Quexana is a woolly-headed, Spanish country gentleman, bordering fifty, from La Mancha, southeast of Madrid. Bewitched by tales of romance, he has dubbed himself Don Quixote, Knight, and set out in search of ‘adventures’ with his companion Sancho Panza. His quest is to capture a giant as a love-offering to his lady Dulcinea (a pleasing fantasy inspired by an old flame) and he has just been promising Sancho his own realm too.
The father of computing believed his machine held the key to some of life’s greatest mysteries.
One day, Charles Babbage was in his drawing-room showing off his calculating machine to two friends from Ireland, Dr Lloyd and Dr Robinson. He showed them how the machine automatically flipped back and forth between multiple programs ad infinitum, and remarked that there may be a parallel with the laws governing Evolution. The spark in the eyes of his two visitors made him even bolder.
RL Stevenson was of the opinion that wrongthink was better than groupthink.
In Crabbed Age and Youth, Robert Louis Stevenson argued that we should not try to silence the opinions of the young, however foolish they may seem. He did not pretend that the young are wise and pioneering thinkers. He thought they were mostly thinking nonsense. But it was better to come up with bad answers to good questions than to ask no questions at all.
William Wirt recalls an overpowering sermon from a blind man in a little wooden chapel.
William Wirt, a rising Virginian lawyer, published The Letters of a British Spy in 1803. He took the character of a British tourist (not a secret agent) in the US, and remarked on the habits of the Americans twenty years after the Revolutionary War. This famous passage brings to startling life a blind Christian minister in a roadside chapel in Orange County, as he preaches the crucifixion of Jesus Christ.
Aeschines paid tribute to the oratory of his greatest rival — whether he meant to or not.
Aeschines (389-314 BC) and Demosthenes (384-322 BC) were lawyers and statesmen of Athens, and rivals. Cicero, a Roman lawyer of a later generation, knew of their competitive relationship, and told this story to illustrate both their strength of feeling and also, hidden deeper than even Aeschines realised, their mutual respect.
George Berkeley warned that industry, not financial speculation, was the guarantee of a nation’s wealth.
In 1721, Bishop Berkeley published an agonised response to the frenzy for get-rich-quick schemes then gripping the country, of which the infamous South Sea Company was just one startling example. The nation’s economy, he said, needed money and credit to cycle steadily through honest industry. Too many people were taking them out and staking them on the wheel of fortune.