When I’m using a thesaurus, it generally is not because I want to find, as a synonym for “sad,” a word like “gloomy” or “unhappy.” It’s because I’m looking for something like “lugubrious.”
Show me a thesaurus that will give me synonyms like “mendicant,” “tarradiddle,” “recrudescence,” “bowdlerize,” or “sigil,” and I will be happy convivial. Read More
Letter to the Editor, New York Review of Books, Vol. 52, No. 12, July 2005
In “Survival of the Smallest” {NYR, March 10], István Deák writes on page 22: “In ancient Egypt, dwarfs were often venerated like gods.” Deák here is discussing pathological dwarfs. However, Paul Schebesta, Die Bambuti-Pygmäen vom Ituri (Brussels: Institut Royal Colonial Belge, 1938, Vol. 1, pp. 5–11), argues persuasively that the “god-dancers” venerated by the ancient Egyptians were not pathological dwarfs at all, but pygmies from the African rain forest. Schebesta cites, inter alia, a letter of the pharaoh Pepi II or Phiops II (Sixth Dynasty) which seems clearly to support this view.
Theodore John Kaczynski
Florence, Colorado
I’ve already been at Schiller’s too, once or twice, the first time not altogether successfully. I went in, was greeted warmly, and barely noticed at the back of the room a stranger whose appearance, and what little he said at first, did nothing to suggest anything special about him. Schiller told him my name, and told me his too but I didn’t catch it. Coldly, almost without looking at him, I greeted him and was totally taken up, inwardly and outwardly, with Schiller. For a long time the stranger didn’t speak a word. Schiller brought in the Thalia, which contains a fragment of my Hyperion and my poem to Fate, and handed it to me. As Schiller then left us for a moment the stranger took the ioumal from the table, flicked through the fragment as I stood beside him, and didn’t say a word. I felt myself getting gradually redder and redder. Had I known what I know now, I’d have gone white as a sheet. He then turned to me, enquired after Frau von Kalb, the area and the neighbours round our village, and I answered all this in monosyllables, in a way I think I rarely do. But luck was simply against me. Schiller came back, we talked about the Weimar theatre, the stranger let fall a few words weighty enough to make me suspect something. But I suspected nothing. The artist Meyer from Weimar also joined us. The stranger conversed with him on various subjects. But I suspected nothing. I left, and learnt the same evening in the Professors’ Club (have you guessed?) that Goethe had been at Schiller’s that day. Heaven help me to make good my misfortune and my stupid behaviour when I get to Weimar. Later on I had supper at Schiller’s – he comforted me as much as he could, and with his wit and his conversation, which revealed the full force of his extraordinary mind, made me forget the disaster that had befallen me on the first occasion. I am also at Niethammer’s occasionally. I’ll tell you more of ]ena next time. Make sure you write soon too, dear Neuffer.
Yours, Hölderlin (letter to Christian Neuffer, 1794)
The role played by “sympathy” in the middle ages, as Foucault develops it in The Order of Things, is today played by “contagion” (though we don’t know it).
According to a Teabagger
Are we supposed to think this is a good thing, Bloomberg?
