The current fetiches, taboos, and hokums are as hard to expel from the mind as the deboshed melody of some vulgar popular song.
As a child, the phrase “civil engineer” puzzled me—the civility or civics of engineering I could not comprehend.
It’s a mistake to conclude that the result of an action was necessarily included in the purpose: i. e. Effects overlap Causes, e. g. The Tariff.
If every day we are surrounded by astonishment and unexpected adventures in the actual realm, why may it not also be true in the spiritual?
Kipling is the kind of man who, after half a dozen visits to the dentist, would have been able to write a story filled with accurate technical details of dental science.
Sign on Italian restaurant on Park Place: If your wife can’t cook don’t divorce her—Keep her as a pet, and eat here.
Sign on a Manicure Parlour: Special Attention Paid to Other Girls’ Fellows.
Potboiling—the crackling of a crown of thorns under a pot.
Biography is impossible. There’s no such thing.
Well, the preceding items, lifted more or less at random from one of these notebooks, are sufficient to explain the sense of mystification with which one examines old memoranda. And yet one always hopes that he may chance upon some germ of thought which is worth the fun of expanding it. It reminds us rather of the Janitor Emeritus of the Post, an elderly and pensive darkness, who has a fixed idea that some day he is going to find something precious in the various rubbish of the office, and is to be seen gravely poking into baskets and canisters of jetsam in the hope of motion picture magazines, tobacco, and detective stories.