SHYLOCK: What judgement shall I dread, doing no wrong? / You have among you many a purchased slave, / Which like your asses and your dogs and your mules / You sue in abject and slavish parts / Because you bought them. 
Shall I say to you, / “Let them be free, marry them to your heirs! / Why sweat they under their burdens? Let their beds / Be mades as soft as yours, and their all their palates / Be seasoned with such viands?” You will answer / “The slaves are ours!” 
So do I answer you: / The pound of flesh which I demand of him / Is dearly bought, ’tis mine and I will have it. / If you deny me, fie upon your law! / There is no force in the decrees of Venice. / I stand for judgement. Answer: shall I have it?
Tag Archives: Ice Friday
Ice Friday: Dante’s “Inferno”
Canto XXIII
Silent, alone, sans escort, with one behind/ And one before, as Friars Minor use,/ We journeyed. The present fracas turned my mind 
To Aesop’s fable of the frog and the mouse:/Now and this moment are not more similar/Than did the tale resemble the newer case,
If one is conscientious to compare/Their ends and their beginning, Then as one thought/ Springs from one before it, this now bore
Another which redoubled my terror: that-/ Having been fooled because of us, with wounds/ And mockery to make them the more irate 
With anger added to their malice- the fiends/ More fiercely than a dog attacks a hare,/ Would soon come after us.
Ice Friday: Highsmith’s “Talented Mr. Ripley”
The economical prose of Patricia Highsmith compel the reader to not only read on, but more importantly, to empathize with the mind of a killer:
The white, taut sheet of his berth on the train seemed the most wonderful luxury he had ever known. He caressed them with his hands before he turned the light out. And the clean blue-gray blankets, the spanking efficiency of the little black net over his head – Tom had an ecstatic moment when he thought of all the pleasures that lay before him now with Dickie’s money, other beds, tables, seas, ships, suitcases, shirts, years of freedom, years of pleasure. 
Then he turned the light out and put his head down and almost at once fell asleep, happy, content, and utterly, utterly confident, as he had never been before in his life.
Ice Friday: John Updike’s “Perfection Wasted”
And another regrettable thing about death
is the ceasing of your own brand of magic,
which took a whole life to develop and market–
the quips, the witticisms, the slant
adjusted to a few, those loves ones nearest
the lip of the stage, their soft faces blanched
in the footlight glow, their laughter close to tears,
their tears confused with their diamond earrings,
their warm pooled breath in and out with your heartbeat,
their response and your performance twinned.
The jokes over the phone. The memories packed
in the rapid-access file. The whole act.
Who will do it again? That’s it: no one,
imitators and descendants aren’t the same.
Ice Friday: Curzio Malaparte’s “Kaputt”
Malaparte’s memoir details Fascist life, both German and Italian, at its height:
Then, as their mysterious fear grew, as that mysterious white stain spread over their eyes, they began killing prisoners whose feet were blistered and who could no longer walk. They began setting fire to the villages that were unable to hand over the fixed number of loads of wheat and flout, a certain amount of loads of corn and barley and of heads of horses and cattle to the requisitioning platoons. 
When only a few Jews remained, they began hanging the peasants. They strung them by their necks or by their feet to the branches of trees in the little village squares, around the bare pedestals where the white statues of Lenin and Stalin had stood only a few days before. They hung them side by side with the rain-washed corpses of the Jews that had been dangling for days under the black sky, side by side with the dogs of the Jews that had been strung up on the same trees with their masters. “Ah, the Jewish dogs,” said the German soldiers as they passed along.
Ice Friday: Ian McGuire’s “The North Water”
Through a stuttering veil of snow he sees at the floe edge a bluish iceberg, immense, chimneyed, wind-gouged, sliding eastwards like an albinistic butte unmoored from the desert floor. The berg moves at a brisk walking pace, and as it moves its nearest edge grinds against the floe and spits up house size rafts of ice like swarf from the jaws of a lathe. Sumner feel, as he watches, that he is seeing something he shouldn’t rightly see, that he is being made an unwilling party to a horrifying but elemental truth telling. As quickly as the chaos began, however, it ceases. The berg loses contact with the edge of the ice, and the shuddering cacophony of impact gives way to the remnant howling of the wind.
Ice Friday: Camus Spins Trump
But again and again there comes a time in history when the man dares to say that two and two make four is punished with death. The schoolteacher is well aware of this. And the question is not one of knowing what punishment or reward attends the making of this calculation. The question is that of knowing whether two and two do make four. 
The essential thing was to save the greatest possible number of persons from dying and being doomed to unending separation. And to do this there was only one resource: to fight the plague. There was nothing admirable about this attitude; it was merely logical.*
(Excerpt from Albert Camus’ The Plague)
Ice Friday: Short Words for These Four Years
Short words, key for these Trump Days, to keep in your head:
Feign: sham, fake
Naught: nil, zilch
Slake: quench one’s thirst
Sot: habitual drunkard
Ice Friday: Dino Buzzati’s “Tartar Steppes”
Little by little his hopes grew fainter. It is difficult to believe in a thing when one is alone and there is no one to speak to. It was at this point that Drogo realized how far apart men are whatever their affection for each other, that if you suffer, the pain is yours and yours alone. No one else can take upon himself the least part of it; that you suffer it does not mean that others feel pain even though their love is great: hence the loneliness of life.
Ice Friday: Pirandello’s “One, No One”
The idea that the others saw me as one who was not I as I knew myself, one whom they could know only through watching me from outside with eyes that weren’t mine, giving me the appearance fated to remain always an outsider’s to me, though for them it was inside me, mine, a life which, though for them it was mine, I couldn’t penetrate: this idea allowed me no peace. 
How could I bear the outsider in me? This outsider that I was for myself? How could I live without seeing him? Without knowing him? How could I remain forever doomed to carrying him with me, inside me, visible to others and beyond my vision?