Simon Leys - The Hall of Uselessness - Collected Essays

Johnson : As to the sailor, when you look down from the quarter deck to the space below, you see the utmost extremity in human misery; such crowding, such filth, such stench!

Boswell : Yet sailors are happy.

Johnson : They are happy as brutes are happy, with a piece of fresh meat, — with the grossest sensuality…

Scott : We find people fond of being sailors.

Johnson : I cannot account for that, any more than I can account for other strange perversions of the imagination.

9. Johnson was a landlubber to an almost Continental degree. He was from Lichfield, one of the very few English cities that are located more than 100 miles from the nearest shore. Though he became a Londoner quite early in his career, it is only at age fifty-nine that he saw the sea for the first time in his life — during an excursion to Plymouth, on which he had been dragged by his old friend, the painter Joshua Reynolds.

10. Letter to Sidney Colvin, written from Tahiti, 16 October 1888. See Selected Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson (Yale University Press, 1997), p. 382.

11. Éric Tabarly, Mémoires du large (Paris: Editions de Fallois, 1997), p. 126. Also in the same book, these lines of equally refreshing sincerity: “One often asks lone sailors what they think about when out at sea, and their answers are nearly always awkward. As for myself, I don’t think at all. Or rather, I only think of the boat; my ears are attuned to its every sound; my only concern is to make it sail as fast as possible. All the time, I only think of the boat, because on board the tasks are absorbing. Contrary to what most people believe, a boat is not synonymous with freedom. To sail means to accept constraints one has freely chosen. It is a privilege: most people must bear with the constraints which life is imposing on them.” ( Ibid. , p. 122.)

12. “I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky / And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by / And the wheel’s kick and the wind’s song and the white sail’s shaking / And a grey mist on the sea’s face and a grey dawn breaking. / I must go down to the seas again, for the call of the running tide / Is a wild call and a clear call that cannot be denied; / And all I ask is a windy day with the white clouds flying, / And the flung spray and the blown spume and the seagulls crying. / I must go down to the seas again, to the vagrant gypsy life, / To the gull’s way and the whale’s way where the wind’s like a whetted knife; / And all I ask is a merry yarn from a laughing fellow rover, / And quiet sleep and a sweet dream when the long trick’s over.”

13. Quoted in David Hays and Daniel Hays, My Old Man and the Sea (New York: Anchor Books, 1996), p. 197.

14. Joseph Conrad, “The Torrens : A Personal Tribute,” in Last Essays (London & Toronto: Dent & Sons, 1926).

15. Joseph Conrad, “The Secret Sharer,” in ’Twixt Land and Sea (London & Toronto: Dent & Sons, 1912). Conrad repeatedly evoked this paradoxical feeling of security: “The peace of the sea… a sailor finds a deep feeling of security in the exercise of his calling. The exacting life of the sea has this advantage over the life of the earth, that its claims are simple and cannot be evaded.” Joseph Conrad, Chance (London: Methuen & Co., 1914), Chap. 1.

16. Hilaire Belloc, The Cruise of the “Nona” (London: Century Publishing, 1983), new edition with an introduction by Jonathan Raban. The original edition was published in 1925.

IN THE WAKE OF MAGELLAN

1. Deus escreve direto por linhas tortas .

The links below refer to the page references of the printed edition of this book. While the numbers do not correspond to the page numbers or locations on an electronic reading device, they are retained as they can convey useful information regarding the position and amount of space devoted to an indexed entry. Because the size of a page varies in reflowable documents such as this e-book, it may be necessary to scroll down to find the referenced entry after following a link .

Abetz (Otto) 121

Adorno (T.W.) 501

Alain (E.A. Chartier) 516

Allégret (Marc) 129, 152–53

Allégret (Yves) 152

Allston (W.) 454

St. Ambrose 307, 553

Amiel (H.F.) 500

An Lushan 289

Aragon (Louis) 182, 221

Archilochus 241

Arendt (Hannah) 235

Arrant (R.) 414

Asselineau (Charles) 517

Auden (W.H.) 493

St. Augustine 165, 307, 492, 542

Austen (Jane) 144

Aymé (Marcel) 277

Bach (J.S.) 128, 348, 481, 534, 543

Badiou (A.) 416

Bail (M.) 354

Balboa (Vasco Nuñez de) 443

Balthus (Balthazar Klossowski) 500

Balzac (Honoré de) 7, 18, 61–70, 83–84, 143, 206, 234, 266, 482, 509, 515–16, 536, 551

Barenboim (D.) 557

Barthes (R.) 8, 245, 248, 375–78, 511, 558

Baudelaire (Charles) 61–62, 67, 69, 73–74, 78, 148, 228, 245, 249, 251, 258–59, 266, 434, 437, 475, 481, 517, 520, 535, 538

Beck (Beatrix) 117, 123, 132, 136, 139, 164, 525–26, 528, 531, 533, 541–42

Beckett (Samuel) 246

Beethoven 371, 495–96

Behan (Brendan) 487

Belloc (Hilaire) 192, 197, 203, 209, 269, 544, 562

Bellour (Raymond) 220

Bennett (Alan) 488

Bennett (Arnold) 536

Berenson (Bernard) 493

Bernanos (Georges) 209, 452, 531, 544

Bernard (Claude) 45

Bernard (Tristan) 170

Bertelé, René 217

Bertrand (A.) 515

Betjeman (John) 200

Biancai 552

Billeter (J.F.) 302, 305, 309–13, 358

Bizot (F.) 413

Blainey (G.) 48

Blake (William) 506

Blanche (Cynthia) 472

Blanche (J.-E.) 115

Bloom (H.) 497–99

Bloy (Léon) 190, 490

Blum (Léon) 116, 118, 526

Bole 44

Bombard (Alain) 433, 559

Boncenne (P.) 240

Borges (J.L.) 47, 109, 212, 293, 316, 473–74, 477, 479–80, 545, 551–52

Bossuet 143, 519

Boswell (James) 163, 172, 264, 308, 530, 553, 561

Bouillier (H.) 86–87, 522

Boyd (Brian) 22, 237, 513

Bo Yibo 400

Braque (G.) 313, 348

Bréchon (Robert) 218

Breton (A.) 520

Brodsky (Joseph) 74, 76, 501, 517–18, 522

Brontë (Emily) 255

Brooke (Rupert) 129

Brosse (Jacques) 545

Brouwer (A.) 481

Brownell (Sonia) 175, 189

Browning (Robert) 144, 262

Brunelleschi (Filippo) 491

Brzezinski (Z.) 413

Bulwer-Lytton (E.) 272

Burgess (A.) 246, 271–72

Burns (Robert) 245, 259

Butler (Samuel) 144

Byron 245, 522

Cabanis (J.) 515

Caldwell (E.) 255

Camoens 434

Camus (Albert) 182, 249

Canetti (E.) 319, 326–27, 408, 554

Carrel (A.) 505

Carroll (Lewis) 370

Carter (Jimmy) 413

Cartier-Bresson (H.) 471

Casanova 59, 515

Casanova (film) 243

Cate (Curtis) 170, 543

Catherine the Great 56

Céline (L.F.) 265

Cervantes 18–25, 28–30, 316, 513

Cézanne (P.) 349, 481, 543

Cha Liangyong, see Jin Yong

Chang Ta-ch’ien 310

Chaplin (Charlie) 223

Chardonne (J.) 169, 208, 257, 268, 543

Charlemagne 56

Charles (son of Prince de Ligne) 58

Charles V 441, 444

Charles X 78

Chateaubriand 358, 434, 547

Chatwin (Bruce) 168, 543

Chekhov 17, 46, 145, 279–80, 474, 497–99, 534

Cheng (François) 547, 555

Chen Wei 559

Chen Yun 400

Chesterton (G.K.) 7, 21, 100–13, 198, 238–39, 271, 477, 497, 510, 523–24, 544

Chiang Ching-kuo 425

Chiang Kai-shek 291, 396

Chopin 304, 348, 534–35

Churchill 176, 385

Cioran (E.) 211, 230, 246, 502–3, 545