A commonplace was a medieval and early modern practice whereby students and others who were literarily inclined would collect quotations and aphorisms that they found useful or interesting. This practice was motivated in part by the scarcity of books and then difficulty in accessing them months or years later. Mass market publishing and the internet have obliviated this use case. Instead, I am using this space to collect passages that I frequently share with (and even read aloud to) people.
From The Overstory by Richard Powers
Twelve hundred miles east, in the city where John Hoel’s mother sewed dresses and his father built ships, disaster hits before anyone knows it. The killer slips into the country from Asia, in the wood of Chinese chestnuts destined for fancy gardens. A tree in the Bronx Zoological Park turns October colors in July. Leaves curl and scorch to the hue of cinnamon. Rings of orange spots spread across the swollen bark. At the slightest press, the wood caves in.
Within a year, orange spots fleck chestnuts throughout the Bronx—the fruiting bodies of a parasite that has already killed its host. Every infection releases a horde of spores on the rain and wind. City gardeners mobilize a counterattack. They lop off infected branches and burn them. They spray trees with a lime and copper sulfate from horse-drawn wagons. All they do is spread the spores on the axes they use to cut the victims down. A researcher at the New York Botanical Garden identifies the killer as a fungus new to man. He publishes the results and leaves town to beat the summer heat. When he returns a few weeks later, not a chestnut in the city is worth saving.
Death races across Connecticut and Massachusetts, jumping dozens of miles a year. Trees succumb by the hundreds of thousands. A country watches dumbstruck as New England’s priceless chestnuts melt away. The tree of the tanning industry, of railroad ties, train cars, telegraph poles, fuel, fences, houses, barns, fine desks, tables, pianos, crates, paper pulp, and endless free shade and food—the most harvested tree in the country—is vanishing.
Pennsylvania tries to cut a buffer hundreds of miles wide across the state. In Virginia, on the northern edge of the country’s richest chestnut forests, people call for a religious revival to purge the sin behind the plague. America’s perfect tree, backbone of entire rural economies, the limber, durable redwood of the East with three dozen industrial uses—every fourth tree of a forest stretching two hundred million acres from Maine down to the Gulf—is doomed.
…
If God had a brownie, He might shoot another animated short subject: blight hovering a moment before plunging down the Appalachians into the heart of chestnut country. The chestnuts up North were majestic. But the southern trees are gods. They form near-pure stands for miles on end. In the Carolinas, boles older than America grow ten feet wide and a hundred and twenty feet tall. Whole forests of them flower in rolling clouds of white. Scores of mountain communities are built from the beautiful, straight-grained wood. A single tree might yield as many as fourteen thousand planks. The stocks of food that fall shin-deep feed entire counties, every year a mast year.
Now the gods are dying, all of them. The full force of human ingenuity can’t stop the disaster breaking over the continent. The blight runs along ridgelines, killing off peak after peak. A person perched on an overlook above the southern mountains can watch the trunks change to gray-white skeletons in a rippling wave. Loggers race through a dozen states to cut down whatever the fungus hasn’t reached. The nascent Forest Service encourages them. Use the wood, at least, before it’s ruined. And in that salvage mission, men kill any tree that might contain the secret of resistance.
A five-year-old in Tennessee who sees the first orange spots appear in her magic woods will have nothing left to show her own children except pictures. They’ll never see the ripe, full habit of the tree, never know the sight and sound and smell of their mother’s childhood. Millions of dead stumps sprout suckers that struggle on, year after year, before dying of an infection that, preserved in these stubborn shoots, will never disappear. By 1940, the fungus takes everything, all the way out to the farthest stands in southern Illinois. Four billion trees in the native range vanish into myth. Aside from a few secret pockets of resistance, the only chestnuts left are those that pioneers took far away, to states beyond the reach of the drifting spores.
From Fire in the Dark by Jack Donovan
This is the story of The First Men. They were not the first men who ever lived. They are The First Men in this story about this particular fire. The First Men came from somewhere. They came from another fire and another story. There are many fires and many stories about fires. But they all start out more or less like this one.
The First Men were roaming through a field or a forest.
They traveled there from somewhere, but the place where they came from was no longer there, or they were no longer welcome in that place. The First Men were men who had nowhere to go, and nowhere to which they could return. In this story, they brought women and children with them, but this is not true in every story.
The First Men wandered through the vast unknown with no particular place to go. They walked through the day when the Sun was high above, illuminating all of the plants and animals and the features of the terrain as it opened up before them. The air was warm.
As the Sun met the horizon and painted the landscape gold, the air began to cool, and The First Men decided to look for a place to build a fire. They knew how to build a fire because they were not from nowhere, and they are only the first men in this story.
The First Men worked together to find wood and build a fire. As the air cooled and the golden light turned blue, The First Men gathered around the fire.
When the Sun disappeared beneath the distant horizon, it took some of its warmth with it, and the fire — however small or shabby — provided light and warmth in place of the Sun.
As darkness settled in, the fire created a natural perimeter of light. The fire lit up a circle around it and whatever was above it — as far as the light of the fire could reach. Everything within the perimeter of light could be seen reasonably clearly, almost as if it were day.
Things that could be seen could be inspected and measured and evaluated. Things that moved could be watched, and the people inside the perimeter of light could observe the patterns in their movements. Things that threatened the health and the survival of the people inside the perimeter could be identified and neutralized or chased away. Things that could be used to sustain or improve the health and the quality of the lives of the people within the perimeter of light could be identified and used accordingly.
The First Men could see each others faces and gestures inside the perimeter of light. They were able to communicate as effectively as they could during the day.
Everything that was inside the perimeter of light around the fire could be comprehended, and everything that happened there was known. Inside the perimeter of light that surrounded the fire that The First Men built to replace the light and warmth of the Sun, the world was ordered. It made sense. And it was as safe as it could be.
The light of the fire flickered at the edges of this half sphere of illumination, and in the flickering light — in the threshold between light and darkness — there was a mystery of things half seen or seen only in part or only for a moment.
There was a space beyond the perimeter of illumination that was lit only by the light of the moon, which itself the reflected light of the Sun — though The First Men did not necessarily know this.
In this space, in The Threshold, the light of the fire was still visible, and the way back to the fire was clear. From The Threshold, one could still see the fire in the dark — the central point from which all distances beyond were measured. The fire in the dark was the center of cosmos for The First Men - the central pole and axis around which their perception of order and meaning and identity revolved. Everything and everyone that The First Men truly cared about was close to the fire. One could say that the fire — the fire that the men built to replace the light and warmth of the sun — created its own "solar system."
Beyond the light of the fire and the cosmos of The First Men, there was only chaos. There was no visible point of orientation to which they could return, unless the way had been explored, and was known. Little could be seen, and what cannot be seen is unknown, and because it is unknown, it is out of order. Something could have had its own order and it may even have been able to see in the dark, but it would have been unknown and disordered to The First Men. If it moved, its patterns could not have been observed reliably. Perhaps it could not move at all - perhaps it was a cliff or a swamp or a patch of thorns. What is important to the story is that it could not be known, and that which cannot be comprehended or predicted or controlled...is chaos.
A fire can be a warning or a beacon, depending on the disposition of any particular creature “out there” in the chaotic realm of darkness. A fire may attract hungry animals, or Other Men.
The First Men relied on themselves, and could not expect help in an emergency. If their fire and the people and the culture and the ordered world they created around it were threatened by a creature from the realm of chaos and darkness beyond The Threshold, it would be up to The First Men to protect it — because no one else would.
And why would anyone else protect the fiery world that The First Men built? It was no one else’s responsibility to keep their fire going, or to protect the people or the culture around it.
To protect the fire in the darkness and the ordered world from the chaos beyond it, The First Men needed to keep watch on the perimeter. When they sensed an external threat, it was their responsibility to overcome their fear of chaos, and venture out to the edges of the perimeter, into The Threshold and beyond, to investigate and ward off or eliminate that threat.
The First Men took turns watching the darkness through the night because it was part of their job to look out into the abyss. After a few hours, the light began to change and the Sun returned to illuminate the void and render the wider world comprehensible.
The First Men looked up to the Sun, and were grateful for the day-lit sky.
From The Last Lion: Visions of Glory by William Manchester
The French had collapsed. The Dutch had been overwhelmed. The Belgians had surrendered. The British army, trapped, fought free and fell back toward the Channel ports, converging on a fishing town whose name was then spelled Dunkerque.
Behind them lay the sea.
It was England’s greatest crisis since the Norman conquest, vaster than those precipitated by Philip II’s Spanish Armada, Louis XIV’s triumphant armies, or Napoleon’s invasion barges massed at Boulogne. This time Britain stood alone. If the Germans crossed the Channel and established uncontested beachheads, all would be lost, for it is a peculiarity of England’s island that its southern weald is indefensible against disciplined troops. In A.D. 61, Queen Boudicca of the Iceni rallied the tribes of East Anglia and routed the Romans at Colchester, Saint Albans, and London (then Londinium), cutting the Ninth Legion to pieces and killing seventy thousand. But because the nature of the southern terrain was unsuitable for the construction of strongpoints, new legions under Paulinus, arriving from Gaul, crushed the revolt, leaving the grief-stricken queen to die by her own hand.
Now the 220,000 Tommies at Dunkirk, Britain’s only hope, seemed doomed. On the Flanders beaches they stood around in angular, existential attitudes, like dim purgatorial souls awaiting disposition. There appeared to be no way to bring more than a handful of them home. The Royal Navy’s vessels were inadequate. King George VI has been told that they would be lucky to save 17,000. The House of Commons was warned to prepare for “hard and heavy tidings.” Then, from the streams and estuaries of Kent and Dover, a strange fleet appeared: trawlers and tugs, scows and fishing sloops, lifeboats and pleasure craft, smacks and coasters; the island ferry Gracie Fields; Tom Sopwith’s America’s Cup challenger Endeavour; even the London fire brigade’s fire-float Massey Shaw-—all of them manned by civilian volunteers: English fathers, sailing to rescue England’s exhausted, bleeding sons.
Even today what followed seems miraculous. Not only were Britain’s soldiers delivered; so were French support troops: a total of 338,682 men. But wars are not won by fleeing from the enemy. And British morale was still unequal to the imminent challenge. These were the same people who, less than a year earlier, had rejoiced in the fake peace bought by the betrayal of Czechoslovakia at Munich. Most of their leaders and most of the press remained craven. It had been over a thousand years since Alfred the Great had made himself and his countrymen one and sent them into battle transformed. Now in this new exigency, confronted by the mightiest conqueror Europe had ever known, England looked for another Alfred, a figure cast in a mold which, by the time of the Dunkirk deliverance, seemed to have been forever lost.
England’s new leader, were he to prevail, would have to stand for everything England’s decent, civilized Establishment had rejected. They viewed Adolf Hitler as the product of complex social and historical forces. Their successor would have to be a passionate Manichaean who saw the world as a medieval struggle to the death between the powers of good and the powers of evil, who held that individuals are responsible for their actions and that the German dictator was therefore wicked. A believer in martial glory was required, one who saw splendor in the ancient parades of victorious legions through Persepolis and could rally the nation to brave the coming German fury. An embodiment of fading Victorian standards was wanted: a tribune for honor, loyalty, duty, and the supreme virtue of action; one who would never compromise with iniquity, who could create a sublime mood and thus give men heroic visions of what they were and might become. Like Adolf Hitler he would have to be a leader of intuitive genius, a born demagogue in the original sense of the word, a believer in the supremacy of his race and his national destiny, an artist who knew how to gather the blazing light of history into his prism and then distort it to his ends, an embodiment of inflexible resolution who could impose his will and his imagination on his people—a great tragedian who understood the appeal of martyrdom and could tell his followers the worst, hurling it to them like great hunks of bleeding meat, persuading them that the year of Dunkirk would be one in which it was “equally good to live or to die”—who could if necessary be just as cruel, just as cunning, and just as ruthless as Hitler but who could win victories without enslaving populations, or preaching supernaturalism, or foisting off myths of his infallibility, or destroying, or even warping, the libertarian institutions he had sworn to preserve. Such a man, if he existed, would be England’s last chance.
In London there was such a man.