Roger Mensink

And yet we have all known flights when of a sudden, each for himself, it has seem to us that we have crossed the border of the world of reality; when, only a couple of hours from port, we have felt ourselves more distant from it than we should feel if we were in India; when there has come a premonition of an incursion into a forbidden world whence it was going to be infinitely difficult to return.

Thus, when Mermoz first crossed the South Atlantic in a hydroplane, as day was dying he ran foul of the Black Hole region, off Africa. Straight ahead of him were the tails of tornadoes rising minute by minute gradually higher, rising as a wall is built; and then the night came down upon these preliminaries and swallowed them up; and when, an hour later, he slipped under the clouds, he came out into a fantastic kingdom.

Great black waterspouts had reared themselves seemingly in the immobility of temple pillars. Swollen at their tops they were supporting the squat and lowering arch of the tempest, but through the rifts in the arch there fell slabs of light and the full moon sent her radiant beams between the pillars down upon the frozen tiles of the sea.

Through these uninhabited ruins Mermoz made his way, gliding slantwise from one channel of light to the next, circling round those giant pillars in which there must have rumbled the upsurge of the sea, flying for four hours through these corridors of moonlight toward the exit from the temple. And this spectacle was so overwhelming that only after he had got through the Black Hole did Mermoz awaken to the fact that he had not been afraid.
 

Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Wind, Sand and Stars
1939

He smiled: for it was less a sentimental tenderness that little child brought than a restoration of his sense of irony, which was in turn the equivalent of a kind of faith in himself. Earlier that evening, when he was in Sir Tom’s brougham, he had had a false sense of living in the present; his rejection then of his past and fuure had been a mere vicious plunge into irresponsible oblivion. Now he had a far more profound and genuine intuition of the great human illusion about time, which is that its reality is like that of a road--on which one can constantly see where one was and were one probably will be--instead of the truth: that time is a room, a now so close to us that we regularly fail to see it.

Charles’s was the very opposite of the Sartrean experience. The simple furniture around him, the warm light from the next room, the humble shadows, above all that small being he held on his knees, so insubstantial after its mother’s weight (but he did not think at all of her), they were not encroaching and hostile objects, but constituting and friendly ones. The ultimate hell was infinite and empty space; and they kept it at bay. He felt suddenly able to face his future, which was only a form of that terrible emptiness. Whatever happened to him such moments would recur; must be found, and could be found.

A door opened. The prostitute* stood in the light. Charles could not see her face, but he guessed that she was for a moment alarmed. And then relieved.

“Oh, sir. Did she cry?”

“Yes, a little. I thinks she has gone back to sleep now.”

John Fowles The French Lieutenant’s Woman
1969

*“What are we faced with in the nineteenth century? An age where woman was sacred; and where you could buy a thirteen-year-old girl for a few pounds--a few shillings, if you wanter her for only an hour or two. Where more churches were built than in the whole previous history of the country; and where one in sixty houses in London was a brothel.”

Genet is related to that family of people who are nowadays referred to by the barbaric name of passéistes.* An accident riveted him to a childhood memory, and this memory became sacred. In his early childhood, a liturgical drama was performed, a drama of which he was the officiant: he knew paradise and lost it, he was a child and was driven from his childhood. No doubt this “break” is not easy to localize. It shifts back and forth, at the dictate of his moods and myths, between the ages of ten and fifteen. But that is unimportant. What matters is that it exists and that he  believes in it. His life is divided into two heterogeneous parts: before and after the sacred drama. Indeed, it is not unusual for the memory to condense into a single mythical moment the contingencies and perpetual rebeginnings of an individual history. What matters is that Genet lives and continues to relive this period of his life as if it had lasted only an instant.

To say “instant” is to say fatal instant. The instant is the reciprocal and contradictory envelopment of the before by the after. One is still what one is going to cease to be and already what one is going to become. One lives one’s death, one dies one’s life. One feels oneself to be one’s own self and another; the fullest life, one has a foreboding that one will merely survive, one is afraid of the future. It is the time of anguish and of heroism, of pleasure and of destruction. An instant is sufficient to destroy, to enjoy, to kill, to be killed, to make one’s fortune at the turn of a card. Genet carries in his heart a bygone instant which has lost none of its virulence, an infinitesimal and sacred void which concludes a death and begins a horrible metamorphosis. The argument of this liturgical drama is as follows: a child dies of shame; a hoodlum rises up in his place; the hoodlum will be haunted by the child. One would have to speak of resurrection, to evoke

the old initiatory rites of shamanism and secret societies, were it not that Genet refused categorically to be a man who has been resuscitated. There was a death, that is all. And Genet is nothing other than a dead man. If he appears to be still alive, it is with the larval existence which certain peoples ascribe to their defunct in the grave. All his heroes have died at least once in their life.

JPS
Saint-Genet
1952

Passéiste: One who is not adapted to the present age, who is not a [person] of his time, who “lives” in the past.” 

In the Middle Ages, the cup-and-ball trick was exhibited by strolling jugglers and gypsies all over Europe, and formed the piéce de résistance of their repertoires of magic. Conjurers in France were formerly known as "escamoteurs," and their art as "escamotage." The word "escamoteur" comes from the "escamot," a cork ball.

A cup-and-ball trick is shown in a book entitled "Hocus Pocus Junior," published in 1635, with some indication of the way in which a ball lies concealed between two caps, one of which fits into the other.

Conus, who appeared in London in 1789 and 1790, had the impudence to advertise that he would by sleight-of-hand convey his wife, who was five feet eight inches high, under a cup, in the same manner that an escamoteur does a ball. Conus used large copper balls instead of the usual light cork muscades.

The classic performer of the cup-and-balls feat in the nineteenth century was the celebrated Bosco, whose sonorous, bizarre cognomen has become a byword in France for deception, whether in conjuring or in politics. The statesman Thiers for example, was called the "Bosco of the Tribune" by his political opponents. Bosco was born in Turin, Italy, January 11, 1793, and died in Dresden, Germany, March 2, 1863.

A Parisian newspaper thus announced his appearance in the "City of Light":

"The famous Bosco, who can conjure away a house as easily as a nutmeg, is about to give his performances at Paris, in which some miraculous tricks will be executed." The allusion to a nutmeg has reference to the magician's cup-and-ball trick, nutmegs frequently being used instead of cork balls. Many clever American sleight-of-hand artists are now exhibiting the cups and balls.

For "close-up work" it is one of the best and most effective feats in the "bag of magic." In fact, there is quite a recrudescence in this age of this most ancient experiment, the origin of which is shrouded in mystery and dates back, perhaps, to the building of the pyramids.

Henry Ridgely Evans
Introduction to Cups and Balls Magic, by Tom Osborne
1937

Compare these sentences:

1.   Henry brought his mother some flowers.
2.   Henry brung his mother some flowers.
3.   Henry some flowers his mother brought.

Sentence 3 is wrong absolutely. No native speaker of English, no matter how uneducated, would ever say it. Sentence 3 would be used only by a foreigner in the process of learning English and not yet acquainted with some of its essential rules.

But what we have said about 3 does not apply to 2. Both 1 and 2 are produced normally by speakers of English, according to their systems. They are not non-English, as 3 is. Yet there is a difference. Most of us, including many of us who customarily say 2, have a feeling that 1 is more correct, more grammatical. But we must ask, if 2 is not

non-English, in what sense is it ungrammatical. If 1 is better, why is it better? First, we must perceive that it is not a question of clarity. Sentences 1 and 2 are about equally clear and both are clearer than 3. If someone says either 1 or 2, you grasp the meaning in about the same amount of time. Second, there is nothing in the sound of the worlds brought and brung that makes one better than the other. There is no rule in English that all verbs, or all verbs of a certain class should end in -ought rather than -ung or that they should never end in -ung. For if there were, we should have to reject not only "He brung her a book" but also "She clung to her book." In short, there is nothing in the nature of language which leads us to prefer sentence 1 to sentence 2. The two sentences differ simply in that they represent separate dialects, or varieties of English.

GRAMMAR 1 AND GRAMMAR 2

If we prefer sentence 1 to sentence 2, we do so simply because in some sense we prefer the people who say sentence 1 to those who say sentence 2. We associate sentence 1 with educated people and sentence 2 with uneducated people. Hearing sentence 2, we infer that the speaker is uneducated. Hearing sentence 1, we do not make this inference. But mark this well: educated people do not say sentence 1, "Henry brought his mother some flowers," because it is better than 2. Educated people say it, and that makes it better. That's all there is to it.

Paul Roberts
English Sentences
1962