Rarity

“ Nor do we confine the diligence to be used in such a compilation to the leading works and secrets only of every art, and such as excite wonder; for wonder is engendered by rarity, since that which is rare, although it be compounded of ordinary natures, always begets wonder. ”

“ The passion for rare books, merely because of their rarity, is a low order of the taste for books. But the desire to possess and read wise old books which have been touched by the hoar frost of time is of a higher mood. ”

“ We might also say something of the poetic charm of desolation, the interest of rarity and historic truth—all, in short, which we instinctively feel can never be produced by the most perfect imitation. ”

“ What knowledge, what meaning is conveyed in the word rarities? Are not some drawings, some statues, some coins, all monkish manuscripts, and some books, rarities? Could'st thou not find a trisyllable to express some parts of nature for a collection of which that learned and worthy physician is eminent? ”

“ The tales deal chiefly with those elemental problems of the mysteries of life,—pain, the unknown, the strange kinship of man and beast in the struggle for existence,—the enigmas which occur chiefly to the primitive folk on the backwoods fringe of civilization, and they arrest attention for their sincerity, their freshness of first-hand knowledge, and their superior craft. ”

“ I am looking into an unborn and shapeless world that longs to be called to life and order, I am looking into a throng of phantoms of human forms which beckon me to conjure them and set them free: some of them tragic, some of them ridiculous, and some that are both at once—and to these I am very devoted. ”

“ We wander among a profusion of rarities, of trifling intrinsic value, but so quaint in fashion, or connected with such remarkable names and events, that they may well detain our attention for a moment. ”

“ If we call these variations from a common type in the features imperfections, as it is usual to do, it would seem to be the imperfections of perfection that charm and stir us; and that perfection without these so-called imperfections is a cold, dead abstraction, devoid of life: that unity without variety is lifeless and incapable of touching us. ”

“ The mysterious expression entices more thought. All truth is ancient. The enticement of novelty lies only in its expressive variations. The greater the contrast in outward appearance, the greater the joy of recognition. ”

“ Elsewhere we read: "Variety, not uniformity, is more likely to be the key to progress. The genius of being is whimsical rather than consistent. Our strata show broken bones of histories all forgotten. ”

“ Because mystery is horrible to us, we have agreed for the most part to live in a world of labels; to make of them the current coin of experience, and ignore their merely symbolic character, the infinite gradation of values which they misrepresent. ”

“ The quest for the rare, provided that it does not make us forget that the common is often no less beautiful, or lead to that selfish acquisitiveness which is the bane of "collecting," is a foible harmless in itself and even in some cases useful, as inciting us to further activities. ”

“ Upon the truth that is stranger than fiction he had looked all his life as upon an outer barbarian, the measure of whose originality was merely the measure of uncouthness. Nature, in fact, was a dealer of ridiculous limitations; art, a merchant of inexhaustible surprises. Vanity! ”

“ Pour views of its own hideous state revolve around the lost soul, like the pictures of some ghastly show. One while it sees the million times ten million genera and species of pains of sense which meet and form a loathsome union with this vast central pain of loss. ”

“ It is 'natural to be more captivated with what is brilliant than with what is solid, and to prefer splendid negligence to painful and humiliating exactness.'
Mere novelty and peculiarity, having no other merits, when it ceases to be new, it ceases to have value. ”

“ This, at least, it has done: it has discovered that these legends and tales, which so many have been inclined to cast aside as worthless, are of a singular value, as throwing a light which little else can afford upon the mind of primitive man. ”

“ For after all, in his own words, who can know exactly where fancies end and truths begin, and whether at times fancies are not the veritable truths in this universal mystery of which the individual life of each of us is so small a part? ”

“ Now, if life were as simple as a multiplication table, to shatter all its illusions would be the only way to re-form and re-build it on a sounder and more enduring foundation. By all means, we should begin with realities—at the very bottom of stern, bitter realities. ”

“ If in his restless hunt for novelty, always novelty, he grows too original, too unconventional, this sin is unusual enough to approach the estate of a virtue. But his oddity is not mere sensation-mongering. ”

“ But the excerpts—varied enough—already given will suffice to indicate what wealth of literature for our knowledge of the past these venerable relics yield, and how poor beyond redemption would the world be if shorn of those records of human thought and feeling, of those grave and gay pictures of life, so closely resembling our own, whereby, too, we learn how superficial have been the changes in human nature throughout the ages of man's tenancy of the earth. ”

“ And so, this World of Fact daily announces itself to you as a defiant mystery — a mystery such as Job faced, and such as the latest agnostic summary of empirical results, in their bearing upon our largest human interests, or such as even the latest pessimistic novel will no doubt any day present afresh to you, in all the ancient unkindliness that belongs to human fortune. ”

“ Such grumblers, however, do not duly consider that the imaginative faculty invariably depicts the objects it would represent as grand and impressive, with a few striking touches, rather than in fulness of detail, and that thereby it lends to the image more of character, solemnity, and dignity. A thousand times have I heard the complaint that the objects for a knowledge of which we are originally indebted to description, invariably disappoint us when we see them with our own eyes. ”

“ Whatever lay beyond the scope of their analysis and defied their laws, they disliked and dreaded. The outlying regions of mystery which hem life in on every side, are inaccessible to the intellect and irreducible in terms of its laws, were strangely repellent to them, and from such shadowy vistas they resolutely turned their eyes and fastened them on the solid ground at their feet. ”

“ When I think of this end of my moments, the barrier of the moments breaks and I see by the light of death thy world with its careless treasures. Rare is its lowliest seat, rare is its meanest of lives. ”

“ Our books are false by being fragmentary; their sentences are bon mots, and not parts of natural discourse; childish expressions of surprise or pleasure in nature; or, worse, owing a brief notoriety to their petulance, or aversion from the order of nature,—being some curiosity or oddity, designedly not in harmony with nature, and purposely framed to excite a surprise, as jugglers do by concealing their means. ”

“ But this collection must not be considered as affording only entertainment to the idle, or speculative knowledge to the curious; it most forcibly impresses a sense of the vanity and brevity of life, which the moralist and the divine have always thought an important purpose, but which mere declamation can seldom attain. ”

“ Nor do I at all question but they will furnish plenty of noble matter for such whose converting imaginations dispose them to reduce all things into types, who can make shadows—no thanks to the sun—and then mould them into substances—no thanks to philosophy—whose peculiar talent lies in fixing tropes and allegories to the letter, and refining what is literal into figure and mystery. ”

“ Without variety creation would be defective. Its worlds, its classes of matter, animate and inanimate, and the different orders of intelligent beings it contains, would be undistinguished and undistinguishable. Persons and things would be alike incapable of identification, and would present us with nothing but a mass of congregated confusion. ”

“ And the reason of this is obvious; we neglect the reality for the sake of the appearance. We greedily devour certain stereotyped works as a kind of royal road to knowledge; but we omit to notice and inquire into the sensible objects which are strewn along our daily path. ”

“ If, indeed, the realities not reflected became unrealities, were annihilated, then there would be some sense in veiling those portions of the mirror in front of which certain features of our life are exposed. ”

“ Variety then is one principle, one beauty in external nature, and not an everlasting source of pettiness and deformity, which must be got rid of at all events, before taste can set its seal upon the work, or fancy own it. ”

“ But if, on the other hand, facts are to stand for actual finite events, or for things the essence of which is to be confined to a here or a now—facts are then the lowest, and the most untrue, form of appearance. And in the commonest business of our lives we rise above this low level. ”

“ Other sculptors, other statues from the same stone! Other minds, other worlds from the same monotonous and inexpressive chaos! My world is but one in a million alike embedded, alike real to those who may abstract them. ”

“ These things sound like the invention of a diseased mind—like the romance of some excited intellect concerning itself with unreal and impossible events belonging in another age—another world than ours. ”

“ But the very same extravagances and showy paradoxes, when caught up by inferior spirits, presently lose their garb, not only of beauty, but of decency, and show themselves in the unpleasing bareness of error. ”

“ And not only does she claim whatever is inexplicable in the great world, but also in some cases what seems mysterious in the little; some, for instance, of the more paradoxical phenomena of human nature. ”

“ These arise either from great, or beautiful, or uncommon objects: if the two former do not coincide with the latter; for perhaps it would appear upon a diligent enquiry, that neither grand nor beautiful objects please, any longer than they are new: that when the novelty of them is over, the greatest part, at least, of the pleasure they give is over; and in the same proportion as they become familiar, they become flat and insipid. ”

“ The analogy must not be pressed too far; but it will help us to understand why we find a fragment of a custom in one place, a portion of a tale jumbled up with portions of dissimilar tales in another place, a segment of a superstition, and again a worn and broken relic of a once vigorous institution. They are the rocks and the sands which the flood of civilization is first isolating, then undermining, and at last overwhelming, and hiding from our view. ”

“ If I have occasionally given way to those erratic flights of fancy which led me to believe myself a scion of a noble house, well born and nurtured, with wealth at my command and a high station in store, all these delusions were nothing to the creative efforts of her imagination, who commenced by reminding me of a hundred people who never existed, and places and incidents which were all as unreal. ”

“ Class tendencies, religious ideas, popular prejudices, influences or imitations of a current philosophy, excursions of imagination and a desire to give an artistic appearance to facts known only in a fragmentary fashion, all these causes and other analogous causes have contributed to form the substratum of the more or less artless theory of events which is implicitly at the bottom of the narration, or which serves at least to flavor and adorn it. ”

“ What are now idle fancies were once the most portentous of realities; and in this lies the secret of the almost universal diffusion of certain typical tales, beliefs, and observances, and of the fascination which they have not ceased to exercise over the imagination of mankind. ”

“ If we pass from the great to the small, from the employment of tremendous forces to the reconstruction of endless, minute relations, the same divergence between superficial appearance and the reality stares us in the face. ”

“ You see, therefore, that the imagination, feelings, virtues, and failings of human nature, are circumscribed within a very narrow compass; and that the same things, with few exceptions and differences, are to be found everywhere. ”

“ Let the poor canvas figure time and the embroidery figure consciousness—the proportion will perhaps then not strike us as so wrong. Consciousness accordingly still grips me to the point of a felt pressure of interest in such a matter as the recoverable history—history in the esthetic connection at least—of its insistent dealings with a given case. ”

“ For, as a fact, one has only to reflect in order to see, as we just saw in the case of counting the eggs, or of cataloguing the stars, that the process of discrimination, or of forming series, is itself an incident in a life whose Internal Meaning lies not merely in the acknowledgment of facts, but also in the creation of novelties. ”