Snickerdoodles: A momentous memento

I tried to ignore Doug. I forgave Tim. I read Duane with abnormal interest. And then I was once again tagged by Henry. What? Why? Huh? Who are these quidnuncs and why all these quiddities?

It’s the evil “Book Meme!” (Sounds of screaming in a movie theater)

Doug was the first to tag me after being a-tagged by Iyov so I’ll use his version of the meme:

1. Pick up the nearest book of 123 pages or more. (No cheating!)
2. Find Page 123.
3. Find the first 5 sentences.
4. Post the next 3 sentences.
5. Tag 5 people.

According to Duane, the original meme was worded slightly differently:

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
5. Don’t search around and look for the “coolest” book you can find. Do what’s actually next to you.

Tim and Henry both published different versions of the original meme. Here is a scary thought: Many of these people are Biblical scholars. They can’t even safeguard the integrity of a five-line text. Is there any reason to expect that they will be able to agree on the wording of the Bible?

Memes are stoopid. They are transmitted in order to irritate people (See Duane’s comment on his post). But consider a text of the highest importance, like John 3:16. Isn’t it rather important to get this thing right? Yet scholars can’t tell us who was speaking, John or Jesus. Also, there is very little agreement on the meaning of Οὕτως. Does it mean “so much” or “in this way?” Take a look at the critical apparatus:

Fools! All those ciphers are just a fancy way of saying: “In the meme called ‘the New Testament manuscript’ no one agrees on what it really said! And the Old Testament is even scarier. No vowels! Just fill them in as you see fit!

So this meme thing has really got me frothing at the mouth. And another thing. What about mimes? Why are they always sad? Why do they paint their faces? Will they ever escape from the invisible box?!?!

Now let’s move on, shall we? Since I was tagged three times I get to give you the three closest books in three different rooms representing the three different countries of those who tagged me. Very po-mo, don’t you think?

First, from the land of Meta-Doug, Jollye Olde England, it is Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen. My daughter and wife have been reading this lately. For some reason it ended up spinning around on the Lazy Susan at our dining table and so I turned to the proposal scenes involving Mr. Collins and Mr. Darcy. Mr. Collins is the best actor in the BBC six-hour snoot-a-thon version of the book. I love the simper. I love the hair. Elizabeth should have said yes. She would have had a lifetime of laughter at his expense.

While Mr. Darcy’s proposal scene is packed with drama I will lightly pass over it (”In vain have I struggled. It will not do. My feelings will not be repressed. You must allow me to tell you how ardently I admire and love you.”) as well as the scene of Fitzy having a dip in the duck pond in his jammies.

Sentences six through eight are not very much fun so I’ll give you this line on the same page: “Engaged to Mr. Collins! my dear Charlotte,–impossible!”

For Tim in New Zealand, the nearest book at hand is Three Cups of Tea by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin. In this book Greg meets the famous Kiwi, Sir Edmund Hillary at an event at the Fairmont.

A quote on page 129 which is close to 123 so we’ll say that counts:

“I don’t know if I particularly want to be remembered for anything. I have enjoyed great satisfaction from my climb of Everest. But my most worthwhile things have been the building of schools and medical clinics. That has given me more satisfaction than a footprint on a mountain.”

Sir Edmund Hillary

By the way, Hillary passed away in January at a ripe old age.

Finally, we move to Henry Neufeld in the U.S. of A. I would like to quote from Emerson’s apothegms (All the thoughts of turtle are turtle) or even Cummings (What if a much of a which of a wind) but I’ll do Henry David Thoreau:

Interestingly enough, the first quote is H.D. responding to a meme!

March 5 [1853]…. The secretary of the Association for the Advancement of Science requests me, as he probably has thousands of others, by a printed circular letter from Washington the other day, to fill the blank against certain questions…”

On page 123 I notice this quote from Theodore Parker from his “A Discourse Of the Transient And Permanent In Christianity”:

“So if it could be proved-as it cannot-in opposition to the greatest amount of historical evidence ever collected on any similar point, that  the Gospels were the fabrication of designing and artful men, that Jesus of Nazareth had never lived, still Christianity would stand firm, and fear no evil. None of the doctrines of that religion would fall to the ground; for, if true, they stand by themselves. But we should lose-oh, irreparable loss-the example of that character, so beautiful, so divine, that no human genius could have conceived it, as none, after all the progress and refinement of eighteen centuries, seems fully to have comprehended its lustrous life.”

Source for all these quotes: the American Transcendalists: Their Prose and Poetry, edited by Perry Miller.

Finally, I leave you with a very interesting example of textual revisionism as evidenced by my four children. As punishment for their outrageous behavior at the table I made the kids copy Robert Louis Stevenson’s Whole Duty of Children:

A child should always say what’s true
And speak when he is spoken to,
And behave mannerly at table;
At least as far as he is able.

The kids had great difficulty in getting this right. There were three main problems: punctuation, the pronoun he, and the idiom at table. As a result many of their manuscripts came out something like this:

A child should always say what’s true,
And speak when they are spoken to,
And behave mannerly at the table;
At least so far as they are able.

What does this prove? Possibly nothing. But, as we’ve seen in the case of the Book Meme, there is no such thing as an inerrant manuscript.

Thank you to each of you who tagged me. I have to publish this before I get tagged by anyone else! I tag The Bird,  The Kruser, The Blind Beggar, The Gyrovague, and The Pseudo-Polymath because I’m curious about what they are reading.

Others tagged by this irritating meme: Michael Pahl, Judy Redman, Suzanne, Philip Sumpter, Nuggets of Gold, Quiet Paths, The Dream Factory, Adventures in Revland, Mark Goodacre, Jim West, James McGrath, Peter Kirk, Doug Chaplin, Chris Heard, Suzanne McCarthy, Mississippi Fred MacDowell, Maureen, Fr Gregory, Kevin, John… Woohoo. The fun never stops around here!!!