Herbisms

[nancyshane]

And now, a collection of two semesters’ observations on Important Subjects by the great Herr Arnold, because I just found these notes and I don’t want to do my real work.

Read!  Herb’s thoughts on

… zoology!
Humans are the only animals comfortable with self-deception.  My cat never deceives himself.

… literature!
Poetry is that which gets lost in translation.

… irony!
I don’t think you can live as a human being without reading John Donne.

… the French!
Everything important in France is a derivative of something Spanish or Italian.

… philosophy!
You sit outside, you look at the stars, you look at your soul-all that California New Age crap.

… digressions!
I can’t get into this right now, but the Baroque is the great period of cross-dressing.

… world economics!
Super abs and hard buns all come from Sparta.
Money is nothing else but a mutually agreed upon fiction.  Like the theatre!

… theology!
I’ll give you God in three lines!  I’ll give you God in terza rima!

… euphemisms!
You always use “Italy” in Shakespeare’s England if you mean “Machiavelli, Evil, and Catholicism.”

… clarity!
The nothing is the eternal sameness!

…and of course, history!
Gilgamesh, Greeks, Romans, Germans, period.