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Be Sufficient Temptation

New paragraphs are so over-rated; what’s wrong with the old one? Behold, this passage from Proust’s La Fugitive, or The Sweet Cheat Gone, often construed as Vol. 6 of À la Recherche du temps perdu, so I guess it is. This from chapter three – Venice.

Sometimes at dusk as I returned to the hotel I felt that the Albertine of long ago invisible to my eyes was nevertheless enclosed within me as in the dungeons of an internal Venice, the solid walls of which some incident occasionally slid apart so as to give me a glimpse of that past.

Thus for instance one evening a letter from my stockbroker reopened for me for an instant the gates of the prison in which Albertine abode within me alive, but so remote, so profoundly buried that she remained inaccessible to me. Since her death I had ceased to take any interest in the speculations that I had made in order to have more money for her. But time had passed; the wisest judgments of the previous generation had been proved unwise by this generation, as had occurred in the past to M. Thiers who had said that railways could never prove successful. The stocks of which M. de Norpois had said to us: “even if your income from them is nothing very great, you may be certain of never losing any of your capital,” were, more often than not, those which had declined most in value. Calls had been made upon me for considerable sums and in a rash moment I decided to sell out everything and found that I now possessed barely a fifth of the fortune that I had had when Albertine was alive. This became known at Combray among the survivors of our family circle and their friends, and, as they knew that I went about with the Marquis de Saint-Loup and the Guermantes family, they said to themselves: “Pride goes before a fall!” They would have been greatly astonished to learn that it was for a girl of Albertine’s humble position that I had made these speculations. Besides, in that Combray world in which everyone is classified for ever according to the income that he is known to enjoy, as in an Indian caste, it would have been impossible for anyone to form any idea of the great freedom that prevailed in the world of the Guermantes where people attached no importance to wealth, and where poverty was regarded as being as disagreeable, but no more degrading, as having no more effect on a person’s social position than would a stomachache. Doubtless they imagined, on the contrary, at Combray that Saint-Loup and M. de Guermantes must be ruined aristocrats, whose estates were mortgaged, to whom I had been lending money, whereas if I had been ruined they would have been the first to offer in all sincerity to come to my assistance. As for my comparative penury, it was all the more awkward at the moment inasmuch as my Venetian interests had been concentrated for some little time past on a rosy-cheeked young glass-vendor who offered to the delighted eye a whole range of orange tones and filled me with such a longing to see her again daily that, feeling that my mother and I would soon be leaving Venice, I had made up my mind that I would try to create some sort of position for her in Paris which would save me the distress of parting from her. The beauty of her seventeen summers was so noble, so radiant, that it was like acquiring a genuine Titian before leaving the place. And would the scant remains of my fortune be sufficient temptation to her to make her leave her native land and come to live in Paris for my sole convenience? But as I came to the end of the stockbroker’s letter, a passage in which he said: “I shall look after your credits” reminded me of a scarcely less hypocritically professional expression which the bath-attendant at Balbec had used in speaking to Aimé of Albertine. “It was I that looked after her,” she had said, and these words which had never again entered my mind acted like an ‘Open, sesame!’ upon the hinges of the prison door. But a moment later the door closed once more upon the immured victim — whom I was not to blame for not wishing to join, since I was no longer able to see her, to call her to mind, and since other people exist for us only to the extent of the idea that we retain of them — who had for an instant seemed to me so touching because of my desertion of her, albeit she was unaware of it, that I had for the duration of a lightning-flash thought with longing of the time, already remote, when I used to suffer night and day from the companionship of her memory. Another time at San Giorgio degli Schiavoni, an eagle accompanying one of the Apostles and conventionalised in the same manner revived the memory and almost the suffering caused by the two rings the similarity of which Françoise had revealed to me, and as to which I had never learned who had given them to Albertine. Finally, one evening, an incident occurred of such a nature that it seemed as though my love must revive. No sooner had our gondola stopped at the hotel steps than the porter handed me a telegram which the messenger had already brought three times to the hotel, for owing to the inaccurate rendering of the recipient’s name (which I recognised nevertheless, through the corruptions introduced by Italian clerks, as my own) the post-office required a signed receipt certifying that the telegram was addressed to myself. I opened it as soon as I was in my own room, and, as I cast my eye over the sheet covered with inaccurately transmitted words, managed nevertheless to make out: “My dear, you think me dead, forgive me, I am quite alive, should like to see you, talk about marriage, when do you return? Love. Albertine.” Then there occurred in me in inverse order a process parallel to that which had occurred in the case of my grandmother: when I had learned the fact of my grandmother’s death, I had not at first felt any grief. And I had been really grieved by her death only when spontaneous memories had made her seem to me to be once again alive. Now that Albertine was no longer alive for me in my mind, the news that she was alive did not cause me the joy that I might have expected. Albertine had been nothing more to me than a bundle of thoughts, she had survived her bodily death so long as those thoughts were alive in me; on the other hand, now that those thoughts were dead, Albertine did not in any way revive for me, in her bodily form. And when I realised that I felt no joy at the thought of her being alive, that I no longer loved her, I ought to have been more astounded than a person who, looking at his reflexion in the glass, after months of travel, or of sickness, discovers that he has white hair and a different face, that of a middle-aged or an old man. This appalls us because its message is: “the man that I was, the fair young man no longer exists, I am another person.” And yet, was not the impression that I now felt the proof of as profound a change, as total a death of my former self and of the no less complete substitution of a new self for that former self, as is proved by the sight of a wrinkled face capped with a snowy poll instead of the face of long ago? But we are no more disturbed by the fact of our having become another person, after a lapse of years and in the natural order of events, than we are disturbed at any given moment by the fact of our being, one after another, the incompatible persons, crafty, sensitive, refined, coarse, disinterested, ambitious, which we are, in turn, every day of our life. And the reason why this does not disturb us is the same, namely that the self which has been eclipsed — momentarily in this latter case and when it is a question of character, permanently in the former case and when it is a matter of passions — is not present to deplore the other, the other which is for the moment, or for all time, our whole self; the coarse self laughs at his own coarseness, for he is a coarse person, and the forgetful man does not worry about his loss of memory, simply because he has forgotten.

I’ve got to get back to my Venice movie.

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Prodigious strength and generosity of spirit

Finally, some Frida reading on Friday. Since it is Banned Books week and I’m reading from Miller’s Tropic of Cancer at an event tomorrow, I’m going through that and have found some gems that I was going to remind you of. But I also found this review of what sounds like a great new book about Alexandre Dumas’ father, on whom he based one of my favorite books ever, The Count of Monte Cristo:

For Edmond Dantès, both winner and loser at the novel’s centre, is to a significant extent modelled on no less a figure than General Thomas-Alexandre Dumas – father of the novelist, French Revolutionary hero, Napoleonic warrior, and a slave-born mulatto of amazing physical strength and greatness of heart: heroic, in short, to the marrow of his bones.

Monte Cristo, it turns out, was more than just the little Mediterranean islet of the book title. Looking much further westwards in the atlas, we find it marked as a port on the island of Hispaniola, which nowadays is partitioned into Haiti and the Dominican Republic. The future general was born in 1762 in the French sugar colony of Saint-Domingue, in the western half of the island. He was the son of a black slave, Marie-Cessette, and a renegade Norman aristocrat, Alexandre-Antoine Davy de la Pailleterie, who, having paid a high price for Marie-Cessette’s beauty, fathered three more children before selling her off to a merchant from Nantes.

French Enlightenment values meant that young Thomas-Alexandre (known as Alex), brought to France in servitude by his father, was free once he stepped ashore. The pair moved into the smart suburb of Saint-Germain-en-Laye and the fifteen-year-old boy found himself addressed as ‘Monsieur le Comte’. He was kitted out by a court tailor and enrolled at the royal fencing academy, where he learned dancing, music, mathematics and philosophy.

…

On the way home from Egypt, Dumas was captured and imprisoned at Taranto by officers of the Holy Faith Army, a ragtag-and-bobtail force busy massacring republicans, liberals and Jews in the name of King Ferdinand of Naples. Two years of frantic petitioning by Marie-Louise Dumas proved useless and the dungeon door was only unlocked when French forces finally seized control of southern Italy, allowing her husband to totter homewards, wracked with the cancer that would soon kill him. Inevitably his appeals for financial assistance were ignored and, though not cashiered from the army, he was pointedly cold-shouldered by his brother officers. ‘Whatever my sufferings and pains,’ Dumas declared, ‘I will always find enough moral force to fly to the rescue of my country at the first request the government sends me.’ No such summons ever arrived.

Did Napoleon, morally contemptible as he was, effectively kill the general? Dumas’s son, a yet more famous Alexandre, certainly believed so and Reiss presents a plausible case for Edmond Dantès, Monte Cristo‘s wronged hero, as an avatar of the lost father, some of whose prodigious strength and generosity of spirit the novelist inherited. Clearly Dumas cherished memories of the relatively brief time they spent together – a mere four years, cruelly ended by his father’s death – but the devotion went far deeper than orthodox filial piety.

Indeed it did. ‘Best served cold’ in its proper context.

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Eric Hobsbawm, RIP

The world lost Marxist historian (in every sense of that phrase) Eric Hobsbawm this week at 95, truly a giant of scholarship who lived through the very times that shaped him. I kid, of course. We are all doing this. It’s just that some are decidedly less swayed than others:

“Every historian has his or her lifetime, a private perch from which to survey the world,” he said in his 1993 Creighton lecture, one of several occasions in his later years when he attempted to relate his own lifetime to his own writing. “My own perch is constructed, among other materials, of a childhood in the Vienna of the 1920s, the years of Hitler’s rise in Berlin, which determined my politics and my interest in history, and the England, and especially the Cambridge, of the 1930s, which confirmed both.”

In 1919, the young family settled in Vienna, where Eric went to elementary school, a period he later recalled in a 1995 television documentary which featured pictures of a recognisably skinny young Viennese Hobsbawm in shorts and knee socks. Politics made their impact around this time. Eric’s first political memory was in Vienna in 1927, when workers burned down the Palace of Justice. The first political conversation that he could recall took place in an Alpine sanatorium in these years, too. Two motherly Jewish women were discussing Leon Trotsky. “Say what you like,” said one to the other, “but he’s a Jewish boy called Bronstein.”

In 1929 his father died suddenly of a heart attack. Two years later his mother died of TB. Eric was 14, and his Uncle Sidney took charge once more, taking Eric and his sister Nancy to live in Berlin. As a teenager in Weimar Republic Berlin, Eric inescapably became politicised. He read Marx for the first time, and became a communist.

He could always remember the day in January 1933 when, emerging from the Halensee S-Bahn station on his way home from his school, the celebrated Prinz Heinrich Gymnasium, he saw a newspaper headline announcing Hitler’s election as chancellor. Around this time he joined the Socialist Schoolboys, which he described as “de facto part of the communist movement” and sold its publication, Schulkampf (School Struggle). He kept the organisation’s duplicator under his bed and, if his later facility for writing was any guide, probably wrote most of the articles too. The family remained in Berlin until 1933, when Sidney Hobsbawm was posted by his employers to England.

The gangly teenage boy who settled with his sister in Edgware in 1934 described himself later as “completely continental and German speaking”. School, though, was “not a problem” because the English education system was “way behind” the German. A cousin in Balham introduced him to jazz for the first time – the “unanswerable sound”, he called it. The moment of conversion, he wrote some 60 years later, was when he first heard the Duke Ellington band “at its most imperial”. He spent a period in the 1950s as jazz critic of the New Statesman, and published a Penguin Special, The Jazz Scene, on the subject in 1959 under the pen-name Francis Newton (many years later it was reissued with Hobsbawm identified as the author).

Read the whole thing and don’t worry about the Marxist cooties getting on you. Sort of Friday Reading on Tuesday, my gift to you, of his gifts to us.

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‘Till the pinyons get ripe

The 30th anniversary of Banned Books Week is coming up on Sept.30, and it’s amazing how scary words can be. Banning knowledge is exemplary of fear and weakness, Genesis 2:17 notwithstanding. Or sitting.

In that spirit, because it’s Friday and you’re the priest, here’s a little Upton Sinclair. I know The Jungle was banned at one time, though I don’t know about this one, maybe it’s time is coming. This is the beginning section 3 from the novel King Coal, by Sinclair.

Hal Warner started to drag himself down the road, but was unable to make
it. He got as far as a brooklet that came down the mountain-side, from
which he might drink without fear of typhoid; there he lay the whole
day, fasting. Towards evening a thunder-storm came up, and he crawled
under the shelter of a rock, which was no shelter at all. His single
blanket was soon soaked through, and he passed a night almost as
miserable as the previous one. He could not sleep, but he could think,
and he thought about what had happened to him. "Bill" had said that a
coal mine was not a foot-ball field, but it seemed to Hal that the net
impress of the two was very much the same. He congratulated himself that
his profession was not that of a union organiser.

At dawn he dragged himself up, and continued his journey, weak from cold
and unaccustomed lack of food. In the course of the day he reached a
power-station near the foot of the canyon. He did not have the price of
a meal, and was afraid to beg; but in one of the group of buildings by
the roadside was a store, and he entered and inquired concerning prunes,
which were twenty-five cents a pound. The price was high, but so was the
altitude, and as Hal found in the course of time, they explained the one
by the other--not explaining, however, why the altitude of the price was
always greater than the altitude of the store. Over the counter he saw a
sign: "We buy scrip at ten per cent discount." He had heard rumours of a
state law forbidding payment of wages in "scrip"; but he asked no
questions, and carried off his very light pound of prunes, and sat down
by the roadside and munched them.

Just beyond the power-house, down on the railroad track, stood a little
cabin with a garden behind it. He made his way there, and found a
one-legged old watchman. He asked permission to spend the night on the
floor of the cabin; and seeing the old fellow look at his black eye, he
explained, "I tried to get a job at the mine, and they thought I was a
union organiser."

"Well," said the man, "I don't want no union organisers round here."

"But I'm not one," pleaded Hal.

"How do I know what you are? Maybe you're a company spy."

"All I want is a dry place to sleep," said Hal. "Surely it won't be any
harm for you to give me that."

"I'm not so sure," the other answered. "However, you can spread your
blanket in the corner. But don't you talk no union business to me."

Hal had no desire to talk. He rolled himself in his blanket and slept
like a man untroubled by either love or curiosity. In the morning the
old fellow gave him a slice of corn bread and some young onions out of
his garden, which had a more delicious taste than any breakfast that had
ever been served him. When Hal thanked his host in parting, the latter
remarked: "All right, young fellow, there's one thing you can do to pay
me, and that is, say nothing about it. When a man has grey hair on his
head and only one leg, he might as well be drowned in the creek as lose
his job."

Hal promised, and went his way. His bruises pained him less, and he was
able to walk. There were ranch-houses in sight--it was like coming back
suddenly to America!
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Future, less tense

So in my recap from San Francisco earlier this summer, this bit from Julian Castro at the DNC this week is part of what I was talking about:

What the president did in allowing the children of undocumented immigrants to become citizens was Marco Rubio’s idea, but only Julian Castro got to brag about it at a convention. Only Castro got to make the incontrovertible point that, “In the end, the American Dream is not a sprint, or even a marathon, but a relay. Our families don’t always cross the finish line in one generation. But each generation passes on to the next generation the fruits of their labors…. My mother fought for civil rights so that instead of a mop, I could hold this microphone.”

Emphasis added.

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Categorically Re-thought

This is funny, disagreeably agreeable and general snack for thought:

Contemporary art is an easy thing to hate. All the meaningless hype, the identikit openings in cities that blur into one long, banal, Beck’s beer fuelled anxiety dream from which there is no escape. The seemingly endless proliferation of biennials—the biennialization or banalization of the world. One begins to think that everything aspires to resemble the opening of a Frieze art fair and every culture wants its own cheeky Damien or spunky Tracey. Glamour, celebrity, business, and radiant superficiality blend together to give each location the patina of globality with just a frisson of local color. People talk excitedly of what’s hot and what’s selling for millions. Capricious and seemingly tyrannical übercurators wander around quickly with their assistants talking on cell phones. The sharp eyes of eager young gallerists track them like prey, waiting for the moment to pounce. Everyone is either on the make or wants to be on the make. Contemporary art has become a high-end, global culture mall, which requires very little previous literacy and where the routine flatness of the gossip allows you to get up to speed very quickly. People with the right connections or serious amounts of money or sheer stubborn persistence or who are prepared to do anything can quickly gain access to what has the appearance of a cultural experience. God, it’s awful isn’t it? And I haven’t even mentioned how this art system is fed by the seemingly endless proliferation of art schools, M.F.A. programs, and the progressive inflation of graduate degrees, where Ph.D.s in fine art are scattered like confetti.

It is difficult not to be cynical about contemporary art. Maybe the whole category of the “contemporary” needs much more reflection. Maybe it needs replacing. When does the contemporary cease to be contemporary and become something past? When did the modern become the contemporary? Will the contemporary one day become modern or will there, in the future, be museums of postmodern art: MOPMAs? Why not call contemporary “present art” or “actual art” or “potential art,” or, better, “actually potential art” (APA)? At least it sounds more Aristotelian. But, then again, why use temporal categories at all? Why not use spatial terms instead? Some have spoken of visual art as spatial art, which is an attractive idea. Whichever way one approaches it, however, the categories need to be seriously rethought through research that is historiographical, institutional, and anthropological. The problem with contemporary art is that we all think we know what it means and we don’t. As a consequence, the discourse that surrounds it is drastically impoverished.

But despite such confusions of reference and the horrors of the contemporary art business model—or perhaps even because of it—I want to defend contemporary art, up to a point. It is simply a fact that contemporary art has become the central placeholder for the articulation of cultural meanings—good, bad, or indifferent. I am middle-aged enough to remember when literature, especially the novel, played this role and when cultural gatekeepers were literary critics, or social critics, often from literary backgrounds. That world is gone. The novel has become a quaint, emotively life-changing, and utterly marginal phenomenon. The heroic critics of the past are no more. I watched this change happen slowly when I still lived in England in the sensation-soaked 1990s and recall, as a kind of cultural marker, the opening of Tate Modern in 2000 and immensely long lines queuing up to see a vast spider by Louise Bourgeois in the Turbine Hall. It was clear that something had shifted in the culture.

via.

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market speak

In an ongoing series where I answer my own question, it means we’re becoming more stupid. Besides destroying the planet, we’re losing all tether to the ability to think.

I sent this to Mrs. G, but the more I read, I realized I should share here. Seattle’s The Stranger sent its reporter Paul Constant to a startup conference and well… warning: do not drink coffee as you read this.

They have come here in herds, dressed in business casual. Below their belts, the men are an ocean of khaki, broken intermittently by a cresting pair of Very Expensive Jeans. They wear their finest button-down shirts, but they make sure that those shirts are untucked, to demonstrate their willingness to let it all hang out, to think outside the confines of belted chino. The younger ones are in hoodies, their slouches cribbed thoughtfully from Jesse Eisenberg, who cribbed his slouch thoughtfully from Mark Zuckerberg. The women have it tougher. Their business casual is neither business-minded nor all that casual, a confusing melange of sundresses and sensible slacks, gossamer sweaters tossed over spaghetti straps. They totter about in chunky summer sandals that will leave bloody welts. These women and men have come together to do brutal violence to the English language, to leave the spoken and written word bloodied and victimized on a cold cement floor, wishing for the sweet relief of death.

Or at least, that’s the unintentional result. The ostensible reason they’ve gathered in Showbox SoDo, hiding away from the sunny afternoon in a dark room lousy with power strips, is to stare at a podium and a screen and lose a whole day to PowerPoint. They’re all wearing lanyards with big plastic placards dangling around their navels, their names in huge, humpty-point type and the words “Startup Riot Seattle 2012” and “#occupystartups” at the top. Ostensibly, they’re here to take part in something like an American Idol for startups, in which thirty different entrepreneurs explain their business plans to an audience of a couple hundred people. Their pitch presentations will take three minutes or less, and each pitch will be followed by three minutes of questions from a “panel” of two judges. The winners get guaranteed “face-time” with prominent venture capitalists and support from Startup Riot’s sponsoring organizations.

But, oh, my God, the terrible things these people do to words. It’s like watching some sadist work over a baby lamb with a rusty crowbar and a broken gin bottle. The names of these startups sound like the products of an aggressive brain tumor on the frontal lobe. Crowdegy, Placeling, Kouply, QuoteRobot, Appthwack, Makegood, Onthego, Nickler, Kahal, Tanzio, Taskk. They’re all whimsical and unique in exactly the same way. One of the judges works for Storenvy. The main corporate sponsor for Startup Riot is Mailchimp, along with a flock of smaller sponsors like Uber, Gist, and Twilio. I could staple the mismatched meat of syllables together all afternoon and you wouldn’t be able to tell the legitimate businesses from the illegitimate: Mehole, Kaprah, Yimmy, Blanter, Catzap, Dunzyinonezy, Simplert, Lustaminate.

It gets worse when they start talking about the ideas behind the insipid names.

What do all these words that were seemingly invented by a wizard in a kid’s picture book do? They each solve a specific problem. You ever have trouble organizing an office softball team? Don’t you hate looking at the long list of search results that happen when you type a query into google? (“The problem is…the list.”) Isn’t it awful, having an abundance of news sources? Do you have too many tasks? One pitch begins with a simple, honest mission statement: ““There’s a big problem we all face every day: Information.”

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Disposal of Interests

Someone, an actual friend, posted this on fB yesterday and I resolved to make our Friday Reading text for today. Actually, it was an easy call.

A letter from William Burroughs to Truman Capote in 1970, and I think its point is rather, um, clear.

July 23, 1970

My Dear Mr. Truman Capote

This is not a fan letter in the usual sense — unless you refer to ceiling fans in Panama. Rather call this a letter from “the reader” — vital statistics are not in capital letters — a selection from marginal notes on material submitted as all “writing” is submitted to this department. I have followed your literary development from its inception, conducting on behalf of the department I represent a series of inquiries as exhaustive as your own recent investigations in the sun flower state. I have interviewed all your characters beginning with Miriam — in her case withholding sugar over a period of several days proved sufficient inducement to render her quite communicative — I prefer to have all the facts at my disposal before taking action. Needless to say, I have read the recent exchange of genialities between Mr Kenneth Tynan and yourself. I feel that he was much too lenient. Your recent appearance before a senatorial committee on which occasion you spoke in favor of continuing the present police practice of extracting confessions by denying the accused the right of consulting consul prior to making a statement also came to my attention. In effect you were speaking in approval of standard police procedure: obtaining statements through brutality and duress, whereas an intelligent police force would rely on evidence rather than enforced confessions. You further cheapened yourself by reiterating the banal argument that echoes through letters to the editor whenever the issue of capital punishment is raised: “Why all this sympathy for the murderer and none for his innocent victims?” I have in line of duty read all your published work. The early work was in some respects promising — I refer particularly to the short stories. You were granted an area for psychic development. It seemed for a while as if you would make good use of this grant. You choose instead to sell out a talent that is not yours to sell. You have written a dull unreadable book which could have been written by any staff writer on the New Yorker — (an undercover reactionary periodical dedicated to the interests of vested American wealth). You have placed your services at the disposal of interests who are turning America into a police state by the simple device of deliberately fostering the conditions that give rise to criminality and then demanding increased police powers and the retention of capital punishment to deal with the situation they have created. You have betrayed and sold out the talent that was granted you by this department. That talent is now officially withdrawn. Enjoy your dirty money. You will never have anything else. You will never write another sentence above the level of In Cold Blood. As a writer you are finished. Over and out. Are you tracking me? Know who I am? You know me, Truman. You have known me for a long time. This is my last visit.

Thanks, J-Dep.

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Funny, that

In tribute to Romney’s Doofus Abroad act, I wanted to post an excerpt from Graham Greene’s The Comedians, a comic reference to something decidedly not funny.

Of course there’s nothing online that I can find, but you should still take this as a recommendation for Greene’s famous novel about Haiti, wherein friends of Romney could find new and better ways to conduct themselves abroad. See also, The Quiet American.

So instead, we turn to John Ruskin who, in true enlightening nineteenth century fashion, has some choice words for Willard about taxes. This is from Fors Clavigera, Letter VII, 1871:

Do you see, in The Times of yesterday and the day before, 22nd and 23rd June, that the Minister of France dares not, even in this her utmost need, put on an income tax; and do you see why he dares not?

Observe, such a tax is the only honest and just one; because it tells on the rich in true proportion to the poor, and because it meets necessity in the shortest and bravest way, and without interfering with any commercial operation.

All rich people object to income tax, of course;— they like to pay as much as a poor man pays on their tea, sugar, and tobacco — nothing on their incomes.

Whereas, in true justice, the only honest and wholly right tax is one not merely on income, but property; increasing in percentage as the property is greater. And the main virtue of such a tax is that it makes publicly known what every man has, and how he gets it.

For every kind of Vagabonds, high and low, agree in their dislike to give an account of the way they get their living, still less, of how much they have got sewn up in their breeches. It does not, however, matter much to a country that it should know how its poor Vagabonds live, but it is of vital moment that it should know how its rich Vagabonds live; and that much of knowledge, it seems to me, in the present state of our education, is quite attainable.