Works Cited

Zeno, the disciple of Parmenides, having attempted to kill the tyrant Demylus, and failing in his design, maintained the doctrine of Parmenides, like pure and fine gold tried in the fire, that there is nothing which a magnanimous man ought to dread but dishonor, and that there are none but children and women, or effeminate and women-hearted men, who fear pain. For, having with his own teeth bitten off his tongue, he spit it in the tyrant’s face.

Plutarch, The Moralia

Works Cited

“Prisoner at the bar, you have been accused of the great crime of labouring under pulmonary consumption, and after an impartial trial before a jury of your countrymen, you have been found guilty. Against the justice of the verdict I can say nothing: the evidence against you was conclusive, and it only remains for me to pass such a sentence upon you, as shall satisfy the ends of the law. That sentence must be a very severe one. It pains me much to see one who is yet so young, and whose prospects in life were otherwise so excellent, brought to this distressing condition by a constitution which I can only regard as radically vicious; but yours is no case for compassion: this is not your first offence: you have led a career of crime, and have only profited by the leniency shown you upon past occasions, to offend yet more seriously against the laws and institutions of your country. You were convicted of aggravated bronchitis last year: and I find that though you are now only twenty-three years old, you have been imprisoned on no less than fourteen occasions for illnesses of a more or less hateful character; in fact, it is not too much to say that you have spent the greater part of your life in a jail.

“It is all very well for you to say that you came of unhealthy parents, and had a severe accident in your childhood which permanently undermined your constitution; excuses such as these are the ordinary refuge of the criminal; but they cannot for one moment be listened to by the ear of justice. I am not here to enter upon curious metaphysical questions as to the origin of this or that— questions to which there would be no end were their introduction once tolerated, and which would result in throwing the only guilt on the tissues of the primordial cell, or on the elementary gases. There is no question of how you came to be wicked, but only this— namely, are you wicked or not? This has been decided in the affirmative, neither can I hesitate for a single moment to say that it has been decided justly.["]

Samuel Butler, Erewhon

The Windlover

I caught your cadence, cooed in another’s voice—her choice of clauses
Cleaved with air, there! the twin of your tattoo, which clip-clops
Down the cobbled pitch of a cathedral tone—that yours alone: how it drops
In caverns of caramel and buckles stone. Tempo, pulses and pauses
Beating fresh between the terms, the rhythm draped on the stranger’s verbs, flung
As high as a bird unbound, each sound unwound and set to soar
On the winged wish of the word—I almost heard the thrumming reeds that moor
The silken syllables you swirl in the world behind your tongue.

Not you, I knew, but each trace chased, each collage cut collected by hand
One more mote of the wild winter that whirls
From the bursting pane of glass. And my love has lit each shard with a band

Of light so rare it colors the numbing night—and the coming white pearls
Of snow. So my heart hears the hum, the substance and the sand
Of you, not you, you, Osiris in the dew of a thousand scattered girls.