An excerpt from the preface to Giordano Bruno's "The Heroic Frenzies"

An excerpt from the preface to Giordano Bruno's "The Heroic Frenzies". The preface is addressed to Sir Philip Sidney

(this is quoted in Ingrid Rowland's biography of Giordano Bruno)

___________________________________

It is truly, O most generous Sir, the work of a low, filthy animal nature to have made oneself the constant admirer, and to have fixed a solicitous attachment upon or around the beauty of a woman’s body. Good God! What more vile and ignoble vision can present itself to a clear-sighted eye than a man, brooding, afflicted, tormented, sorry, melancholy; who waxes now cold, now hot, now boiling, now trembling, now pale, now blushing, now in a pose of perplexity, now in the act of decisiveness, a man who spends the best season and the choicest fruits of his life distilling the elixir of his brain toward putting into thought and writ and sealing in public monuments those endless tortures, those grave torments, those reasoned arguments, those laborious thoughts and those bitter desires addressed to the tyranny of an unworthy, imbecilic, foolish and sordid smut?

What tragicomedy, what act, I say, more deserving of pity and laughter could be produced in this theater of the world, on this stage of our perceptions, than these many subjugated men, rendered pensive, contemplative, constant, steadfast, faithful, lovers, devotees, adorers, and slaves of a thing without faith, bereft of all constancy, destitute of intelligence, empty of all merit, void of any acknowledgment or gratitude, where no more sense, intellect, or goodness is to be obtained than might be found in a statue or a painting on a wall? And where there abound more disdain, arrogance, effrontery, vainglory, rage, scorn, perfidy, lust, greed, ingratitude, and other mortal vices than the poisons and instruments of death that could have issued forth from Pandora’s box, all to have, alas, such expansive accommodation within the brain of such a monster? Behold, inscribed on paper, enclosed in books, set before the eyes, and intoned in the ears, a noise, a commotion, a clash of devices, of emblems, of mottoes, of epistles, of sonnets, of epigrams, of books, of chattering scribbles, of terminal sweats, of lives consumed, of cries that deafen the stars, laments that make hell’s caverns reverberate, aches that strike the living dumb, sights that exhaust the pity of the gods, for those eyes, for those cheeks, for that bosom, for that white, for that crimson, for that tongue, for that tooth, for that lip, for that hair, that dress, that mantle, that glove, that slipper, that high heel, that avarice, that giggle, that scorn, that empty window, that eclipse of the sun, that throbbing, that disgust, that stench, that sepulchre, that cesspit, that menstruation, that carrion, that malaria, that uttermost insult and lapse of nature, that with a surface, a shadow, a phantasm, a dream, an enchantment of Circe plied in the service of reproduction, should deceive in the matter of beauty; which simultaneously comes and goes, issues and dies, flowers and rots, and is somewhat beautiful on the outside, but truly and fixedly contains within a shipyard, a workshop, a customhouse, a marketplace of every foulness, toxin, and poison that our stepmother Nature has managed to produce: and once the seed she requires has been paid out, she often repays it with a morass, a remorse, a sadness, a flaccidity, a headache, a lassitude, this and that distemper that are known to all the world, so that every place aches bitterly where it itched so sweetly before.

_____________________________________

Here's an excerpt from another of his works, a dialogue called "Cause, Principle, and Unity"

Poliinnio: As I was studying in my little sanctuary of the Muses, I came upon that passage in Aristotle, at the beginning of the Physics, in which, when he wishes to expound upon what the primal matter may be, he takes as its mirror the feminine sex, that sex, I say, which is wayward, fragile, inconstant, soft, feeble, unlucky, ignoble, vile, abject, despicable, unworthy, reprobate, sinister, detestable, frigid, deformed, empty, vain, indiscreet, insane, perfidious, sluggish, affected, filthy, ungrateful, lacking, maimed, imperfect, inchoate, insufficient, cut short, attenuated, that rust, that caterpillar, that chaff, plague, disease, death.

Among us placed by nature at God’s will

To be a burden and a bitter pill.

Gervasio: You humanists, who call yourselves professors of good literature, when you grow so full of your great ideas that you can’t contain yourselves anymore, you have nothing better to do than dump them on the poor women, just as, when another kind of frenzy takes you, you vent it on the first of your wretched students who passes by.

Hobbledehoy

An excerpt from Anthony Trollope's The Small House at Allington:

I have said that John Eames had been petted by none but his mother, but I would not have it supposed, on this account, that John Eames had no friends. There is a class of young men who never get petted, though they may not be the less esteemed, or perhaps loved. They do not come forth to the world as Apollos, nor shine at all, keeping what light they may have for inward purposes. Such young men are often awkward, ungainly, and not yet formed in their gait; they straggle with their limbs, and are shy; words do not come to them with ease, when words are required, among any but their accustomed associates. Social meetings are periods of penance to them, and any appearance in public will unnerve them. They go much about alone, and blush when women speak to them. In truth, they are not as yet men, whatever the number may be of their years; and, as they are no longer boys, the world has found for them the ungraceful name of hobbledehoy.

Such observations, however, as I have been enabled to make on this matter have led me to believe that the hobbledehoy is by no means the least valuable species of the human race. When I compare the hobbledehoy of one or two and twenty to some finished Apollo of the same age, I regard the former as unripe fruit, and the latter as fruit that is ripe. Then comes the question as to the two fruits. Which is the better fruit, that which ripens early—which is, perhaps, favoured with some little forcing apparatus, or which, at least, is backed by the warmth of a southern wall; or that fruit of slower growth, as to which nature works without assistance, on which the sun operates in its own time,—or perhaps never operates if some ungenial shade has been allowed to interpose itself? The world, no doubt, is in favour of the forcing apparatus or of the southern wall. The fruit comes certainly, and at an assured period. It is spotless, speckless, and of a certain quality by no means despicable. The owner has it when he wants it, and it serves its turn. But, nevertheless, according to my thinking, the fullest flavour of the sun is given to that other fruit,—is given in the sun's own good time, if so be that no ungenial shade has interposed itself. I like the smack of the natural growth, and like it, perhaps, the better because that which has been obtained has been obtained without favour.

But the hobbledehoy, though he blushes when women address him, and is uneasy even when he is near them, though he is not master of his limbs in a ball-room, and is hardly master of his tongue at any time, is the most eloquent of beings, and especially eloquent among beautiful women. He enjoys all the triumphs of a Don Juan, without any of Don Juan's heartlessness, and is able to conquer in all encounters, through the force of his wit and the sweetness of his voice. But this eloquence is heard only by his own inner ears, and these triumphs are the triumphs of his imagination.

The true hobbledehoy is much alone, not being greatly given to social intercourse even with other hobbledehoys—a trait in his character which I think has hardly been sufficiently observed by the world at large. He has probably become a hobbledehoy instead of an Apollo, because circumstances have not afforded him much social intercourse; and, therefore, he wanders about in solitude, taking long walks, in which he dreams of those successes which are so far removed from his powers of achievement. Out in the fields, with his stick in his hand, he is very eloquent, cutting off the heads of the springing summer weeds, as he practises his oratory with energy. And thus he feeds an imagination for which those who know him give him but scanty credit, and unconsciously prepares himself for that latter ripening, if only the ungenial shade will some day cease to interpose itself.

Such hobbledehoys receive but little petting, unless it be from a mother; and such a hobbledehoy was John Eames when he was sent away from Guestwick to begin his life in the big room of a public office in London.