New Orts #4

Feb.11 MMXXIV

 The classic phrase “scripta manet, verba volat” --which has come to mean, in our time, “what is written remains, what is spoken vanishes into air”-- used to express the exact opposite; it was coined in praise of the word said out loud, which has wings and can fly, as compared to the silent word on the page, which is motionless, dead.
  -- Alberto Manguel (1948- ), A History of Reading

[ In 1828 Felix Mendelssohn wrote an orchestral overture, Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage (Meeresstille und glückliche Fahrt), inspired by a pair of poems by Goethe written in 1795. Nowadays, a prosperous voyage in calm seas sounds like a pleasant cruise, but in Mendelssohn’s day the title had quite a different meaning: a calm sea would leave the ship literally becalmed, and only when the wind returned could the voyage continue. ]

 All wars are civil wars, because all men are brothers...  Each one owes infinitely more to the human race than to the particular country in which he was born.
-- Francois Fenelon, theologian and writer (1651-1715)

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