Sir Walter Scott
1940
A letter came from Dan [her husband], dated January 29th: ‘We have arrived and our official address is Notts Sherwood Rangers Yeomanry, Palestine. Letters by airmail take about a week.’ I also had a letter from Whitaker [her husband’s valet]. It was completely blacked out by a censor except for ‘My Lady’ at the top. I wonder what he wrote.
Countess of Ranfurly
1941 [POW Camp, Germany]
Last night’s rumour of thousands of parcels was apparently true – except that they were all for Obermassfeld. But however disappointing it may be for us, I’m extremely glad this hospital is at last getting them, as they have had a rotten time. Wounds were taking twice as long to heal because the patients hadn’t the food to build up on. Hunger must have cost hundreds of lives. However, tho’ no food parcels, we hear there are 21 smokes ones – and smoke is half the battle. It is extraordinary, looking round the room during meals the number of backs which are now rounded. Anybody sitting with a straight back looks enormous. I suppose due to hard benches and stools. How odd it will seem to sit in an armchair again.
Captain John Mansel
1991
‘Iraqi morale wilts under allied onslaught’. Mine has rather wilted too. And the country has disappeared beneath a blanket of snow.
Gyles Brandreth
10 February
1661
(Lord’s Day.) Took physique all day, and, God forgive me, did spend it in reading of some little French romances.
Samuel Pepys
1858 [New Orleans]
As all my paintings are finished and my easel packed up I seem to have unlimited hours in the day, so I went to a Slave Auction. I went alone (a quarter of an hour before the time) and asked the auctioneer to allow me to see everything. He was very smiling and polite, took me upstairs, showed me all the articles for sale – about thirty women and twenty men, twelve or fourteen babies. He took me round and told me what they could do: ‘She can cook and iron, has worked also in the fields.’ etc., ‘This one a No. 1 cook and ironer –,’ etc. He introduced me to the owner who wanted to sell them (being in debt) and he did not tell the owner what I had told him (that I was English and only came from curiosity), so the owner took a great deal of pains to make me admire a dull-looking mulatress and said she was an excellent servant and could just suit me. At twelve we all descended into a dirty hall adjoining the street big enough to hold a thousand people. There were three sales going on at the same time, and the room was crowded with rough-looking men, smoking and spitting, bad-looking set – a mêlée of all nations.
I noticed one mulatto girl who looked very sad and embarrassed. She was going to have a child and seemed frightened and wretched. I was very sorry I could not get near to her to speak to her. The others were not sad at all. Perhaps they were glad of a change. Some looked round anxiously at the different bearded faces below them, but there was no great emotion visible.
Before I went the young man of the house had said, ‘Well, I don’t think there is anything to see – they sell them just like so many rocking chairs. There’s no difference.’ And that is the truest word that can be said about the affair. When I see how Miss Murray speaks of sales and separations as regretted by the owners and as disagreeable (that is her tone if not her words), I feel inclined to condemn her to attend all the sales held in New Orleans in two months. How many that would be one may guess, as three were going on the morning I went down.
Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon
1915
My neighbour talks for hours with the landlady. Both speak softly, the landlady almost inaudibly, and therefore so much the worse. My writing, which has been coming along for the past two days, is interrupted, who knows for how long a time? Absolute despair. Is it like this in every house? Does such ridiculous and absolutely killing misery await me with every landlady in every city?
Franz Kafka
1922
Not many remarks about art have so gripped one as Meier-Graefe’s comment on Delacroix: ‘This is a case of a hot heart beating in a cold person.’
Bertolt Brecht
1947
In three days I’m leaving New York. I have a lot of shopping to do and business to take care of, and all morning long I stride along the muddy streets of the better neighborhoods. In their windows, candy stores display huge red hearts decorated with ribbons and stuffed with bonbons. Hearts are also ingeniously suspended in stationery stores and tie shops. It’ll soon be Valentine’s Day, the day when young girls give gifts to their boyfriends. There’s always some holiday going on in America; it’s distracting. Even private celebrations, especially birthdays, have the dignity of public ceremonies. It seems that the birth of every citizen is a national event. The other evening at a nightclub, the whole room began to sing, in chorus, ‘Happy Birthday,’ while a portly gentleman, flushed and flattered, squeezed his wife’s fingers. The day before yesterday I had to make a telephone call; two college girls went into the booth before me. And while I was pacing impatiently in front of the door, they unhooked the receiver and intoned ‘Happy Birthday.’ They sang it through to the very end. In shops they sell birthday cards with congratulations all printed out, often in verse. And you can ‘telegraph’ flowers on one occasion or another. All the florists advertise in large letters, ‘Wire Flowers.’
Simone de Beauvoir
11 February
1938
All the women in the region are excised. ‘This,’ we are told, ‘is to calm their lust and ensure their conjugal fidelity.’
Immediately afterward we are told: ‘You understand: since these women feel nothing, they give themselves to anyone whatever; nothing stops them . . . Oh, of course, they never give themselves for nothing!’
Obviously the two statements seem contradictory. One is forced to admit that if the aim were conjugal fidelity . . . But no (it seems); rather this: keep the wife from making love for pleasure. For money, it’s all right! And the husband congratulates himself on having a (or more than one) wife who produces income.
This is one of the rare points on which all the Frenchmen, when questioned, agree. One among them, who has a great experience of the ‘moussos’ of Guinea, asserts that he has never met a native woman who sought pleasure in the sexual act; he even went so far as to say, not one who knew voluptuous pleasure.
André Gide
1941 [Holland]
‘Seize the day,’ says Mother. But I’m worried. At home everyone is so optimistic, but others are pessimistic. Many people are hanging around aimlessly in the streets, out of work. There are riots and demonstrations. It doesn’t bode well for us. Enfin Let’s hope that ‘Alles sal reg kom’ – soon! Actually, I’m an idiot to grumble on like this. I’m still enjoying my life as much as I can.
Edith Velmans
1975
