Capping quotes

 

And how can man die better than facing fearful odds..

Go on, you know the second half of this (or you don't. Either way, it doesn't matter)
But if you have completed the quote to its full length by saying:

And how can man die better

Than facing fearful odds,

For the ashes of his fathers,

And the temples of his Gods

Then you have just capped a quote. It's Horatius by Macaulay from the Lays of Ancient Rome,  a very popular Victorian collection, and one often learned by heart to declaim. And this post is about capping quotes and the joy that comes from it and the way that it links to our hearts and feelings and relationships. You don't have to actually complete the quote (though you may) but the sharing of something you both know and love is the essence of this, and the purpose of this post. 

When Cro's father, my father-in-law, who we all knew by his Norwegian title 'Far', died, I remember Cro telling me the loss that she felt, on top of all the others, that there would be nobody there to cap quotes with.  Cro and Far had been conspiratorial readers and memorizers and quoters her whole life, and had not stopped when Cro reached adulthood. To hear them talk was a real smorgasbord of all the words that had passed through their lives and which they had shared. It included big chunks of Dickens (You've no idea how small you'd come out, if I had the articulating of you.')

and huge swathes of Gilbert and Sullivan

"Am I alone and unobserved? I am!"

but it also, because of their background, would be peppered with Norwegian or even Anglo-Saxon, along with all the nonsense songs that Far had made up as an atypically playful father of three young children in the 1960s. I remember one about the 'Fretful Porpentine' (go on readers, place that one) which was apparently thought up for a very tearful teething Cro in the late 1950s.

And I have to say that it was Far himself who made up the brilliant response to the first digital camera that he was shown: "C'est magnifique, mais c'est pas Dageurre"

There is a line from near then end of TS Eliot's The Waste Land' which maybe links very much to all this quoting. It is: 

These fragments I have shored against my ruins.

There is a whole culture in the world of words that you have shared with another person, as much as the experiences that you have shared. When you say something in the presence of someone who has shared the enjoyment of it with you, it reminds you of the enjoyment, and that you enjoyed it together (though not necessarily at the the same time, but you both know that the other knows it). I feel this about Cro, obviously, and that is part of the reason that the life and character of someone you love lives on after their death: when you hear or think of these phrases, it brings the person as well as the words back to your mind too.

It doesn't have to be high culture either. Quotes from films and TV are just as powerful with your emotions. Let's try "Now I have a machine-gun. Ho Ho Ho". If you know it, you know it. Or maybe something like "You give that fuckin Nimrod fifteen hundred dollars and I'll shoot him on general principle" or "I'm a foolish old man who's been drawn into a wild goose chase by a harpie in trousers and a nincompoop."

The loss of the link with the people that you cap quotes with is a double reminder. It reminds you that they are not there, but the quote itself reminds you of the link that you shared. Earlier in this blog I wrote about 'Grannyisms', quotes that we in my family know came down via our own mother from her mother, and which have a whole weight of Irishness behind them. When we use them still, we think of the people we got them from, but by using them we are also keeping them alive and so in some way keeping alive the original users. 

I will finish with a final quote, that Cro and I used to use when we thought of all the things that we had done together and the places that we had been. And its context in the work that it comes from also makes it clear that all of these things, whether experiences or quotes, will eventually leave you in some way, because all things pass. But they are glorious still. Here it is. Place it; it's not hard.

I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.