[lit-ideas] Nubes

I thought it sounded effeminate! It's Sainte-Beuve's  French!
 
---- Anway, here some stone wall Oxford quotes.
 
Cheers,
 
J. L. S.
     That Place.
 
-----
 
 
1786 G.  FRAZER Dove's Flight 41 
"She takes her flight to her *stone-walled  refuge."
 
[The asterisk means this is the first collocation ever -- found -- for  
'stone-walled']
 
1977 Jrnl. R.  Soc. Arts CXXV. 670/1 
 
Some of the best safety managers I know left  school at 14 or 15 years of 
age. Conversely, we have seen people who come from  red bricks and grey stones 
but are quite unable to do the job at all.
 
               -- This is good as it shows McCreery that no matter the 
material of the stone  (please don't use 'ivory tower' -- it's been _overdone_! 
See 
quotes below -- and  it's a gallicism!) they'll never be good enough for the 
professional  persuaders!
 
 
1837 SAINTE-BEUVE  Pensées d'Août, à M. Villemain 152 

       "Et Vigny, plus secret,  Comme en sa tour d'ivoire, avant midi 
rentrait."
 
 
1911  BRERETON  & ROTHWELL tr.  Bergson's Laughter  iii. 135 
 
Each member [of society] must be ever attentive  to his social 
surroundings..he must avoid shutting himself up in his own  peculiar character 
as a 
philosopher in his ivory tower.  [This is french too so ignore]
 
1916 H. JAMES Ivory Tower (1917) II. iii. 142 
 
Doesn't living in an ivory tower just mean the  most distinguished 
retirement? 
 
                    -- well, actually his brother lived on a wooden house, 
which is much more  masculine than a stone-wall if you
                    live on the water (even Charles River). 
 
                    I'd answer James ('what a snob')'s question in the 
affirmative: provided  the elevator-system is o-kay.
 
 
1922 H. CRANE  Let. 10 Dec. (1965) 108, 
 
   "I have grown accustomed to an  ‘ivory tower’ sort of existence."
 
Well, it doesn't show, or you shouldn't be showing it  off.

 
1936 E. POUND Let. Jan. (1971) 277 Ivory tower  aesthetes. 
 
      This person had the worst of characters. He  hated and envied 
everybody, and possibly had the kitschest of tastes, so  beware
 
1938 R. G. COLLINGWOOD Princ. Art vi. 120 
 
The tendency was for each artist to construct an ivory tower  of his own: to 
live, that is to say, in a world of his own devising. 
 
       -- Well, for once it's Francis Bacon  and not H. P. Grice who is said 
to like the ivory tower! Actually Francis Bacon  did live in a tower
       in the worst part of London and trust  him to invite his own killer 
for sex (and die). 
 
 
1940  H. G. WELLS New World Order § 9. 133 
 
We want a Minister of Education who can..electrify and  rejuvenate old dons 
or put them away in ivory towers, and stimulate the younger  ones. 
 
                 'don' means 'dominus' in Latin, and Spanish -- and why these
                 [rather inferior class in the class-system of England] were
                 thought to _deserve_ an 'ivory tower' escapes me!
 
 
1945 A. HUXLEY Let. 2 Apr. (1969) 518 
 
Between ivory-towerism and art for art's sake on the one  hand and direct 
political action on the other lies the alternative of  spirtuality. 
 
       Yes, and between your pretentiousness  with words and your terribly 
bad sight (he wore very thick-rimmed spectacles)  lies my Aldous ("Eyeless in 
Gaza") 
 
 
1947  J. HAYWARD Prose Lit. since 1939 46 
 
If [literature] fails in this task it will be reduced to the  status of an 
art pursued for art's sake by isolated groups of writers,  segregated from the 
world in their ivory towers and ‘private worlds’. 
 
         -- and that should be bad  for ...?   ...?  I mean, even Geary, who 
has this 'Work in  Progress' wouldn't care, or would he? 
         I'm never sure what it's  meant by 'literature'. And I'm glad I am 
so not sure.
 
1953 G. VANN  Water & Fire iii. 50 
 
That ivory-tower æstheticism which averts its  gaze from the squalors of 
humanity. 
 
              Wrong. All the ivory-tower aesthetes I've known had loved their 
bits of  'slumming'. Sir Nowel Coward, Sir (well, ...) Cole Porter,
              Thomas Driberg, Bernard Berenson, Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde, 
Symmonds, Whitman,  Wittgenstein, even!
              There's no pleasure _in_ the ivory tower if you cannot come out 
of it on  occasion, and meet the 'other'
 
                          -- Your place or mine?
                          -- Yours! This is supposed to be my slumming
                                 [and he may spit on the ivory]
 
 
1954 ‘N. BLAKE’ Whisper in Gloom vii. 94 
 
        I'm going to  plunge you into reality, my little Ivory-Towerist. 
 
Perhaps the idea started with Socrates's Thinkery (Phronisgerion). This is  
in Aristophanes _Nubes_. So the idea is that of UP UP UP. Hence the TOWER (cf.  
TOWER OF BABEL). The ivory is an Indian metal (from the elephant), so the  
material escapes me. Also African. 
 
(I use 'metal' on the purpose). 
 
1959 20th Cent. Nov. 401 
 
British governments..have been badly informed..and Britain's  ivory-towered 
embassies may have to bear some of the blame. 
 
              I've never been to one. The Buenos Aires one used to be a 
pretty stone-walled  building on Avenida Alvear -- which is still there to be
seen. But with the nouveau-riche of the British diplomatic corps, they  found 
the swimming-pool wasn't good enough. So they moved to a rather  tacky
little new Frenchie mansion on Calle Agote, in the middle of a nicely  
urbanized area (5 blocks from my place), but not too private enough (Diana was  
notably photographed _in the swimming-pool_ from a neighbouring tower! --  
overlooking the embassy garden!
 
---- Perhaps the nicest Brit embassy (overseas, ha) is the Paris one, which  
was incidentally the birthplace of Somerset Maugham (hence he was French). 
 

1963 M. MCCARTHY  Group vi. 120 We called you the  Ivory Tower group. Aloof 
from the battle. 
 
                  And why did they cease to call me that?
 
1963 Daily Tel. 12 Oct. 8/7 
Pity the poor parson!.. If he eschews all worldly contact,  he's accused of 
being ivory-towerish and out of touch.  

And if he's too much in touch he's accused of molesting.
 
1963 Economist 26 Oct. 355/1 
 
Every don..however attached to academic ivory-toweredness. 
 
     I'm starting to hate 'don'. In Buenos Aires it's  very _vulgar_ to call 
someone 'don'. One could hear this conversation among the  vernacular types:
 
                A: Hey, don! Can I ask you a question?
           Don  Gomez:  Sure.
                A:  A fiver.
            Don  Gomez gives five
               A: Thankyou, don.
 
"don" is the equivalent of 'guv'.
 
What's the fem. of 'don' in Oxford. Philippa Foot was a 'donna' or still a  
'don'? In Spanish it would be "doña", which is even ruder than 'don'. 
 
 
1967 P. NOKES  Professional Task in Welfare Pract. vii. 113 
When I began teaching at the Prison Staff  College..I soon became aware of a 
well established tradition that what was  taught there was ‘ivory-towered’. 
 
                 I like that. I suppose it was stone-walled, too. Ha ha.
                                              Never _red-brick_.
 
 
1968 J. J. C. SMART Between Sci. & Philos. 17 
It would be unwise to think that philosophy is exclusively a  subject for 
inhabitants of ivory towers. 
 
                      Right. First, the bathrooms are terrible. Nobody 
_lives_ in an ivory  tower.
                      Why, it was even never _taught_ in an ivory tower, but 
by the Alpheos river, in  the Academus Grove!
                                   (so what's this silly idea of the ivory 
tower?)
 
 
1972  Science 19 May 769/3 
New realities which make it impossible for them to think and  perform in such 
ivory-tower isolation.
 
               Well, but on the other hand the new realities _have_ it 
impossible
               to perform in an ivory tower. New Realities tend to be 
new-clumsy.
 
 
Cheers,
 
J. L.
   This Place.
 
 
J. L. Speranza, Esq.  

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Buenos Aires, Argentina.
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La Plata  B1900 BPY
Provincia de Buenos Aires, Argentina.
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