“Straight might have grown the laurel bough...”
Oh dear. A certain somebody local to Dorsetshire has done something really quite incongruous. At the price of their reputation as an eSeller (from the inevitable negative feedback) has sold two families a photo of a games console, for the princely sum of four-hundred and fifty pounds. Technically the description is correct, stating clearly that the item for sale is a new photograph, of said gaming console. Statistically more rows in families happen at Christmas than any other time. This Yuletide is surely no exception.
In other news I am still freaking out about D-day for the archæology paper due in, at midnight.
“...and now thou hast but one bare hour to live,
and then thou must be damned perpetually.
Stand still, you ever-moving spheres of heaven,
That time may cease and midnight never come!
Fair nature’s eye, rise, rise again, and make
Perpetual day, or let this hour be but a day
A year, a month, a week, a natural day,
That Faustus may repent and save his soul!
O lente, lente currite noctis equit!
The stars move still, time runs, the clock will strike,
...
Where is it now? ’Tis gone; and see where God
Stretcheth out His arm and bends His ireful brows!
Mountains and hills come, come and fall on me,
and hide me from the heavy wrath of God!
No, no!
Then I will headlong run into the earth.
Earth, gape! O, no, it will not harbour me.
You stars that reigned at my nativity,
Whose influence hath allotted death and hell,
Now draw up Faustus like a foggy mist
Into the entrails of yon labouring cloud,
That when you vomit forth into the air,
My limbs may issue from your smokey mouths,
So that my soul may but ascend to heaven...
O, no end is limited to damndēd souls.
Why wert thou not a creature wanting soul?
Or why is this immortal that thou hast?
Ah, Pythagoras’ metempsychosis, were that true,
This soul should fly from me and I be changed
Unto some brutish beast.
All beasts are happy, for, when they die,
Their souls are soon dissolved in elements,
But mine must live still to be plagued in hell.
...
...curse thyself. Curse Lucifer!
That hath deprived thee of the joys of heaven.
...Now, body, turn to air,
...O soul, be changed into waterdrops,
and fall into the ocean, n’er to be found...”
Although I have a few hundred good words down, I still have hundreds to go, and have had to take the last resort: plea to my tutor for an extension. Thankfully it was granted. Three days. Moon-day morning, at high-noon. So, I am fighting a deadline, and working on the pre-history paper.
“Cut is the branch that might have grown full straight,
and burnēd is Apollo’s laurel bough
That sometimes grew within this learnēd man...”
- Marlowe’s
Faust’Marlowe, C. (2003 [1594]) Christopher Marlowe: The Complete Plays, Penguin, London, pp.393-395, ll.63-72, 79-92, 101-109, 111-113, 115-116 & 1-3.
Maximus Mercurius
et Ronulus Latratus.
