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The Wunderkammer of the Mild Colonial Boy, Esq., a Reactionary Tory Gentleman, who armed only with a Steampowered Babbage Engine and Pure Intentions, wanders the Time Streams and Aetheric Plane gathering an Eccentric Hodgepodge of Curiousities, Frivolities, Whimsicalities and Nonsense.

Q. Why is your Tumblelog called "My Ear-Trumpet Has Been Struck by Lightning"?

A. Because "My Grandmother's Ear-Trumpet Has Been Struck by Lightning" wouldn't fit in the available space.

"Often these young inquirers read a book of mine - read it once, in the desperate rush which is apparently inseparable from modern education - and then they tell me what it means. Or rather they inquire about what it means indirectly, by a form of words that fills me with the desire to kill them. They look me in the eye and declare, “What you’re trying to say is …” and that is where I choke them off, roaring, “I’m not trying to say anything; I am saying it with all the art and skill that I have acquired in a lifetime of hard work.” But what I really ought to say is, “The book does not call for your reductive, half-baked explanation; it exists, and to you it may be a tale or a parable, or a direct revelation of reality; you will gain nothing by pulling it to pieces. It is like a clock, and if you observe it understandingly it will tell you what time it is in my life and yours, but if you pull it apart you will have nothing but a handful of junk."

— Robertson Davies, “Writing” (in The Merry Heart)

(Source: phantasmagorical)

"Alas, though necessity has driven me to read much that even Matthew Arnold would have approved, and a mountain of rubbish that nobody could approve – I mean mediocre journalism, government publications, the essays of students, and all that sort of thing – when I read for my own satisfaction, I read just as I please. That is why I have called this address “A Rake at Reading.” The phrase comes from a letter written to a friend by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu: “I have been a rake at reading,” says she. The word rake, in the middle of the eighteenth century when Lady Mary made her confession to the Countess of Bute, still meant to roam or stray, but I think she also meant it to have a hint of what was dissolute and irresponsible. So – I confess I have been a rake at reading. I have read those things which I ought not to have read, and I have not read those things which I ought to have read, and there is no health in me – if by health you mean an inclusive and coherent knowledge of any body of great literature. I can only protest, like all rakes in their shameful senescence, that I have had a good time."

— Robertson Davies, The Merry Heart, p.2 (via phantasmagorical)