This indigested vomit of the Sea,
Fell to the Dutch by Just Propriety.
--
The Character of Holland (c. 1653).Andrew Marvell
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Obscuritie in affection of words and indigested concets, is pedanticall and childish.
George Chapman
Even the street, the sunshine, the very air had a special Sunday quality. We walked differently on Sundays, with greater propriety and stateliness. Greetings were more formal, more subdued, voices more meticulously polite. Everything was so smooth, bland, polished. And genuinely so, because this was Sunday. In church the rustling and the stillness were alike pervaded with the knowledge that all was for the best. Propriety ruled the universe. God was in His Heaven, and we were in our Sunday clothes.
Rose Wilder Lane
ESSAY — A loose sally of the mind; an irregular indigested piece; not a regular and orderly composition.
Samuel Johnson
Now the sower went out, took a handful (of seeds), and scattered them. Some fell on the road; the birds came and gathered them up. Others fell on the rock, did not take root in the soil, and did not produce ears. And others fell on thorns; they choked the seed and worms ate them. And others fell on the good soil and produced good fruit: it bore sixty per measure and a hundred and twenty per measure. (9)
Jesus Christ
He was reminded of a Dutch book whose moral he often returned to: De Schoonheid van hoogspanningslijnen in het Hollandse landschap, written by a couple of academics in Rotterdam University, Anne Kieke Backer and Arij de Boode. The Beauty of Electricity Pylons in the Dutch Landscape was a defence of the contribution of transmission engineering to the visual appeal of Holland, referencing the often ignored grandeur of the towers on their march from power stations to cities. Its particular interest for Ian, however, lay in its thesis about the history of the Dutch relationship to windmills, for it emphasised that these early industrial objects had originally been felt to have all the pylons’ threateningly alien qualities, rather than the air of enchantment and playfulness now routinely associated with them. They had been denounced from pulpits and occasionally burnt to the ground by suspicious villagers. The re-evaluation of the windmills had in large part been the work of the great painters of the Dutch Golden Age, who, moved by their country’s dependence on the rotating utilitarian objects, gave them pride of place in their canvases, taking care to throw their finest aspect into relief, like their resilience during storms and the glint of their sails in the late afternoon sun. … It would perhaps be left to artists of our own day to teach us to discern the virtues of the furniture of contemporary technology.
Alain de Botton
Marvell, Andrew
Marx, Groucho
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