Jacques Barzun & Wendell Hertig Taylor, on Solitary Confinement by Christopher Burney: “A remarkable book and in some ways the most remarkable in this entire Catalogue. It records 18 months’ life in a French prison as a captive of the Gestapo during the Second World War. The observation and recall are not more amazing than the writing and compression of thought. Implications for criminology (especially discussions of capital punishment) and for sociology and education occur on every page. It is enough to mention that the prisoner’s transfer to Buchenwald toward the end of his ordeal struck him as disagreeable because of the threat of sociability.” (A Catalogue of Crime)

Soon I foresee few acres for harrowing
Left once the rich men’s villas have seized the land;
Fishponds that outdo Lake Lucrinus
Everywhere; bachelor place-trees ousting

Vine-loving elms; think myrtle-woods, violet-beds,
All kinds of rare blooms tickling the sense of smell,
Perfumes to drown those olive orchards
Nursed in the past for a farmer’s profit;

Quaint garden-screens, too, woven of laurel-boughs
To parry sunstroke. Romulus never urged
This style of life; rough-bearded Cato
Would have detested the modern fashions.

Small private wealth, large communal property —
So ran the rule then. No one had porticoes
Laid out with ten-foot builder’s measures,
Catching the cool of the northern shadow,

No one in those days sneered at the turf by the
Roadside; yet laws bade citizens beautify
Townships at all men’s cost and quarry
Glorious marble to roof the temples.

(Horace, Ode XV, Book II, Translated by James Michie)

I, who have never been
A generous or a keen
Friend of the gods, must now confess
Myself professor in pure foolishness

And, driven by sheer force
Of proof to alter course,
Must shift my sails and voyage back
To think again upon a different tack.

For Jove, who usually throws
A lightning-flash that goes
Glittering through intervening cloud,
This morning hurtled with his thunder-loud

Chariot and horses through
A sky entirely blue
The brute earth and its restless waters,
Styx and the hateful underworld’s grim quarters,

Even the last known land
Where Atlas takes his stand
Staggered. I see, then, that God can
Change high and low: the unregarded man

Steps up, the proud backs down.
Here Fortune sets a crown,
And there upon her screeching wing
She swoops to dispossess another king.

(Horace, Ode XXXIV, Book I, Translated by James Michie)

Leucon, no one’s allowed to know his fate,
Not you, not me: don’t ask, don’t hunt for answers
In tea leaves or palms. Be patient with whatever comes.
This could be our last winter, it could be many
More, pounding the Tuscan Sea on these rocks:
Do what you must, be wise, cut your vines
And forget about hope. Time goes running, even
As we talk. Take the present, the future’s no one’s affair.

(Horace, Ode XI, Book I, Translated by Burton Raffel)

Don’t ask (we may not know), Leuconoe,
What ends the gods propose for me
Or you. Let Chaldees try
To read the ciphered sky;

Better to bear the outcome, good or bad,
Whether Jove purposes to add
Fresh winters to the past
Or to make this the last

Which now tires out the Tuscan sea and mocks
Its strength with barricades of rocks.
Be wise, strain clear of the wine
And prune the rambling vine

Of expectation. Life’s short. Even while
We talk Time, grudging, runs a mile.
Don’t trust tomorrow’s bough
For Fruit. Pluck this, here, now.

(Horace, Ode XI, Book I, Translated by James Michie)