Recalling, late ’seventies, my allegiance to Régis Franc’s “Le Café de la Plage,” publish’d daily in the (short-lived) newspaper, Le Matin de Paris. More animals talking A brief appearance by Gertrude Stein, talking excruciating French, portray’d as a pig. More often, Little Nemo ’scapes, and voices carrying in off the miles, a distant ship-speck, a distant Saharan caravan-speck. Lots of “Courage, mes enfants!”
Ando Hiroshige (1797-1858)
The heart of décor is what. (How I want it to be “heart,” knowing in advance that it is not. Décor is what is pull’d (like an eel out of a horse’s water-sod head) out of the heart. The root of ornament is . . .
Samuel Johnson:
DECO•RUM. n.s. [Latin.]
Decency; behaviour contrary to licentiousness, contrary to levity; seemliness.
If your master
Would have a queen his beggar, you must tell him,
That majesty, to keep decorum, must
No less beg than a kingdom.
Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra.
I am far from suspecting simplicity, which is bold to trespass in points of decorum.
Wotton.
Beyond the fix’d and settled rules
Of vice and virtue in the schools,
The better sort should set before ’em
A grace, a manner, a decorum.
Prior.
Gentlemen of the army should be, at least, obliged to external decorum: a profligate life and character should not be a means of advancement.
Swift.
He kept with princes due decorum;
Yet never stood in awe before ’em.
Swift.
Clark Coolidge: “To create is to make a pact with nothingness.”
