Willard meets the General

The following is a transcription of part of the magnificent scene near the start of Apocalypse Now where Captain Willard goes to General Corman's compound to get his orders. He is asked questions by the General's subordinate, Colonel Lucas, played as you will all remember by Harrison Ford, while the General and a spook look on silently. I transcribed it because Stu & I wanted to get straight exactly what it said:

                                          Harrison Ford as Colonel Lucas

Lucas: You've worked a lot on your own, haven't you, Captain ?

Willard: Yes, sir, I have.

Lucas: Your report specifies intelligence, counter-intelligence with COMSEC/I-CORPS.

Willard: I am not presently disposed to discuss those operations, sir.

PAUSE

Lucas [reading from file]: Did you not work for the CIA in I-CORPS ?

Willard: No, sir.

Lucas: Did you not assassinate a government tax collector, Quang Tri province, June 18, 1968 ...... Captain ?

Willard: Sir, I am unaware of any such activity or operation [clears throat], nor would I be disposed to discuss such an operation if it did in fact exist - sir !

In Fossgate Books

One afternoon I was in a second-hand bookshop called Fossgate Books which is owned and run by my friend Alex. We were chatting about this and that. A young couple came in and disappeared off to browse. Later they reappeared. The man had two books to buy. His partner said in mock reproof, "You don't need those books." To which he simply replied, "You never need any books," and bought them. They left. It made both Alex and I think about the justice of what they'd each said. I remarked that by definition almost anyone who is in a bookshop has no business being there, since they probably already have more books than they know what to do with.

It makes me think now - can you put a limit to the book-lover's desire for books ? There is always some rationalisation, more or less satisfactory, for buying the next book or books. Some of them are justified (e.g. buying a guide book to the city you are going to visit) or almost so, some merely plausible, some impudent, some scarcely even believed by the book buyer themselves. "I want this because it is by X, or about Y , or fits with Z, which I am interested in." Prudence could well reply, "You seem to have a remarkably wide range of interests." The book buyer buys anyway. He or she is satisfying their obsession.

Some stray favourite stories now about book buyers & their libraries.

When Darwin, who as we know was a very methodical man, was thinking about getting married, he drew up a list, for & against, so that he could consider his options carefully. In the against column he wrote, "Less money for books."

Michael Foot's father, Isaac Foot, was supposed to have the largest library in private hands in England at that time. When I heard this fact, my instant reaction was "I want a bigger one." Isaac Foot also taught himself French at one point so that, as he said, he could read Montaigne in the original . This is one of the best reasons I have ever heard for anyone doing anything.

When Stanley Kubrick was alive, he once saw a television programme by the journalist Jon Ronson which he admired, so he invited Ronson to come & see him at his home, Childwickbury Manor in Hertfordshire. Ronson recalls that there was one room filled from floor to cieling with books about Napoleon. (Kubrick long planned a film about Napoleon which was ultimately never made. He had many discussions about it with Ian Holm, who he wanted to play the Emperor.) The existence of this room & its contents makes perfect sense to me, & if I could have such a thing I surely would.

One mad book collecting idea I have is this (many of my friends will have heard this one): I would like to get a copy of every single book of Christian theology ever written, then build a city of libraries to house them. When they were all assembled, & the city was complete, I would stand in the middle of it, stretch my arms out to indicate the millions of books all around and cry, "IT'S ALL NONSENSE !" Of course one could do this with the books generated by any monotheistic religion. But there has to be a limit somewhere.

Europe Then & Now

I am reading a book about The Thirty Years War at the moment. In the light of the current situation in Europe, you may well imagine how startled I was to read the following in that book (the subject is the finances of the French Government in the early 17th century):

"The war strained a system that worked only imperfectly even in peacetime. The monarchy always overspent, forcing it to borrow heavily. As in Spain, specific sources of revenue were mortgaged to financiers in return for loans. Revenue was not only spent before it had been collected, but large parts of the fiscal system were transferred into private hands, largely beyond government control. Only 49 per cent of expenditure under Richelieu was submitted to the royal audit office, with the remainder only presented in total. The government claimed exemption on grounds of national security, but the real reason was to hide the exorbitant rates of interest paid to financiers. A total of 700 million livres of loans (affaires extraordinaires) was raised between 1620 and 1644 at the cost of 172 million. The formal structure of ordinary taxation 'became little more than a front behind which the financiers carried on their affairs with studied indifference towards the damage that they did to the government and contempt for the suffering of the tax-paying element of the population'" 

- Peter H. Wilson, Europe's Tragedy: A New History of The Thirty Years War, Penguin, 2009, p.558

The quote in the last sentence is from J. Dent, Crisis in Finance. Crown, financiers & society in 17th century France, Newton Abbot, 1973, p.32

It may be remembered that the immediate trigger of the French Revolution was an unsolvable debt crisis in the government of Louis XVI.