The first significant instances of the Greek word eironeia occur in the dialogues of Plato , with reference to Socrates. It is here that eironeia no longer meant straightforward lying, as it did for Aristophanes; but an intended simulation which the audience or hearer was meant to recognise. Aristotle also referred to irony, most notably in his Ethics and Rhetoric, but it was the Platonic and Socratic use that became definitive for later thought.

Literary, verbal or situational, irony is usually an incongruity between the actual result of a sequence of events and the normal or expected result, in real life or fictional.
. There are several types of irony: Socratic ( feigning ignorance to expose others’ weaknesses as by Sacha Baron Cohen), tragic ( widely used by Shakespeare), cosmic,( also called irony of fate, like Beethoven losing his hearing), comic, historical, or Romantic ( usually associated with the group of Jena, German Romantic authors like the Schlegel brothers or Ludwig Tieck and sometimes mistaken for poetic justice). Also in Art, medieval gargoyles or the ironic Renaissance smiles or those works that will leave the viewer wondering about their deep hidden meaning, when sometimes there may be no hidden meaning at all…

I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him …
Shakespeare, Mark Antony’s speech, in which it is constantly emphasized that Brutus and the other conspirators are ” honourable men“, although the whole monologue aims at glorifying Caesar and incite the crowd against the assassins.

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.”
Jane Austen, opening line of Pride and Prejudice. In fact, it soon becomes clear that Austen means the opposite: women (or their mothers) are always in search of, and desperately on the lookout for, a rich single man to make a husband.

A classical example of Romantic irony is Percy Bysshe Shelley’s  letter to John Gisborne on  18 June 1822, in which he describes his new boat and the joys of sailing.. Shelley would drown while sailing twenty days later.

“No Modern Library edition of the great polemicists of the blogosphere to yellow on the shelf; nothing but a virtual tomb for a billion posts – a choric song of the wordweary bloggers, forlorn mariners forever posting on the slumberless seas of news.” ( from an article on blogging, in The Financial Times)

(February, by Margaret Atwood)

The Boulevard Montmartre at Night, by Pissarro(1897)

Romance originally referred to anything written in romanz, which meant derived from Latin, the language of the Romans. That’s why French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian and Romanian are called Romance languages. In the 12th century they called anything in vernacular French romance, while serious literature was still in Latin. Gradually a specific kind of literature emerged, usually about knights and their ladies, often set at the court of king Arthur and those tales were called romances. Women loved those poetic pieces, and that’s how the troubadours made their appearance as well as courtly love , or fin’amors as they called it in Provence.

In courtly love the knight serves his lady with the same loyalty as he serves his lord in feudalism. She is in complete control of the relationship while he owes her obedience and submission ( the love service). Courtly love was an inspiration, the knight would try to win the lady’s favours through great deeds. Marriage had nothing to do with love in those times, it was a contract betwen two families, so courtly love took the place of the real thing although it wasn’t necessarily ” immoral” or adulterous. Young knights went around sighing, lovesick as troubadours described them, usually in love with an older woman who was married to the feudal lord of the castle. Ladies felt extremely flattered and happy for the attention they got , husbands weren’t exactly the kind to bring them flowers or write poems dedicated to their wives.

Some authors see Andreas Capellanus’s “Art of Courtly Love” ( late 12th century) as only a satire on the fin’amors, not a serious set of rules. Anyway here are what he called TheTwelve Chief Rules in Love ( compare them with today’s “codes”, if any).

1.Thou shalt keep thyself chaste for the sake of her whom thou lovest. 2. Thou shalt not knowingly strive to break up a correct love affair that someone else is engaged in. 3.Thou shalt not chose for thy love anyone whom a natural sense of shame forbids thee to marry. 4. Be mindful completely to avoid falsehood. 5.Thou shalt not have many who know of thy love affair.

One of Gustav Klimt‘s beautiful gardens.

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,

To the last syllable of recorded time

…It is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

Signifying nothing (from Macbeth)

It’s arguable that books can change your life, some critics say they can’t, although they agree books can change your perspectives , opinions and the way you interact with others. The cynical, like me, believe that at least they can give you a much wider vocabulary and the know-how to use it, including the metaphors, so dear to Neruda. William Golding once said in an interview that he had spent about twenty years quoting Shakespeare, he would introduce the Bard to every lecture, literary discussion or mere conversation in which he participated. It took him a very long time to realize what a pain he might have been to his listeners, always with a quotation from The Tempest or Hamlet ready, making himself a bore to all but the most fervorous fans of William of Stratford or whoever wrote the plays . I once knew a man who would quote old comedy lines just like Golding did with Shakespeare’s works, after a while he got too predictable because we knew exactly what he was going to say under such or such circumstances. Literary trends are cyclical, there’s a tide for historical fiction, for fantasy or for romance, as well as for trash literature, it largely depends not on quality or even public tastes but on marketing techniques; if the target population are the uneducated with money to spend , then keeping them in the illusion they are becoming well read is the goal. That short passage from Macbeth reminded me of William Faulkner and his masterpiece ‘The Sound and the Fury‘, a novel divided into four parts each being narrated and/or focusing upon the perspective of an individual character and which I consider one of the greatest and most influential works of the twentieth century fiction.

Nobody wrote about loss as Faulkner did, a perfect example of how literature and philosophical concept complete each other. Also, and because reading is much more than a mechanic skill, Céline came to my mind with his definition of travel, from ‘Journey to the End of the Night’, another magnificent novel which seems to be more or less forgotten these days:

“Travel is very useful and it exercises the imagination. All the rest is disappointment and fatigue. Our own journey is entirely imaginary. That is its strength. It goes from life to death. People, animals, cities, things, all are imagined. It’s a novel, simply a fictitious narrative”.

Schopenhauer classified writers as meteors, planets and fixed stars. Meteors make striking effects for a short time but they’re soon gone for ever. Planets and wandering stars last for a much longer time and sometimes they even outshine the fixed stars, but it’s only because they are near and the inexperienced will not know the difference. But the light they give is reflected only, and the sphere of their influence is confined to their own orbit — their contemporaries.Their path is one of change and movement, and with the circuit of a few years their tale is told. Fixed stars are the only ones that are constant; their position in the firmament is secure; they shine with a light of their own; their effect to-day is the same as it was yesterday, because, having no parallax, their appearance does not alter with a difference in our standpoint. They belong not to _one_system,_one_nation only, but to the universe. And just because they are so very far away, it is usually many years before their light is visible to the inhabitants of the earth.

I’ve always loved Schopenhauer’s description, one can enjoy meteors, planets, wandering stars and all the rest, but today I ’m all for the fixed fixed stars, like Faulkner, Borges , or Céline, or William Shakespeare, the brightest star and  an endless source for quotations.

All the words that I utter,

And all the words that I write,

Must spread out their wings untiring,

And never rest in their flight,

Till they come where your sad, sad heart is,

And sing to you in the night,

Beyond where the waters are moving,

Storm-darken’d or starry bright.

(W.B. Yeats )

painting is Danish Landscape (1891), by Harald Slott-Moller.

Another view of the Gare Saint Lazare, in Paris, this time by Claude Monet. Railway stations and airports fascinate me, although they have lost a lot of their glamour with globalisation, they used to be much more romantic places.