{
  "export": {
    "source": "https://urth.darkrealm.vip/thread/urth/594",
    "note": "Exported from an unofficial mirror of a public mailing list. Copyright in each message remains with the person who wrote it.  Email addresses are obscured as `user at host`, the form the original archive published. This file was rebuilt from parsed fields rather than retained headers, so it is faithful in content but not byte-exact.",
    "addresses": "obscured as 'user at host'"
  },
  "archive": "urth",
  "thread": {
    "id": 594,
    "subject": "Suzanne (Horatio) Delage",
    "messages": 1,
    "voices": 1,
    "first": "1998-05-12T00:38:18+00:00",
    "last": "1998-05-12T00:38:18+00:00"
  },
  "messages": [
    {
      "message_id": "<urth-v0010-0144@digest.urth.net>",
      "from": {
        "name": "William H. Ansley",
        "address": "wansley at warwick.net"
      },
      "date": "1998-05-12T00:38:18+00:00",
      "subject": "Re: (urth) Suzanne (Horatio) Delage",
      "in_reply_to": null,
      "reply_link": null,
      "blocks": [
        {
          "kind": "quote",
          "depth": 1,
          "text": "Craig Christensen wrote:"
        },
        {
          "kind": "quote",
          "depth": 2,
          "text": "Peter Westlake wrote:\n\nThe Hamlet, at least, is easy:\n\n \"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,\n   Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.\"\n...\nIt's a very well-known quote (no offense!), hence \"Hamlet's hackneyed\nprecept\"."
        },
        {
          "kind": "quote",
          "depth": 1,
          "text": "None taken.  Yes, it is a very well-known quote, even to me.  But, aren't\nthere many familiar quotes from Hamlet? I haven't read the play for a\ncouple of years and didn't make the effort to check it myself.  I guess\nbecause I was so taken with the notion that forgetting was central to the\nstory, I was trying to recall a quote about memory. ..."
        },
        {
          "kind": "text",
          "depth": 0,
          "text": "One thing I am sure of (perhaps the *only* thing I am sure of) in this\nstory is that the \"Horatio\" quote is the one intended here. (Of course,\njust because I'm sure doesn't mean I'm right.) Look at the passage in\nquestion:\n\n------------\nThe idea which had so forcibly struck me was simply this: _that every man\nhas had in the course of his life some extraordinary experience, some\ndislocation of all we expect from nature and probability, of such magnitude\nthat he might in his own person serve as a living proof of Hamlet's\nhackneyed precept_ -- but that he has, nearly always, been so conditioned\nto consider himself the most mundane of creatures, that, finding no\nrelationship to the remainder of his life in this extraordinary experience,\nhe has forgotten it.\n------------\n\nNotice that I have used underscores to indicate the beginning and ending of\nthe use of italic text (at least its this way in the paperback copy of\n_Endangered Species_ I am referring to).\n\n(The use of italics seems odd, if it is not a mistake. It seems as if\neither too much or too little is italicized. I would guess that it is an\nerror and that all the text in the quote above, after the colon, was meant\nto have been in italics;  the whole thing is the striking fact, after all.\n\nWait, maybe Wolfe did this deliberately--maybe we're supposed to read\neverything in italics as meaning the opposite\n[italics--Italy--Romans--Greeks--Beware of Greeks bearing gifts!] So the\nstriking fact is that everyone really is perfectly ordinary and they have\nforgotten it!\n\nNahhh!)\n\nAnyway, my point is that the narrator mentions Hamlet *after* he talks\nabout the \"extraordinary experience\" but *before* he says anything about\nforgetting it. So \"Hamlet's hackneyed precept\" is about the unusual, not\nabout memory, making the Horatio quote most probably the one intended by\nfar.\n\nActually, the only other line from Hamlet that is so well know as to be\nhackneyed (that I can think of) is: \"To be, or not to be- that is the\nquestion...\" Hmmm, maybe this fits if we take it to mean existence and not\nsuicide.\n\nOh, well.\n\nWilliam Ansley"
        }
      ]
    }
  ]
}