1: Pygmalion, George Bernard Shaw

A beautiful stage direction from Act IV:

Eliza's beauty becomes murderous

(Is there a book or website listing funny, amusing, interesting, and unusual stage directions? I thought I'd seen something of the sort, but all my "pursued by a bear" searches came up blank.)

Some concluding remarks from Act V:

LIZA: You see, really and truly, apart from the things anyone can pick up (the dressing and the proper way of speaking, and so on), the difference between a lady and a flower girl is not how she behaves, but how shes treated. I shall always be a flower girl to Professor Higgings, because he always treats me as a flower girl, and always will; but I know I can be a lady to you, because you always treat me as a lady, and always will.

HIGGINS: [...] The great secret, Eliza, is not having bad manners or good manners or any other particular sort of manners, but having the same manner for all human souls: in short, behaving as if you were in Heaven, where there are no third-class carriages, and one soul is as good as another. [...] The question is not whether I treat you rudely, but whether you ever heard me treat anyone else better.

HIGGINS: Would the world ever have been made if its maker had been afraid of making trouble? Making life means making trouble. Theres only one way of escaping trouble; and thats killing things. Cowards, you notice, are always shrieking to have troublesome people killed.

And from the "Sequel":

When Higgins excused his difference to young women on the ground that they had an irresistible rival in his mother, he gave the clue to his inveterate old-bachelordom. The case is uncommon only to the extent that remarkable mothers are uncommon. If an imaginative boy has a sufficiently rich mother who has intelligence, personal grace, dignity of character without harshness, and a cultivated sense of the best art of her time to enable her to make her house beautiful, she sets a standard for him against which very few women can struggle, besides effecting for him a disengagement of his affections, his sense of beauty, and his idealism from his specifically sexual impulses. This makes him a standing puzzle to the huge number of uncultivated people who have been brought up in tasteless homes by commonplace or disagreeable parents, and to whom, consequently, literature, painting, sculpture, music, and affectionate personal relations come as modes of sex if they come at all. The word passion means nothing else to them; and that Higgins could have a passion for phonetics and idealize his mother instead of Eliza, would seem to them absurd and unnatural. Nevertheless, when we look round and see that hardly anyone is too ugly or disagreeable to find a wife or a husband if he or she wants one, whilst many old maids and bachelors are above the average in quality and culture, we cannot help suspecting that the disentanglement of sex from the associations with which it is so commonly confused, a disentanglement which persons of genius achieve by sheer intellectual analysis, is sometimes producesd or aided by parental fascination.

...[Higgins] declared that if [Freddy] tried to do any useful work some competent person would have the trouble of undoing it: a procedure involving a net loss to the community, ....

And finally, from the Preface (Sweet was a phoneticist, and creator of a specific form of shorthand, which he used in the postcards described here):

The postcards which Mrs Higgins describes are such as I have received from Sweet. I would decipher a sound which a cockney would represent by zerr, and a Frenchman by seu, and then write demanding with some heat what on earth it meant. Sweet, with boundless contempt for my stupidity, would reply that it not only meant but obviously was the word Result, as no other word containing that sound, and capable of making sense with the context, existed in any language spoken on earth.

I find it interesting that Shaw's language is very imprecise, yet his meaning crystal clear. For example, in the above paragraph he does not explicitly state whom he's writing. I'd be tempted to stick a "back" or "in reply" after the write, but he sees it is not needed. I believe he treasures simple language. Things that would make my stomach wrench if others had written them somehow work and are quite pleasant from his hand; see for example the quotation above which uses five forms of "make" in two lines. Terrible, but I read right over it.

Finished January 1st.