March 2, 2009
-
Fish Story, continued:
StraightFrom this journal's Sunday sermon:
"Flowers's thoughts stray to Brown,
with affectionate pity, as he
drinks port and eats walnuts
for the first time in
Senior Combination Room."-- G. H. Hardy recounting the plot
of A Fellow of Trinity
A Glossary of Cambridge: Combination Room
Attached to the High Table end of the largely unheated medieval college halls, this was a warm place for Fellows to gather before and after meals. Now known as the Senior Combination Room to distinguish it from the Junior and Middle combination rooms.George Herbert's "Redemption" --"'I resolved to be bold,/And make a suit unto him, to afford/A new small-rented lease and cancel th'old.'
But first he has to find him.... Either he's just left or he hasn't been seen, but then, unexpectedly and in the most unlikely circumstances, he turns up:
'At length I heard a ragged noise and mirth/Of thieves and murderers: there I him espied.'
Before he or his reader can ask 'what on earth are you doing here?,' the final line provides an answer with a compact swiftness that is literally breathtaking:
'Who straight, "Your suit is granted," said, and died.'"
For Senior Combination Room as
a den of thieves and murderers,
see That Hideous Strength.Related material:
G. H. Hardy died at 70
on December 1, 1947.
That date is now observed as
"Day Without Art."
Click on image
for further details.
