Elizabeth Madox Roberts? Harvey Wickham? Charles P. Curtis Jr.? Ferris Greenslet? Anonymous?
“Life is peculiar” said Jeremy. “Compared to what?” said the spider.
I have encountered this exchange several times, but I have never been able to determine its source, and I am unsure of the precise phrasing. There is a variant line with “very strange” instead of “peculiar”. Would you please explore this topic?
Reply from Quote Investigator: Elizabeth Madox Roberts was an acclaimed Kentucky novelist and poet who was part of the Southern Renaissance. In 1928 she published the satirical fantasy novel “Jingling in the Wind”. During one scene the character Jeremy converses with a spider which is weaving a web that embodies the entirety of human culture:[ref] 1928, Jingling in the Wind by Elizabeth Madox Roberts, Quote Page 230, The Viking Press, New York. (Verified with scans; thanks to Dennis Lien) [/ref]
“I have it all here, the whole of culture I draw it all out of myself with my long supple fingers, I pattern it on the air. I make it as I go, but it is made already within me, spinning . . .
A dark age is followed by an age of enlightenment, and here is a new religion. Votes for women, moral prescriptions, Egypt, India, Babylon, I make a knot, a rise and a decline.”
The spider rhapsodizes about the web, and Jeremy comments about the oddity of life. The ellipsis below appears in the original text. Boldface added to excerpts by QI:[ref] 1928, Jingling in the Wind by Elizabeth Madox Roberts, Quote Page 233, The Viking Press, New York. (Verified with scans; thanks to Dennis Lien) [/ref]
“Life, though, is peculiar,” said Jeremy.
“As compared with what?” said the spider.
“There has never been a great woman philosopher,” Jeremy began to say.
“All women are philosophers,” said the spider.
“Philosophies are the common knowledge of all females.”
“Has any woman poet ever been buried in the Poets’ Corner?” Jeremy asked.
“Who wants to be buried?” asked the spider.
Below are additional selected citations in chronological order.
In 1928 the book’s publisher, The Viking Press, ran advertisements in several periodicals promoting “Jingling in the Wind” including “The Saturday Review of Literature”[ref] 1928 September 29, The Saturday Review of Literature, The Viking Gallery (Advertisement from The Viking Press of New York for the book “Jingling in the Wind” by Elizabeth Madox Roberts), Quote Page 173, Column 2, New York. (Unz) [/ref] and the “New York Herald Tribune”. The ad compared the book to Sinclair Lewis’s “Babbitt” which is set in the city of Zenith. The dialog under examination achieved wide distribution because it appeared within the ad:[ref] 1928 September 23, New York Herald Tribune, The Viking Gallery (Advertisement from The Viking Press of New York for the book “Jingling in the Wind” by Elizabeth Madox Roberts), Quote Page J15, Column 3, New York. (ProQuest) [/ref]
Instead of a Zenith, however, or one of the towns along the Bandwagon route, there emerges here a city such as might have been included in the itinerary of Swift’s Gulliver. Jeremy, the Rain-Maker, comes to this city where adventure bombards the traveller; where Zelda the dancer holds men enthralled; where even the stars have fallen into the hands of Big Business and now blaze forth advertisements.
“Life, though, is peculiar,” said Jeremy.
“As compared with what?” said the spider.Despite the spider’s cryptic question, life remains peculiar to Jeremy—peculiar and singularly fascinating in this delightful fantasy and satire of modern civilization.
In 1931 an altered version of the dialog appeared in a book of literary criticism titled “The Unrealists” by Harvey Wickham. The name “Jeremy” was mistakenly changed to “Jerry”. The Latin phrase below means “It is certain because it is impossible”:[ref] 1933 (First published 1931), The Unrealists: William James, Bergson, Santayana, Einstein, Bertrand Russell, John Dewey, Alexander and Whitehead by Harvey Wickham, Chapter 1: What Do You Know?, Quote Page 6, Sheed & Ward, London. (Verified with scans) [/ref]
Certum est quia impossibile est; or, as Jerry puts it in Jingling in the Wind, “Life is very peculiar.”
“Compared with what?” said the spider.
That is just it. What is there which is not peculiar and totally impossible? Impossible, that is, for our own unaided selves to have brought about.
In 1945 Charles P. Curtis Jr. and Ferris Greenslet published a collection titled “The Practical Cogitator: Or, The Thinker’s Anthology”. A slightly altered version of the dialog appeared between the entries for Aristotle and William Allen White:[ref] 1975 (First edition 1945), The Practical Cogitator: Or, The Thinker’s Anthology, Selected by Charles P. Curtis Jr. and Ferris Greenslet, Third Edition, (Filler item between the entries for Aristotle and William Allen White), Quote Page 309, A Laurel Edition, Dell Publishing Company, New York. (Note: quotation was checked in the 1975 third edition; it has not yet been checked in the 1945 first edition) (Verified with scans) [/ref]
Life is peculiar, said Jeremy. As compared with what? asked the Spider.
In 1957 a reviewer in “The Atlantic Monthly” examined a recent book of quotations edited by Charles P. Curtis. The reviewer referred back to Curtis’s earlier compilation “The Practical Cogitator”:[ref] 1957 November, The Atlantic Monthly, The Atlantic Bookshelf: The Peripatetic Reviewer by Edward Weeks, Start Page 232, Quote Page 236, Published by The Atlantic Monthly Company at The Rumford Press, Concord, New Hampshire. (Verified online theatlantic.com; accessed September 21, 2022) link [/ref]
Many of these friends of his figured in The Practical Cogitator, which Mr. Curtis and Ferris Greenslet edited. And there is an unseen aid — Mrs. Curtis, whose quotations, according to her husband, “are usually better than their source.” Here is one of them: “Life is peculiar,” said Jeremy. “As compared with what?” asked the Spider.
In 1968 Norman Moss published “Men Who Play God: The Story of the H-Bomb and How the World Came To Live With It”. Moss printed a version of the dialog:[ref] 1968 Copyright, Men Who Play God: The Story of the H-Bomb and How the World Came To Live With It by Norman Moss, Chapter 10: Thinking Thermonuclear, Quote Page 237, Harper & Row, New York. (Verified with scans) [/ref]
But there is no standard of normalcy for thermonuclear war, by which one sort can be judged more bizarre or more unorthodox than another. To enter such a war would be to embark on a totally unprecedented situation. As an old saw has it:
“Life is peculiar,” said Jeremy.
“Compared with what?” asked the spider
In 1995 researcher H. H. Pattee published an article titled “Artificial Life Needs a Real Epistemology” in the proceedings of the “Third European Conference on Artificial Life”. Pattee used the dialog as an epigraph of his article. The accompanying footnote pointed to the 1945 edition of “The Practical Cogitator”:[ref] 1995, Proceedings: Advances in Artificial Life, Third European Conference on Artificial Life, Held in Granada, Spain on June 4-6, 1995, Editors: F. Morán, A. Moreno, J. J. Merelo, and O. Chacon, Article: Artificial Life Needs a Real Epistemology, Author: H. H. Pattee (Systems Science and Industrial Engineering Department, State University of New York at Binghamton), (Epigraph for article), Start Page 23, Quote Page 23, Publisher: Springer, Berlin. (Google Books Preview) [/ref]
Life is peculiar, said Jeremy. As compared with what? asked the spider.
In conclusion, Elizabeth Madox Roberts deserves credit for this dialog which appeared in her 1928 novel “Jingling in the Wind”. During subsequent decades the attribution became vague and the phrasing evolved which made tracing the expression more difficult.
Image Notes: An illustration of a spiderweb network from geralt at Pixabay. Image has been resized and cropped.
(Great thanks to Dennis Lien whose inquiry led QI to formulate this question and perform this exploration. Further thanks to Lien for accessing the crucial 1928 edition of “Jingling in the Wind”.)