Word: byronism
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...months before he died of fever in Missolonghi in western Greece, broken and legendary at 36, George Gordon, Lord Byron, staged an elaborate practical joke on a friend. Knowing that a recent earthquake had frightened the friend badly, Byron sent fifty men into the basement of the house where they were staying, with instructions to jump up and down. Meanwhile, other men were dispatched to roll cannonballs back and forth across the upstairs rooms. The friend fled the shuddering house, terrified...
This is the sort of anecdote to which I have subjected my sainted roommates on an hourly basis in the six days since I turned in my thesis about Byron. I have also, in that time, slept a lot, returned 43 books to Widener, washed my clothes, and knit half a scarf—all in the hopes of eradicating the Christmas-afternoon feeling that has been haunting me since 5 o’clock Tuesday. It hasn’t worked. I can still feel Byron, poor man, unhouseled and perching on my bookshelf...
...Have you guys heard about the time, right after Byron’s exile, that his Swiss hotelier burst in on him, like, in flagrante delicto with a chambermaid, because the hotelier was convinced that Byron was getting it on with his wife?” They have...
...have it done: I no longer have a daily quota of pages to write, no longer have cause to visit Widener regularly, no longer consider the respective advantages of MLA and Chicago-style methods of citation. But I did not anticipate the emptiness of a life in which Byron has suddenly become superfluous...
Dubrovnik has had that effect on visitors for more than a millennium. Byzantine Emperor Constantine Porphyrogenitus wrote of "the city ... on the cliffs" to his son in the 10th century. The poet Lord Byron called it "the Pearl of the Adriatic" in the early 19th century. In the 1930s the British King Edward and Wallis Simpson sunbathed naked on a nearby island. (The current crop of celebrities drawn to the city includes Steven Spielberg, Sharon Stone and John Malkovich...