On Nov 4, 2011, at 2:58 PM, Ron Andrico wrote: > Not Pascal but good old George Bernard Shaw, who also reviewed concerts with > a certain measure of wit.
I've seen it attributed to Shaw, Mark Twain and Oliver Wendell Holmes, not very specifically or reliably. The Provincial Letters were a polemic attacking the Jesuits (and defending Jansenism, which was under attack from the Jesuits), if I have this straight. An English translation was published in the US in 1828, and became fairly well known in a time when much of the American right wing made anti-Catholicism part of its political platform. The United States broke off diplomatic relations with the Vatican in 1867 and didn't restore them until 1984. So it would not be surprising if an American writer echoed Pascal's words. Shaw, of course, would have read Pascal, because he read everything. Anyone who writes for publication is aware that brevity can be time-consuming. When I'm perfectly happy with my 1500-word whatever that has to fit into a 1100-word space, I know I'm a long way from finished. Of course, Pascal did not actually write "The present letter is a very long one, simply because I had no leisure to make it shorter." He wrote, "Je n'ai fait celle-ci plus longue que parce que je n'ai pas eu le loisir de la faire plus courte." -- To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
