Miserlily

I would be seated so cozily by your side, with Molly (kiss her for me, won’t you ?) on my knee, while we would chat, and laugh, and miserlily count over our hoards of pleasant memories.

At Leigh. Alone with them. Angel in France. It rained most of the time. It bores me terribly, being with them. The absolute empty dryness of such an existence. We seize on the little felicities – M’s cooking, F’s sporadic culture and old man’s endearingness. But the deadness at the heart of things. They shuffle through life now, subsisting mainly on television and gossip; gossip gone over and over again, miserlily.

Jajan means to serve one’s neighbours and elate them. We serve but miserlily our environment nowadays, and the whole country goes on like that. Big men tell us to be charitable, but we need impulse from within for works of charity. That is why jawjan is so important. It is the basis of jajan. And that is why we prefer jajaks, adharjus, and ritwiks to lead us in works of public service.

All the same, nobody can prevent us looking round the various malt distilleries which give the individual tastes which we sometimes can recognize in the blended bottles, and even on occasion and by favor (for the great blenders leave very few “single” whiskies for the connoisseur) picking up a lone bottle for evening sampling with chosen friends. This you will hoard, and treat as carefully as you would an authentically old fine champagne from Cognac—certainly, you will dole it out far more miserlily than you would any of the commercial liqueurs.

He published his dissertation and two text-books, and then began writing a continuing series of rather brilliant little monographs on a variety of subjects. They were short, incisive, novel contributions to learning, and, when graduate students began having to buy them, he became moderately and miserlily wealthy.

“Oh Morri, if only everything didn’t cost so much!” And the happier she became, the harder and more irritating it was to have to explain that he had the runs and that that was why he kept popping into all these cafés, so as to empty himself over their filthy insanitary holes in the ground. It was her fault (he had an itch now too) for the godawful diet she was miserlily insisting on; but she laughed and said he should learn to see the funny side of things.

Investigating more precisely, speculating almost uninterruptedly, Sambikin was coming to suppose that at the moment of death some kind of mysterious sluice opens in the human body, and that from this sluice there flows through the organism a special moisture which poisons the pus of death and washes away the ash of exhaustion, and which is carefully preserved all through life, up until the supreme danger. But where in the darkness, in the bodily ravines of a human being, is this sluice that faithfully and miserlily preserves the last charge of life?