Agriculture

At last I tired of bread and water, got on my good behavior, and took to reading. The prison had a splendid library, not a worthless book in it. All the best English authors were there and I went through them hungrily. I became so immersed in reading that I was careful not to break the rules lest I lose three days or more from my books. I got schoolbooks and studied them. Remembering my poor arithmetic, I tried mathematics but couldn't get anywhere. Then the grammar, but the rules seemed to have been made for no other purpose than to confuse the beginner and "repress his noble rage," so I gave that up, got intensely interested in a small dictionary, and almost went into the dark cell for carrying it out with me to work and looking into it when the guard's back was turned. I read the best books in the library, except the Bible, and would have taken that only I already had six months with it in the Scotchman's jail.

I went through Chambers's Encyclopedia from A to Z. Read all about acids and paper, metals and metallurgy, dies and molds. I studied the history of locks and lockmaking, poring over the pictures of locks and their escutcheons -- all kinds of locks and keys, door locks, padlocks, combination locks, nothing was neglected. I read a most interesting paper on picklocks and lock-picking by a famous lock-maker of London. I followed the history of explosives from gunpowder down to nitroglycerin. I found a passage that old clearly and concisely which explosives did the greatest damage and made the least noise. What a mine of information! I was fascinated. I studied guns and pistols, drills and saws and files, braces and bits and drilling machines of high and low pressure and fast or slow motion.

I investigated poisons, herbs, and drugs. I discovered that the finest quality of morphine may be obtained from lettuce and proved it in the prison garden by extracting it and eating it. I read up on sleeping and dreaming and learned just what kind of noise is most apt to wake a sleeping person; just when he sleeps the deepest and at what hour of the night his courage is at the lowest ebb. I can sit in a hotel lobby today and pick out the sound sleeper, the medium sleeper, and light sleeper. I got it out of the encyclopedia, and proved it in practice later.

Jack Black, You Can't Win (Edinburgh, UK: AK Press/Nabat, 2000), 189-190.

"But what about that big radish? You see it, don't you? Right there in the palm of your hand? And the little one? You see it too, don't you? Stunted! Dwarfed! This miserable puny radish! . . . A radish is a perfectly simple matter, isn't it? No, it's not simple? Ah, you disarm me! . . . And a giant radish, Ferdinand? Imagine an enormous radish! . . . Say as big as your head! . . . Suppose I take this ludicrous little radish and blow it up to enormous size with telluric blasts . . . Well? Like a balloon! Ah? And suppose I make a hundred thousand of them . . . a hundred thousand radishes! More and more voluminous! . . . And each year as many as I please . . . Five hundred thousand . . . enormous radishes! . . . As big as pears . . . As big as pumpkins! . . . Radishes such as nobody has ever seen! . . . Why, it's automatic . . . I eliminate the small radish . . . I wipe small radishes off the face of the earth! . . . I corner the market, I erect a monopoly! All your measly undersized vegetables are finished! Unthinkable! Through! All these baubles! These small-fry! No more tiny bunches! No more piddling shipments! If they keep, it's only by miracle . . . It's wasteful, my friend . . . anachronistic . . . shameful! . . . Enormous radishes, that's what I want to see! And here's our slogan: The future belongs to the radish . . . my radish . . . And what's going to stand in my way? My market? The whole world! . . . Is my radish nutritious? Tremendously! . . . Radish flour is fifty percent richer than the other kind . . . 'Radicious bread' for the army! . . . Far superior to all the wheat in Australia! . . . The analyses bear me out! . . . Well what do you think of it? . . . Is it beginning to dawn on you? You're not interested! Neither is she . . . But I am . . . If I devote myself to the radish . . . I'm only taking the radish as an example, I might have chosen the turnip . . . . But let's take the radish! The shock value will be greater. So there you are! I'm going into it! To the hilt! . . . to the hilt, do you hear . . . You catch my meaning?"

-- Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Death on the Installment Plan, tr. Ralph Manheim (New York: New Directions, 1966), 467-68.