Litotes of the Year Award

This year's peerless understatement was made in the November 2007 edition of The New Criterion, which is, some days, my favorite magazine.

In the "Notes & Comments" section, which -- I think -- are penned by Hilton Kramer and Roger Kimball, the following bon mot is entered with sardonic mastery:

We think ... of the marquee outside the National Portrait Gallery in London that features, on one side, the beaming visage of Mick Jagger with the words "Please allow me to introduce myself" and, on the other side, an abstract portrait of T. S. Eliot with a famous line from Four Quartets: "Human kind cannot bear very much reality." It would require a lengthy disquisition to enumerate everything that had to go wrong to produce that conjunction.

Hear, hear. The NPG was right to quote Sir Jagger (I kid you not about the "sir" -- a sorry event that has to account for one of the beastliest signs of England's decline into Great Britain).

But the tragically idiotic reference to the thrush in Burnt Norton is akin to the story of one sycophantic gent, who once approached the poet Frost for his autograph. "Please write 'good fences make good neighbors' above your name," gushed the philistine. The man had joined the unlettered zillions who had snipped the line out of the sense of Mending Wall, and had rendered it into proverbial gas.

"No, they don't," Frost averred, and -- I think -- he refused to sign.

Imagine with me what Eliot would have done had he the unpleasantness to see his words juxtaposed with Jagger's satanic paean. He would have embarked on just the lengthy disquisition necessary to "enumerate everything that had to go wrong."

"Had to go wrong" and most assuredly did go wrong.