Bad Air
In
Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar (Act I: Scene 2) Casca describes how the
people cheered for Caesar to take the proffered crown: “He put it the third
time by, and still as he refused it, the rabblement hooted, and clapped their
chapped hands, and threw up their sweaty nightcaps, and uttered such a deal of
stinking breath because Caesar refused the crown that it had, almost, choked
Caesar; for he swooned and fell down. And for mine own part, I durst not laugh,
for fear of opening my lips and receiving the bad air.”
In
Dostoevsky’s novel The Humiliated and the Insulted, Prince Valkovsky
remarks that if each of us should describe all the filth hidden away in our
inner selves and in our subconscious, then “such a stench would rise up above
the earth that we all would necessarily suffocate.”
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