This is rather good, I think, from Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey (1768):
‘I was walking down that which leads from the Carousal to the Palais Royal, and observing a little boy in some distress at the side of the gutter which ran down the middle of it, I took hold of his hand and help’d him over. Upon turning up his face to look at him after, I perceived he was about forty.—Never mind, said I, some good body will do as much for me when I am ninety.’
Well, A Sentimental Journey is essentially a novel, so the narrator is not exactly the author, but crossing the road when he was 90 was not a problem Sterne ever had. He died some months after A Sentimental Journey was published, aged 54.
And then, there was a piece in The London Review of Books, by Thomas Keymer, about the difficulty of pinning down the meaning of satire, and about ‘getting the wrong end of the stick.’ He writes:‘The cleverest inheritor of the phenomenon was Laurence Sterne, whose Tristram Shandy (1759-67) intersperses its narrative with explicit rebukes to imagined readers … The work was there to be grasped or debated as the reader wished, and when one of them sent Sterne a walking stick as a gift, it was, Sterne replied, ‘in no sense more Shandaic than in that of its having more handles than one’.
I must say I’d never seen a walking stick with more than one handle, but I find they do exist, like this:
But that’s not the same as grasping the wrong end. In most cases, with most walking sticks, there’s surely only one end you’d really want to grasp.
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