Friday December 21, 2007
As I will be in Las Vegas for Christmas and Disneyland for New Years, posting entries will be put on the back-burner most likely until I get back. So, please have a great holiday, play safe, and try to stay out of trouble.
Best holiday wishes to all.
Monday November 26, 2007
In light of that perpetual step one takes each year as one approaches the top of the hill labeled old age, today is like any other. Or, as Ralph Parlett tactfully puts it: “Real birthdays are not annual affairs. Real birthdays are the days when we have a new birth.” Why do we invariably celebrate this “holiday” that stops nothing short of directly handing our wallets to greedy corporations, then?
The only logical conclusions I can surmise after minutes of hard-core contemplation are as follows:
1. The celebration serves to celebrate the day on which family and/or friends were “blessed” with the individual.
2. People are parasites for love and attention and (1) enjoy basking in the spotlight under which they are waited hand-and-foot to their every whim and (2) crave the sensation of feeling special.
3. There’s an unspoken competition among friends as to who hosts the best parties.
4. It’s all an excuse to receive gifts and eat artery-clogging cake.
That’s 5 of the 7 deadly sins in the course of a single day — Luxuria, Gula, Avaritia, Invidia, and Superbia. If it were up to Pope Gregory I, we’d all be in hell by now.
Others of us consider birthdays and New Years to be synonymous, where we reflect on what we’ve done wrong and how to prevent such blunders from occurring again or, simply put, we seek self-improvement. From what I’ve thus managed to gather from my 21 years of existence, self-improvement is a continuous process and an arduous one at that. Picking merely those 2 days out of 365 (not counting leap years) to reflect on ourselves and our surroundings is utterly pathetic. And we wonder why the current condition of our society is so abismal.
There is one show on TV that I absolutely cannot endure: My Super Sweet 16. Three words would describe such characters as seen on this show perfectly — Paris Hilton, Jr. I cannot even begin to form coherent sentences to convey the atrocities of the show and the people taking part in it. Suffice to say, I hope they learn how to put their money to better use once they ackowledge that daddy won’t be alive forever to plant money trees for them. Can you imagine how many famished families one of their exorbitantly extravagant birthday parties could feed? I’m not against celebrations, but a dress with $12,000 worth of diamonds as sequins is a smidgeon surpassing the boundary. Oh, and don’t even get me started on celebrities whose only transactions are houses, food, and clothes to satisfy their self-indulgent lives.
I digress.
I feel no better today than I did yesterday; I feel no worse today than I did yesterday. Besides serving as a tracking device to show the speed at which I am aging physically and (hopefully) maturing emotionally and mentally, birthdays have little significance. I do admit, however, that I look forward to having cake every year and spending time with those close to me but not to celebrate my birthday, instead, to celebrate the fact that we’ve remained friends until age ___.
I’ve said it multiple times before and I’ll say it again — it’s always the thought that counts. You can’t put a pricing on thoughtfulness.
Anyone up for sky-diving sometime in the near future? (I know, it’s a random question.)
Saturday November 17, 2007
For anyone who finds shiny, falling objects entertaining –
There’s going to be a meteor shower tonight! The Earth’s orbit will be passing through the debris zone left by the Temple-Tuttle comet, producing the Leonid meteor shower. The peak hour should be around 10pm (my time, i.e. CT), and it should average roughly 15 stars per hour. Seeing as how the cold front has approached, it’s the perfect time for some hot chocolate and some stargazing on the pool deck for me! …note to self, buy hot chocolate after publishing entry.
To all those out there with a significant other, bring a blanket, each other, and savor the moment!
Thursday November 15, 2007
This entry is short but just to satiate my curiosity…
I’ve never fully understood why rapacious characters are constantly out to “take over the world” either by killing all civilians or enslaving them. What’s the point? The former will yield a solitary world devoid of any human contact. The latter, though it may seem desirable at first, will grant you chattels but paranoia as well — a revolution is bound to erupt, it is not in human nature to want to be enslaved, to want to be inferior. I can understand that the path to such a feat may be exhilarating, an adrenaline rush, but — Gah! — what a stupid endeavor to seek.
So, what is the point? Do we all agree that it’s completely pointless? Good.
Monday November 12, 2007
In continuation of Part Two.
~*~
Of the Inconsistency of Our Actions
Those who make a practice of comparing human actions are never so perplexed as when they try to see them as a whole and in the same light; for they commonly contradict each other so strangely that it seems impossible that they have come from the same shop. One moment young Marius is a son of Mars, another moment a son of Venus. Pope Boniface VIII, they say, entered office like a fox, behaved in it like a lion, and died like a dog. And who would believe that it was Nero, that living image of cruelty, who said, when they brought him in customary fashion the sentence of a condemned criminal to sign: “Would to God I had never learned to write!” So much his heart wrung at condemning a man to death!
Everything is so full of such examples–each man, in fact, can supply himself with so many–that I find it strange to see intelligent men sometimes going to great pains to match these pieces; seeing that irresolution seems to me the most common and apparent defect of our nature, as witness that famous line of Publilius, the farce writer:
Bad is the plan that never can be changed.
Publilius Syrus
There is some justification for basing a judgment of a man on the most ordinary acts of his life; but in view of the natural instability of our conduct and opinions, it has often seemed to me that even good authors are wrong to insist on fashioning a consistent and solid fabric out of us. They choose one general characteristic, and go and arrange and interpret all a man’s actions to fir their picture; and if they cannot twist them enough, they go and set them down to dissimulation. Augustus has escaped them; for there is in this man throughout the course of his life such an obvious, abrupt, and continual variety of actions that evn the boldest judges have had to let him go, intact and unsolved. Nothing is harder for me than to believe in men’s consistency, nothing easier than to believe in their inconsistency. He who would judge them in detail and distinctly, bit by bit, would more often hit upon the truth.
In all antiquity it is hard to pick out a dozen men who set their lives to a certain and constant course, which is the principal goal of wisdom. For, to comprise all wisdom in a word, say an ancient [Seneca], and to embrace all the rules of our life in one, it is “always to will the same things, and always to oppose the same things.” I would not deign, he says, to add “provided the will is just”; for if it is not just, it cannot always be whole.
In truth, I once learned that vice is only unruliness and lack of moderation, and that consequently consistency cannot be attributed to it. It is a maxim of Demosthenes, they say, that the beginning of all virtue is consultation and deliberation; and the end and perfection, consistency. If it were by reasoning that we settled on a particular course of action, we would choose the fairest course–but no one has thought of that:
He spurns the thing he sought, and seeks anew
What he just spurned; he seethes, his life’s askew.
Horace
Our ordinary practice is to follow the inclinations of our appetite, to the left, to the right, uphill and down, as the wind of circumstance carries us. We think of what we want only at the moment we want it, and we change like that animal which takes the color of the place you set it on. What we have just now planned, we presently change, and presently again we retrace our steps: nothing but oscillation and inconsistency:
Like puppets we are moved by outside strings.
Horace
We do not go; we are carried away, like floating objects, now gently, now violently, according as the water is angry or calm:
Do we not see all humans unaware
Of what they want, and always searching everywhere,
And changing place, as if to drop the load they bear?
Lucretius
Every day a new fancy, and our humors shift with the shifts in the weather:
Such are the minds of men, as is the fertile light
That Father Jove humself sends down to made earth bright.
Homer
We float between different states of mind; we wish nothing freely, nothing absolute, nothing constantly. If any man could prescribe and establish definite laws and definite organization in his head, we should see shining throughout his life an evenness of habits, an order, and an infallible relation between his principles and his practice.
Empedocles noticed this inconsistency in the Agrigentines, that they abandoned themselves to pleasures as if they were to die on the morrow, and built as if they were never to die.
This would be easy to understand, as if shown by the example of the younger Cato: he who has touched one chord of him has touched all; he is a harmony of perfectly concordant sounds, which cannot conflict. With us, it is the opposite: for so many actions, we need so many individual judgments. The surest thing, in my opinion, would be to trace our actions to the neighboring circumstances, without getting into any further research and without drawing from them any other conclusions.
During the disorders of our poor country, I was told that a girl, living near where I then was, had thrown herself out of a hight window to avoid the violence of a knavish soldier quartered in her house. Not killed by the fall, she reasserted her purpose by trying to cut her throat with a knife. From this she was prevented, but only after wounding herself gravely. She herself confessed that the solder had as yet pressed her only with requests, solicitations, and gifts; but she had been afraid, she said, that he would finally resort to force. And all this with such words, such expressions, not to mention the blood that testified to her virtue, as would have become another Lucrece. Now, I learned that as a mater of fact, both before and since, she was a wench not so hard to come to terms with. As the story says: Handsome and gentlemanly as you may be, when you have had no luck, do not promptly conclude that your mistress is inviolably chaste; for all you know, the mule driver may get his will with her.
Antigonus, having taken a liking to one of his soldiers for his virtue and valor, ordered his physicians to treat the man for a persistent internal malady that had only tormented him. After his cure, his master noticed that he was going about his business much less warmly, and asked him what had changed him so and made him such a coward. “You yourself, Sire,” he answered, “by delivering me from the ills that made my life indifferent to me.” A soldier of Lucullus who had been robbed of everything by the enemy made a bold attack on them to get revenge. When he had retrieved his loss, Lucullus having formed a good opinion of him, urged him to some dangerous exploit with all the dine expostulations he could think of,
With words that might have stirred a coward’s heart.
Horace
“Urge some poor soldier who has been robbed to do it,” he replied;
Though but a rustic lout,
“That man will go who’s lost his money,” he called out;
Horace
and resolutely refused to go.
We read that sultan Mohammed outrageously berated Hassan, leader of his Janissaries, because he saw his troops giving way to the Hungarians and Hassan himself behaving like a coward in the fight, Hassan’s only reply was to go and hurl himself furiously–alone, just as he was, arms in hand–into the first body of enemies that he met, by whom he was prompt swallowed up; this was perhaps not so much self-justification as a change of mood, nor so much his natural valor as fresh spite.
That man whom you saw so adventurous yesterday, do not think it strange to find him just as cowardly today: either anger, or necessity, or company, or wine, or the sound of a trumpet, had put his heart in his belly. He was a courage formed not by reason, but by one of those circumstances; it is no wonder if he has now been made different by other, contrary circumstances.
These supple variations and contradictions that are seen in us have made some imagine that we have two souls, and others that two powers accompany us and drive us, each in its own way, one toward good, the other toward evil; for such sudden diversity cannot well be reconciled with a simple subject.
Not only does the wind of accident move me at will, but, besides, I am moved and disturbed as a result merely of my own unstable posture; and anyone who observes carefully can hardly find himself twice in the same state. I give my soul now one face, now another, according to which direction I turn it. If I speak of myself in different ways, that is because I look at myself in different ways. All contradictions may be found in me by some twist and in some fashion: Bashful, insolent; chaste, lascivious; talkative, taciturn; tough, delicate; clever, stupid; surly, affable; lying, truthful; learned, ignorant; liberal, miserly, and prodigal: all this this I see in myself to some extent according to how I turn; and whoever studies himself really attentively find in himself, yes, even in his judgment, this gyration and discord. I have nothing to say about myself absolutely, simply, and solidly, without confusion and without mixture, or in one word. Distinguo is the most universal member of my logic.
Although I am always minded to say good of what is good, and inclined to interpret favorably anything that can be so interpreted, still it is true that the strangeness of our condition makes it happen that we are often driven to do good by vice itself–were it not that doing good is judged by intention alone.
Therefore one courageous deed must not be taken to prove a man valiant; a man who was really valiant would be so always and on all occasions. If valor were a habit of virtue, and not a sally, it would make a man equally resolute in any contingency, the same alone as in company, the same in single combat as in battle; for, whatever they say, there is not one valor for the pavement and another for the camp. As bravely would he bear an illness in his bed as a wound in camp, and he would fear death no more in his home than in an assault. We would not see the same man charging into the breach with brave assurance, and later tormenting himself, like a woman, over the loss of a lawsuit or a son. When, though a coward against infamy, he is firm against poverty; when, though weak against the surgeon’s knives, he is steadfast against the enemy’s swords, the action is praiseworthy, not the man.
Many Greeks, say Cicero, cannot look at the enemy, and are brave in sickness; the Cimbrians and Celtiberians, just the opposite; for nothing can be uniform that does not spring from a firm principle [Cicero].
There is no more extreme valor of its kind than Alexander’s; but it is only of one kind, and not complete and universal enough. Incomparable though it is, it still has its blemishes; which is why we see him worry so frantically when he conceives the slightest suspicion that his men are plotting against his life, and why he behaves in such matters with such violent and indiscriminate injustice and with a fear that subverts his natural reason. Also superstition, with which he was so strongly tainted, bears some stamp of pusillanimity. And the excessiveness of the penance he did for the murder of Clytus is also evidence of the unevenness of his temper.
Our actions are nothing but a patchwork–they despise pleasure, but are too cowardly in pain; they are indifferent to glory, but infamy breaks their spirit[Cicero]–and we want to gain humor under false colors. Virtue will not be followed except for her own sake; and if we sometimes borrow her mask for some other purpose, she promptly snatches it from our face. It is a strong and vivid dye, once the soul is steeped in it, and will not go without taking this fabric with it. That is why, to judge a man, we must follow his traces long and carefully. If he does not maintain consistency for its own sake, with a way of life that has been well considered and preconcerted [Cicero]; if changing circumstances makes him change his pace (I mean his path, for his pace may be hastened or slowed), let him go: that man goes before the wind, as the motto of our Talbot says.
It is no wonder, says an ancient [Seneca], that change has so much power over us, since we live by change. A man who has not directed his life as a whole toward a definite goal cannot possibly set his particular actions in order. A man who does not have a picture of the whole in his head cannot possible arrange the pieces. What good does it do a man to lay in a supply of paints if he does not know what he is to paint? No one makes a definite plan of his life; we think about it only piecemeal. The archer must first know what is is aiming at, and then set his hand, his bow, his string, his arrow, and his movements for that goal. Our plans go astray because they have no direction and no aim. No wind works for the man who has no port of destination.
I do not agree with the judgment given in favor of Sophocles, on the strength of seeing one of his tragedies, that it proved him competent to manage his domestic affairs, against the accusation of his son. Nor do I think that the conjecture of the Parians sent to reform the Milesians was sufficient ground for the conclusion they drew. Visiting the island, they noticed the best-cultivated lands and the best-run country houses, and noted down the names of their owners. Then they assembled the citizens in the town and appointed these owners the new governors and magistrates, judging that they, who were careful of their private affairs, would be careful of those of the public.
We are all patchwork, and so shapeless and diverse in composition that each bit, each moment, plays its own game. And there is as much difference between us and ourselves as between us and others. Consider it a great thing to play the part of one single man[Seneca]. Ambitions can teach men valor, and temperance, and liberality, and even justice. Greed can implant in the heart of a shop apprentice, brought up in obscurity and idleness, the confidence to cast himself far from hearth and home, in a frail boat at the mercy of the waves and angry Neptune; it also teaches discretion and wisdom. Venus herself supplies resolution and boldness to boys still subject to discipline and the rod, and arms the tender hearts of virgins who are still in their mothers’ laps:
Furtively passing sleeping guards, with Love as guide,
Alone by night the girl comes to the young man’s side.
Tibullus
In view of this, a sound intellect will refuse to judge men simply by their outward actions; we must probe the inside and discover what springs set men in motion. But since this is an arduous and hazardous understaking, I wish fewer people would meddle with it.
~*~
Fin.
Saturday November 10, 2007
(In continuation of Part One.)
~*~
For the rest, they live in a country with a very pleasant and temperate climate, so that according to my witnesses it is rare to see a sick man there; and they have assured me that they never saw one palsied, bleary-eyed, toothless, or bent with age. They are settled along the sea and shut in on the land side by great high mountains, with a stretch about a hundred leagues wide in between. They have a great abundance of fish and flesh which bear no resemblance to ours, and they eat them with no other artifice than cooking. The first man who rode a horse there, though he had had dealings with them on several other trips, so horrified them in this posture that they shot him dead with arrows before they could recognize him.
Their buildings are very long, with a capacity of two or three hundred souls; they are covered with the bark of great trees, the strips reaching to the ground at one end and supporting and leaning on one another at the top, in the manner of some of our barns, whose covering hands down to the ground and acts as a side. They have wood so hard that they cut with it and make of it their swords and grills to cook their food. Their beds are of cotton weave, hung from the roof like those in our ships, each man having his own; for the wives sleep apart from their husbands.
They get up with the sun, and eat immediately upon rising, to last them through the day, for they take no other meal than one. Like some other Eastern peoples, of whom Suidas tells us, who drank apart from meals, they do not drink then; but they drink several times a day, and to capacity. Their drink is made of some root, and is of the color of our claret wines. They drink it only lukewarm. This beverage keeps only two or three days; it has a slightly sharp taste, is not at all heady, is good for the stomach, and has a laxative effect upon those who are not used to it; it is a very pleasant drink for anyone who is accustomed to it. In place of bread they use a certain white substance like preserved coriander. I have tried it; it tastes sweet and a little flat.
The whole day is spent in dancing. The younger men go to hunt animals with bows. Some of the women busy themselves meanwhile with warming their drink, which is their chief duty. Some one of the old men, in the morning before they begin to eat, preaches to the whole barnful in common, walking from one end to the other, and repeating one single sentence several times until he has completed the circuit (for the building are fully a hundred paces long). He recommends to them only two things: valor against the enemy and love for their wives. And they never fail to point out this obligation, as their refrain, that it is their wives who keep their drink warm and seasoned.
There may be seen in several places, including my own house, specimens of their beds, of their ropes, of their wooden swords and the bracelets with which they cover their wrists in combats, and of the big canes, open at one end, by whose sound they keep time in their dances. They are close shaven all over, and shaves themselves much more cleanly than we, with nothing but a wooden or stone razor. They believe that souls are immortal, and that those who have deserved well of the gods are lodged in that part of heaven where sun rises, and the damned in the west.
They have some sort of priests and prophets, but they rarely appear before the people, having their home in the mountains. On their arrival there is a great feast and solemn assembly of several villages–each barn, as I have described it, makes up a village, and they are about one French league from each other. The prophet speaks to them in public, exhorting them to virtue and their duty; but their whole ethical science contains only these two articles: resoluteness in war and affection for their wives. He prophesies to them things to come and the results they are to expect from their undertakings, and urges them to war or holds them back from it; but this is on the condition that when he fails to prophesy correctly, and if things turn out otherwise than he has predicted, he is cut into a thousand pieces if they catch him, and condemned as a false prophet. For this reason, the prophet who has once been mistaken is never seen again.
Divination is a gist of God; that is why its abuse should be punished as imposture. Among the Scythians, when the soothsayers failed to hit the mark, they were laid, chained hand and foot, on carts full of heather and drawn by oxen, on which they were burned. Those who handle matters subject to the control of human capacity are excusable if they do the best they can. But these others who come and trick us with assurances of an extraordinary faculty that is beyond our ken, should they not be punished for not making food their promise, and for the temerity of their imposture?
They have their wars with the names beyond the mountains, further inland, to which they go quite naked, with no other arms than bows or wooden swords ending in a sharp point, in the manner of the tongues of our boar spears. It is astonishing what firmness they show in their combats, which never end but in slaughter and bloodshed; for as to routs and terror, they know nothing of either.
Each man brings back his trophy the head of the enemy he has killed, and sets it up at the entrance to his dwelling. After they have treated their prisoners well for a long time with all the hospitality they can think of, each man who has a prisoner calls a great assembly of his acquaintances. He ties a rope to one of the prisoner’s arms, by the end of which he holds him, a few steps away, for fear of being hurt, and gives his dearest friend the other arm to hold in the same way; and these two, in the presence of the whole assembly, kill him with their swords. This done, they roast him and eat him in common and send some pieces to their absent friends. This is not, as people think, for nourishment, as of old the Scythians used to do; it is to betoken an extreme revenge. And the proof of this came when they saw the Portuguese, who had joined forces with their adversaries, inflict a different kind of death on them when they took them prisoner, which was to bury them up to the waist, shoot the rest of their body full of arrows, and afterward hang them. They thought that these people from the other words, being men who had sown the knowledge of many vices among their neighbors and were much greater masters than themselves in every sort of wickedness, did not adopt this sort of vengeance without some reason, and that it must be more painful than their own; so they began to give up their old method and to follow this one.
I am not sorry that we notice the barbarous horror of such acts, but I am heartily sorry that, judging their faults rightly, we should be so blind to our own. I think there is more barbarity in eating a man alive than in eating him dead; and in tearing by tortures and the rack a body still full of feeling, in roasting a man bit by bit, in having him bitten and mangled by dogs and swine (as we have not only read but seen within fresh memory, not among ancient enemies, but among neighbors and fellow citizens, and what is worse, on the pretext of piety and religion), than in roasting and eating him after he is dead.
Indeed, Chrysippus and Zeno, heads of the Stoic sect, thought there was nothing wrong in using our carcasses for any purpose in case of need, and getting nourishment from them; just as our ancestors, when besieged by Caesar in the city of Alesia, resolved to relieve their famine by eating old men, women, and other people useless for fighting.
The Gascons once, ’tis said, their life renewed
By eating of such food.
Juvenal
And physicians do not fear to use human flesh in all sorts of ways for our health, applying it either inwardly or outwardly. But there never was any opinion so discorded as to excuse treachery, disloyalty, tyranny, and cruelty, which are our ordinary vices.
So we may call these people barbarians, in respect to the rules of reason, but not in respect to ourselves, who surpass them in every kind of barbarity.
Their warfare is wholly noble and generous, and as excusable and beautiful as this human disease can be; its only basis among them is their rivalry in valor. They are not fighting for the conquest of new lands, for they still enjoy that natural abundance that provides them without toil and trouble with all necessary things in such profusion that they have no wish to enlarge their boundaries. They are still in that happy state of desiring only as much as their natural needs demand; anything beyond that is superfluous to them.
They generally call those of the same age, brothers; those who are younger, children; and the old men are fathers to all the others. These leave to their heirs in common the full possession of their property, without division or any other title at all than just the one that Nature gives to her creatures in bringing them into the world.
If their neighbors cross the mountains to attack them and win a victory, the gain of the victory is glory, and the advantage of having proved the master in valor and virtue; for apart from this they have no use for the goods of the vanquished, and they return to their own country, where they lack neither anything necessary no that great thing, the knowledge of how to enjoy their condition happily and be content with it. These men of ours do the same in their turn. They demand of their prisoners no other ransom than that they confess and acknowledge their defeat. But there is not one in a whole century who does not choose to die rather than to relax a single but, by word or look, from the grandeur of an invincible courage; not one who would not rather be killed and eaten than so much as ask not to be. They treat them very freely, so that life may be all the dearer to them, and usually entertain them with threats of their coming death, of the torments they will have to suffer, the preparations that are being made for the purpose, the cutting up of their limbs, and the feast that will be made at their expense. All this is done for the sole purpose of exhorting from their lips some weak or base word, or making them want to flee, so as to gain the advantage of having terrified them and broken down their firmness. For indeed, if you take it the right way, it is in this point alone that true victory lies:
It is no victory
Unless the vanquished foe admits your mastery.
Claudian
The Hungarians, very bellicose fighters, did not in olden times pursue their advantage beyond putting the enemy at their mercy. For having wrung a confession from him to this effect, they let him go unharmed and unransomed, except, at most, for exacting his promise never again to take up arms against them.
We win enough advantages over our enemies that are borrowed advantages, not really our own. It is the quality of a porter, not of valor, to have sturdied arms and legs; agility is a dead and corporeal quality; it is a stroke of luck to make our enemy stumble, or dazzle his eyes by the sunlight; it is a trick of art and technique, which may be found in a worthless coward, to be an able fencer. The worth and value of a man is in his heart and his will; there lies his real honor. Valor is the strength, not of legs and arms, but of heart and soul; it consists not in the worth of our horse or our weapons, but in our own. He who falls obstinate in his courage, if he has fallen, he fights on his knees [Seneca]. He who relaxes none of his assurance, no matter how great the danger of imminent death; who, giving up his soul, still looks firmly and scornfully at his enemy–he is beaten not by us, but by fortune; he is killed, not conquered.
The most valiant are sometimes the most unfortunate. Thus there are triumphant defeats that rival victories. Nor did those four sister victories, the fairest that the sun ever set eyes on–Salamis, Plataea, Mycale, and Sicily–ever dare match all their combined glory against the glory of the annihilation of King Leonidas and his men at the pass of Thermopylae.
Who ever hastened with more glorious and ambitious desire to win a battle than Captain Ischolas to lose one? Who ever secured his safety more ingeniously and painstakingly than he did his destruction? He was charged to defend a certain pass in the Peloponnesus against the Arcadians. Finding himself wholly incapable of doing this, in view of the nature of the place and the inequality of the forces, he made up his mind that all who confronted the enemy would necessarily have to remain on the field. On the other hand, deeming it unworthy both of his own virtue and magnanimity and of the Lacedaemonian name to fail in his charge, he took a middle course between these two extremes, in this way. This youngest and fittest of his band he preserved for the defense and service of their country, and sent them home; and with those whose loss was less important, he determined to hold this pass, and by their death to make the enemy buy their entry as dearly as he could. And so it turned out. For he was presently surrounded on all sides by the Arcadians, and after slaughtering a large number of them, he and his men were all put to the sword. Is there a trophy dedicated to victors that would not be more due to these vanquished? The role of true victory is in fighting, not in coming off safely; and the honor of valor consists in combating, not in beating.
To return to our story. These prisoners are so far from giving in, in spite of all that is done to them, that on the contrary, during the two or three months that they are kept, they wear a gay expression; they urge their captors to hurry and put them to the test; they defy them, insult them, reproach them with their cowardice and the number of battles they have lost to the prisoners’ own people.
I have a song composed by a prisoner which contains this challenge, that they should all come boldly and gather to dine off him, for they will be eating at the same time their own fathers and grandfathers, who have served to feed and nourish his body. “These muscles,” he says, “this flesh and these veins are your own, poor fools that you are. You do not recognize that the substance of your ancestors’ limbs is still contained in them. Savor them well; you will find in them the taste of your own flesh.” An idea that certainly does not smack of barbarity. Those that paint these people dying, and who show the execution, portray the prisoner spitting in the face of his slayers and scowling at them. Indeed, to the last gasp they never stop braving and defying their enemies by word and look. Truly here are real savages by our standards; for either they must be thoroughly so, or we must be; there is an amazing distance between their character and ours.
The men there have several wives, and the higher their reputation for valor the more wives they have. It is a remarkably beautiful thing about their marriages that the same jealousy our wives have to keep us from the affection and kindness of other women, theirs have to win this for them. Being more concerned for their husbands’ honor than for anything else, they strive and scheme to have as many companions as they can, since that is a sign of their husbands’ valor.
Our wives will cry “Miracle!” but it is no miracle. It is a properly matrimonial virtue, but one of the highest order. In the Bible, Leah, Rachel, Sarah, and Jacob’s wives gave three beautiful handmaids to their husbands; and Livia seconded the appetites of Augustus to her own disadvantage; and Stratonice, the wife of King Deiotarus, not only lent her husband for his use a very beautiful young chambermaid in her service, but carefully brought up her children, and backed them up to succeed to their father’s estates.
And lest it be thought that all this is done through a simple and servile bondage to usage and through the pressure of the authority of their ancient customs, without reasoning or judgment, and because their minds are so stupid that they cannot take any other course, I must cite some examples of their capacity. Besides the warlike song I have just quoted, I have another, a love song, which begins in this vein: “Adder, stay, stay, adder, that from the pattern of your coloring my sister may draw the fashion and the workmanship of a rich girdle that I may give to my love; so may your beauty and your pattern be forever preferred to all other serpents.” This first couplet is the refrain of the song. Now I am familiar enough with poetry to be a judge of this: not only is there nothing barbarous in this fancy, but it is altogether Anacreontic. Their language, moreover, is a soft language, with an agreeable sound, somewhat like Greek in its endings.
Three of these men, ignorant of the price they will pay some day, in loss of repose and happiness, for gaining knowledge of the corruptions of this side of the ocean; ignorant also of the fact that of this intercourse will come their ruin (which I suppose is already well advanced: poor wretches, to let themselves be tricked by the desire for new things, and to have left the serenity of their own sky to come and see ours!)–three of these men were at Rouen, at the time the late King Charles IX was there. The king talked to them for a long time; they were shown our ways, our splendor, the aspect of a fine city. After that, someone asked their opinion, and wanted to know what they had found most amazing. They mentioned three things, of which I have forgotten the third, and I am very sorry for it; but I still remember two of them. They said that in the first place they thought it very strange that so many grown men, bearded, strong, and armed, who were around the king (it is likely that they were talking about the Swiss of his guard) should submit to obey a child, and that one of them was not chosen to command instead. Second (they have a way in their language of speaking of men in halves of another), they had noticed that there were among us men full and gorged with all sort of good things, and that their other halves were beggars at their doors, emaciated with hunger and poverty; and they thought it strange that these needy halves could endure such an injustice, and did not take the others by the throat, or set fire to their houses.
I had a very long talk with one of them; but I had an interpreter who followed my meaning so badly, and who was so hindered by his stupidity in taking in my ideas, that I could get hardly any satisfaction from the man. When I asked him what profit he gained from his superior position among his people (for he was a captain, and our sailors called him king), he told me that it was to march foremost in war. How many men followed him? He pointed to a piece of ground, to signify as many as such a space could hold; it might have been four or five thousand men. Did all this authority expire with the war? He said that this much remained, that when he visited the villages dependent on him, they made paths for him through the underbrush by which he might pass quite comfortably.
All this is not too bad–but what’s the use? They don’t wear breeches.
~*~
The Inconsistencies of Our Actions will be coming soon.
Thursday November 8, 2007
The unusual increase in the series of discriminatory events occurring in society lately warrants the next segue of entries. These entries are not my original writings; rather, they are pieces from one of my favorite compilations of essays: Essays. Of Cannibals, Essays. Of the Inconsistency of Our Actions, and Essays. Of Repentanceby Miguel de Montaigne. I will be posting pieces of the essays for the next couple of days in hopes that readers will find the works as enjoyable as I found them to be. Of course, if you prefer not to indulge in analytical readings by French writers, this website should return to its original state by the beginning of next week.
Please note: In order to increase efficiency, all typing will be done with eyes glued to the text instead of the keyboard and/or screen; hence, I sincerely apologize for any spelling, punctuation, and such errors.
~*~
To the Reader
This book was written in good faith, reader. It warns you from the outset that in it I have set myself no goal but a domestic and private one. I have had no thought of serving either you or my own glory. My powers are inadequate for such a purpose. I have dedicated it to the private convenience of my relatives and friends, so that when they have lost me (as soon they must), they may recover here some features of my habits and temperament, and by this means keep the knowledge they have had of me more complete and alive.
If I had written to seek the world’s favor, I should have bedecked myself better, and should present myself in a studied posture. I want to be seen here in my simple, natural, ordinary fashion, without straining or artifice; for it is myself that I portray. My defects will here be read to the life, and also my natural form, as far as respect for the public has allowed. Had I been placed among those nations which are said to live still in the sweet freedom of nature’s first laws, I assure you I should very gladly have portrayed myself here entire and wholly naked.
Thus, reader, I am myself the matter of my book; you would be unreasonable to spend your leisure on so frivolous and vain a subject.
So farewell. Montaigne, this first day of March, fifteen hundred and eighty.
Of Cannibals
When King Pyrrhus passed over into Italy, after he had reconnoitered the formation of the army that the Romans were sending to meet him, he said: “I do not know what barbarians these are” (for so the Greeks called all foreign nations), “but the formation of this army that I see is not at all barbarous.” The Greeks said as much of the army that Flamininus brought into their country, and so did Philip, seeing from a knoll the order and distribution of the Roman camp, in his kingdom, under Publius Sulpicius Galba. Thus we should beware of clinging to vulgar opinions, and judge things by reason’s way, not by popular say.
I had wit me for a long time a man who had lived for ten or twelve years in that other world which has been discovered in our century, in the years in that other world which has been discovered in our century, in the place where Villegaignon landed, and which he called Antarctic France. This discovery of a boundless country seems worthy of consideration. I don’t know if I can guarantee that some other such discovery will not be made in the future, so many personages greater than ourselves having been mistaken about this one. I am afraid we have eyes bigger than our stomachs, and more curiosity than capacity. We embrace everything, but we clasp only wind.
Plato brings in Solon, telling how he had learned from the priests of the city of Sais in Egypt that in days of old, before the Flood, there was a great island named Atlantis, right at the mouth of the Strait of Gibraltar, which contained more land than Africa and Asia put together, and that the kings of that country, who not only possessed that island but had stretched out so far on the mainland that they held the breadth of Africa as far as Egypt, and the length of Europe as far as Tuscany, undertook to step over into Asia and subjugate all the nations that border on the Mediterranean, as far as the Black Sea; and for this purpose crossed the Spains, Gauls, Italy, as far as Greece, where the Athenians checked them; but that some time after, both the Athenians and themselves and their island were swallowed up by the Flood.
Is is quite likely that that extreme devastation of waters made amazing changes in the habitations of the earth, as people maintain that the sea cut off Sicily from Italy –
‘Tis said an earthquake once asunder tore
These lands with dreadful havoc, which before
Formed but one land, one coast
Virgil
–Cyprus from Syria, the island of Euboea from the mainland of Boeotia; and elsewhere joined lands that were divided, filling the channels between them with sand and mud:
A sterile marsh, long fit for rowing, now
Feeds neighbor towns, and feels the heavy plow.
Horace
But there is no great likelihood that that island was the new world which we have just discovered; for it almost touched Spain, and it would be an incredible result of a flood to have forced it away as far as it is, more than twelve hundred leagues; besides, the travels of the moderns have already almost revealed that it is not an island, but a mainland connected with the East Indies on one side, and elsewhere with the lands under the two poles; or, if it is separated from them, it is by so narrow a strait and interval that it does not deserve to be called an island on that account.
It seems that there are movements, some natural, others feverish, in these great bodies, but as in our own. When I consider the inroads that my river, the Dordogne, is making in my lifetime into the right bank in its descent, and that in twenty years it has gained so much ground and stolen away the foundations of several buildings, I clearly see that this is an extraordinary disturbance for if it had always gone at this rate, or was to do so in the future, the face of the world would be turned topsy-turvy. But rivers are subject to changes: now they overflow in one direction, now in another, now they keep to their course. I am not speaking of the sudden inundations whose causes are manifest. In Medoc, along the seashore, mt brother, the sieur d’Arsac, can see an estate of his buried under the sands that the sea spews forth; the tops of some buildings are still visible; his farms and domains have changed into very thing pasturage. The inhabitants say that for some time the sea has been pushing toward them so hard that they have lost four leagues of land. These sands are its harbingers; and we see great dunes of moving sand that march half a league ahead of it and keep conquering land.
The other testimony of antiquity with which some would connect this discovery is in Aristotle, at least if that little book Of Unheard-of Wondersis by him. He there relates that certain Carthaginians, after setting out upon the Atlantic Ocean from the Strait of Gibraltar and sailing a long time, at last discovered a great fertile island, all clothed in woods and watered by great deep rivers, far remote from any mainland; and that they, and others since, attracted by the goodness and fertility of the soil, went there with their wives and children, and began to settle there. The lords of Carthage, seeing that their country was gradually becoming depopulated, expressly forbade anyone to go there any more, on pain of death, and drove out these new inhabitants, fearing, it is said, that in course of time they might come to multiply so greatly as to supplant their former masters and ruin their state. This story of Aristotle does not fit our new lands any better than the other.
This man I had was a simple, crude fellow–a character fit to bear true witness; for clever people observe more things and more curiously, but they interpret them, and to lend weight and conviction to their interpretation, they cannot help altering history a little. They never show you things as they are, but bend and disguise them according to the way they have seen them; and to give credence to their judgment and attract you to it, they are prone to add something to their matter, to stretch it out and amplify it. We need a man either very honest, or so simple that he has not the stuff to build up false inventions and given them plausibility; and wedded to no theory. Such was my man; and besides this, he at various times brought sailors and merchants, whom he had known on that trip, to see me. So I content myself with information, without inquiring what the cosmographers say about it.
We ought to have topographers who would give us an exact account of he places where they have been. But because they have over us the advantage of having seen Palestine, they want to enjoy the privilege of telling us news about all the rest of the world. I would like everyone to write what he knows, and as much as he knows, not only in this, but in all other subjects; for a man may have some special knowledge and experience of the nature of a river or a fountain, who in other matters knows only what everybody knows. However, to circulate this little scrap of knowledge, he will undertake to write the whole of physics. From this vice spring many great abuses.
Now, to return to my subject, I think there is nothing barbarous and savage in that nation, from what I have been told, except that each man calls barbarism whatever is not his own practice; for indeed it seems we have no other test of truth and reason than the example and pattern of the opinions and customs of the country we live in. There is always the perfect religion, the perfect government, the perfect and accomplished manners in all things. Those people are wild, just as we call wild the fruits that Nature has produced by herself and in her normal course; whereas really it is those that we have changed artificially and led astray from the common order, that we should rather call wild. The former retain alive and vigorous their genuine, their most useful and natural, virtues and properties, which we have debased in the latter in adapting them to gratify our corrupted taste. And yet for all that, the savor and delicacy of some uncultivated fruits of those countries is quite as excellent, even to out taste, as that of our ow. It is not reasonable that art should win the place of honor over our great and powerful mother Nature. We have so overloaded the beauty and richness of her works by our inventions that we have quite smothered her. Yet wherever purity shines forth, she wonderfully puts to shame our vain and frivolous attempts:
Ivy comes readier without our care;
In lonely caves the arbutus grows more fair;
No art with artless bird song can compare.
Propertius
All our efforts cannot even succeed in reproducing the nest of the tiniest little bird, its contexture, its beauty and convenience; or even the web of the puny spider. All things, says Plato, are produced by nature, by fortune, or by art; the greatest and most beautiful by one or the other of the first two, the least and most imperfect by the last.
These nations, then, seem to me barbarous in this sense, that they have been fashioned very little by the human mind, and are still very close to their original naturalness. The laws of nature still rules them, very little corrupted by ours; and they are in such a state of purity that I am sometimes vexed that they were unknown earlier, in the days when there were men able to judge them better than we. I am sorry that Lycurgus and Plato did not know of them; for it seems to me that what we actually see in these nations surpasses not only all the pictures in which poets have idealized the golden age and all their inventions in imagining a happy state of man, but also the conceptions and the very desire of philosophy. They could not imagine a naturalness so pure and simple as we see by experience; nor could they believe that our society could be maintained with so little artifice and human solder. Thus is a nation, I should say to Plato, in which there is no sort of traffic, no knowledge of letters, no science of numbers, no name for a magistrate or for political superiority, no custom of servitude, no riches or poverty, no contracts, no successions, no partitions, no occupations but leisure ones, no care for any but common kinship, no clothes, no agriculture, no metal, no use of win or wheat. The very words that signify lying, treachery, dissimulation, avarice, envy, belittling, pardon–unheard of. How far from this perfection would be find the republic that he imagined: Men fresh sprung from the gods [Seneca].
These manners nature first ordained.
Virgil
~*~
The next segment will be published soon.
Saturday November 3, 2007
The original plan was to compose a lengthy argument on the attenuation of senses; however, seeing as how 4 mid-term exams are fast approaching and labeled “Needs Preparation” on my Outlook Calendar for this coming week, I should probably do just that — prepare.
Alas, I leave you all with an article and this simple phrase to consider: Humans are idiots.
OMAHA, Neb. – The fiery message of the Westboro Baptist Church has led its followers into a fight for what they say are their First Amendment rights.
After what would appear at first glance to be a setback in one court, the group heads to another one on charges that include flag mutilation — and members of the Topeka, Kan.-based church could not be happier.
“Our message has exploded all over the world,” a delighted Shirley Phelps-Roper said Thursday.
Phelps-Roper’s comments came a day after the fundamentalist church was ordered in Maryland to pay nearly $11 million to a grieving father whose son’s military funeral was the target of the congregation’s frequent picketing campaigns.
The church believes that U.S. deaths in the Iraq war are punishment for the nation’s tolerance of homosexuality. The protesters carry signs bearing such slogans as “Thank God for dead soldiers” and “God hates fags.” Followers say they are entitled to protest at soldiers’ funerals under the First Amendment which guarantees freedom of speech and religion.
Phelps-Roper, 50, is to appear in Sarpy County Court on Monday on charges of flag mutilation, negligent child abuse, contributing to the delinquency of a minor and disturbing the peace. The charges were filed after Phelps-Roper allowed her 10-year-old son to stand on the flag while protesting at a Bellevue soldier’s funeral in June.
Sarpy County Attorney Lee Polikov said when the Westboro followers specifically target grieving families, “they don’t really deserve the protection of freedom of speech, freedom of religion.”
Phelps-Roper’s attorney, Bassel El-Kasaby, said he has asked that the case be thrown out because the charges are unconstitutional. El-Kasaby was hired by the Nebraska ACLU to represent Phelps-Roper.
Nebraska’s flag law defines flag mutilation as when a “person intentionally casts contempt or ridicule upon a flag by mutilating, defacing, defiling, burning or trampling upon such flag.”
Phelps-Roper has noted that the U.S. Supreme Court has struck down laws forbidding flag desecration.
Westboro has been effective in getting its name and message out, but most people will not be able to make a logical connection between homosexuality and soldiers’ deaths, said David Meyer, a sociology professor at the University of California, Irvine.
“Sometimes you actually want to provoke a fury, because the action of protest is meant to be polarizing,” he said. “But you hope when you do that more people break on your side than the other side.”
Meyer said protesters are typically effective in encouraging social change when they fight against something generally accepted as being wrong — as happened with the Civil Rights and anti-draft movements — or when protesters can make a connection to something wrong, such as anti-abortion protesters likening abortion doctors to murderers.
Westboro’s last legal fight occurred in U.S. District Court in Maryland, where Albert Snyder sued the church after a protest last year at the funeral of his son, a Marine who was killed in Iraq. He claimed the protests intruded on what should have been a private ceremony and sullied his memory of the event.
Nebraska and at least 37 other states have adopted laws restricting how close protesters can get to funerals. The laws were at least partly inspired by Westboro’s protests. Congress has passed a law prohibiting such protests at federal cemeteries.
On Wednesday, the church was found liable for invasion of privacy and intent to inflict emotional distress. Jurors awarded Snyder $10.9 million.
Ronald Collins, a scholar at the First Amendment Center, said that while he finds the church’s message reprehensible, it is protected by the Constitution. He expects the judgment to be thrown out on appeal.
“You don’t get around the First Amendment by issuing an $10.9 million verdict,” Collins said.
Tuesday October 23, 2007
Let’s be realistic for just one minute – multiple aspects of my life are not going as planned, and I constantly feel at war with the university and their pathetic, tyrannical policies. Imagine for a second a ladder; suppose I manage to climb myself up to the second to last rung and there’s an evil woman by the name of “UT” holding a frying pan waiting to send me plummeting to the ground beneath with a simple whisk of her arms. Granted that I am me and the woman is an idiot, I will (of course) devise some sort of alternative plan to access the pinnacle if not for the sole purpose of removing that pan from UT’s death-grip hands. The process of exuding such an effort does not bother me, but the fact that UT instates these useless policies in the first place simply boggles my mind, aside from the fact that I know it’s doing so to sustain its authority and hold on its students, allowing them no room for freedom and, essentially, colonizing their mind. Well, I refuse to be colonized and I will find some sort of loophole. I always do.
I’m not angry; I’m discombobulated — all that plummeting muddles one’s brain. The College of Natural Sciences is the devil – not the professors, just the administrative officials.
Speaking of the devil…
I’ve been reading Dante’s The Divine Comedy, and although I can’t qualify myself as Christian, or even religious at that, I still did find the reading to be quite fascinating. The illusions and analogies presented are simply…well, divine. It is highly recommended to anyone who’s interested in a not-so-short, highly graphic read. For those who are familiar with Dante’s Inferno, I took a quick quiz online to see in which level of hell I would be placed taking into account Dante’s moral perspectives.
The Dante’s Inferno Test has sent you to the First Level of Hell – Limbo!
Charon ushers you across the river Acheron, and you find yourself upon the brink of grief’s abysmal valley. You are in Limbo, a place of sorrow without torment. You encounter a seven-walled castle, and within those walls you find rolling fresh meadows illuminated by the light of reason, whereabout many shades dwell. These are the virtuous pagans, the great philosophers and authors, unbaptised children, and others unfit to enter the kingdom of heaven. You share company with Caesar, Homer, Virgil, Socrates, and Aristotle. There is no punishment here, and the atmosphere is peaceful, yet sad.
Here is how you matched up against all the levels:
| Level | Score |
|---|---|
| Purgatory (Repenting Believers) | Very Low |
| Level 1 – Limbo (Virtuous Non-Believers) | Very High |
| Level 2 (Lustful) | Very Low |
| Level 3 (Gluttonous) | Moderate |
| Level 4 (Prodigal and Avaricious) | Very Low |
| Level 5 (Wrathful and Gloomy) | Low |
| Level 6 – The City of Dis (Heretics) | Very High |
| Level 7 (Violent) | Low |
| Level 8- the Malebolge (Fraudulent, Malicious, Panderers) | Moderate |
| Level 9 – Cocytus (Treacherous) | Low |
Take the Dante’s Inferno Test
(Feel free to share your results with me.)
Seeing as how instead of paying attention in class I am typing about devils and circles, I best redirect my attention back to what I ought to be doing. Au revoir, my little munchkins!
Monday October 8, 2007
I don’t know how else to put it — Life is different outside of the jail-like dormitory. That’s not to say I didn’t enjoy the company of my hall-mates; the atmosphere per se just felt suffocating. My new condo, however, is absolutely magnificent. We have a small garden in the front and a patio and creek in the back. There are even fireflies outside the front door at night!
Since I cannot fully describe the house in words, I decided to take some pictures of a few of the main rooms:
There’s even a guest bedroom; hence, if anyone ever wants to visit, there’s a place (a very nicely furnished place) for you to stay!
And here is my exceedingly eccentric roommate, “Krebs,” fashioning a beautiful white gown, i.e. her bed-sheet. It took some severe schmoozing on my part to convince her to wear it.
I think that’s enough pictures for one entry… Onwards to more pressing matters.
My societal perspective (up until recently) seemed to have never surpassed the bubble I had been residing in, my reality obscured by the suburban life I led whereby the only real homeless and severely deprived individuals I saw were from the passenger seat of my mother’s Benz ML350. All along, I believed I was commendable for merely feeling sympathetic for their situation and giving them a couple of dollars or buying them a meal; all along, I regarded them as nonentities who roamed the streets desperate for a cigarette or beer; all along, I cared for the wrong reasons.
Their lives truly are pitiful — so fixated on materials they abuse to escape the deplorable reality in which they’ve managed to land themselves and with no normal human being to share their tale because all the fast-paced, self-absorbed individuals walking through them are too obsessed with leading their sybaritic life and sustaining their haute monde facade to be seen engaging in a conversation with a filthy hobo.
Now that I live so far off campus, riding the Capitol Metro has become a daily wont. As such, I’ve seen my fair share of derelicts. I’ve seen them digging through the wastebin in hopes for a bus ticket that has not already expired. I’ve seen one individual who was so famished, every vein and every muscle could be clearly distinguished under his sun-scathed skin. Somehow, though, I have more respect for these people than most of the self-professed “accomplished” personages who occupy the same bus. There were the bus drivers who made snide remarks to the less well-dressed occupants of the cart (or oftentimes simply ignored them) but remained unbearably friendly with the soignee females. Then, there were the selfish glitterati in their refined suits who shamelessly placed their leather suitcases on the empty seat beside them, fully aware of the fact that an elderly couple just boarded the bus. Ironically, who always did give up their seats for others? The foul-smelling, rag-wearing individuals.
Last week, I came across another such incredulous scenario. A woman of about 35 began having a one-sided verbal contention with the bus driver for no apparent reason that went on for at least 10 minutes. When the hobo sitting next to me asked the woman to please stop fighting, the woman screamed back, “Don’t you dare talk to me! You’re a bum. I ain’t listening to you. I’m smarter than you and all your grandsons. At least I got a job, you dumb-ass bum.” As if that was not enough, 4 more started criticizing the “bum,” forcing him to ran off the bus at the next stop. Can these fools’ minds be any more distorted than they already are?
I am appalled by the current state of “elite” society. What makes you any better than the homeless man who can’t withdraw himself from his alcohol addiction? His lack of self-control is no worse than your lack of respect for others you deem to be unworthy, and your self-proclaimed superiority is equally as detestable.
If you want to know what a man’s like, take a good look at how he treats his inferiors, not his equals.
And on that note, I must now depart for a quick breakfast and then onwards to the bus. Au revoir!
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