[lit-ideas] Re: Honor: A History
- From: Chris Bruce <bruce@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Thu, 11 May 2006 06:52:39 +0200
The following passage is from a recent posting to this list recently :
The youngest children know without having the concept explained to
them what it means to lose face, to be contemptible in the eyes of
their coevals, and will risk almost any displeasure or punishment from
the adults in authority over them, rather than submit to such
humiliation. This is honor at its most basic. And so deep-seated is
the response that it's almost impossible to imagine its replacement by
some more benign principle of social interactions, either for
individuals or for nations.
It is not my intention here to counter the fallacies (both factual and
argumentative) in this short passage. ( I quoted it to a professional
I know who works in with 'the youngest children', suggesting that she
was more than qualified to explode yet another myth concerning same.
She just ruefully shook her head.)
But (since I am not offering those arguments) - let us suppose such
'childish' behaviour *were* true of children …
To Carry the Child
To carry the child into adult life
Is good? I say it is not,
To carry the child into adult life
Is to be handicapped.
The child in adult life is defenceless
And if he is grown-up, knows it,
And the grown-up looks at the childish part
And despises it.
The child, too, despises the clever grown-up,
The man-of-the-world, the frozen,
For the child has the tears alive on his cheek
And the man has none of them.
As the child has colours, and the man sees no
Colours or anything.
Being easy only in things of the mind,
The child is easy in feeling.
Easy in feeling, easily excessive
And excessively powerful,
For instance, if you do not speak to the child
He will make trouble.
You would say a man had the upper hand
Of the child, if a child survive,
But I say the child has fingers of strength
To strangle the man alive.
Oh it is not happy, it is never happy,
To carry the child into adulthood,
Let children lie down before full growth
And die in their infanthood
And be guilty of no man's blood.
But oh the poor child, the poor child, what can he do,
Trapped in a grown-up carapace,
But peer outside his prison room
With the eye of an anarchist?
- Stevie Smith (1966)
ChrisBruce
Kiel, Germany
P.S. I know that I am repeating myself to many of you in once more
posting this poem, but it has been 4 years (where do they go?) - and it
is a sort of anniversary ….
-cb
--
------------------------------------------------------------------
To change your Lit-Ideas settings (subscribe/unsub, vacation on/off,
digest on/off), visit www.andreas.com/faq-lit-ideas.html
Other related posts:
