[lit-ideas] Re: "Why the Bad Must Always Attack the Good"
- From: Eric Yost <Mr.Eric.Yost@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sun, 26 Jun 2005 18:44:03 -0400
>
> "They paved paradise and put up a parking lot." Yes, but why?
Precisely because it was a paradise. The existence of the paradise
pulled the parking lot into existence.
>
> Anyone else notice this phenomena at work in the universe?
M.C. Not really. For without wanting to plunge into the fetid miasmas of
Relativism, I must admit that I often have a pretty hard time telling
the distance between the good and the bad. Mozart good, Salieri bad :
really? I kind of like Salieri, actually.
Eric: So did a lot of people. Beethoven, for example, often described
himself as "a pupil of Salieri." Salieri is only considered "bad" in
relation to the other major composers of his period, and only in the
view of critical and historical distance--and even then, not truly bad,
just mediocre.
I used Salieri loosely, not in the sense of asserting the truth of the
poisoning controversy or Salieri's alleged confession of poisoning and
his later alleged suicide. (Pushkin apparently bought into the poisoning
theory and wrote the first play about it.) As metaphor, I mentioned
Salieri as an example of Cain and Abel, for Salieri was certainly an
extremely ambitious person in the realm of Italian opera and did try to
thwart Mozart (for whom most forms came easily) on occasion.
MC: Might good and bad be - to *some* extent at any rate - a matter of
perspective?
Eric: Sure. Maybe there's nothing more to it than saying "excellence
creates envy," but I didn't want to dwell on the issue of what
constitutes good versus what constitutes bad--because in the initial
spark of this thread we are given Cain and Abel, who by definition
represent the "good" sacrifice to the Lord versus the "less than good
but adequate" sacrifice to the Lord.
Mike, you undoubtedly know the Philo allegory better than I do. If we
put the question of what constitutes good and bad in brackets, would you
concede that there is a tendency for the mediocre to attack the better
than mediocre, at least more than vice versa?
Eric
------------------------------------------------------------------
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:
