[lit-ideas] Re: Things to Die For/Things to Live for --The Overlap and Lack of It: A Lit-Ideas Questionnaire
- From: "Andreas Ramos" <andreas@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 10 Jan 2008 19:36:03 -0800
The Battle of Waterloo was fought in the playing fields of Eton.
I don't know if others have already pointed this out: when Wellington was at
Eton, there were no playing fields. In fact, there were no sports at all.
That came later.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eton_College
yrs,
andreas
www.andreas.com
----- Original Message -----
From: <jlsperanza@xxxxxxx>
To: <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Cc: <andreas@xxxxxxxxxxx>; <lawrencehelm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>; <rpaul@xxxxxxxx>
Sent: Thursday, January 10, 2008 7:10 AM
Subject: [lit-ideas] Things to Die For/Things to Live for --The Overlap and
Lack of It: A Lit-Ideas Questionnaire
I spoonerly wrote:
The Battle of Waterloo was fought in the playing fields of Eton.
Prof R. Paul, not up in the ivory towers of Historia, the Muse, writes:
Yes, and they still bear the faint scars.
Exactly. Perhaps Wellington should not be trusted when he said that. After
all, he is credited also with the reposte:
The Queen of England: Why do you call yourself English? You´re Irish to the
backbone, right, General?
Wellington: Well, I beg to differ, your Majesty. The fact that you are born
in a stable does not make you a pig.
Anyway,
Noel Coward used the sobriquet about Eton too:
The playing fields of Eton
have made us frightfully brave.
The Stately Homes of England, how beautiful they stand
-- parody on Felicia Hamans.
It´s not clear what the Greeks had to do with the Playing Fields of Eton. My
innuendo was to T. Brown´s Schooldays, by T. Hughes. There is this chapter
which, though set in Rugby, is meant to indicate that sport was thought of
as related to the highest military values. They´d just been reading Homer´s
Iliad -- the one-to-one combat between Achilleus and Hector, and Tom is now
all ready to sacrifice it all for the love of his life, whatever that was.
I said that my mother is to live for and die for. This should apply to
everyone unless she is an orphan. Also children, etc. Some say, dogs, too.
L. K. Helm is too generous in instilling Western Values on non-Westerners.
Today I was reading in The Buenos Aires Herald this man in Turino who was
deported because his religious service was thought not to be in accordance
with Western Values that we Ligurians value so much.
On the other hand, there´s Jemmy Button. He was an "Indian" of Tierra del
Fuego (his biography is called Savage!) and he had military values all
right. I.e. he did not need to be immersed into the Homeric warrior code to
_acquire_ them. Sometimes, and this may be L. K. Helm´s point, Western
civilised (people) tend to APPROPRIATE what is in fact a common human drive.
Dumezil thought that at least as far as Aryan civilisation (and hence
Western at its best) is concerned, there was a tripartite functional scheme:
-- the priests, who were, as today, mainly homosexual, and into molesting
things (their stupid rites and dances around the fire)
-- the farmers, who in spite of my love for them (see my "Et in Arcadia
ego") were very bad at teeth. As Geary agrees with Helm, farmers _are_ the
worst.
Finally, the heroes, the creme de la creme: the warriors. These were always
ready for battle and would see ´pax´or ´nike´as, in Aristotelian parlance,
an "accidence".
It would be serious to consider to what extent though, the Aristotelian
categories of dunamis and energeia could apply to Dostowievky´s things like
war and peace. There seems to be something momentary about war. Except for
the Spartans whose only reason to live was indeed to die for Sparta.
Cheers,
J. L. Speranza
Buenos Aires, Argentina
-- writing from Villa Speranza, off Bordighera, Isola Speranza.
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