Monday, December 19, 2022
Veneration for Long-Established Custom and Ritual
Wilfred Thesiger (1910-2003), The Life of My Choice (London: Collins, 1987), p. 56 (after the Battle of Segale in 1916):
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I had been reading Tales from the Iliad. Now, in boyish fancy, I watched the likes of Achilles, Ajax and Ulysses pass in triumph with aged Priam, proud even in defeat. I believe that day implanted in me a life-long craving for barbaric splendour, for savagery and colour and the throb of drums, and that it gave me a lasting veneration for long-established custom and ritual, from which would derive later a deep-seated resentment of Western innovations in other lands, and a distaste for the drab uniformity of the modern world.
