Laudator Temporis Acti

He called old age the harbour of all ills; at least they all take refuge there.

τὸ γῆρας ἔλεγεν ὅρμον εἶναι τῶν κακῶν· εἰς αὐτὸ γοῦν πάντα καταφεύγειν.

The ravages, of course, began long before the war. The invention of the internal-combustion engine may be regarded with justice as the greatest single disaster in the history of mankind. Not only has it destroyed the security of England and made wholesale death and mutilation familiar things; it has also destroyed the beauty of England, killed quiet, and, with quiet, dignity. Take, for example, the case of Sussex. Who would have thought, as we wandered years ago through the Weald in spring and saw that incredible profusion of primroses and wild daffodils, or in summer through the empty spaces of the high downs, that these things upon which we had been nourished in childhood and had grown to rely upon in manhood, turning to them again and again for rest and refreshment of the spirit, would in our time be destroyed, dying before we ourselves should die? Yet so it is. First, the railways scattered their scurf of 'resorts' along the coast and accumulated little ganglions of vulgarity around their stations, as an alien body thrust into the flesh accumulates a zone of inflamed tissue around its place of entry; but the county as a whole remained inviolate. Then came the cars. The south and south-east of England were brought within the range of daily accessibility from the centre, with the result that London burst like a bomb and scattered its debris far and wide over the faces of Surrey and Kent, and presently over that of Sussex. With the coming of the car the peace of the county was broken, its traditions destroyed, its power to refresh and reinvigorate the spirit, a power which depended in part upon its emptiness and its peace, impaired. Its inhabitants bought gramophones and grew basely rich; its roads became maelstroms of traffic along which cars hurled their inert occupants to the coast, its valleys came out in a rash of angry pink; every hilltop had its villa, every village its multiple store, while the sacred peace of the downs was broken by the snorts of motor-bicycles and the hoots of straining cars. If the horde of invaders had derived benefit from their defilements, the case though bad would have been bearable. In fact, however, the majority of those who rifled beauty were unaware of what they did. Walking, just before the war, on Amberley Down, I came upon a small Austin perched upon its highest point, outraging the sight of all beholders. I approached, intending to draw the attention of the occupants to the beneficent but unobserved law which forbids a car to park itself more than fifteen yards from the highway (see the Road Traffic Act 1930). Within it sat a young man and his girl. Their backs were to the view, their windows shut. Were they engaged in the fulfilment of a function intelligible, if there misplaced? They were not. They were sitting stolidly, side by side, listening to the fat-stock prices over the wireless.

• Born Too Late
• A Gloomy Milestone
• What is the Advantage of Locomotion?
• Jouyl
• A Bionic Roach
• No Respect for Mechanical Genius
• American Culture
• Going for the Sake of Going

Labels: Luddism

Lawrence did not know Italian sufficiently well, nor did he have enough time to do justice to the original. As a result, his Verga is full of oddities. He misunderstood or misread many Italian words, so that "a picnic in the country" became "the ringing of the bells," a "fiancée" became a "wife," a "mother" a "midwife," a "hard bed on the ground" a "hard biscuit," a "storeroom" a "millstone," a "rump" a "group"; the olive trees instead of "fading gradually in the twilight," "fumed upon the twilight," etc. He translated southern Italian idioms literally, and thus the common expressions meaning "they had spent a fortune" and "as happy as a king" became "they had spent the very eyes out of their head" and "as happy as an Easter Day."

There will come an epoch late in time
when Ocean will loosen the bonds of the world
and the earth lie open in its vastness,
when Tethys will disclose new worlds
and Thule not be the farthest of lands.

venient annis saecula seris,
quibus Oceanus vincula rerum
laxet et ingens pateat tellus
Tethysque novos detegat orbes
nec sit terris ultima Thule.

Farnaby reports that Abraham Oertel (the sixteenth-century Flemish geographer) regarded this passage as a prophecy by a Spaniard of the discovery of America by his fellow countrymen. Thinking on the same lines Ferdinand Columbus wrote in the margin of his copy of Seneca's tragedies 'haec prophetia expleta est per patrem meum Christoforum Colon almirantem anno 1492' (Damsté, Mnem. 46 (1918), 134).

A jolly life has the frog, my lads. No care has he
for one to pour out his drink, for he has it by him unstinted.

εὐκτὸς ὁ τῶ βατράχω, παῖδες, βίος· οὐ μελεδαίνει
τὸν τὸ πιεῖν ἐγχεῦντα· πάρεστι γὰρ ἄφθονον αὐτῷ.

When I approached Viterbo I first saw an astonishing wall, perpendicular to my road, untouched, the bones of the Middle Ages. It stood up straight before one like a range of cliffs, seeming much higher than it should; its hundred feet or so were exaggerated by the severity of its stones and by their sheer fall. For they had no ornament whatever, and few marks of decay, though many of age. Tall towers, exactly square and equally bare of carving or machicolation, stood at intervals along this forbidding defence and flanked its curtain. Then nearer by, one saw that it was not a huge castle, but the wall of a city, for at a corner it went sharp round to contain the town, and through one uneven place I saw houses. Many men were walking in the roads alongside these walls, and there were gates pierced in them whereby the citizens went in and out of the city as bees go in and out of the little opening in a hive.

During those years several New York banks refused to do business with democrats, and a parson refused at the font to christen a child Thomas Jefferson.

It is a misfortune to be born into a position in society from which there is no possibility of escape, however uncongenial this inescapable position may be to the victim's temperament, gifts, and consequent inclinations. This misfortune is a rare one. There are few stations in life that have held everyone that has been born into them as their life-long prisoner. One prisoner in a thousand, or one in a million at least, has succeeded in breaking his way out of even the most cramping and most crushing original confinement. At least one person, out of the many born into this position, will have found his position uncongenial enough, and will have had importunate enough incompatible ambitions, to have nerved him to make the necessary effort of will for breaking out, hard and painful though the act of self-liberation may have been.

Perhaps the only social position from which escape is impossible for those born into it is royalty; for this continues to haunt its victim psychologically even if he has managed to extricate himself from it officially. A royal personage who, so long as he has remained officially royal, has been longing to enjoy the satisfactions and amenities of private life, is apt to find, if and when he has had his way, that he now misses the servitude that was so irksome to him so long as he was officially subject to it. He now discovers, too late, that, unconsciously, he had been wishing to have the best of both worlds; and he has actually got the worst of both as an ironical result of his apparently successful fight to win his freedom. Moreover, the royal personage who is free to divest himself of his royalty officially is relatively fortunate. Even this limited degree of self-liberation can be attained by a royal personage only in a society that has become so orderly, or that has reduced royalty to so insignificant a social role, that, in this society, it has ceased to be dangerous either to wear a crown or to doff one. In most societies, at most times and places, the wearer of a crown has been holding a wolf by the ears.

In the present-day Western World, to be royal has ceased to be dangerous, yet royalty continues to be awkward for inheritors of it who are irked by it.

Also that it was provided in other plebiscites that no one might hold the same office twice within ten years...

item aliis plebi scitis cautum ne quis eundem magistratum intra decem annos caperet...

Mayst thou sleep in nettles.

ἐν κνίδαισι καθεύδοις.

Three kappas [are] worst — Kappadokia, Krete and Kilikia.

τρία κάππα κάκιστα· Καππαδοκία, Κρήτη καὶ Κιλικία.

Liars achieve that they are not believed even when they tell the truth.

mendaces faciunt ut nec vera dicentibus credatur.

To the question, "What do people gain by telling lies?" his answer was, "Just this, that when they speak the truth they are not believed."

ἐρωτηθεὶς τί περιγίνεται κέρδος τοῖς ψευδομένοις, "ὅταν," ἔφη, "λέγωσιν ἀληθῆ, μὴ πιστεύεσθαι."

As a rule we do not believe a liar even when he tells the truth.

cum mendaci homini ne verum quidem dicenti credere soleamus.

“We Germans,” civilization’s literary man says in a manifesto that appeared at the turn of the years 1917–18, “now that we have grown up to democracy, have the greatest experience of all before us. A nation does not reach self-government without learning much about human nature and without managing life with more mature organs. The play of social forces lies in nations that govern themselves in full public view with the individuals educating one another and learning about each other. But if we act now at home, the barriers abroad will also soon fall; European distances will become shorter, and we will see our fellow nations as family members travelling the same paths. As long as we persisted in the national status quo, they seemed to us to be enemies—doomed because they did not also persist. Has not every revolution come just before the end? Was it not ruin to try to realize ideas in battles and crises? This destiny shall now be ours as well . . .”

What unspeakably painful resistance rises up in my inner being before this hostile gentleness, before all this beautifully stylized unpleasantness? Should one not laugh? After all, is not every sentence, every word in it, false, translated, basically mistaken, grotesque self-deception—the confusion of the wishes, instincts, and needs of a novelist who has been spiritually naturalized in France with German reality? “This destiny shall now be ours as well!” A sublime and brilliant but basically Latinized literary man who long ago renounced every feeling for the particular ethos of his people, yes, who even ridicules the recognition of such a special national ethos as bestial nationalism, and who opposes it with his humanitarian-democratic civilization and “social” internationalism.

Soon it will be fifty years since Dostoyevsky, who had the eyes to see, asked almost incredulously: “Can it be true that cosmopolitan radicalism has already taken roots in Germany, too?” This is a way of asking that is equivalent to astonished confirmation, and the idea of cosmopolitan, or more correctly, international radicalism, itself contradicts the protestation that it is a “mirage” of our present enemies that the national democracies could ever unite into an intellectually unified European or world democracy. By “cosmopolitan radicalism,” Dostoyevsky meant that intellectual tendency that has the democratic civilization-society of “mankind” as its goal; la république sociale, démocratique et universelle; the empire of human civilization. A mirage of our enemies? But mirage or not: those who see this mirage hovering before them must definitely be enemies of Germany, for it is certainly true that a union of the national democracies into a European, a world democracy, would leave nothing of the German character: the world democracy, the imperium of civilization, the “society of mankind,” could have a character that would be more Latin or more Anglo-Saxon—the German spirit would dissolve and disappear in it, it would be obliterated, it would no longer exist.

From his childhood Dante had been familiar with the image of Lucifer in the mosaic decoration of the cupola of the Baptistery in Florence. Work on these mosaics began in the first half of the thirteenth century and continued during Dante’s early years. The design on the cupola consists of an apocalyptic vision of Christ in majesty presiding over the Last Judgement, the angelic hierarchy, events from the Old and New Testaments and scenes of damnation, arranged symmetrically in rectangular segments and culminating in a central triple-octagonal ornamentation. The image of Lucifer dominates a tumultuous scene in which souls of the damned are tormented by demons. Lucifer himself is a grotesque monster, horned and bearded, munching a soul whose legs and buttocks dangle from his mouth. From his ears protrude two snakes, also munching two souls, who dangle face forwards. Lucifer clenches other souls in his hands, held ready for the continuation of his meal. His feet are clamped on yet another two, and demons force others towards him and towards other snakes. A crude representation of his insides shows a soul being digested and about to be excreted. The devouring is thus represented as endlessly continuous.

[3] There is no disgrace in making concessions to one’s own people — as Dorian does to Dorian or Chalcidian to others of their kin — since we are all of us neighbours and share one island home and one name as Sicilians. We shall no doubt have our wars in future when occasion arises, and we shall no doubt then make peace again by conferring amongst ourselves. [4] But when foreigners invade we would always be wise to act together to repel them, since if any one of us is harmed we are all endangered; and never again in future should we bring in allies or peace-makers from outside.

[3] οὐδὲν γὰρ αἰσχρὸν οἰκείους οἰκείων ἡσσᾶσθαι, ἢ Δωριᾶ τινὰ Δωριῶς ἢ Χαλκιδέα τῶν ξυγγενῶν, τὸ δὲ ξύμπαν γείτονας ὄντας καὶ ξυνοίκους μιᾶς χώρας καὶ περιρρύτου καὶ ὄνομα ἓν κεκλημένους Σικελιώτας· οἳ πολεμήσομέν τε, οἶμαι, ὅταν ξυμβῇ, καὶ ξυγχωρησόμεθά γε πάλιν καθ᾽ ἡμᾶς αὐτοὺς λόγοις κοινοῖς χρώμενοι· [4] τοὺς δὲ ἀλλοφύλους ἐπελθόντας ἁθρόοι αἰεί, ἢν σωφρονῶμεν, ἀμυνούμεθα, εἴπερ καὶ καθ᾽ ἑκάστους βλαπτόμενοι ξύμπαντες κινδυνεύομεν· ξυμμάχους δὲ οὐδέποτε τὸ λοιπὸν ἐπαξόμεθα οὐδὲ διαλλακτάς.

The society in which we are now living has two determining characteristics: it is a technological and a democratic society. The stress that it places on scientific applications on the one hand and on the manifestations of popular opinion on the other, imposes on every member of the society the obligation to become and to remain literate, i.e. to cultivate the capacity to read and to write the language that is in use for these partly cultural, partly political operations. The upshot of this requirement is that suspicion and contempt attach themselves necessarily to the illiterate person, and his economic possibilities are correspondingly limited. This estimate of the sociological situation in modern states is not exaggerated. Here is a typical statement of the current point of view: "The dimensions of illiteracy throughout the world and its grave economic, social, cultural, and political con sequences point up the need to find practical means for the eradication of this brake on human progress and welfare ..."¹⁾

Graeco-Roman Egypt presents us with the spectacle of a society very different in kind, living on quite other presuppositions and with purposes remote from those of our day. That society was both pre-technological and pre-democratic. We shall find that it made a large place for illiteracy. The illiterate person was able to function in a broad variety of occupations, to be recognized as a respectable member of his class, to attain financial success, to hold public office, to associate on equal terms with his literate neighbors.

1) L.H. Hughs, Innovator (Univ. Mich. School of Education) 6, No. 7, 1975, 8. Indicative of modern concern with world literacy is the series published by Unesco under the title "Literacy:, beginning with the report for 1965-7 (Paris).

This summary enables us to recognize three main categories of writers for the illiterate: (1) relatives, preferably close relatives, but when these were lacking, more remote connections; (2) business associates or colleagues in government service; and finally (3) professional scribes, who might or might not have personal knowledge of their clients. Of these, the first group is by far the most striking because it shows illiteracy operating as a centripetal force in an ancient non-technological society. The special needs that stemmed from wide spread illiteracy confirmed the traditional rules that governed the selection of kyrioi or male "guardians" as well as the selection of guardians for minor children. These were kept as far as possible within the family. Illiteracy similarly promoted domestic cooperation, what we should be inclined to call family solidarity. This is nowhere seen more clearly than in the frequency with which illiterate fathers and mothers supplemented their own lack with the literate capacities of their sons.

The conversation ended with an exchange of stories among the soldiers. One of them told me a story about a priest. He wondered whether I knew what a priest meant, and to make it plain he said: "A priest, you know, is a man who always lies."

But indeed, that was quite a clever remark which Cato made many years ago: "I wonder," said he, "that a soothsayer doesn't laugh when he sees another soothsayer."

vetus autem illud Catonis admodum scitum est, qui mirari se aiebat quod non rideret haruspex haruspicem cum vidisset.

Certainly these people have a benediction upon them, granted them for their simple lives and their justice. Their eyes are fearless and kindly. They are courteous, straight, and all have in them laughter and sadness. They are full of songs, of memories, of the stories of their native place; and their worship is conformable to the world that God made. May they possess their own land, and may their influence come again from Italy to save from jar, and boasting, and ineptitude the foolish, valourless cities, and the garish crowds of shouting men. . . . And let us especially pray that the revival of the faith may do something for our poor old universities.