Category Archives: Studies in English Literature

More Thoughts on Watership Down

This post was inspired by Ross Douthat Opinion Columnist Oct. 22, 2019.

Read Ross’s opinion piece.

The following are some of my notes on his piece…

What is Ross Douthat’s plot?

A NEW Political Founding is a home resulting from both vision and struggle.

What does liberal order mean? The political structure of a party with tenets in the liberal mindset.

OTHER:

By shedding emotions in order to achieve certain goals, one comes full circle and becomes extremely emotional when those goals are threatened, impaired or ignored.

Every dogged pursuit without human and emotional consideration leads to separation from humanity.

Every suppression of humanity leads to depression and skepticism.

When a society, however large or small, by denying agency to a group or individual plants the seed of decay or segregation in its midst.

When the fundamentals of humanity are sacrificed for order or safety or escape, that society initiates its own demise rather than rebirth.

Societal good results from distributed input of virtues and values rather than one credentialed souls generous or will.

The village of ideas, strong and wise and prescient, contribute more to a society than any one type of mindset.

The impossibility of uninterrupted comfort or impenetrable safety must be accepted as future elements in a establishing a diverse society.

Ignoring reality, a liberal society must choose between dark futures: one that leaves fate to others or cruel nature; the other which constricts society to total control and harsh sanctions while still ignoring the enemies at the gates.

However, when combining ignorance of threat with suppression of descent, a society evolves into the worst of all worlds: societal elites escaping from a lower class of citizen temporarily in a doomed high castle.

Acceptance and integration of the society within hold the only real solution to withstanding the terrible tides without.

Societal success depends on putting politics behind the humanity those politics represent.

Of Friendship: A Look at Francis Bacon’s Essay in Context

Analysis of Bacon’s Essay “Of Friendship” by Kiran.A.K.L. (The 3 Fruits of Friendship)

Kiran first explains Baconian style as following the two fundamental Renaissance principles of:

  1. Search for Knowledge and
  2. The Art of Rhetoric

Each of these are presented in an aphoristic style.  But, according to the reviewer, the essay Of Friendship is different in that it contains passionate and flattering statements and profuse analogies with examples to support or explain his arguments.  I find Kiran’s finding puzzling.  All of Bacon’s essays contain passionate and flattering statements and profuse analogies with a plethora of examples to support and no shortage of explanations for his arguments.  And then some.  Kiran possibly used his prior finding as a segue to insert the fact that the essay was requested by a friend.  He then quotes Aristotle again: Whosoever is delighted in solitude is either a wild beast or a god.  Dog or God.

Kirin then quotes Bacon’s essay, stating that friendship is necessary for maintaining good mental health by controlling and regulating the passions of the mind. Bacon speaks of the therapeutic use of friendship through which one can lighten the heart by revealing the pent-up feelings and emotions: sorrows, joys, fears, hopes, suspicions, advice.  So, the first (1) and principal fruit of friendship is good mental health.

Note here that if Bacon’s assessment is taken as fact, then a relationship that degrades one’s mental health, disturbs the passions to extremes, heavies the heart, inflames feelings and emotions, is a litmus test which reveals what you all ready suspect – your companion is not a friend.

Bacon justifies friendship by pointing out that royalty makes friends by “raising” persons fit for friendship.  I’m not sure exactly how this would work.  He tries to glorify friendship by translating a Roman term for friendship which means ‘sharers of their cares’.   Today we would say Care Bears.  He gives examples of deterioration of mental faculty because of loneliness.  That’s simply crazy.  Bacon asserts that friendship functions in a double manner: “…it doubles joys, and cuts griefs in half”.  Much like the Doublemint Twins of today who provide joyous chewing gum and grievous television commercials but also leave you something to stick under your desk at work for later.

Bacon’s second (2) fruit of friendship is clarity.  A friend clarifies confusions, his counsel is “drier and purer” than the counsel of one’s self, counsel out of self love.  With a friend there are two kinds of counsel: manners and business. Constructive criticism of behavior is better than that of a book of morality – but more boring than the Kama Sutra.  In business, a true friend’s advice helps one avert danger – usually taking you straight into poverty.

The third (3) fruit of friendship is help.  Bacon quotes “a friend is another self”, that friend can achieve unfulfilled desires and can talk to you on equal terms.  Kiran concludes that Bacon concludes that a man’s life is concluded if he does not have a friend.  If you have the usual procession of faux friends, the ones that never show-up when you need them, life with these “friends” is hell on earth and if this all you have then your life needs to be concluded or they need to be excluded from your life.

So, boys and girls, what have we learned from reviewing Kiran’s look at Bacon’s essay on Of Friendship?
One thing you should have noted, though unstated, is that this essay (and each of Bacon’s essays) is written by and for men and their manly friendships.  Women’s friendships weren’t important in 16th century Europe (for a good laugh read Bacon’s take on women in his essay Of Anger).  In any case the key take away is that Kiran see’s Bacon’s essay Of Friendship as consisting of 3 beneficial fruits:
  1. mental health: modulate passions, lighten the heart
  2. clarity: pure insight into the confusions of behavior and business
  3. help: fulfill needs, desires, and tasks while communicating without deference or condescension.

The benefits of friendship are:

  1. Does that other person (think contemporary here, you can include females) incite destructive passion and heavy your heart?
  2. Does that other person cause your behavior to be confused or even amoral and lead into business bungles?
  3. When you need help whether it be with future goals (like keeping my head above water) or present tribulations (like a farging flood where 90% of my possessions floated south to the Gulf of Mexico) or in analyzing past personal mysteries (like why some mental case didn’t show up for an emergency as promised), does this “friend” show up with straight talk and a helping hand or do that person stand on ceremony?

If you can’t enter yes to all three questions, it’s time to exit this one relationship.  There must be 50 ways.

OF FRIENDSHIP: analysis by paragraph with comments on style and other notes.

by Pat Der Sin

Friendship is the determinate as to whether a person is human or not.  If you have no friends you are either a wild beast or a god.  Take note all you workaholics and hustlers.  Now the friendless can be distinguished by their pursuits as to whether they are beast or god.  If solitude and aversion towards society is a product of higher conversion from heathen to hermit to holy father, you might be a god.  If you are a practicing beast, raise you paw or claw.  Without friends the world is wilderness.  In between friendships the world is a journey.  In found friendship, the world stops spinning out of control and waits to see how long your relations will last.  I like particularly, in this first paragraph, this series:

  • For a crowd is not company; and faces are but a gallery of pictures; and talk but a tinkling cymbal, where there is no love.

This Bacon sizzles and entices the reader all the way to its period.  “No Love” is the object. But how did we get there?  Well, if there IS love then there must be company in that crowd, or feelings in those faces, or a resounding cymbal the spoken language.  Check your crowd, faces, and talk the next time you’re out and about.  Do you feel me?

Bacon’s principal fruit of friendship is analogized to the practice of medicine.  He lists the cures for physical ailments then imparts that friendship is the cure for mental and emotional ailments.  In today’s medical practice, my cardiologist doesn’t consider your problem her problem unless it involves making money.  That means expensive surgery or dangerous drugs are the only solution, even if there is no problem.  In other words, if she were your friend and you were bound and gagged and chained to a chair, she would recommend a stent and a statin which carries a number of warnings from the FDA and the dubious American Heart Association.  Surgery and prescriptions is the only stuff American health insurance pays for these days.  It’s not the doctor’s fault, they’re following protocol you know.

Bacon has two paragraphs on kings and princes and other Roman royalty which describes how important friends are and even how friends are raised, much like my deceased chickens.  The second paragraph details a rather dense review of how the Roman cow ate the romaine cabbage, which I find of little use in my exploration of friendship for application in today’s context.  Oh, if could only be 100 BC.

Bacon calls those who do not seek the counsel of friends “Cannibals of their own hearts”.  Pretty neat!  Lack of joy and preponderance of grief can be relieved by the joker you call friend and you can that hearty heart meal for later when you have run them off due to your own pretentiousness and condescension.

The second fruit of friendship is understanding.  A friend provides clarity, order, and wisdom.  Counsel that is considerate yet free of emotions comes from a friend whether it is on behavior or business.  One’s faults can be acknowledged when presented by a friend.  Errors and extremes can be avoided when another walks you through the perils of your personal purpose.

There are many things a man can’t do himself.  There are so many of those things that can be done with, by, and because of friend.  Without a friend, your life’s work is over when you die.  With a friend, your life continues and things continue to get done in your name.

 

 

Three Lurid Pictures – Continued 1

If I were to only tell you that the extract, “Three Lurid Pictures”, was a characterization of three prominent people associated with the French Revolution, you might guess, incorrectly, who they might be.  When I told you that the three were Robespierre, Dr. Guillotin and Honore Mirabeau, you might guess, incorrectly, that attention and volume of the eight pages would be paid to the aforementioned in the order I mentioned them.  And you (probably), like me, being American, having never learned French history, while they (the French) having never forgot it, could not understand why these three and why write about the apparent least of these firstly and prominently (6 of 8 pages are dedicated exclusively to Mirabeau).  In order for me to bring you, dear reader, up to my frail understanding of this subject, I’ll have to first speak of James Russell Lowell’s characterization of Thomas Carlyle.  Next, I need to give his and my comparison of Carlyle to Shakespeare.  And finally, I’ll select certain of Carlyle more histrionic portrayals of Mirabeau for in depth analysis.  Shall we?

James Russell Lowell finds Thomas Carlyle both original (kaleidoscopic, brilliant, colorful) and thoroughly absent of any new original ideas in his later works.  Carlyle’s condemnations and ridicule of shortcomings are softened by humorous sympathy and acknowledgement of mortal frailty.  Lowell says, in fact, that the author’s type of humor runs and ends, as it must, into humor first cousin, cynicism (my wording here).  J.R.L. continues, saying, “There are no half-tints, no gradations (in his verbal portraits of powerful and historic men and women).  Carlyle’s historic compositions are wonderful prose-poems and names like Voltaire, Shakespeare, Thackeray and Homer are mentioned.

Lowell writes that one must go back to Shakespeare to find a rival to Carlyle in characterization and caricature.  Once the scales are set up, our critic looks at specific attributes of both Carlyle and the Bard.  Where Shakespeare portrays the ordinary strikingly, Carlyle examines the exceptional with exaggeration.  Shaky expounds the graces of Nature and the evolution of character, where as Carlyle gifts his characters with full detailed representation, firstly factual, then emboldened.  William Shakespeare knows the psychology of man most probably better than any practitioner today, while as Carlyle conducts a physical exam from face to follicle, from finances to feces.  With the gift of song, Lowell goes on, Carlyle’s prose-poems might sail off from Shakespeare’s lake to the epic oceans of Homer.

to be continued…Mirabeau summation here next

 

Three Lurid Pictures – Thomas Carlyle…some thoughts.

I was about to completely put down my 1880 vintage “Studies in English Literature” by Thomas Swinton when I came across an excerpt from “The French Revolution: A History”, by Thomas Carlyle.  The excerpt, ‘Three Lurid Pictures’, at once, seemed to be more Shakespeare than Gibbon, more rage than rational.  It was irresistible. Immediately, I had to get some background so that I could follow the sundry historical references he made throughout the eight fun pages.  I read about the Louis’, XIV, XV, and XVI.  The quotes attributed to their reigns are repeated to this day, even though those quotes are most probably inappropriately attributed.  In any case, I got the idea of imagining those same quotes being appropriately applied in modern times to the last two American presidential administrations and the next future one.  Here we go…

Around 1751, King Louis XIV brought France to its peak of absolute power and his words “L’etat c’est moi” express the spirit of a rule in which the king held all political authority.  His absolutism brought him into conflict with the Huguenots and the papacy, with damaging repercussions (quoted from HyperHistory.Com).   Around 2006, President George Bush sharply defended Donald Rumsfeld…, saying the embattled Pentagon chief is doing a “fine job” despite calls for his resignation from six retired military generals.  Continuing, the president was quoted as saying, “I hear the voices (indeed!), and I read the front page, and I know the speculation.  But I’m the decider…”.  I can only imagine Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld mumbling “Death has a tendency to encourage a depressing view of war.  Don’t blame the boss. He has enough problems deciding.  As for me, I am the State”.

Around 1774, King Louis XV’s decisions had damaged the power of France, weakened the treasury, discredited the absolute monarchy, and made it more vulnerable to distrust and destruction, as happened in the French Revolution which broke out 15 years after his death. “Après nous le déluge”  is a French expression, attributed to Marquise de Pompadour, the lover of the King of France.  The expression has two possible meanings: ‘After us, the deluge will come,’ asserting that if the revolution ended his reign, the nation would be plunged into chaos; or ‘After us, let the deluge come,’ implying “I don’t care what happens after I’m gone.”  Around 2016, President Obama gave an incredible, hilarious speech at the 2016 White House Correspondents Dinner.  At the end he dropped the mic and walked out telling the audience, “yeah, you’re gonna miss me when I’m gone!”   I can only imagine First Lady Michelle Obama mumbling “I love that for Barack, there is no such thing as ‘us’ and ‘them’…  But for me…after us, the deluge”.

Around May 9, 2016, a reporter asked the presumptive GOP presidential candidate, Donald J. Trump, what he would do to reduce the deficit. Trump replied, “We’ll just print money…”.  One might have speculated that a move like this would devalue the poverty wages of the already near starving poor.  I can only imagine the presumptive First Lady Melania Trump mumbling, “Nothing lasts forever, so we live it up, drink it down, laugh it off, take chances, and never have regrets. Because at one point everything we do is exactly what we wanted.  And as for ‘them’… Let them eat cake”.

I hear the past again, in every present quote.

I see history repeated each time we take a vote.

The coming of a state of one,

The deluge starts to crest,

This cake for rich it weighs a ton,

It will not float the rest.