A Thing of Beauty in a Barbarous Time

Barbarus hic ego sum, quia non intelligor illis. — Ovid

With the economy imploding, and the wars, and crimes, and torture, and impotent political posturing -- even as the pockets of the people are picked on a daily basis -- there is a time, there must be a time for beauty, for a time apart the madness. We must remember what our humanity is, and why we even bother with the onus of civilization, with its exploitation and its barbarism.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in his famous essay, "Discourse on the Arts and Sciences," provocatively asked whether it wasn't such condolences that bound us ever tighter to the chains of oppression:

So long as government and law provide for the security and well-being of men in their common life, the arts, literature and the sciences, less despotic though perhaps more powerful, fling garlands of flowers over the chains which weigh them down. They stifle in men’s breasts that sense of original liberty, for which they seem to have been born; cause them to love their own slavery, and so make of them what is called a civilised people....

What would become of the arts, were they not cherished by luxury? If men were not unjust, of what use were jurisprudence? What would become of history, if there were no tyrants, wars, or conspiracies? In a word, who would pass his life in barren speculations, if everybody, attentive only to the obligations of humanity and the necessities of nature, spent his whole life in serving his country, obliging his friends, and relieving the unhappy? Are we then made to live and die on the brink of that well at the bottom of which Truth lies hid?

Let it be remarked here that Rousseau went on to write one of Europe's first and most popular novels, and even composed an opera of his own!

But philosophy is not my intent here, only to select a respite from the sorry spectacle that 21st century capitalism has provided us, and the sure prospect that, unless humanity grab history in its puissant fist, things will only be getting worse.

The following aria and duet from Richard Strauss's opera, Arabella, is some of the most beautiful music I have ever heard. The duet between the sisters in the last minute is as close to perfection as one will ever hear in vocal music. Who cares that the subtitles are in another language (Finnish?)?

Enjoy, and remember John Keats' epoch-making words:

A thing of beauty is a joy for ever:
Its loveliness increases; it will never
Pass into nothingness; but still will keep
A bower quiet for us, and a sleep
Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.
Therefore, on every morrow, are we wreathing
A flowery band to bind us to the earth,
Spite of despondence, of the inhuman dearth
Of noble natures, of the gloomy days,
Of all the unhealthy and o'er-darkened ways
Made for our searching: yes, in spite of all,
Some shape of beauty moves away the pall
From our dark spirits.

"Ich danke Fräulein - Aber der Richtige" from act I, Richard Strauss' Arabella, Théâtre du Châtelet, Paris (2002) -- with Karita Mattila (Arabella), Thomas Hampson (Mandryka), Barbara Bonney (Zdenka), Günter Missenhardt (Graf Waldner), Cornelia Kallisch (Adélaide), Hugh Smith (Matteo), Endrik Wottrich (Elemer), Olga Trifonova (Fiakermilli), Sarah Walker (Kartenaufschlägerin) et al. Christoph von Dohnányi conducts the Philharmonia Orchestra.

(Oh, yes, the Latin quote at the top, it's from the opening of the Rousseau essay, and is translated, "In this place I am a barbarian, because men do not understand me.")

Poem on the Lisbon Earthquake, 1759

On November 1, 1755, the first massive earthquake to shake modern Europe destroyed the city of Lisbon, then the fourth largest city in the Western World. Lisbon was a rich, pious city, with many churches, one of the centers of the Inquisition. The quake and resultant fire and tsunami was said to kill over 70,000 people. The priests and philosophers of the time grappled with how such wanton destruction could happen in a world supposedly run by a beneficent God.

One of the most famous responses came from a leader of the European Enlightenment, François-Marie Arouet, known as Voltaire. His reaction to the disaster came in the form of a poem, "Poem on the Lisbon Disaster, or: An Examination of that Axiom 'All Is Well". The following selections from this long work are from a 1912 translation by Joseph McCabe:

Unhappy mortals! Dark and mourning earth!
Affrighted gathering of human kind!
Eternal lingering of useless pain!
Come, ye philosophers, who cry, “All’s well,”
And contemplate this ruin of a world.
Behold these shreds and cinders of your race,
This child and mother heaped in common wreck,
These scattered limbs beneath the marble shafts—
A hundred thousand whom the earth devours,
Who, torn and bloody, palpitating yet,
Entombed beneath their hospitable roofs,
In racking torment end their stricken lives.
To those expiring murmurs of distress,
To that appalling spectacle of woe,
Will ye reply: “You do but illustrate
The iron laws that chain the will of God”?

*******
Did fallen Lisbon deeper drink of vice
Than London, Paris, or sunlit Madrid?
In these men dance; at Lisbon yawns the abyss.

*******
"’T is pride,” ye say—“the pride of rebel heart,
To think we might fare better than we do.”
Go, tell it to the Tagus’ stricken banks;
Search in the ruins of that bloody shock;
Ask of the dying in that house of grief,
Whether ’t is pride that calls on heaven for help
And pity for the sufferings of men.
“All’s well,” ye say, “and all is necessary.”
Think ye this universe had been the worse
Without this hellish gulf in Portugal?
Are ye so sure the great eternal cause,
That knows all things, and for itself creates,
Could not have placed us in this dreary clime
Without volcanoes seething ’neath our feet?
Set you this limit to the power supreme?
Would you forbid it use its clemency?
Are not the means of the great artisan
Unlimited for shaping his designs?

*******
Nay, press not on my agitated heart
These iron and irrevocable laws,
This rigid chain of bodies, minds, and worlds.
Dreams of the bloodless thinker are such thoughts.
God holds the chain: is not himself enchained;
By his indulgent choice is all arranged;
Implacable he’s not, but free and just.

Why suffer we, then, under one so just?
There is the knot your thinkers should undo.

********
The vulture fastens on his timid prey,
And stabs with bloody beak the quivering limbs:
All ’s well, it seems, for it. But in a while
An eagle tears the vulture into shreds;
The eagle is transfixed by shaft of man;
The man, prone in the dust of battlefield,
Mingling his blood with dying fellow-men,
Becomes in turn the food of ravenous birds.
Thus the whole world in every member groans:
All born for torment and for mutual death.
And o’er this ghastly chaos you would say
The ills of each make up the good of all!
What blessedness! And as, with quaking voice,
Mortal and pitiful, ye cry, “All ’s well,”
The universe belies you, and your heart
Refutes a hundred times your mind’s conceit.

All dead and living things are locked in strife.
Confess it freely—evil stalks the land,
Its secret principle unknown to us.
Can it be from the author of all good?

********
He sinks beneath the ruin he has wrought.
What is the verdict of the vastest mind?
Silence: the book of fate is closed to us.
Man is a stranger to his own research;
He knows not whence he comes, nor whither goes.
Tormented atoms in a bed of mud,
Devoured by death, a mockery of fate.
But thinking atoms, whose far-seeing eyes,
Guided by thought, have measured the faint stars,
Our being mingles with the infinite;
Ourselves we never see, or come to know.

*******
The hand of pleasure wipes away our tears;
But pleasure passes like a fleeting shade,
And leaves a legacy of pain and loss.
The past for us is but a fond regret,
The present grim, unless the future’s clear.
If thought must end in darkness of the tomb,
All will be well one day—so runs our hope.
All now is well, is but an idle dream.
The wise deceive me: God alone is right.
With lowly sighing, subject in my pain,
I do not fling myself ’gainst Providence.
Once did I sing, in less lugubrious tone,
The sunny ways of pleasure’s genial rule;
The times have changed, and, taught by growing age,
And sharing of the frailty of mankind,
Seeking a light amid the deepening gloom,
I can but suffer, and will not repine.

A caliph once, when his last hour had come,
This prayer addressed to him he reverenced:
“To thee, sole and all-powerful king, I bear
What thou dost lack in thy immensity –
Evil and ignorance, distress and sin.”
He might have added one thing further—hope.

To support disaster relief in Mynamar (Burma), and make a donation online, click here.

On Knowledge, Ignorance, and Pride

From Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Emile:

Human intelligence has its limits, and not only can a man not know everything, but he cannot even know in its entirety the little that other men know. Since the contrary of every false proposition is a truth, the number of truths is as unfathomable as the number of errors. We must, therefore, choose what to teach as well as when to teach it. Of the knowledge within our reach some is false, some is useless, some merely serves to feed the pride of him who has it....

Beware of the specious attraction of falsehood and the intoxicating fumes of pride. Remember, remember always, that ignorance never did any harm, that error alone is fatal, and that we do not lose our way because of what we do not know but because of what we think we know.

Who said this?

What should one think about the massive inequality in the world?

"... one should think in this regard about the sort of inequality that reigns among all civilized people, for it is obviously contrary to the law of nature, however it may be defined, for a child to command an old man, for an imbecile to lead a wise man, and for a handful of people to gorge themselves on superfluities while the starving multitude lacks necessities."

Hint: This was written before prophecies were stocked in grocery store bins, and after a hangman burned a blind man's books.

"Non ignara mali, miseris succurrere disco"

The quote in Latin in the title of this post comes from Virgil's Aeneid, Book I, line 630. Roughly translated, it means: "No stranger to misfortune myself, I have learned to relieve the sufferings of others."

The Enlightenment philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau was taken by the motto, and gave prominence to it in his book, Emile. The book is worth reading, viewed, as it is, through the prism of 250 years of civilized progress and decay, through terrible wars, revolutions, genocides, the war against slavery, nationalist struggle, and renewed religious wars. It resonates for one, such as myself, who fights against the absolutely human, the profoundly evil practice of torture. The Virgil quote resonates, as I am a psychologist who has had opportunity to treat the traumatized and the tortured.

Rousseau:

Man's weakness makes him sociable.... Every affection is a sign of insufficiency; if each of us had no need of others, we should hardly think of associating with them. So our frail happiness has its roots in our weakness....

We never pity another's woes unless we know we may suffer in like manner ourselves.

'Non ignara mali, miseris succurrere disco.' -- Virgil.

I know of nothing so fine, so full of meaning, so touching, so true as these words.

Why have kings no pity on their people? Because they never expect to be ordinary men. Why are the rich so hard on the poor? Because they have no fear of becoming poor. Why do the nobles look down upon the people? Because a nobleman will never be one of the lower classes....

The pity we feel for others is proportionate, not to the amount of the evil, but to the feelings we attribute to the sufferers....

Man is the same in every station of life; if that be so, those ranks to which most men belong deserve most honour. All distinctions of rank fade away before the eyes of a thoughtful person; he sees the same passions, the same feelings in the noble and the guttersnipe....

Have respect then for your species; remember that it consists essentially of the people, that if all the kings and all the philosophers were removed they would scarcely be missed, and things would go on none the worse....You are a man; do not dishonor mankind.

You are a man; do not dishonor mankind. This should be emblazoned on the hearts and souls of the rising generation, as the world has been terribly dishonored by leaders who wage illegal wars, murder thousands, lie, cheat, steal, torture, promote the benefit of the few through the exploitation and violation of the many.

This is something to remember; something to measure and judge those who would seek to lead us. The quoted material above was only written in 1762. Could the spirit of it be so soon forgotten?