This is from the Brian Hooker’s 1923 translation of Rostand’s CYRANO. I give some of the surrounding line, for context, in the play. The poem is being recited by Cyrano while he is fencing Valvert, who unwisely insulting the hero’s nose.
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“The Dark Ages are a myth. The long centuries between the fall of Rome and the full emergence of a Christian Europe were incomparably the greatest period of moral improvement in human history. In the Classical world, such practices as infanticide, abortion, pederasty, sodomy, slavery, suicide, and crucifixion were everyday facts of life. Public entertainment in Rome included going to the Colosseum to watch gladiators kill each other or wild animals tear helpless people apart.
“As Christianity gained ascendancy, all these things were abolished by law. By the end of the so-called Dark Ages they had been banned throughout Christendom and ceased to exist, except insofar as they could be performed illicitly. Until recently we took their non-existence so much for granted that we forgot our huge debt to the Dark Ages — the very name of which signifies our modern ingratitude.
“The Dark Ages understood virtue and built a civilization; the progressive age doesn’t understand virtue and is tearing down the civilization it inherited.” – Joe Sobran
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A truly inspired insult is a work of art.
The stageplay has a different version, both in English and the original French. This is the wording as appeared in the 1950 version of CYRANO starring José Ferrer and directed by Michael Gordon. For the record, Edmond Rostand wrote the stageBrian Hooker the English tCarl Foreman the
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Vicomte de Valvert: Monsieur, your nose… your nose is rather large.
Cyrano de Bergerac : Rather?… Is that all?
Vicomte : Well of course…
Cyrano : Oh, no, young sir. You are too simple. Why, you might have said a great many things. Why waste your opportunity?
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A recent discussion in this space touched on the topic of how, before there is one sovereign power to hold all tribes, tongues, and nations in awe, the conquest of land over generations is a tragic reality human law cannot ameliorate.
I mentioned in passing that the urge to deracinate the current landholders to return terrain to descendants of older claimants is an urge with no appeal to me, nor has been since my youth.
For better or worse, my first impression of the topic was informed by, of all things, a science fiction novel by the underrated and unfairly neglected grandmaster Jack Vance. I have seen no reason to revisit the issue. The attempt to effect a restitution for evils that befell before the current reign and realm of a prince or parliament was established is in vain, and, moreover, is pernicious if the attempt engenders evils equally as great.
Here is a quote from the Jack Vance science fiction book published as THE GRAY PRINCE, later, republished under the author’s preferred title THE DOMAINS OF KORYPHON.
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And here is another trifle of juvenilia poetry found in a shoebox. This was when I was entering my ‘Clark Ashton Smith’ phase.
A VISION
IN a garden where golden lianas lean
Entwining boughs that house their drooping lines
And flowers hold a fragrant congregation
There I, silent, lie, secreted by the vines
Eager for that vision rumor warns to leave unseen
A dangerous angel drifts on outspread wings
Armed with girdling aureoles and rays
Garbed with circling constellations
Crowned with moons of crescent phase
I risk my eyes and more to see these things
I pain myself, profaning what I look on and adore
Till hair like strands of night eclipse her face
Love and stir the planets from their stations
But it cannot pull me from my hiding place
Where I gaze my eyes to blindness and then see nothing more.
A an untitled poem I wrote in my youth, which I just found in a shoebox. Enjoy
How bravely our brass-throated trumpets brayed
How bravely our empurpled ensigns flew
Oh! A magnificent sight we made
As bravely we charged, spears held high, and fell to.
Burdened we were in our sweat-stinking mail
Partly blind, wholly deaf in our heavy chain cowls
Calls mute in the clamor, chaos and travail,
Choked by the stench of fear-liquefied bowels.
How ugly the sight as we fell and we bled
Unwound guts, pumping stumps; man wailing like child
Ugly the sight as we cowered and fled
Dropping shields, trampling friends, disordered and wild
The brave tales we heard were far, far from true
Yet we gather tomorrow to battle anew.
For those of you who have not had these pleasure of reading one of the most widely read books in history, this is a quote from Pilgrim’s Progress by Bunyan. The scene here concerns a neighbor named faithful who has been offered a job by old Adam.
As with all allegory, the symbolism is clear, heavy-handed, and exists without any depth or double meeting to confound the reader. Most allegories are not worth reading, but this Puritan classic may well be the exception that tempts the rule.
He said his name was Adam the First, and I dwell in the Town of Deceit. I asked him then, What was his work? and what the wages that he would give? Read the remainder of this entry »
Another favorite preface of mine, and a pleas to the wary bookbuyer, was penned by Robert Louis Stevenson as front matter for his immortal TREASURE ISLAND. With the moxie of Lucretius, he pens his plea in poetry, at the same time praising his forebears, promising wonders, and defying time and fashion.
All in all, a most professional, humble, yet bold entreaty. God send more quills like this to scribble on the pages of the world!
To the Hesitating Purchaser
“If sailor tales to sailor tunes,
Storm and adventure, heat and cold,
If schooners, islands, and maroons
And Buccaneers and buried Gold
And all the old romance, retold,
Exactly in the ancient way,
Can please, as me they pleased of old,
The wiser youngsters of to-day:
-So be it, and fall on! If not,
If studious youth no longer crave,
His ancient appetites forgot,
Kingston, or Ballantyne the brave,
Or Cooper of the wood and wave:
So be it, also! And may I
And all my pirates share the grave,
Where these and their creations lie!”
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In a recent discussion in this space, it was questioned whether or not the Marvel Universe is ruled by a Supreme Being.
Let us hear what the cosmic superbeing The Watcher says on the matter:
From Fantastic Four (1961) issue #72.
Here is a quote I rather admire from our own Mr. Vic Q. Ruiz:
To me, the one indisputable truth taught by Christianity is that the human species is an imperfect one, always liable to error and corruption. Those who instead believe that mankind is perfectible inevitably create hells on earth.
Any society that assumes that leaders will be flawed, and builds in self-correcting mechanisms, is bound to be both more successful and more happy in the long run than is a system which only works if the leaders are particularly virtuous. In short, what is desirable is the rule of law, and the rights of Englishmen.
He goes on to describe himself as an ally of Christianity, albeit not Christian himself.
Allow me to quote a parallel passage from a man who was a very thoroughly converted Christian, Mr. G. K. Chesterton:
Modern masters of science are much impressed with the need of beginning all inquiry with a fact. The ancient masters of religion were quite equally impressed with that necessity. They began with the fact of sin — a fact as practical as potatoes.
Whether or no man could be washed in miraculous waters, there was no doubt at any rate that he wanted washing. But certain religious leaders in London, not mere materialists, have begun in our day not to deny the highly disputable water, but to deny the indisputable dirt.
Certain new theologians dispute original sin, which is the only part of Christian theology which can really be proved. Some followers of the Reverend R. J. Campbell, in their almost too fastidious spirituality, admit divine sinlessness, which they cannot see even in their dreams. But they essentially deny human sin, which they can see in the street.
The strongest saints and the strongest sceptics alike took positive evil as the starting-point of their argument. If it be true (as it certainly is) that a man can feel exquisite happiness in skinning a cat, then the religious philosopher can only draw one of two deductions. He must either deny the existence of God, as all atheists do; or he must deny the present union between God and man, as all Christians do. The new theologians seem to think it a highly rationalistic solution to deny the cat.
Tom Simon, in one of his typically luminous essays, on the topic of why Americans fear dragons, reports that, as a matter of fact, they do not.
In part, he has this to say:
Our composite American has never shied away from fantasy or the imagination. He loved tall tales long before he learnt to read; and since he grew up in a landscape of wild and wonderful possibilities, he did not much care whether the tall tales were strictly impossible or not.
He is equally delighted with Paul Bunyan and Johnny Appleseed. He will swallow the feats of Natty Bumppo, which are flatly impossible without being magical, right along with the ghost stories of Edgar Allan Poe, which are magical and might not be quite impossible.
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My regular readers are familiar with this idea, and perhaps with this quote. Nonetheless, it bears repeating.
“In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, not to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse, when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is . . . in some small way to become evil oneself. One’s standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to.”
– Theodore Dalrymple.
The quote for today is from Edward Feser:
“… the early modern philosophers’ transition away from Aristotelianism to a mechanical understanding of nature constituted not an advance but a regression, a willful forgetting of crucial distinctions and categories the drawing and elucidation of which had been one of the great achievements of Scholasticism, and a conceptual impoverishment that inevitably created problems rather than solved them.”
Hear, hear.
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I wanted to pass this along:
Actually I hope Biden does well for We The People BUT here is my issue with the whole; “let us all be a United States again” that we heard from Joe Biden:
For the last 4+ years, the Democrats have gone scorched earth. You have salted the fields and now you want to grow crops.
The problem is 72+ million of us have memories longer than a hamster.
- We remember the women’s march (vagina hats and all) the day after inauguration.
- We remember the 4 years of attacks and impeachments.
- We remember “Not My President!” and “Resist!”
- We remember Maxie Walters telling followers to harass us in restaurants.
- We remember the President’s spokesman being kicked out a restaurant.
- We remember hundreds of Trump supporters physically attacked.
- We remember Trump supporters getting doxxed, and fired from jobs.
- We remember riots, and looting We remember “a comedian” holding up the President’s severed head.
- We remember a play in Central park paid with public funding, showing the killing of President Trump.
- We remember Robert de Niro yelling “F” Trump” at the Tony’s and getting a standing ovation.
- We remember Nancy Pelosi tearing up the State of the Union Address.
- We remember the total in the tank move on the mainstream media.
- We remember the non-stop and live fact checking on our President and his supporters.
- We remember non-stop in your face lies and open cover-ups from the media.
- We remember the President and his staff being spied on.
- We remember five Senators shot on a ballfield.
- We remember every so-called comedy show turn into nothing but Trump hate fest.
- We remember 95% negative coverage in the news.
- We remember the state governors asking and getting everything they ask for and then blaming Trump for their problems.
- We remember a Trump top aid verbally assaulted in two DC restaurants.
- We remember people banging on the Supreme Court doors.
- We remember that we were called every name in the book on a daily basis, including “racists” and “Nazis,” for supporting President Trump.
- We remember that Hollywood said they would leave after Trump was elected but they stayed.
This list is endless, but you get the idea.
My friends will be my friends, but a party that has been on the attack for four long years does not get a free pass with me! There can’t be healing or unity after what you’ve put us through so stop talking about it, and prepare for the tables to be turned. It’s our turn for Not My President!, Impeach!, and #ChinaGate.
Hope you enjoy lying in the bed you made.
—Michael Bassett
My comment: For one, I am glad that none of the threatening events will come to pass, despite that the world says they are inevitable. My firm conviction is that, no matter what mortal men do, the warrior angels on the side of truth, decency and justice outnumber and surpass the jihadist demons from the realm of darkness, decay, and brutality.
But even if the insolent attempt of the Powers That Be to steal the national election for Joe Biden so openly were crowned with success, the laurels would be ashes on their brow.
President Trump was investigated for what Hillary did, impeached for what Biden did, blamed for what China did, and now being attacked for mentioning what Hunter did.
