Even more extraordinary than the ape of the Tura Pieta is the one we encounter in a Crucifixion by the unknown Dutch painter of the last years of the fifteenth century nicknamed the Master of the Virgo inter Virgines. In this panel, one of the treasures of Northern art preserved in the Uffizi, a particularly sinister simian sits near the foot of the cross, but instead of holding an apple he places his hand on a human skull. This, we may be sure, is the cranium of Adam, who according to mediaeval legend was buried on Mount Golgotha. How could the function of the ape as a visual metaphor for the Fall of Man be conveyed more strikingly than that? And here is the detail:
Investors are already placing their bets on who the winners of the new Internet will be: Over the past five years Amazon’s shares, despite their recent fall, have risen 370%. Apple’s are up 438%. Google’s, meanwhile, have merely risen by 17% in all that time. It is still the early days of this long-term trend, but my hunch is that this gap in performance will widen over the coming year — and that Google’s long slow decline has already begun.What makes Google’s predicament so serious is that it has little to do with technology and everything to do with business models. You can buy or copy technology, but changing a business model is about the hardest thing any company can do. Google’s business model, and nearly all its revenue and profits, depend on the Internet remaining open. When we search, Google pockets billions from advertising. If the old Internet is changing, Google’s original way of doing business loses value.
A Prayer for Persons Troubled in Mind or Conscience
O Blessed Lord, the Father of mercies, and the God of all comforts: We beseech thee, took down in pity and compassion upon this thy afflicted servant. Thou writest bitter things against him, and makest him to possess his former iniquities; thy wrath lieth hard upon him, and his soul is full of trouble: But, 0 merciful God, who hast written thy holy Word for our learning, that we, through patience and comfort of thy holy Scriptures, might have hope; give him a right understanding of himself, and of thy threats and promises; that he may neither cast away his confidence in thee, nor place it any where but in thee. Give him strength against all his temptations, and heal all his distempers. Break not the bruised reed, nor quench the smoking flax. Shut not up thy tender mercies in displeasure; but make him to hear of joy and gladness, that the bones which thou hast broken may rejoice. Deliver him from fear of the enemy, and lift up the light of thy countenance upon him, and give him peace, through the merits and mediation of Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
(This, I think, is one of the more remarkable prayers in the Book of Common Prayer. It is very interesting to see the underlying theology here, which is that a person who is consumed by self-accusation lacks “a right understanding of himself.” The hope is for that right understanding to be restored, and in the meantime note how earnest are the pleas that God be patient and forbearing. How lovely.)
Which? Magazine, May 1959
Ezra Pound’s beautiful translation of a poem by Li Po, from Pound’s great early book Cathay, is a compendium of all his many gifts. Somewhere Pound says that the ideas in poetry should be simple, even banal, and universal and human; he points out that the chorus in Greek tragedies always sticks close to home truths of the sort “All men are born to die.” “Exile’s Letter” has this universal simplicity (“There is no end of things in the heart”). It is about the sadness of parting from dear friends. As someone who was himself often living far from writer-friends, Pound knew all about the exquisite melancholy of leave-taking.There is also a historical dimension to this poem worth noting: the Chinese had the world’s first civil service and no hereditary nobility. All prominent scholar-bureaucrats could secure positions only by passing rigorous Confucian examinations. Once they obtained these positions, they had to serve somewhere outside of their native district in order to avoid favoritism or nepotism. Each advancement meant a new dislocation. Since the empire was so large and transportation was so bad, friends and lovers and family members were often separated for many decades. Such separation is the subject of this poem.
Drum asks us to envision a Muslim-run hospital that required its employees to bind themselves to Shariah law. But the analogy is hopelessly flawed, because the typical Catholic hospital doesn’t require its employees to follow Catholic doctrine in their personal lives — on sexual matters or anything else. The Church isn’t asking for the right to fire an employee for missing Mass on Sunday or for coveting his neighbor’s wife. It just doesn’t want its institutions to be legally required to pay for acts that it considers immoral, as the price of running hospitals at all. (Or to pay for them directly, since obviously an employee could use their paycheck to buy any produce or service they so chose.) This isn’t the equivalent of a hypothetical Muslim hospital demanding, say, that all its employees permanently abstain from pork and alcohol and premarital sex. It’s the equivalent of a hypothetical Muslim hospital declining to stock Playboy in its gift shop, or serve pork and alcohol in its cafeteria.
There’s also a question for Twitter that’s still pending: Will it enter countries where it will likely be forced to censor? It can stay out—not building offices, not selling advertising—and then just let users post whatever they want. Or it can go in and have to obey the onerous requests. Tim Wu, a law professor at Columbia, told me, ‘In those countries, Twitter has no particular reason or legal duty to follow the laws of that nation, and I don’t think Twitter should agree to be bound by their censorship laws, even for their citizens. Obviously, it has the right to, but I don’t agree it’s good policy.’ If Twitter has no corporate presence in Syria, it can let users go to Twitter.com and post whatever they want. If a censorship request comes in, Twitter can ignore it. (If the government threatens to shut off all access to the site, then, perhaps, Twitter can choose to censor.)
Hence reading is self-mastery, because the self (and its affirmations) are held in check while the author (and his structures of thought) are fully attended to. True diversity in literature would be to read authors in circumstances as different from our own as possible, because we might then imagine ourselves as different than we are — not the creature of circumstances, but their master. Reading is fundamental, all right: to a person’s ethical development.