Alan Jacobs

wesleyhill:

I just read this quote from W. H. Auden: “In times of war even the crudest kind of positive affection between persons seems extraordinarily beautiful, a noble symbol of the peace and forgiveness of which the whole world stands so desperately in need.”

And it reminded me of the picture everybody, including me, has been passing around on the internet.

Just wanted to note the connection.

landscapelifescape:

Phander, Ghizar, Pakistan

Morning.. (by Atif Saeed)

Particularize

The Harrowing of Hell: one of the great 15th-century alabasters from Nottingham. See others here.

from the tomb of Agilbert, Bishop of Wessex, at Jouarre Abbey, France

Egypt, like many Arab societies, has a wealthy and well-armed elite at the top and a fanatical and well-organized Islamic fundamentalist movement at the bottom. In between lies a large and unorganized body of people who have never participated in politics, whose business activities have been limited by corruption and nepotism, and whose access to the outside world has been hampered by stupid laws and suspicious bureaucrats. Please note that the Egyptian government ‘s decision to shut down the entire country’s Internet access over the weekend—something it can do because Internet access is still so limited—had almost no impact on the demonstrators. For all the guff being spoken about Twitter and social media, the revolution in Cairo appears to be a very old-fashioned, almost 19th-century revolution: People see other people going out on the streets, and they join them

I wish I could be more enthusiastic about the events in Egypt and Tunisia – but … the citizens of the Arab world all too often have a choice between a Bad Guy and a Worse Guy. Egypt looks like its choice is between the status quo, the Muslim Brotherhood or a military coup. This is not a 1989-style revolution, there is no Arabic equivalent of Scorpions singing Wind of Change. Successful revolutions normally have a well-organised alternative government, with a clear route towards democracy. Where is the Egyptian Lech Walesa, or the Tunisian Vaclav Havel?

Such wistful desire to evade responsibility exposes the childishness of the adults now preaching the good news of emerging adulthood. They have decided that taking responsibility for other people — spouses, children, employees and subordinates, neighbors, friends, eventually even parents — and relying on them in turn is the heaviest burden that can befall a person. But what if this is instead the means to happiness? Advocates of emerging adulthood share in common with children a proclivity to see the future as nearly infinite and themselves as, for all practical purposes, immortal. In their view of themselves and their world, it is never too late and there is never any rush. But a few-year increase in the average life expectancy has bought us much less time than they think, and it has done nothing to mitigate our potential to make irreversible errors and experience gnawing regret. The indefinite extension of childhood doesn’t even approximate the immortality required to free us from these miseries. In the meantime, putting off all responsibilities and commitments as long as possible to avoid hard realities may only result in missing the opportunity to make these decisions at all.

Who, alive today, will still be famous in 500 years? It’s the kind of question people might ask at dinner parties during a lull in conversation. But it’s one I’ve been pondering for the past couple of years, while writing a novel about three men who were together for a six-month period of bloody battles and lavish parties in central Italy. The story, set in 1502, is almost entirely a true one. The names of the men? Cesare Borgia, Niccolo Machiavelli and Leonardo da Vinci.

When I first read about this little-known moment in history, I was amazed that the three men should have known one another. In fact, Leonardo was working as Borgia’s military engineer, while Machiavelli had been sent by the Florentine government on a diplomatic mission. But I had never thought of them as contemporaries, perhaps because they are famous for such different reasons. Indeed, two of the three are really infamous rather than famous, and—thanks to the vicissitudes of time and rumor—they are remembered for things they probably didn’t even do.

Unfortunately, however, traditions that are not passed on from one generation to the next die. If an entire generation grows up largely unexposed to a particular tradition, then that tradition can in essence be said to be dead, because it is no longer capable of reproducing itself. It does not matter whether the tradition in question is imagined as the Western tradition, the Christian tradition, or the Marxist tradition (and of course both Christianity and Marxism are part of the Western tradition). Traditions are like languages: if they are not passed on, they die. Most traditions, of course, have good and bad elements in them (some might argue for Christianity, some for Marxism, relatively few for both), and what dies when a tradition dies is therefore often both good and bad, no matter what one’s perspective. But what also dies with a tradition is any possibility of self-critique from within the tradition (in the sense that Marxism, for instance, constituted a self-critique from within the Western tradition), since a tradition’s self-critique presupposes the existence of the tradition. Therefore the death of a tradition is not just the death of the oppression and tyranny that might be associated with the tradition, but also the death of progressive and liberating impulses within the tradition.