Even a Little Learning…

Even a little learning teaches that human nature is always in trouble. Drinking deeper confirms it. A good example comes in today’s post on Laudator Temporis Acti (link); it is delightfully titled—but it could’ve been titled “So What Else Has Changed.”

Some stray thoughts that rose, reading that. Note the language. Rose. Not progressed. In our times, though ever more hesitantly, we believe in progress. That belief contradicts what plainly lies in front of us. Progress is either personal, creative or it’s just as vanishing as everything else. Ocean waves don’t progress, they just rise and fall; tides ebb or flow.

Those with little learning, like me, don’t know where the Pierian spring is located. Irritated, I looked it up. Turns out that a portion of Greek Thessaly was called Pieria (link). In that region is Mount Pierus. The Greeks though that the Muses lived there. Being a mount it had at least one spring.

The phrases comes from Alexander Pope poem, An Essay on Criticism. Scholars have traced it back to Petronius’ Satyricon. Here is the verse in J.M. Mitchell’s translation.

I LOSE MY WAY

But whether he’s nursed ‘neath the fortress grim of the armed Tritonian maid,

Or a Spartan settlement nurtured him, or the home where the Sirens played;

His boyhood’s years he must give to song, and quaff the Maeonian spring

With a generous heart; he must hurry along, just giving his steeds their fling,

With Socrates’ pupils, and unafraid, he must learn from Demosthenes

To wield the orator’s giant blade; and — when he has learned all these —

Then let the poets of Roman race throng round, and, their old Greek dress

But lately shed, in native grace, lend him their own loveliness.

Let the page have done with the dusty Court, let Fortune go her own way;

Let the theme be banquets and fields hard fought, told bravely in warrior lay;

Let Cicero’s thunders try thy soul; be these thy strengthening.

So in full flood high thoughts shall swell from the true Pierian spring.

Innocence

Words are magical—if only we look at them. The thought behind this entry comes from pondering the scurry of squirrels in our yard as they prepare for winter. We have a great Y-shaped tree in our backyard on the left strut of which Y, this year, the clan has built itself two nests. We didn’t consciously see these nests until the leaves reluctantly went south during the last few weeks. But now we see them. And the squirrels, as every year, are in a seemingly frantic hurry to store-store-store up there the treasures they find on the ground, scurrying to great heights. To complete this picture I must say that they don’t always work. This time of year some impulse also causes several or maybe all of them to clamber about in the branches of a set of smaller trees, entirely bare of any kind of nutrition, while performing astounding feats of acrobatics, apparently strictly for fun—often chasing one another in the process.

Squirrels came into our sharper view here in the suburbs of Detroit for the first time because the area is densely populated with people and with trees, and the trees are full of squirrels. Here, for the first time, we saw black as well as grey ones. Brigitte and I come from lands across the Atlantic where squirrels are seemingly smaller and almost reddish brown. American squirrels draw European attention. Our granddaughter Stella demonstrated this on walks in the Grosse Pointes here during her recent visit—absolutely fascinated with the creatures and avidly making photographs of little beasts in actions that, for us, no longer invoke much interest; they’ve become mere background.

It’s been going on like this forever here, the same patterns repeating, repeating. And, yesterday, when my eyes followed squirrels in their play and labor, the world “social Darwinism,” mentioned in that day’s blog here still on my mind, a meditation on innocence began spontaneously, as follows, more or less: Nature is innocent—humanity cannot be. For a while there I was muddled as I pondered this, thinking that innocence is rooted in knowledge, thus rising from the Latin for gnoscere. In meaning not and gnoscere meaning to know. Unknowing. Not so, it turns out. Innocence is rooted in the word nocere, meaning harm: not harming. But, of course—and never mind the etymologies—it comes to the same thing. Nature does not know. Therefore, no matter what it does, Nature can do no harm. Man always knows, also does, and therefore always knows when it does—harm. Our superiority carries a high price.

Images of the Garden loomed up, of course, that Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil—and thoughts of the paradox of humanity’s fall—or was it humanity’s rising? For you must already know good and evil before you’re able to disobey. The disobedience is present in potential before the teeth sink down into the apple. And the corollary, of course, is that a way of life aping the purely natural, thus obeying the hidden hand of the market or the roar of the vox populi, is not good policy. But, having arrived at that thought, the innocent pleasure of watching the squirrels faded away and I went indoors to make a cup of coffee.

Blaming the Victim

It brought me wry amusement to discover the following stanza in Dante’s Paradiso last night. It comes from Canto XVII in which Dante encounters one of his forebears, Cacciaguida, who predicts Dante future for him. Dante, of course, wrote these lines after he already knew that future, having lived it. He was banished from Florence and condemned to death in one of the endless and often violent political conflicts of his day. Cacciaguida is the voice behind the lines, and, commenting on Dante's fate, he says:

The injured side will bear the common blame
As ever; but the day of reckoning,
By truth appointed, shall the truth proclaim.

Two different translations (the above is Dorothy Sayers’) are these: Charles Eliot Norton: “The blame will follow the injured party, in outcry, as is wont; but the vengeance will be testimony to the truth which dispenses it.” The Carlyle-Okey-Wicksteed translation: “The blame shall cleave unto the injured side in fame, as is the wont; but vengeance shall bear witness to the truth which doth dispense it.”

Now considering the fact that Dante began to write the Divine Comedy in 1308 and probably wrote these lines toward the end of his life (he died in 1321)—and given the phrasing of the leading sentiment (“as ever,” “as is the wont”)—we must conclude that blaming the victim, known as old news in the fourteenth century, is certainly a well-entrenched habit of humanity. What is our contribution to this stellar side of human behavior? We've managed to shorten the phrasing down to three words in English. As I remember from studying linguistics a good ways back, as languages persist, they grow ever more brisk, succinct. Long words get chopped, and long concepts too. Thou shalt blame the victim must surely belong among the first five commandments of Satan’s ten.