Saturday, July 23, 2005
Short Order
For some light reading during the coming dog days of summer, may I recommend Kenneth Rexroth's sumptuous appetizer tray Classics Revisited.
A sample from Njal's Saga: If one makes a life habit of unlimited liability, the accumulated responsibilities of a lifetime may become too complex and, at the same time, too poignantly focused to be borne. One man might sustain so complicated an architecture of stresses and balances as long as there was no unaccountable interference from outside...
Njal, after a lifetime of unparalleled nobility and relentless education of the conscience, ends, like the Nibelungs, in fire. His home and his family are destroyed with him, and all for an impetuous spite. A vector of tension unaccounted for in his careful system of checks and balances of moral liability smashes a lifetime's husbandry, like an arrow shot from outside into a web of glass...
Existence is orderly; the individual and his related fellows persist only so long as they are so; but it is vital disorder that endures throughout time and from which organization emerges into temporary significance and into which it washes away.
A sample from Njal's Saga: If one makes a life habit of unlimited liability, the accumulated responsibilities of a lifetime may become too complex and, at the same time, too poignantly focused to be borne. One man might sustain so complicated an architecture of stresses and balances as long as there was no unaccountable interference from outside...
Njal, after a lifetime of unparalleled nobility and relentless education of the conscience, ends, like the Nibelungs, in fire. His home and his family are destroyed with him, and all for an impetuous spite. A vector of tension unaccounted for in his careful system of checks and balances of moral liability smashes a lifetime's husbandry, like an arrow shot from outside into a web of glass...
Existence is orderly; the individual and his related fellows persist only so long as they are so; but it is vital disorder that endures throughout time and from which organization emerges into temporary significance and into which it washes away.
