Heading to Colorado for my first Elk hunt!
Good ole Noam
http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/opinion/2011/09/201192514364490977.html
Fascinating stuff, is he wrong?
Just started reading “Walden” by Thoreau
…and Wow am I underwhelmed. First of all, Henry David is only thirty when he writes it, and he says “I have yet to hear the first syllable of valuable or even earnest advice from my seniors.” Old age brings only loss, not wisdom, he belabors this point. Sounds like typical youth to me…
But the real stinker is this one: “I sometimes wonder that we can be so frivolous, I may almost say, so as to attend to the gross but somewhat foreign servitude called Negro Slavery, there are so many keen and subtle masters that enslave both North and South. It is hard to have a Southern overseer; it is worse to have a Northern one; but worst of all when you are the slave-driver yourself!”
Uh, okay, I get your point, but really? Seriously? Do you sometimes whip yourself to death, physically? Trying to end slavery is frivolous?
And then comes the famous “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation…” what is implied, of course, is that Thoreau DOES NOT, being wise and having seen the light. “But alert and healthy natures remember that the sun rose clear.” Thoreau, and just maybe the lucky reader are those special people with ‘alert and healthy natures.’
To be plain, I think Thoreau is simply wrong. The mass of men do not lead lives of quiet desperation, that is a callow conceit.
Anyway, I should probably keep reading.
The Survivor, by Terrence Des Pres
The basic structure of Western civilization or perhaps of any civilization, insofar as the processes of culture and sublimation are one, is the division between body and the spirit, between concrete existence and symbolic modes of being. In extremity, however, divisions like these collapse. The principle of compartmentalization no longer holds, and organic being becomes the immediate locus of selfhood. When this happens, body and spirit become the ground of each other, each bearing the other’s need, the other’s sorrow, and each responds directly to the other’s total condition. If spiritual resilience declines, so does physical endurance. If the body sickens, the spirit too begins to lose its grip. There is a strange circularity about existence in extremity: survivors preserve their dignity in order “not to begin to die”; they care for the body as a matter of “moral survival.”
For many among us, the word “dignity” no longer means much; along with terms like “conscience” and “spirit” it has grown suspect and is seldom used in analytic discourse. And certainly, if by “dignity” we mean the projection of pretense and vaingflory, or the ways power cloaks itself in pomp and ritual pride; if, that is, we are referring to the parodic forms of this principle, as men exploit it for justification or gain—just as honor and conscience are exploited and likewise parodied, although real in themselves—then of course the claim to dignity is false. But if we mean an inward resistance to determination by external forces; if we are referring to a sense of innocence and worth, something felt to be inviolate, autonomous and untouchable, and which is most vigorous when most threatened; then, as in the survivor’s case, we come upon one of the constituents of humanness, one of the irreducible elements of selfhood. Dignity, in this case, appears as a self conscious, self-determining faculty whose function is to insist upon recognition of itself as such.
Certainly the SS recognized it, and their attempt to destroy it…was one of the worst aspects of the camp ordeal.
Thinking about Jones
What really impressed me about the Jon Jones fight was Jones’ instincts. Yes, he’s an incredible athlete with an amazing wingspan, but none of that means shit without the composure to utilize it. When he came out in that crawl–that spider-monkey-attack, fluid and athletic, not scared, never in danger, he started the process of throwing Rampage completely off his game and “mesmerizing” him, as Rampage later admitted. Jones would later say when pressed that he had a great outside single and thought maybe he could get it from there, but still….
That instinct was flawless. It was exactly the right thing to do. And that, at 24 years of age, is what really impresses about Jones. Not just the tools, but the ‘composture,’ as old boxing trainers sometimes say. His confidence and composure felt so complete…has the guy ever lost a round, or half a round?
Maybe, maybe Machida can somehow muster up enough elusiveness, clever striking, and speed to challenge Jones, but I don’t see anyone else doing it. And I see him going to heavyweight in 2 years and taking that belt, too.