The Plight of Animals
The plight of animals, how must it be
Ordained thus, either by a just God or
A merciful? By nature meek and poor,
They have no hopes, no future can they see
And all they own their living now as we.
No retrospect, their past is nevermore,
Their present short, a wretched end in store
Though dear their lives to them as mine to me.
Our ends will come, in torment or at peace,
For we too hold mere tenure of a lease,
Yet proudly we alone anticipate
A future life if we can expiate
The past. But why are helpless beasts outcast,
And who will give the sinless peace at last?
Pigs at the Fair
A summer country fair, no matter where,
And by the dodgems, swings and roundabout
In livestock pens found hereabouts are stout
Prize boars and bloated sows that cannot bear
Their weight but lie prostrate. Too late to spare
Them their impending fate, each comic snout
And corkscrew tail, each oink and squeak no doubt
Belies their desperation and despair.
And children here poke fun at them and mock
Their girth and make of them a laughing stock,
Or voice disgust, revile their fat and flab,
A preface to the shambles and the slab!
Their massive waistlines no-one could deny:
We fatten them to give us more to fry.
We Don’t Know What They Are
We don’t know what they are, nor why they’re here,
We know not whence they came nor where they go,
But some of them give comfort to the low,
Some help the blind to see, the deaf to hear.
They leave us poignant memories that cheer
And some that ache, remembered deeds that show
The lowly creature kindnesses we know
Once Eden knew when Eden knew no fear.
We don’t know what they are and never will,
But sure it is they know themselves and learn
And think and understand, when parting yearn
For us and grieve sometimes; and sometimes still
It feels we would be better, to my mind,
Allied to them and far less to our kind.
Peter Hartley is a retired painting restorer. He was born in Liverpool and lives in Manchester, UK.
Peter, please call me Joe S. or Joseph S. — there is no need for titles here. I add the “S” because there are several persons with this Christian name at the website.
I do not doubt for a second your commitment to preserving your English heritage, and I salute it heartily. Saving and restoring the aesthetic artifacts of our culture is one of the highest vocations possible. My uncle (who ran the Previti Gallery here in New York City) was an expert restorer of old paintings, specializing in 19th-century American landscapes and forest scenes.
I would disagree with you on one point in this matter — people like Duchamp, Ofili, Ermin, and Cage are NOT a part of our Western heritage. They are purveyors of garbage who have deliberately and consciously made a choice to break with tradition and to degrade it. We have every right to reject their worthless work, and when the right time comes, to destroy it.
As for the traditional punishment for high treason (hanging, drawing, and quartering), it was certainly OK to do away with it as unnecessary, as long as we still killed traitors by the hempen noose or the firing squad. But don’t you see? THAT’S MY VERY POINT. Those people who were opposed to all capital punishment did exactly what Lannie is doing — they “hid in plain sight.” They played on the humane tendencies of persons who were appalled by the medieval fierceness of hanging, drawing, and quartering, and they used it to promote, surreptitiously, a ban on capital punishment in toto. And now we can’t kill anybody, no matter what atrocious crimes they have perpetrated!
The left does this all the time! It works on the sympathies and kind-heartedness of ordinary apolitical conservatives, and silently dragoons them into voting for much more wide-ranging social changes that were not originally part of the deal. I have seen this happen so many times that I have reached the point where I am tempted to scream that our worst enemies are not leftists, but mild-mannered, milksop conservatives who are always voting incorrectly because of some moral scruple, or because of some emotional impulse of false piety or effeminate “niceness.” Look at the good people of Arizona (conservative, but stupid) who voted in Senators Flake and McCain. They are a textbook example of what I am trying to say.
There is no more time for being ‘Nice.” We are under direct attack.
As for bull-baiting and bear-baiting — sure, they were savage entertainments, and I suppose we can do without them. But they were part of a tradition that went as far back as the Roman arena, and the bullfights of Hispanic countries go as far back as the bull-jumping of the Minoans and the killing of the sacred bull by Mithra, or the Pharaonic bull confrontations of ancient Egypt. Are you going to tell the Spanish that they can’t kill bulls, or the Puerto Ricans here in New York that they can’t have cock-fighting?
There is one absolutely horrific statement in your above post. You say “There is much in our cultural heritage that is frankly not worth or worthy of preserving.” That appalling viewpoint is, in a nutshell, the core rot that is leading to the slow suicide of the West. It is the Achilles’ heel that will allow persons like Lannie to slowly and incrementally strangle what little is left of our Western identity. One’s cultural inheritance is not a smorgasbord table where you can pick and choose what one has a fancy for. It is our basic identity and our birthright!
Also, when you say “all right-thinking people,” you have slipped into garden-variety political correctness. That’s a way of saying “All people who think like me.”
Incidentally, the Sermon on the Mount doesn’t mention a thing about animals.
Joe S – The reason you find my statement, repeated in your antepenultimate paragraph “absolutely horrific” is because I INCLUDE the “works” of the likes of Duchamp, Ofili and the semi-literate Emin as (whether we like it or not) a part of our cultural heritage, “cultural” because that is what they are to the mass of people who visit art galleries or sites of cultural interest, whether they have the aesthetic integrity and discernment of the art critic Brian Sewell, the intellect of the philosopher Roger Scruton (who, incidentally, wiped the floor with Emin in a televised debate I once saw. Unsurprisingly she was the last one to know that he had); OR they have the artistic tastes and abilities of a woodlouse which in the light of some works of “contemporary” art I’ve seen is a gross insult to the intellectual faculties of the woodlouse. I remember at one of the galleries where I worked the splodges of a four-year-old were accepted in an open exhibition by a selection of eminent artists and judges. When they were presented with the facts the lead judge said it must have been a very talented four-year-old. But this is all the culture that many of the great unsoaped and pseudos of the art world know of, and they will stand in front of a work of art painted in yak-crap and concentrated Congolese fruit-bat vomit and make all the appropriate knowing grunts of approval and deliver the right expansive arm gesticulations and laud it to the skies. But this to them is their culture and it is their cultural heritage because they inherit it. And you can’t say it isn’t if you are telling me in the same paragraph that our cultural inheritance is not a smorgasbord from which we can pick and choose. Unfortunately this visual crap, like the sonic crap of John Cage, is a part of our cultural heritage as much as the works of Raphael or of Dürer. And there is no more annoying truism that has come down to us from the ancients than “De gustibus non est disputandum”. The big trouble with truisms is that they are either factoids or they are true. By the way as soon as I had posted my last I noticed “All right-thinking people” and wished that I’d spotted the lazy adjective sooner, but I assure you that I would not consciously conform to any pc criteria.
Peter, have you viewed Roger Scruton’s “Why Beauty Matters”? It is one my favourite documentaries. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bHw4MMEnmpc
Having mentioned that, how is Modernism in the arts any less valuable a concept than the concept of zero is in mathematics, and the concept of Atheism is in religion?
Actually, Peter, I don’t think we are in that much disagreement at all.
The artists you have mentioned are, in my view, simply NOT a part of the Western cultural tradition. They are alien frauds and interlopers. Ofili and the insufferable Emin aren’t even true Europeans. As for the awards and honors they receive, these are coming from an absolutely corrupt and anti-cultural establishment, one which today has total control of the apparatus of teaching, training, hiring, and funding for artists. It’s an utter disgrace and a bad joke that Emin has the sort of elevated status she now enjoys — it was given to her by the enemies of real culture.
All I can say is this: congratulations to everyone in the UK on the huge victory of Boris Johnson. He has kicked Labourite arse; now let’s see him do the same, as Englishmen have valiantly done in the past, to Frog and Kraut arse. Brexit IMMEDIATELY!!!
And on that happy note …
Hear, hear!
But I must hark back to the subject of animal cruelty. Joe S. you posted a long self-revelatory comment above with much of which I can wholeheartedly
identify. However I am appalled by all that you said in that comment about the cruelty to helpless animals that you support and condone in order to oppose the insane animal rights movement in the omly way you consider possible. You may be right there, but the end cannot justify the means when the means are unjustifiable.
You condemned animal cruelty in an earlier comment, and claimed that you would have no part in it. Yet now you say that in order to preserve your ‘cultural heritage’ you eat paté de foie gras, knowing that ducks and geese live and die in unimaginable discomfort and pain to provide you with an unnecessary foodstuff – frankly to feed your greed! You wear fur in the knowledge that while some animals are farmed for their fur, huge numbers are trapped in various types of trap to suffer in pain and terror until they are released by death. It is no longer necessary to use fur for warmth – merely now for vanity. You justify bull-fighting, cock- fighting and, I presume, any other similar ‘entertainments’ as part of somebody’s ‘cultural heritage’. Any part of any cultural heritage that involves evils such as cruelty to man or beast should be quietlydropped, not because of agitating PC factions, but because of a true civilising progression of human thought.
From a religious (Christian) point of view the matter admits of no argument. In the order of Creation God created all things and ‘saw that they were good’. He saw that humans were good (before the Fall) and as He had dominion over man and all creation, He gave to man dominion over all His animal creation. Among the attributes of God are mercy and compassion, and as He deals with mankind with mercy and compassion, He could not but intend that man should showsmercy and compassion to the brute creation over which we exexercise dominion at His command.
I recommend a search into the writing of Dom Ambrose Agius, OSB, appointed Archbishop of Malta by Leo XIII and Apostolic Delegate to the Phillippines by Pius X. I mention this to deflect suspicion that he might have been a modernist – and so his views were entirely orthodox, although Google will pop up his writing uon recent modernist sites if it serves theit purpose. I like one in particular that refers to him as the first Editor of ‘Ark’ some 27 years after his death!
We were given domnion over animals, and while we may use them for our legitimate and necessary needs we must care for them as appropriate, and we may not inflict unnecessary pain or suffering upon them in pursuit of these ends exercising compassion at all times in conformity with their Creator’s will.
Christina, indeed as Mr. Salemi did mention, the U.S.A. is a great country, and I would like to qualify that sentiment by mentioning that one of the things which makes it great, is that it does not prohibit Mr. Eduardo Souza of Spain from selling to Yankee doodle dandies his cruelty-free natural whole goose foie gras that is authentic and neither vegetarian nor vegan.
Yes, Mr. Souza’s cruelty-free fois gras is more expensive than the foie gras produced by those whose uncompassionate companies are funded by their equally uncompassionate customers, and that cause nothing but pain and suffering to the geese it is made from. But the higher retail price of Mr. Souza’s product is reasonable, because it reflects the true cost of making foie gras in a way that is honourable and therefore humane.
https://eduardosousafarm.com/index.php?view=producto&product_id=1
Christina, I would also like to mention that I appreciate your having mentioned the importance of not only being cruelty-free towards animals, but also towards our fellow humans. Though it was critical, your previous reply to Mr. Salemi was nonetheless a cruelty-free reply, because it did not contain any verbally abusive cyberbullying towards him—and by extension, towards the rest of us who read your reply. That you have consistently contributed to this thread in a manner that is civilized and thus thoughtful, is something which I value, and for that, I am thankful.
The same way that the good shepherd does care for their flock, the good hockey coach does care for their players, and the good writer does care for their readers.
Thank you, Lannie, and I apologise for getting your name wrong – my sight is not too good!
Christina, you are just not listening to what I have been saying. Neither has anyone else here, it would seem.
We are right now in a WAR with the Left. Not a debate, not a polemical exchange, not a parliamentary disagreement, and not a polite contretemps at the afternoon tea table. It’s a WAR, and in a war, as Shakespeare says, you must “imitate the action of the tiger,” and you must “dream of cutting foreign throats.” Shakespeare, good Englishman and recusant Catholic that he was, knew this quite well.
The war with the political and cultural Left is quite real, even though many sentimentalist Christian conservatives refuse to acknowledge it. You people in the UK just won a major skirmish in that war. Do you have any idea of what would have happened to you, your family, your property, your money, and your rights if that gimlet-eyed maniac Corbyn had been elected? This isn’t a polite chess game, dammit! This is a life-and-death struggle for the existence of Western identity.
Warfare and capital punishment are savage and brutal, and yet both are in complete accord with accepted and long-standing Christian morality, no matter what that buffoonish embarrassment of an Antipope in Rome says. The issue of fur or pate de foie gras isn’t that important to me, personally. If I had to do without them it would not be the end of my world. But right now, in the current objective situation of WARFARE that we find ourselves in, it has become a battle! And if you decline to fight a battle, you give the enemy a victory by default. Do that often enough, and you lose the whole war.
This is what I mean by timorous and deferentially polite conservatives always being the Achilles’ heel of our side of the cultural war. The Left takes five steps forward, and instead of fighting savagely to win back the field, you counsel the rest of us to that we should settle for one step backwards. When people like Lannie come here and “hide in plain sight,” playing on weak-willed sympathy and mild-hearted pity, you give in. In short, you are simply incremental enablers for the Left. You timidly step on a weak emergency-brake to slow down the Revolution for a little bit, and then you claim to be fighters for conservatism.
That isn’t helping the war effort. That’s just an organized retreat.
So yes, I shall continue to eat real pate de foie gras from Strasbourg, and wear fur coats, and have lamb kebabs, and fling heavy stones at the bloody cats who defile my backyard. Because if people like me didn’t do that, do you think someone like Lannie would be satisfied? No, they’d immediately start coming up with ANOTHER demand or ANOTHER suggestion, and they would have even deeper moral authority on their side in the form of the precedents that weak-willed Christian sentimentalists have given them via past surrenders. In the 1930s, they called this appeasement. It didn’t work with Hitler, and it won’t work with crackpots like Lannie. The Left never stands still, which is why they call themselves “progressives.”
Think about it, everyone here who is actually committed to saving the West from slow-motion suicide.
Christina,
You’re welcome. I did not sense any maliciousness on your part. It seemed more like a smartphone typo, than anything else.
It is not as though you have been doing your Voldemort-best in this thread to make it seem as though SCP is an alt-right website that has a twerpy chicken hawk subculture of verbally abusive cyberbullying.
As for eye health, there are herbs and supplements, such as astaxanthin, lutein, and zeaxanthin, which are available at health food stores. There is much information online about those products.
Lannie – Thank you very much for your link to the documentary “Why Beauty Matters” which I had NOT seen before, although a few short extracts therefrom were in the televised interview between Roger Scruton and Emin, which I DID see. I shall never forget the statement, common to both recordings, “It’s art because I say it’s art”, which must be the most arrogant remark in the entire history of Western Europe; and another little gem, from the same source I think, the delightful petitio principii “It’s art because it’s in an art gallery”.
And to return briefly to the subject of the plight of animals, Descartes has figured prominently in this thread. The following short poem, which I wrote more than a year ago, may indeed open a can of worms:
DESCARTES AND ANIMAL PAIN
Descartes tells us sensation marks mankind
From all the beasts, their feelings less than stone.
Because they suffer silently we find
They suffer not at all: it helps condone
The hunter if the hunted feel no pain.
The gutted wildebeest will mutely fall,
It seldom shrieks, in dying won’t complain.
The end can’t be so dreadful after all.
It cannot be, or wouldn’t it be odd,
Those sparrows sold, two farthings paid for five,
Not one of them forgotten before God?
How could some great celestial joke contrive
Not only for a few of us to thrive,
We eat each other barely to survive?
The opening paragraph of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy on Rene Descartes suffices to put to rest some of the nonsense flying in this strand:
“René Descartes (1596–1650) was a creative mathematician of the first order, an important scientific thinker, and an original metaphysician. During the course of his life, he was a mathematician first, a natural scientist or “natural philosopher” second, and a metaphysician third. In mathematics, he developed the techniques that made possible algebraic (or “analytic”) geometry. In natural philosophy, he can be credited with several specific achievements: co-framer of the sine law of refraction, developer of an important empirical account of the rainbow, and proposer of a naturalistic account of the formation of the earth and planets (a precursor to the nebular hypothesis). More importantly, he offered a new vision of the natural world that continues to shape our thought today: a world of matter possessing a few fundamental properties and interacting according to a few universal laws. This natural world included an immaterial mind that, in human beings, was directly related to the brain; in this way, Descartes formulated the modern version of the mind–body problem. In metaphysics, he provided arguments for the existence of God, to show that the essence of matter is extension, and that the essence of mind is thought. Descartes claimed early on to possess a special method, which was variously exhibited in mathematics, natural philosophy, and metaphysics, and which, in the latter part of his life, included, or was supplemented by, a method of doubt.”
I cannot even imagine modern mathematics without Descartes.
Mr Rabbit-Vacuum (if I may), I hope you didn’t take the concluding couplet of my third little poem viz “It feels we would be better to my mind, allied to them and far less to our kind” as anything more than a rhetorical statement. It was not intended to be taken literally. I remember when another SCP member made a kind, well-meant rhetorical statement in concurrence with the gist of your “Sonnet: America in 2019” you riposted with a po-faced piece of gratuitous unpleasantness, the sarcasm and the bile in which appeared wholly unwarranted by his comment. Thank you for the extract from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. I have read similar encomia to the genius and the achievements and the virtues of Descartes but I am not interested in them for present purposes. My concern is for the cruelty to animals that his beliefs promoted, and which meant that animals had virtually no hearing at all in mainstream philosophy till the likes of Jeremy Bentham a hundred and fifty years later. Incidentally, unlike you, I can very well imagine modern mathematics with or without Descartes or Newton or Euler: I still can’t do long division but I cannot say it has been a crippling handicap in life. I can, though, in my worst nightmares conjure up a world without animals, and it is a hideous and an arid place to be.
Sorry, I meant Bentham was TWO hundred and fifty years after Descartes, and not a moment too soon.
And later in this same entry on Descartes one reads:
‘The twentieth century variously celebrated his famous “cogito” starting point, reviled the sense data that some alleged to be the legacy of his skeptical starting point, and looked to him as a model of the culturally engaged philosopher. He has been seen, at various times, as a hero and as a villain; as a brilliant theorist who set new directions in thought, and as the harbinger of a cold, rationalistic, and calculative conception of human beings. Those new to the study of Descartes should engage his own works in some detail prior to developing a view of his legacy.’
Good advice indeed. It is neither helpful nor, I think, intelligent to quote selectively from a respected source in support of one’s own viewpoint or “to put to rest” the perceived “nonsense” of other contributors to the discussion.
My entry above was to that of E Base, December 21st.
Christina – It was exceedingly cruel of you, I trow, to occasion Mr Base such acute embarrassment by your revelation of his rather Base (in the sense “underhand”) attempt to pervert a carefully balanced view of the man by selective quotation. Perhaps Mr Base did not consider it likely that anybody would bother to examine the context of his snippet from Stanford’s to find other little excerpts that might allow the reader to form a more accurate appraisal. I certainly would not have credited Mr Base with such, let us say, “Base” behaviour; but then I must be a great deal more naive than you. I take issue, though, with his self-satisfied and arrogant assumption that his selective extract “suffices” to lay to rest some of the “nonsense flying in this strand”. How on earth does he arrogate the right to tell ME that his selective quotation (tantamount to misquotation) “suffices” to transform my opinions to accord with his own? Nobody on this thread has ever denied the noteworthy achievements of Descartes: that was never the point at issue, so why Mr Base (in the sense “ignominious”) felt the need to heave a carefully chosen cob out of Stanford’s to support a non-existent contention I cannot fathom.
Julius Caesar (100 BC – 44 BC) cautioned Romans to pay less attention to dogs and more attention to children. I may not agree with Caesar on some things, but I definitely agree with him on that.
I knew that sooner or later someone on this thread would have to make odious comparisons between our treatment of animals and children, or something along those lines; as in the UK we hear the oft-repeated winge that we have an RSPCA but only an NSPCC. I’m proud to say I don’t know what Caesar thought about anything to agree or to disagree with, although I DO know of several things that he DID. And I’m sure the people of Rome could have done well without his gratis advice on parenthood: everybody knows that children are more important than dogs.
How can you agree with Ceasar on that if you’ve got no way of knowing if he actually said those words? And no way of knowing ANYTHING that he said in his lifetime? It truly fascinates me how some people can hold firm a quote that someone supposedly said 10, 15, 20 centuries ago! It’s the ultimate in self-delusion.
If you’re thinking of posting some worthless passage from a ‘history’ book to support your claim; you may be dissuaded from doing so after reading the following words once uttered by some French chap:
‘History is the version of past events that people have decided to agree upon’.
That is the last sentence on history . . and the defining sentence. If we talk of anything more than 500 years ago; then it’s not history . . it’s only versions.
Monty – The reason Mr Base says “I may not agree with Caesar on some things, but I definitely agree with him on that” is because he hopes to convey the impression to we poor ignorant illiterates that he is familiar, not only with every single thing that Caesar said and wrote, but also everything he ever thought.
I’m aware that it’s become a cliche these days, but it remains true that all species – including humans – are equal; as in, each species has a role to play in the sustenance of our planet .
it’s that simple. The human species differs from all others in only one way . . it’s the only species with the capability of destroying the planet.
Those who don’t recognise such equality (probably the majority in North America) would do well to wiki the word ‘biocentrism’.
Monty – Thank you for your contribution, and with Jeremy Bentham you are in distinguished company with your belief: “that the capacity for suffering is the essential characteristic that entitles animals to equal consideration” (Google). I would qualify the word “equal” with “in some respects” in this quote but your point is well made.
Certainly a world without other life forms (animals or plants) would be horrible; for without them everyone of us (and them) would die.
Ah, even @ the SCP one must defend Descartes; but still it is worth while, the method of his heart’s discourse.
What I admire about Descartes are his methodical doubt and his application of 16th century algebra to the geometry of the Ancient Greeks, an advancement in mathematical abstraction, observable in high school mathematics..
The hatred (or willful ignorance) of mathematics runs deep @ SCP. That is a deep flaw. One quote from Descartes suffices: “…mathematics is a more powerful instrument of knowledge than any other that has been bequeathed to us by human agency.”
Who other than a Dutch portrait painter from the Golden Age, like Franz Hals, could have painted Descartes with an overall air of truth? Here is a bilding [sic] from decades ago.
Portert van Rene Descartes
by Sir Bac de Leeuw
Franz Hals’ rendition of Descartes shows, in his pose,
the arched eyebrows above the thoughtful, round, brown eyes,
the wrinkles faint below, the large and bumpy nose,
the graying whiskers that his lips enclose, the chin’s large size,
his face encased in long brown, falling, curling hair,
beneath a starched and bright white collar’s square, which lies
upon a cape of ebony, a black roquelaire
perhaps. He holds his hat, black too, in his right hand.
His arrogance and confidence infuse his stare,
the man who thought and brought geometry’s great land
to algebra—so clearly and distinctly—Hals shows
the man, against a gray background of cool command.
I confess: I have both a hatred and a willful ignorance of maths. Can you explain to me how that might be a “deep flaw” in my character? No, I didn’t think you’d be able to.
Ah, even @ SCP one has to defend Gaius Julius Caesar. What does the word classical even mean to these individuals?
1. Caesar was a writer. He is among the greatest of prose writers, especially in military history, and among the greatest of orators.
2. What we have of Caesar’s writings is not that much. They can be taught at a very early age; at home school my children read his “Bello Gallica” in Latin.
3. Even in the public high school World literature class I taught, the students read excerpts from Caesar.
4. It is from Caesar that I learned the value of referring to oneself in the third person.
You’re on the wrong roof, Bruce: you DON’T have to defend Caesar.. ‘coz Caesar’s not under attack! Nobody in this thread has spoken ill of him; not in the slightest. The only person under attack is you.. for trying to quote someone from 2000 years ago, without the thinnest shred of evidence that he actually said it . . other than you ‘read it somewhere’. Can you really not see the futility in making such a claim?
If you can’t, let me assist you . . . Imagine, one day, that I made the following comment on these pages:
‘When Caesar was 37, he turned to a close friend one day and said: “I think beef is better than chicken before going into battle; beef seems to give me more energy”.’ Can you you imagine the derisory ripostes it might attract from other commenters? (“how can you make such a pathetic claim, Monty, when nobody on this planet has any way of knowing whether or not he said those words”) . . See? It’s senseless and worthless to quote anyone, not just Caesar, but ANYONE from 2000 years ago. That’s the point we’re trying to make to you, Bruce; no one’s attacking Caesar.
Regarding your four points above:
1/ You’ve got no right to claim that Caesar was one of “the greatest of prose writers” . . ‘coz you’ve never read anything that the man wrote! You’ve only ever read things that he was SUPPOSED to have written. It really is that simple.
2/ Caesar’s writings “can be taught at a very early age”. What does that mean? WHAT DOES THAT MEAN? What a vacuous thing to say. ANYONE’S writings can be taught at an early age if a kid(s) is curious enough – and it’s drummed into them enough times. Why and how is Caesar any different?
3/ Students read excerpts from Caesar ‘coz they’re forced to. One can only wonder how many of them – once they get a bit older – start to form their own opinions as to whether what they’ve been told has any truth or substance . . and subsequently become disillusioned with the whole subject. And when that happens.. of course they’re not gonna tell the teacher of their true feelings. Hence, teachers blindly continue deluding themselves that they’re doing good . . they’re not! They’re just misleading the kids.
4/ Of course there’s nothing wrong in referring to oneself in the third-person . . but can you kindly explain the “value” of doing so. To me, such a practise would only be of interest to fantasists.
Sorry Monty, you posted while I was writing my two-pennorth. You may well be right about what Caesar was only supposed to have written, but then it’s ‘De Bello Gallico’ he’s supposed to have written and not ‘Bello Gallica’!
Well, Mr. Cwerbus, I advise you to dismiss your children’s Latin tutor immediately and without pay. Then when you replace him/her with a proper Latin tutor you must be sure that he/she teaches them that a Latin adjective agrees with the noun it qualifies in gender number and case – hence ‘bello gallico’, NOT ‘bello gallica’. You must also check on that book, supposedly by Julius Caesar that your children were reading. Caesar never wrote a book entitled ‘Bello Gallica’. What he did write were seven separate books entitled ‘De Bello Gallico’ (1 – VII). You can’t be too careful about what children are reading these days.
Thank goodness it was you, a proper classics man, who taught students in the public high school World Literature class to read excerpts from Caesar and not one of the illiterates @SCP!
Aha!!! So Mr Rabbit Vacuum, aka Aedile Cwerbus aka Eris Bawdle-Cue: exposed as a charlatan!!! And a charlatan of the classics no less!!! And were it not for his pomposity and withering remarks one who might never have been rumbled even now. I came bottom of my class in Latin though I still read and learned hefty chunks of Virgil’s Aeneid (In those days we were expected to translate from English to Latin, not just the easier Latin to English) and was relegated to the art room whence I managed to forge a lowly career as a paintings conservator. But even I had a double take when I read your “Bello Gallica” and felt sure it was wrong, but was not assiduous enough to check. I’m glad somebody did.
Quick notes:
1. I fear the country’s going to the dogs.
2. Aggressive dogging, nipping at one’s heels, the dogs of war! O, hear their baying squeals.
3. A flaw in artistic vision is not a flaw in character, or is it?
4. Pedanticism reigns supreme.
5. “Never argue with a fool, onlookers may not be able to tell the difference.” Twain.
6. Alas, it seems my varied seams are fraying in this thread. I shall return to Poetry, which I prefer instead.
Puri Semonis Amator
And, you, too, at the summit, did not double only Terence twice;
but you were also lauded because of your simply-written prose.
What you could’ve used and then added to the smoothly-running lines
was comical power. That alone would make you honored more
than the Grecians, never henceforth despised for this awful lack.
I’m vexed merely because that alone, Caesar, was lacking in you.
The correct Latin is “Sermonis,” not “Semonis.”
Good catch from another defender of Western Civilization.
Quem deus vult perdere dementat prius