Post date: Mar 17, 2020 3:11:26 AM
so i recently [1/2] finished a book by Hemingway called Death in the Afternoon. oddly enough, it's nonfiction .. well, not in the sense that it is entirely factual ..
after all, Hem gives plenty of opinions about certain bullfighters and how certain things should be done, in typical machismo.
.. but in the sense that it is not a novel. it does attempt to describe the nature and practice of bullfighting. the last chapter, for example, is about what makes a good killing of a bull and what does not. (unsurprisingly, in Hem's opinion: there are very few matadors that are actually good killers.)
this was a difficult book to read. i had to renew the book from the library ten(!!) times.
...
i'm not exactly sure what drove me to read Death in the Afternoon.
most likely it was a fascination with the novel The Sun Also Rises, in which the main characters attend a bullfighting festival .. that is, during the second half of that novel. there, Hem wrote enough about bullfighting that i probably wondered what it was about [1]. i mean: what could make killing honorable?
then again, it was only several millennia ago that humans were organised mostly in tribes [2], probably only a few exceeding Dunbar's number, and that anyone outside of the tribe was a probable enemy. at the very least, if they were killed, then it wouldn't harm your tribe in the short-term [e].
hell, arguably humans are seven times more likely to kill one another than most other mammals.
i've said before that i'd consider going time-traveling .. even for a one-way trip [3] .. if it means that i'd reach far enough into the future where the human pre-frontal cortex has had enough evolutionary time to change and acclimate towards reason and away from emotion .. if that ever happens, of course [4].
Hemingway has his take on humanity, and it's not flattering. maybe, through a distant fascination with death, i wanted to hear more of what he has to say .. if only through the "safe" practice of some kind of ritual killing.
...
honestly, i don't know if we'll make it as a species. the good money is that we don't, and i suspect that the wealthy elites are planning to live it up as much as they can, buy a ticket off this planet when it's time to go, and leave all of us peons behind ..
.. in which case the calvinists were actually right, after a fashion:
maybe, eventually, wealth indicates predestination;
the rapture will take the rich ..
.. maybe the mighty too, if they are friends of the rich.
to re-appropriate some famous lines:
maybe the meek will inherit an Earth ..
.. One that nobody wishes anymore to inherit.
imagine drumpf in space, with another select few dozen on that spaceship, arguing about how to de-regulate the new stock market on Earth 2.0 and how to divvy up the real estate.
fvck that: i'll die of radiation first, or being eaten by zombies.
maybe Fate will be merciful and we'll all die from a meteor crash;
i've always been partial to fairness and equality, anyway.
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epilogue: this post took a strange, dark turn. i didn't mean it, this way. it was only supposed to be about a book i read. maybe it's because of the turn that the book takes, at the end.
here's an excerpt from the last chapter:
"There are two things that are necessary for a country to love bullfights. One is that the bulls must be raised in that country and the other that the people must have an interest in death. The English and the French live for life. The French have a cult of respect for the dead, but the enjoyment of the daily material things - family, security, position, and money - are the things that are most important. The English live for this world too and death is not a thing to think of, to consider, or mention, to seek, or to risk except in the service of the country, or for sport, or for adequate reward. Otherwise it is an unpleasant subject to be avoided or, at best, moralised on, but never to be studied."
evidently, it takes a Roman to utter: memento mori. on a related note, Hem's last chapter has a similar, sobering tone as Machiavelli's the Prince:
"Thus, no prince should mind being called cruel for what he does to keep his subjects united and loyal; he may make examples of a very few, but he will be more merciful in reality an those who, in their tenderheartedness, allow disorders to occur, with their attendant murders and lootings. Such turbulence brings harm to an entire community, while the executions ordered by a prince affect only one individual at a time ..
.. if you have to make a choice, to be feared is much safer than to be loved. For it is a good, general rule about men, that they are ungrateful, fickle, liars and deceivers, fearful of danger, and greedy for gain. While you serve their welfare they are all yours, offering their blood, their belongings, their lives, and their children's lives, as we noted above - so long as the danger is remote. But when the danger is close at hand, they turn against you."
unfortunately, i think these words stand the test of time. hell, Niccolo himself was actually for democracy over despotism and had an unenviable fate himself.
such is the price of realism and pragmatism; to paraphrase Seneca: the core of all anger .. is hope.
maybe i'll have happier things to say. anyone have any actually-fun book recommendations, by the way? (:
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[1/2] this post was actually written on 4 mar 2020. lately i've been putting a delay on my posts, as to not say things too rashly.
[1] in contrast, the characters in that novel also do an incredible amount of drinking. that doesn't fascinate me, because .. well, i know a little something about drinking already.
[2] to be clear, yes: Sumer dates from 4000 BCE and Egypt from 3000 BCE. on the other hand, agriculture may date only 12,000 years ago.
[e] this, of course, does not account for long drawn-out feuds that kill many people over time, due to seeking immediate vengeance; reacting emotionally doesn't always correlate with long-term foresight.
[3] this is a particularly arrogant assumption, isn't it? that humans will make it that far? on the same note, another stipulation would be that i would not be put in a zoo and have agency, even if everyone treated me like a Cro-Magnon.
[4] to be clear, those conversations pre-date my current relationship with a lovely woman. i wouldn't ever want to be away from her, now.