The Best Introduction to the Mountains

treilly · 04 Jan 2002, 11:44 · from urth-v0031.mbox · original

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: <treilly at ozemail.com.au>
Subject: The Best Introduction to the Mountains
Date: Fri, 4 Jan 2002 22:44:28 +1100
Message-ID: <urth-v0031-urth.v031.n024.7 at digest.urth.net>
X-Urthmirror-Source: http://www.urth.net/urth/archives/v0031/urth.v031.n024.7.shtml
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

Yes, the naive political content certainly detracted from the admirably hea=
rtfelt remainder.  Can it be seriously questioned that societies of hundred=
s of millions require more complex self regulation than Anglo Saxon tribes =
of a few thousand at most?  Bureaucratic this might be, but there are worse=
 things than bureaucracy.  I suppose Wolfe must say he would prefer to live=
 among the Goths and Vandals than in Rome of the same era.  I would prefer =
now, and Rome next.

The (Heinleinesque) political asides irresistably reminded me of Sir Peter =
Medawar's comment on a similar essay by C S Lewis idealising the traditiona=
l feudal relationship of old England where every man knew his place and was=
 happy.  Medawar pointed out that of course Lewis in writing this unquestio=
nably envisaged himself as lord of the manor!  The same assumption runs dee=
p in Wolfe's words.

I will try to find the exact quote when I return home to Sydney in a few we=
eks.

Tim

This message was sent through MyMail http://www.mymail.com.au

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net