ITHAKA
Lew Rockwell introduced me to the
Z Man’s blog, when he reposted
this
wonderful essay on “Essential Knowledge.” Among the several profound truths
discussed, the Z Man noted that:
For the student of history, the
habit has been to start at the beginning and read forward, thinking about how
each era led to and shaped the next. The tides of history have carried man to
the place he is today, not by chance, but through the great chain of causality.
Each new civilization was built on those that came before it. In this way,
history is a stack of blocks and the story of man is a tower reaching to the
heavens. To know what comes next means knowing every block in the stack and why
it is there…
You cannot be an educated man
without having read Homer. You can get the Iliad and the Odyssey for close to free as an eBook.
I am quite certain that the so-called
elites whose number include the fanatic Cultural Marxists and the Social
Justice Warriors want to expunge history and Homer from our
consciousness; they can only do so if we let them. For our past is not only the
guide to choosing a better future; it allows us to understand and be aware of
the tyrannies of the present, to resist those who seek to limit our liberty,
who promote war, who have no sense of the spiritual and only believe in the
material, who believe in the rightness of might, the ones who are featured on
the daily headlines posted on LewRockwell.com and whose mentality appears so
alien to anyone with a sense of common sense, not to mention common decency.
Perhaps Edith Hamilton is no
longer in fashion; yet she is someone who appreciated the best creations of the
best minds of the Ancient Greeks and how their greatest gift was not just
civilizational but an insight into the human spirit and into that which makes
life beautiful, despite its moments of pain and suffering, grief and despair.
She wrote in her The Greek Way:
Before
Greece the domain of the intellect belonged to the priests. They were the
intellectual class of Egypt. Their power was tremendous. Kings were subject to
it. Great men must have built up that mighty organization, great minds, keen
intellects, but what they learned of old truth and what they discovered of new
truth was valued as it increased the prestige of the organization. And since
Truth is a jealous mistress and will reveal herself not a whit to any but a
disinterested seeker, as the power of the priesthood grew and any idea that
tended to weaken it met with a cold reception, the priests must fairly soon
have become sorry intellectualists, guardians only of what seekers of old had
found, never using their own minds with freedom. There was another result no
less inevitable: all they knew must be kept jealously within the organization.
To teach the people so that they would begin to think for themselves, would be
to destroy the surest prop of their power. No one except themselves must have
knowledge, for to be ignorant is to be afraid, and in the dark mystery mystery
of the unknown a man cannot find his way alone. He must have guides to speak to
him with authority. Ignorance was the foundation upon which the priest-power
rested. In truth, the two, the mystery and those who dealt in it, reinforced
each other in such sort that each appears both the cause and the effect of the
other. The power of the priest depended upon the darkness of the mystery; his
effort must ever be directed toward increasing it and opposing any attempt to
throw light upon it. The humble role played by the reason in the ancient world
was assigned by an authority there was no appeal against. It determined the
scope of thought and the scope of art as well, with an absolutism never questioned…
That
is what happens when one course is followed undeviatingly for ages. We are
composite creatures, made up of soul and body, mind and spirit. When men’s
attention is fixed upon one to the disregard of the others, human beings result
who are only partially developed, their eyes blinded to half of what life
offers and the great world holds. But in that antique world of Egypt and the
early Asiatic civilizations, that world where the pendulum was swinging ever
farther and farther away from all fact, something completely new happened. The
Greeks came into being and the world, as we know it, began…
Thus, I would describe our controllers, the ones who fight
against liberty and knowledge of history very much in the mold of the ancient
priestly cast—without any sense of spirituality of course. If I may return to
the Z man he makes a distressing point in his most recent essay:
While
it is entertaining, these orgies of destruction are killing Western civilization.
The culture of the West is not a single thing, but a series of waves from
Greece to the present. As each wave crashed, the next wave built upon what was
accomplished by the previous wave. The current waves breaking on the rocks of
reality are leaving nothing but rubble, as Progressive culture furiously erases
our past. To call it a suicide cult is to give it too much credit. It is
cultural nihilism that will usher in a new dark age.
I cannot be as pessimistic as the Z
Man on the murder of Western civilization; I do not say that every reader of
Lew Rockwell or Z Man’s blog share the same goals yet I think among the
billions of souls living on our enemy occupied planet, there are a great many—even
if a minority—who value liberty, beauty, life and realize the importance of our
cultural heritage. Thanks to this site and the Internet, I have encountered
likeminded souls. And I have reason to believe that we few, “we happy few,” we
band of brothers and sisters will do our best to remember and to spread the
word, not just through social media, but in what we create, what we value, what
we hold dear.
I had no idea that Sean Connery was a
friend of the composer Vangelis; from the
polis of the Internet I learned they collaborated on a work of art together: a
reading of (Edmund
Keeley’s translation of) C.P.
Cavafy’s poem Ithaca set to Vangelis’ original music.
While I suspect the
original CD is very difficult to obtain, a kindred spirit created this
video on YouTube:
Our
modern day Laistrygonians and Cyclops are not the true dangers; only those if:
you
bring them along inside your soul,
unless
your soul sets them up in front of you
Life is a journey; the poem Ithaca captures
not only our heritage and the gift of Homer but speaks of eternal truths;
remembering Ithaca’s gift to us
and avoiding Scylla and Charybdis, life’s journey can be a beautiful one. And
that is why it’s so important that we honor and remember the past, remember our
shared history, celebrate it, share it, and never forget, despite the efforts
of the blind whose goal is for us to blind ourselves and deny our common
humanity. There is neither peace nor joy in their “vision.” Their view of life
is ugly, grey and one of continual strife and conflict; in other words, they do
not see the truth.
For they suffer from a hubris that most likely will bring
retribution from a higher power, if only in the fullness of time.
