Thank you. I’ll re-examine it, if I can muster the self-discipline neded to ignore the malignant substance of the poem.
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Also re-read Ecclesiastes? It’s reputedly the atheists’ favorite book of the bible. Overlook the references to “God” and “your Creator” and it is splendidly worded and (dryly humorously) wise.
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Yes, I have dipped into Ecclesiastes. It seems to me to be the least Hebraic and most Hellenic in it’s skeptical tone.
Still, when looking for discussions on how to live our lives, I’ll take the Greco-Romans any day. Is there anything in the Bible that can compare with the ethical wisdom of Aristotle, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, the Epicureans, or Cicero?
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Good point! That would be a topic I’d enjoy seeing debated.
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The KJV Bible (“Old Testament”) is full of marvelous English poetry. The beautifully written book, Ecclestiastes, is iconoclastic and utterly free of sentimentality. There is a great, candidly erotic, love poem, The Song of Solomon. Choose the poetic books and passages (not many in the five books of Moses), read them as English literature and not as a religious text, and if you have a feeling for poetry it is a splendid experience that bears repeating.
There is no beautiful English translation of great Greek and Latin poetry that I have ever come across. I don’t think anyone reads Greek and Roman philosophy in English as literature but purely as philosophy.
I’m most sympathetic to the atheist Epicureans.(They really are atheists though they made conciliatory noises about very distant gods, utterly uninterested in human affairs, existing somewhere or other.)
A discussion of our inheritance from the Hellenes and the Romans would be a very long one, and I would guess almost entirely harmonious.
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George Orwell wrote this in an essay titled Politics and the English Language.
The first paragraph is a quotation from the Book of Ecclesiastes.
The second paragraph is his rendering of those ideas into modern academic English.
Which is easier to understand? Which is pleasanter to read?
I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but that time and chance happeneth to them all.
Objective consideration of contemporary phenomena compels the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.
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Maybe everyone knows this, but here it is anyway:-
Professor Judith Butler won a first prize for Bad Writing with this:
The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power. The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.
Read about it here, where there are more quotations, all quite as bad in my opinion:
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Yes, I take your point. The poetry in Ecclesiastes is truly superb.
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Wow, that first prize for bad writing was well deserved! But it’s in the “grand tradition” of Marxists pontificating in loftly platitudes and intellectual sounding jargon in order to obscure their real agenda and motives.
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