anarchonomicon.substack.com
A piece I wrote on one of the most fascinating and incredible thriftstore finds I've ever stumbled upon.
The Edwardians and Victorians were not like us, they believed in a nobility of their political class that's almost impossible to understand or relate to, and that believe, that attribution of nobility is tied up with something even more mysterious: their belief in the fundamental nobility of rhetoric.
Still not sure entirely how I feel about this, or how sure I am of my conclusions but this has had me spellbound in fascination and so I wrote about it.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
IMO it's an excellent quote. It's well-crafted. It sounds good. It describes something intuitively admirable. It also provides a good overview of many of the key abilities required to maintain a civilization.
Yes it's a blatant exaggeration and cannot be taken literally, but I'd say it's still a chunky piece of good writing.
It's easy to say that such a quote is good if you may take it sufficiently non-literally.
I would agree that saying things like "I've never planned an invasion, obviously this is wrong" takes the quote too literally. On the other hand, "don't take it literally" can be a fully general excuse against any possible objection.
The quote is really parochial to a combination of 1930s living and the military. Lazarus Long doesn't even include "repair an air leak in a spaceship" or anything that's parochial to his era but not to Heinlein's. Half of the list are specific skills that are only a pretense at being general skills. And I think this is a fundamental problem: Heinlein's specializing while claiming otherwise because humans have to specialize in order to function.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link