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News Briefs 10-05-2010

As WH Davies lamented…
What is this life if, full of care, we have no time to stand and stare?

Quote of the Day:

Inventions and the scientific method of research have so transformed human life that the long inherited, timeless universe of symbols has collapsed. It is not only that there is no hiding place for the gods from the searching telescope and microscope but there is no such society as the gods once supported. Ideals of the social unit are not those of the hieratic pantomime, making visible on earth the forms of heaven, but of the secular state, in hard and unremitting competition for material supremacy and resources. And within the progressive societies themselves, every last vestige of the ancient human heritage of ritual, morality, and art is in full decay.

One does not know toward what one moves. One does not know by what one is propelled. The hero-deed to be wrought is not today what it was in the century of Galileo. Where there was darkness, now there is light; but also, where light was, there is now darkness. The modern hero-deed must be that of questing to bring light again to the lost Atlantis of the coordinated soul.

The modern hero, the modern individual who dares to heed the call and seek the mansion of that presence with whom it is our whole destiny to be atoned, cannot – indeed must not – wait for his community to cast off its slough of pride, fear, and rationalized avarice and sanctified misunderstanding. ‘Live’, Nietzsche says, ‘as though the day was here.’ It is not society that is to guide and save the hero, but precisely the reverse. And so every one of us shares the supreme ordeal – carries the cross of the redeemer – not in the bright moments of his tribe’s great victories but in the silences of his personal despair.

Joseph Campbell, in The Hero with a Thousand Faces.

  1. American Colonists…
    The Good Mayor of Devon might be shocked to know that there were Englishmen living in America even before Raleigh’s 1587 Croatan colony.

    Damariscove Island, off the coast of Maine, also gave it;s name to the entire area, prior to it becoming Bristol & Damariscotta. In the mid 1500’s, there were semi-permanent colonies of fishermen plying the salt cod trade. Vast quantities of cod (and other fish) were brought ashore and salted/dried before packing and being sent back to England. These colonies became more and more permanent.

    Besides the Damariscove colony referenced at the link below, other at Bristol and nearby areas existed, complete with stone and timber homes with leaded glass windows, a tavern, and ship repair facilities.

    Much more was going on in the New World before the Pilgrims and others arrived. Its unfortunate that the history isn’t being better taught outside of the local areas.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damariscove_Island

  2. Alas
    Re pressurized water in Palenque: one less reason for Euros to assume that they were the crown of creation. One more reason that tells us all men are created equal.

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