>“Achilles glared at him and answered, "Fool, prate not to me about covenants. There can be no covenants between men and lions, wolves and lambs can never be of one mind, but hate each other out and out an through. Therefore there can be no understanding between you and me, nor may there be any covenants between us, till one or other shall fall.”
What did he mean by this?
He meant he didn't understand the nature of God and the unity of Man. He chose to live by the sword, heedless of instruction wasted on him.
He is stating that he is a hero and aware of that fact.
Other heroes are not aware that they are heroes ; Ajax, Hektor, Patroklus etc.
>wolves and lambs can never be of one mind
I always thought it was to do with racial/tribal differences, i.e. superiority over others.
He's dissing him.
this. he called the guy a bitch, told him his treaty was refused, and told him that he was going to murder him even harder than before just for being such a bitch.
No, it's Achilles specific. He knows he's a hero and demigod. Hellenic racial conception didn't really exist, and certainly not against the Trojans, in Northern Anatolia, within what definitely should be considered the ancient Greek world
...
You and I*
Achilles is speaking of his descent from the rationality of humanity into the bestial rage which is sung of in the opening of the Iliad.
>"Paris, they say, was undone, because the Greeks invaded Troy and laid it waste, and his family were slain in battle. By no means; for no one is undone by an action not his own. All that was only as laying waste the nests of birds, But his true undoing was when he lost the modest, the faithful, the hospitable, and the decent character. When was Achilles undone? When Patroclus died ? By no means. But when he gave himself up to rage; when he wept over a girl; when he forgot that he came there not to get mistresses, but to fight. This is human undoing; this is the siege; this the overthrow; when right principles are ruined; when these are destroyed.
>...Do not you think, now, that Homer composed all this on purpose to show us that the noblest, the strongest, the richest the handsomest of men may nevertheless be the most unfortunate and wretched, if they have not the principles they ought to have?"
-Epictetus
IT is no common attainment merely to fulfil what the nature of man promises. For what is man?
A rational and mortal being.
Well: from what are we distinguished by reason?
From wild beasts.
From what else?
From sheep and the like.
Take care, then, to do nothing like a wild beast; otherwise you have destroyed the man; you have not fulfilled what your nature promises. Take care, too, to do nothing like cattle; for thus likewise the man is destroyed.
In what do we act like cattle?
When we act gluttonously, lewdly, rashly, sordidly, inconsiderately, into what are we sunk?
Into cattle.
What have we destroyed?
The rational being.
When we behave contentiously, injuriously, passionately, and violently, into what are we sunk?
Into wild beasts.
No. Learn grammar.
????
Exactly, one major theme of the Iliad is what it means to be human, and that it's equally bad for a man to be like a god or a beast, and that humanity is somewhere between god and beast. That's why the greek word used for Achilles' rage normally is reserved for gods.
That's why he refers to himself as a "wolf" and later says he was even more like a beast and could engage in cannibalism, a big taboo for the greeks, and one of the biggest signs for them of being savage and backwards.
>it's equally bad for a man to be like a god or a beast, and that humanity is somewhere between god and beast
I disagree here. Man has the qualities of both God and beast - the divine quality being the rational mind, whose attributes are logic and the virtues, and the bestial quality the lower appetites, whose attributes are the vices and subjection to irrational whims. Achilles, being part man and part God, symbolizes the two elements of humanity. Though he possesses an inordinate amount of the divine quality, he still succumbs to the bestial quality, and is ruined. It is a warning that even the best of us can fall. This ties in with the Greek concept of hubris.
So it goes
>Hellenic racial conception didn't really exist
fuck off with that bullshit you fucking pseud
not at all the iliad clearly sees the trojans and aegeans as complete equals, even morally. The main contrast is between heroic humans and normal humans.
fuck off, you forgot to add the part where Epictetus shills his self help book.
It is one more night.
There is no light when you
Come in to do the things you do
Things that I don’t want to.
I don’t mean to taunt you
To encourage you to touch,
To touch my secret parts.
That makes me feel dirty.
You say I act flirty and that’s why,
But it makes me cry.
I wish you won’t want to play
This awful game again today
That you will go play it
With Mommy.
Maybe she likes it.
I already know I won’t.
Daddy, please don’t.
Don’t get on your knees
Beside my bed and touch my head
And tell me I am pretty like a girl.
It makes my head whirl with fear.
You tell me no tears, keep quiet
And I try it, but it never works
When you jerk down my unders
And I feel your fingers blunder
All around on me.
And inside me.
It’s nasty.
Daddy, please don’t do it.
I knew it was wrong the first time
And I know I’m the reason
And you say you are pleasing me
And you mean it lovingly
But it is hurting me inside.
That’s why I always cried
Even though it made you mad
I couldn’t help myself, Daddy
It hurt so badly, and you didn’t care.
You told me not to dare to tell
Or I would go to hell.
That I was a bad little boy.
You didn’t have to tell me
Because nobody will help me.
"You and me" is correct. Learn grammar.
This is a good thread.
It astonished her to think that so much could be lost, even the quantity of hallucination belonging just to the sailor that the world would bear no further trace of. She knew, because she had held him, that he suffered DT’s. Behind the initials was a metaphor, a delirium tremens, a trembling unfurrowing of the mind’s plowshare. The saint whose water can light lamps, the clairvoyant whose lapse in recall is the breath of God, the true paranoid for whom all is organized in spheres joyful or threatening about the central pulse of himself, the dreamer whose puns probe ancient fetid shafts and tunnels of truth all act in the same special relevance to the word, or whatever it is the word is there, buffering , to protect us from. The act of metaphor then was a thrust at truth and a lie, depending where you were: inside, safe, or outside, lost. Oedipa did not know where she was. Trembling, unfurrowed, she slipped sidewise, screeching back across grooves of years , to hear again the earnest, high voice of her second or third collegiate love Ray Glozing bitching among “uhs” and the syncopated tonguing of a cavity, about his freshman calculus; “dt,” God help this old tattooedman, meant also a time differential, a vanishingly small instant in which change had to be confronted at last for what it was, where it could no longer disguise itself as something innocuous like an average rate; where velocity dwelled in the projectile though the projectile be frozen in midflight, where death dwelled in the cell though the cell be looked in on at its most quick. She knew that the sailor had seen worlds no other man had seen if only because there was that high magic to low puns, because DT’s must give access to dt’s of spectra beyond the known sun, music made purely of Antarctic loneliness and fright. But nothing she knew of would preserve them, or him. —Thomas Pynchon.The Crying of Lot 49
God dammit, that's so well written. I love everything about this. I need to read this book soon.
Poo-tee-weet?
>fuck off, you forgot to add the part where Epictetus shills his self help book.
>his self help book
He didn't write that book you ignorant pleb. The 'Moral Discourses' are notes that Arrian made of Epictetus' lectures.
A minor accident had forced me down in the Rio de Oro region, in Spanish Africa. Landing on one of those table-lands of the Sahara which fall away steeply at the sides, I found myself on the flat top of the frustrum of a cone, an isolated vestige of a plateau that had crumbled round the edges. In this part of the Sahara such truncated cones are visible from the air every hundred miles or so, their smooth surfaces always at about the same altitude above the desert and their geologic substance always identical. The surface sand is composed of minute and distinct shells; but progressively as you dig along a vertical section, the shells become more fragmentary, tend to cohere, and at the base of the cone form a pure calcareous deposit. Without question, I was the first human being ever to wander over this ... this iceberg; its sides were remarkably steep, no Arab could have climbed them, and no European had as yet ventured into this wild region. I was thrilled by the virginity of a soil which no step of man or beast had sullied. I lingered there, startled by this silence that never had been broken. The first star began to shine, and I said to myself that this pure surface had lain here thousands of years in sight only of the stars.But suddenly my musings on this white sheet and these shining stars were endowed with a singular significance. I had kicked against a hard, black stone, the size of a man’s fist, a sort of moulded rock of lava incredibly present on the surface of a bed of shells a thousand feet deep. A sheet spread beneath an apple-tree can receive only apples; a sheet spread beneath the stars can receive only star-dust. Never had a stone fallen from the skies made known its origin so unmistakably. And very naturally, raising my eyes, I said to myself that from the height of this celestial apple-tree there must have dropped other fruits, and that I should find them exactly where they fell, since never from the beginning of time had anything been present to displace them. Excited by my adventure, I picked up one and then a second and then a third of these stones, finding them at about the rate of one stone to the acre. And here is where my adventure became magical, for in a striking foreshortening of time that embraced thousands of years, I had become the witness of this miserly rain from the stars. The marvel of marvels was that there on the rounded back of the planet, between this magnetic sheet and those stars, a human consciousness was present in which as in a mirror that rain could be reflected. — Antoine de Saint-Exupery.Wind, Sand, and Stars
Al cabo de los años me rodea
una terca neblina luminosa
que reduce las cosas a una cosa
sin forma ni color. Casi a una idea.
La vasta noche elemental y el día
lleno de gente son esa neblina
de luz dudosa y fiel que no declina
y que acecha en el alba. Yo querría
ver una cara alguna vez. Ignoro
la inexplorada enciclopedia, el goce
de libros que mi mano reconoce,
las altas aves y las lunas de oro.
A los otros les queda el universo;
a mi penumbra, el hábito del verso.
~JBL
JLB*
i'm retarded
Estes putas aman Sosa
O fin o no fin
Chingando con los ninos 'O'
Eras llegar jodido
Los rarris y los rovers
??? Did you just suffer a stroke?
"And then there was Twisk, who usually appeared as an orange-haired maiden wearing a gown of gray gauze. One day while wading in the shallows of Tilhilvelly Pond, she was surprised by the troll Mangeon. He seized her about the waist, carried her to the bank, ripped away the gray gauze gown and prepared to make an erotic junction. At the sight of his priapic instrument, which was grotesquely large and covered with warts, Twisk became frantic with fear. By dint of jerks, twists and contortions she foiled the best efforts of the sweating Mangeon. But her strength waned and Mangeon's weight began to grow oppressive. She tried to protect herself with magic, but in her excitement she could remember only a spell used to relieve dropsy in farm animals, which, lacking better, she uttered, and it proved efficacious. Mangeon's massive organ shriveled to the size of a small acorn and became lost in the folds of his great gray belly.
Mangeon uttered a scream of dismay, but Twisk showed no remorse. Mangeon cried out in fury: "Vixen, you have done me a double mischief, and you shall do appropriate penance."
He took her to a road which skirted the forest. At a crossroads he fashioned a kind of pillory and affixed her to this construction. Over her head he posted a sign: DO WHAT YOU WILL WITH ME and stood back. "Here you stay until three passersby, be they dolts, lickpennies or great earls, have their way with you, and that is the spell I invoke upon you, so that in the future you may choose to be more accommodating to those who accost you beside Tilhilvelly Pond."
- Jack Vance, "Lyonesse"
"We’ve all grown unaccustomed to life, we're all
lame, each of us more or less. We've even grown so unaccustomed that at times
we feel a sort of loathing for real “living life," and therefore cannot bear to be
reminded of it. For we’ve reached a point where we regard real “living life”
almost as labor, almost as service, and we all agree in ourselves that it’s better
from a book."
Notes from Underground
I orkestern bröt just nu det hemlighetsfulla ledmotivet igenom: "Du skall icke fråga!" Och jag tyckte mig i denna mystiska tonserie och dessa fyra ord läsa en plötslig uppenbarelse av en urgammal och hemlig visdom. "Du skall icke fråga!" Icke gå till botten med tingen: då går du själv till botten. Icke söka efter sanningen: du finner den icke och förlorar dig själv. "Du skall icke fråga!" Den sanningsmängd, som är dig tjänlig, får du till skänks; den är blandad med villfarelse och lögn, men det är för din hälsas skull, oblandad skulle den bränna dina inälvor. Försök inte att rensa bort lögnen ur din själ, det följer så mycket med som du inte har tänkt på, du tappar bort dig själv och allt som är dig kärt. "Du skall icke fråga!"
Hjalmar Söderberg, Doktor Glas