"'I am as pious as the next person, but I cannot believe God meant the Consecrates to freeze every life in Larsum into an eternal pattern. There was an age of heroes once, before Ourata brought Uplands and Lowlands together beneath him. Such an age can come again, if the grip upon us is broken.'" (p. 210)
The three possible responses to a received tradition, (i) conserve; (ii) reform; (iii) reject, all involve change.
(i) People conserve their idea of a tradition but in changing circumstances. Thus, nothing really remains as it was.
(ii) To reform is to change. Reformers appeal to precedents although sufficiently radical reform may be effective rejection of whatever the original principles were.
(iii) To reject is to be influenced by whatever is rejected. Atheists argue against theism whereas Jains, believing in a beginningless universe, were pretheists, in a completely different context.
In Larsum, we perceive social rigidity but potential for change.
9 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
I prefer a Burkean interpretation of "reform."
Ad astra! Sean
There are aspects of life that really didn't change much for a long, long time.
A poetic example: take Tennyson's "Lady of Shallot". It's set in the ancient/mythical world of the Arthurian cycle.
So, from the viewpoint of his mid-Victorian readers, many aspects would be archaic (knights in armor) or magical (the TV-like "mirror" that shows the Lady everything going on around her).
But a lot of it is archaic and strange to -us- but wouldn't be to Tennyson's readers, which is to say our great-great-grandparents.
Eg., people going by on horses, unpowered barges, horse and ox-drawn wagons, reapers with sickles "in among the beaded barley" and "piling sheaves in uplands airy".
And it wouldn't have been strange in any previous post-Neolithic period of British history, either. Horses on dirt roads, wagons pulled by horses and oxen, men and women reaping grain and tying it into sheaves by hand, etc.
Nothing that would have been massively out of place a thousand years before Tennyson's 1850's, or two thousand, or three thousand. A Victorian reader of that poem could look out their window, see those things happening, and known that only details would have been different in 2000 BC.
It's alien to -us- because of the pace of change since, but that's the way my grandparents lived.
Or meanwhile, among a San hunter-gatherer band in the Kalahari in Tennyson's time, nearly all the details of day-to-day life would have been identical or very similar to what happened 60,000 years before.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
I certainly found these reflections of yours interesting, and nothing for me to disagree with.
Yes, much that WE would think strange and archaic in Tennyson's poem were still matters of ordinary every day life circa AD 1870.
What has been different since Tennyson's time has been the sheerly DIZZYING pace of changes, both good and bad.
Ad astra! Sean
And historical events cast long shadows.
Eg., a recent study found that people in Britain with actual "Norman" names -- the descendants of the conquerors of 1066 -- still have more education, own more property, and have higher incomes than people with Anglo-Saxon names.
My mother was an Irish Fitzgerald.
Paul: the Normans did get around, didn't they? 8-).
Kaor, Mr. Stiring!
Well, the Normans and their descendants were, mostly, both tough and shrewd! (Smiles)
The Anglo/Normans who settled in Ireland were not always so fortunate. Those who remained Catholics were impoverished by the Penal Laws.
Ad astra! Sean
Or to put it another way, a tradition is a solution to a forgotten problem. But the fact that the problem has been forgotten doesn't mean it won't come back if you remove the solution.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Absolute agreement! And that's a huge reason why I am so skeptical and distrustful of radical "reforms." They so often backfire, often gruesomely so.
Ad astra! Sean
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