Thursday, December 06, 2007
Thoughts get scattered as the morning gets underway, so I better write now.
I'm about 4/5's of the way done with Le Guin's The Dispossessed and I don't quite know what to make of it. It's kept me reading, obviously, but beyond that I don't feel a lot of sympathy for the characters. I expected to have a different reaction to a book that garnered the awards this one did. I'll finish it, but I'm not that excited about it.
Disk 1 of Ken Burn's The War left quite an impression the other night, mostly of the violence man can perpetrate on man and how horrible it is. Relevant to that was an idea mentioned by some of the soldiers interviewed, to wit, that although, as one of them put it, there is no "good" war, there are in fact some necessary wars, and that World War II was one of them.
Another impression was the sheer scope of that war. That dawned on me as I observed that this first disk of a six disk documentary did nothing more than hit the highlights of what it covered. Nothing was discussed in depth because there's just too much of it.
My mind wanders, linkages made from one topic to the next . . .
The first of the Buddhist Ten Great Precepts concerns killing. The Buddhists I'm affiliated with interpret that to mean killing anything. "Thou shalt not kill" is one of the Ten Commandments from the Judeo-Christian family of faiths; it is often interpreted as "that shalt not murder", something a touch different. It's a difficult thing, sometimes, to reconcile these profound teachings with the reality of survival in the face of a regime like, for example, Nazi Germany. Shall we kill to survive? I think Buddhists I know—they regularly pick up cockroaches and gently take them outside, something I've done myself and see the logic in—would shun even this, while the Christians, for the most part would struggle with it, but likely come down on the side of survival. Both faiths clearly struggle hard to come to grips with the idea. Both would clearly rather not be involved in any killing of other people. I imagine it to be a very ugly thing to confront and am thankful I've never had a personal encounter with it. My heart goes out to the soldiers who have.
I'm about 4/5's of the way done with Le Guin's The Dispossessed and I don't quite know what to make of it. It's kept me reading, obviously, but beyond that I don't feel a lot of sympathy for the characters. I expected to have a different reaction to a book that garnered the awards this one did. I'll finish it, but I'm not that excited about it.
Disk 1 of Ken Burn's The War left quite an impression the other night, mostly of the violence man can perpetrate on man and how horrible it is. Relevant to that was an idea mentioned by some of the soldiers interviewed, to wit, that although, as one of them put it, there is no "good" war, there are in fact some necessary wars, and that World War II was one of them.
Another impression was the sheer scope of that war. That dawned on me as I observed that this first disk of a six disk documentary did nothing more than hit the highlights of what it covered. Nothing was discussed in depth because there's just too much of it.
My mind wanders, linkages made from one topic to the next . . .
The first of the Buddhist Ten Great Precepts concerns killing. The Buddhists I'm affiliated with interpret that to mean killing anything. "Thou shalt not kill" is one of the Ten Commandments from the Judeo-Christian family of faiths; it is often interpreted as "that shalt not murder", something a touch different. It's a difficult thing, sometimes, to reconcile these profound teachings with the reality of survival in the face of a regime like, for example, Nazi Germany. Shall we kill to survive? I think Buddhists I know—they regularly pick up cockroaches and gently take them outside, something I've done myself and see the logic in—would shun even this, while the Christians, for the most part would struggle with it, but likely come down on the side of survival. Both faiths clearly struggle hard to come to grips with the idea. Both would clearly rather not be involved in any killing of other people. I imagine it to be a very ugly thing to confront and am thankful I've never had a personal encounter with it. My heart goes out to the soldiers who have.
# posted by goldpython @ 8:18 AM 
