LOS LOTÓFAGOS DE NUESTA ERA ((II) TENNYSON)

 II

Why are we weigh'd upon with heaviness,

And utterly consumed with sharp distress,

While all things else have rest from weariness?

All things have rest: why should we toil alone,

We only toil, who are the first of things,

And make perpetual moan,

Still from one sorrow to another thrown:

Nor ever fold our wings,

And cease from wanderings,

Nor steep our brows in slumber's holy balm;

Nor harken what the inner spirit sings,

"There is no joy but calm!"

Why should we only toil, the roof and crown of things?

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45364/the-lotos-eaters

IV

Hateful is the dark-blue sky,

Vaulted o'er the dark-blue sea.

Death is the end of life; ah, why

Should life all labour be?

Let us alone. Time driveth onward fast,

And in a little while our lips are dumb.

Let us alone. What is it that will last?

All things are taken from us, and become

Portions and parcels of the dreadful past.

Let us alone. What pleasure can we have

To war with evil? Is there any peace

In ever climbing up the climbing wave?

All things have rest, and ripen toward the grave

In silence; ripen, fall and cease:

Give us long rest or death, dark death, or dreamful ease.

(...)

V

To hear each other's whisper'd speech;

Eating the Lotos day by day,

To watch the crisping ripples on the beach,

And tender curving lines of creamy spray;

To lend our hearts and spirits wholly

To the influence of mild-minded melancholy;

(...)

Let what is broken so remain.

The Gods are hard to reconcile:

'Tis hard to settle order once again.

There is confusion worse than death,

Trouble on trouble, pain on pain,

Long labour unto aged breath,

Sore task to hearts worn out by many wars

And eyes grown dim with gazing on the pilot-stars.

(...)

VIII

Where they smile in secret, looking over wasted lands,

Blight and famine, plague and earthquake, roaring deeps and fiery sands,

Clanging fights, and flaming towns, and sinking ships, and praying hands.

But they smile, they find a music centred in a doleful song

Steaming up, a lamentation and an ancient tale of wrong,

Like a tale of little meaning tho' the words are strong;

Chanted from an ill-used race of men that cleave the soil,

Sow the seed, and reap the harvest with enduring toil,

Storing yearly little dues of wheat, and wine and oil;

Till they perish and they suffer—some, 'tis whisper'd—down in hell

Suffer endless anguish, others in Elysian valleys dwell,

Resting weary limbs at last on beds of asphodel.

Surely, surely, slumber is more sweet than toil, the shore

Than labour in the deep mid-ocean, wind and wave and oar;

O, rest ye, brother mariners, we will not wander more.

LOS LOTÓFAGOS DE NUESTRA ERA (DEVORADORES DEL BOE)

THINK LITTLE : SOLO ESCRIBE EL INDIVIDUO https://t.co/AKSDb1Gdx8 @WendellDaily
The lotus eaters of this era are in Washington, D.C., Thinking Big ...The result, mostly, has been the persistence of the problem and the enlargement and enrichment of the government pic.twitter.com/8eeLqjh3Y4

— Guillermo Ruiz Zapatero (@ruiz_zapatero) July 2, 2022

 

THINK LITTLE (WENDELL BERRY (EXTRACTS FROM ESSAYS 1969-1990))

For the environmental crisis should made it dramatically clear, as perhaps it has not always been before, that there is no public crisis that is not also private.

(…)

In this crisis it is certain that every one of us has a public responsibility.

(…)

I believe in American political principles, and will not sit idly by and see those principles destroyed by sorry practice. I am ashamed that American government should have become the chief cause of disillusionment with American principles.

(…)

We don’t live in the government or in institutions or in our public utterances and acts, and the environmental crisis has its roots in our lives. By the same token, environmental health will also be rooted in our lives. That is, I take it, simply a fact, and in the light of it we can see how superficial and foolish we would be to think that we could correct what is wrong merely by tinkering with the institutional machinery. The changes that are required are fundamental changes in the way we are living.

What we are up against in this country, in our attempt to invoke private responsibility, is that we have nearly destroyed private life. Our people have given up their independence in return for the cheap seductions and the shoddy merchandise of so-called “affluence”.We have delegated all our vital functions and responsibilities to salesman and agents and bureaus and experts of all sorts.

(…)

Individualism is going around these days in uniform, handing out the party line on individualism.

(…)

A man who understands the weather only in terms of golf is participating in a public insanity that either he or his descendants will be bond to realize as suffering. I believe that the death of the world is breeding in such minds much more certainly and much faster than in any political capital or atomic arsenal.

For an index of our loss of contact with the earth we need only to look at the condition of the American farmer-who must enact our society’s dependence on the land.

(…)

We are going to hereto rebuild the substance and the integrity of private life in this country.

(…)

For most of the history of this country our motto, implied or spoken, has been Think Big. A better motto, an essential one now, is Think Little.

(…)

The lotus eaters of this era are in Washington, D.C., Thinking Big. Somebody perceives a problem, and somebody in the government comes up with a plan or a law. The result, mostly, has been the persistence of the problem and the enlargement and enrichment of the government.

But the discipline of thought is not generalization; it is detail, and it is personal behavior.

(…)

Odd as I am sure it will appear to some, I can think of no better form of personal involvement in the cure of environment that that of gardening.

(…)

Amid the outcries for the liberation of this group or that, we will know that no person is free except in the freedom of other persons, and that our only real freedom is to know and faithfully occupy our place-a much humbler place that we have taught to think- in the order of creation.

(…)

The principles of ecology, if we will take them to heart, should keep us aware that our lives depend upon other lives and upon processes and energies in an interlocking system that, though we can destroy it, we can neither fully understand nor fully control. And our great dangerousness is that, locked in our selfish and myopic economy, we have been willing to change or destroy far beyond our power to understand. We are not humble enough or reverent enough.

(…)

Sometime ago , I heard a representative of a paper company refer to conservation as a “no-return investment”.

(…)

Consider in contrast, the profound ecological intelligence of Black Elk, “a holy man of the Oglala Sioux”, who in telling his story said that it was not his own life that was important to him, but what he shared with all life:

“It is the story of all life that is holy and is good to tell, and of us two-leggeds sharing in it with the four-leggeds and the wings of the air and all green things…”

(…)

“And I saw that it was holy”

(A continuous Harmony: Essays Cultural and Agricultural (1972))

https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alce_Negro

Si el pensamiento no estuviera en el detalle y en el individuo, ni HDT, ni WB podrían haber escrito lo que escribieron. WB dijo hace 50 años -y BLACK ELK antes- lo que hoy es evidente, pero todavía se esconde y desconoce.

Thoreau dijo:

"I am grateful for what I am and have. My thanksgiving is perpetual"

EL ORDEN DEL AGRADECIMIENTO SIGUE AL DEL SER:

ESTOY COMPLETAMENTE AGREDECIDO DE LO QUE HE RECIBIDO, DE LO QUE SOY, DE LO QUE TENGO, DE LO QUE COMPARTO Y, FINALMENTE, COMPARTIRÉ

I am grateful for what I received, for what I am, have and share