Back in 2015 I started reading Ernst Robert Curtius’s European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages (see this post), and I seem to have abandoned it almost immediately for reasons I no longer recall. I got a poke in the ribs about this from Michael Gilleland’s brief post at Laudator Temporis Acti quoting Curtius’s Essays on European Literature:
For previous ages the exempla maiorum were a confirmation; for us they are a confrontation, and tradition is reversed into a corrective. We are so far removed from tradition that it appears new to us.
But what are exempla maiorum? Googling finds the phrase translated as “examples from our ancestors” or “the exemplary moral behaviour of the ancestors,” and it is sometimes treated as equivalent to mos maiorum, “the unwritten code from which the ancient Romans derived their social norms” — e.g., in V. Henry T. Nguyen’s Christian Identity in Corinth, p. 75: “Augustus himself recognised the imitative value of the mos maiorum, ‘By the passage of new laws I restored many traditions of our ancestors (exempla maiorum) which were then falling into disuse […]’” — but Claudia Rapp, in her “Old Testament Models for Emperors in Early Byzantium,” explains at length the significance of the exemplum, including the Augustus quote (p. 177):
Two main modes of establishing a relationship to Old Testament models can be identified, the Roman mode of the exemplum and the Christian mode of typology. In Roman political thought and Latin historiography, the dominant vehicle to express ideas of imitation was the exemplum. The ancient exemplum (Greek: ὑπόδειγμα or παράδειγμα) in word and deed is defined by rhetorical theorists, beginning with Aristotle and continuing through the author of the Rhetorica ad Herennium (first century BCE) and Quintilian (first century CE). It is a rhetorical device that may also serve a moral purpose. It always refers to a deed or saying of a person from a nostalgically glorified past, and it provides an illustration for or serves as a point of comparison with the present. In addition to simply describing or illustrating a person’s deeds or character, the exemplum can also have a moral function, when an author registers approval for the successful imitation of a great model or expresses the desire that the model may be followed in the immediate future. Exempla were essential to Roman education and a staple of Latin historiography. Following the exempla maiorum and becoming in turn an exemplum for future generations were the highest goals of the Roman statesman. As Thomas Wiedemann observes: “When Roman writers deploy the theme that the history they are writing is useful, what is meant is not that it provides a framework for understanding human nature or the possible ways in which communities can be controlled politically, but that they are providing a storehouse of further exempla to assist decision-making,” so that “historical material is seen as a series of exempla.” This is the significance of Augustus’s proud statement in the Res gestae divi Augusti: “By new laws passed on my proposal I brought back into use many exemplary practices of our ancestors [exempla maiorum] which were disappearing in our time, and in many ways I myself transmitted exemplary practices [exempla] to posterity for their imitation.”
We discussed the Ad Herennium in this two-decade-old post. At any rate, I really should get back to Curtius.
It sounds positively Confucian.
I really should get back to Curtius
I don’t think that’ll help. From my first book of riddles as a child:
“Why is it useless to send a telegram to Washington these days?”
“Because he’s dead.”
(ba-doom-tish)
======
By the way, the ancestors are called maiores because most people are dead. John Brunner’s story “The Vitanuls” is based on what happens when the combination of longevity drugs and improved healthcare case the total number of living persons to outnumber the dead, so that some people are born without souls, the supply of which is apparently finite.
When Gale and I first knew each other, a friend of mine and I discussed the idea of this story with enthusiasm: she thought we were mocking her, and it took us both some emotional labor to convince her otherwise. There may be a baby somewhere who is Gale, but this is not exactly an operational hypothesis. “There are eight million stories in the naked city”, which therefore has a slight excess of stories over inhabitants; in the past I have misquoted this as “a million stories”, which would imply (by the pigeonhole principle) that at least seven other people share yours.
By the way, the ancestors are called maiores because most people are dead.
The silent majority.
@JC: I don’t know if you’re perhaps being facetious, but maior simply has “older, elder” as one of its meanings, and in that meaning doesn’t even necessarily imply “dead”.
The silent majority is an unspecified large group of people in a country or group who do not express their opinions publicly.[1] The term was popularized by U.S. President Richard Nixon in a televised address on November 3, 1969, in which he said, “And so tonight—to you, the great silent majority of my fellow Americans—I ask for your support.”[2][3] In this usage it referred to those Americans who did not join in the large demonstrations against the Vietnam War at the time, who did not join in the counterculture, and who did not participate in public discourse. Nixon, along with many others, saw this group of Middle Americans as being overshadowed in the media by the more vocal minority.
Preceding Nixon by half a century, it was employed in 1919 by Calvin Coolidge’s campaign for the 1920 presidential nomination. Before that, the phrase was used in the 19th century as a euphemism referring to all the people who have died, and others have used it before and after Nixon to refer to groups of voters in various nations of the world.
This explains those horror movies in which the dead stretch their arms through the earth of their graves, trying to get out. They are on their way to the voting booths to support Trump. They are fed up with their deep state and want to put an end to it.
I don’t know if you’re perhaps being facetious, but maior simply has “older, elder” as one of its meanings
Indeed it does, but why? I think the idea of the ancestors outnumbering us is the underlying metaphor.
I rather think it’s the same idea as behind “big brother / sister” or German groß / größer werden “grow (up)” – you grow bigger when you grow older (at least until you reach adulthood), and parents and older relatives are generally bigger than children while those are young, so an association “older” = “bigger” is quite understandable.
Edit: I just checked Lewis & Short on that meaning – very often, maior and also the positive magnus are combined with natu “of birth” and annis “in years” when meaning “old, older”, so I guess we’re both wrong – the idea is about quantity of time, not about size or quantity of persons.
@John Cowan:
Because Latin and later Romance languages treat age as a quantity of measurable amount, so maiores are essentially elders.
An elder brother is a frater maior; the opposite of a minor, i.e., someone who has attained the age of majority, is a maior; Lewis & Short report that maiores can mean “adults (opp. pueri) — but usually ancestors, forefathers.”
The first three survive in Italian: an elder brother is a fratello maggiore, the opposite of a minorenne is a magiorenne, and adults as opposed to children can be i grandi.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2010/mar/14/eton-class
I think the idea of the ancestors outnumbering us is the underlying metaphor.
Your own private folk etymology!
@JC, I suppose the Brunner story presupposes a creationist origin of the human race? 8 billion, more or less, souls were created along with Adam and Eve and then doled out over time?
I think the idea of the ancestors outnumbering us is the underlying metaphor.
For that you’d want plures rather than maiores, ugye?
Those neither dead nor alive, who are yet to be born, might for all we know outnumber the quick and the dead combined. Those not dead, nor alive, nor yet to be born do vastly outnumber all of those combined (always assuming we have a way of settling the individuation and demarcation of entities I have here called those: no straightforward task). But if, per impossibile in my view, it were a matter of souls – preincarnated, incarnated, reincarnated, or never incarnated – it would all be much weirder than that, and in need of detailed explication.
Asked if I believe in reincarnation, my reply: How could I? I can’t even believe in incarnation. (But then, don’t get me started on belief.)
“We are all going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones.”
[compared to the mathematically/genetically possible people who will never exist]
– Richard Dawkins
I have seen it said that most of the people who have ever lived are actually alive now.
Whether this is true or not may depend on just when you start calling our ancestors “people”, I imagine. On the other hand, by the time you get back to eras when there might be some dispute about it, you’re talking about very small total populations anyway.
“Behind every man now alive stand thirty ghosts, for that is the ratio by which the dead outnumber the living. Since the dawn of time, roughly a hundred billion human beings have walked the planet Earth.” — Foreword to 2001: A Space Odyssey (often quoted)
“Clarke, recollecting the statement many years later, felt that there ought to have been a good deal more than thirty.” — In Search of Deep Time (1999), book on paleontology
But they aren’t all thirty different ghosts specific to each living person. Quite the contrary. (My siblings share all the same ghosts as me.)
So Clarke’s calculation means nothing.
Stu Clayton : The first time I saw the English phrase “Deep State” in the context of politics was in analyses of Turkish politics during the time of Tansu Çiller and/or Mesut Yılmaz. I understand it is used in US politics now, by Trumpistas, and means something quite different?
In Trumpish, the term “Deep State” simply refers to what Normals just call “the State”: all government employees, the army, the judiciary, the legislature, with the exception of individuals within those groups who have expressed their unqualified allegiance to the Leader.
Clarke got a figure of 100 billion from who knows where and divided that by 3+ billion (as of 1968), so he clearly did mean thirty different ghosts specific to each living person; he didn’t say they were the ghosts of your own ancestors, they could be anybody, including people who died without progeny. Are you saying that he’s wrong because ghosts can’t stand behind you unless they’re your own ancestors?
@V: Spinoza is on record for mentioning the idea:
# Bei Baruch de Spinoza (1632–1677) findet sich die Formulierung (lateinisch imperium in imperio).[1] Im Deutschen lässt sich die Formulierung „Staat im Staate“ erstmals im Jahr 1764 nachweisen. Größere Aufmerksamkeit erlangte sie in der 1784 erschienenen Schrift Ueber Freymaurer, besonders in Bayern des Münchner Theaterdichters Joseph Marius Babo, in der er verschiedene Verschwörungsphantasien zusammenfasste, die gerade im Umlauf waren. Babo erhob den Vorwurf, der Illuminatenorden, eine radikalaufklärerische Geheimgesellschaft, hätte den bayrischen Staat bereits vollständig unterwandert. Nichteingeweihte würden gegebenenfalls mit Gift aus dem Weg geräumt, die Mitglieder hätten sich der Ordensleitung, die sie persönlich gar nicht kennen würden, zu absolutem Gehorsam verpflichtet: #
[No link to a corresponding English WiPe article]
The Deep State in Turkey
I note the modernization that Trump takes advantage of. It is no longer necessary to swear absolute allegiance to him, it suffices that you give him your vote and otherwise do as you’re told. The Superficial State will replace the Deep State, and a new Deep State will arise within it.
Are you saying that he’s wrong because ghosts can’t stand behind you unless they’re your own ancestors?
I suspect that his hundred billion is in fact the result of assuming thirty individual ghosts per living person.
Are you saying that “individual ghosts” cannot be shared between individuals ?
That was the sense I was attempting to express. Unique non-shareable ghosts. Like NFTs.
Do the dead outnumber the living?
Unique non-shareable ghosts. Like NFTs.
I asked only because I do not automatically associate the notion of “individual” with the notion of “share”. If there are 30 ghosts in front of me, they are individual ghosts in that I count thirty of them. Of course if ghosts are a plasmatic or auratic substance, I may mistakenly believe that I am seeing thirty of it.
Even granting the individuality of ghosts, I don’t see why an individual ghost should not be shareable by two or more people. If you say they are not thus shareable, I am obliged to believe you. But I had to ask at least one question before committing.
I guess Clarke doesn’t make it clear which assumption he started from, but a total of 100 billion is about what the Population Reference Bureau says. For a rival calculation, and an attribution for the idea that “most of the people who have ever lived are actually alive now”, see All the many humans ever: An update by Arthur H. Westing (2010):
See there for sources; he also references Haub, the author at the Population Reference Bureau.
I think “deep state” got introduced into U.S. political discourse by some people who may have been at least open to supporting Trump (although not necessarily representative of his broader array of supporters) who meant more or less exactly the Turkish sense: the permanent establishment which will use its power to block, undermine, and/or overthrow any popularly-elected leader with a perceived electoral mandate to deviate from Kemalism-or-the-local-equivalent, i.e. a set of ideological commitments that seem foundational to the incumbent elite whether or not they are in favor with the Unwashed Masses – so foundational that you cannot allow the Unwashed Masses to vote against them. Now, the failure-to-date of the Turkish military to overthrow Erdogan via the coup that would have once been traditional suggests that the Ur-Deep-State is not what it once was and/or that Erdogan has managed to transform it to defend a different and post-Kemalist ideology against the vagaries of future election outcomes.
Childhood mortality would certainly make a big difference. Perhaps one could rescue the hypothesis by saying “most people who have ever lived to adulthood are alive now.” If that didn’t do the trick, you could progressively raise the age cut-off. “Most people who have ever lived to be a hundred are alive today.”
the permanent establishment which will use its power to block, undermine, and/or overthrow any popularly-elected leader with a perceived electoral mandate to deviate from …
Sounds like a Leftist conspiracy theory of the 1960’s/70’s — specifically of the CIA activity in S.America. And most of Trumpism is repurposed Leftist rhetoric.
Annoyingly, wikip on ‘Deep State’ dances around various historical precedents (‘state within a state’), but is vague about the appearance of the precise phrase. ‘Military-industrial complex’ is in the same ball park.
Ah, here we go: I suspected Chomsky all along
I suspected Chomsky all along
Why especially him ? As you yourself write: “Sounds like a Leftist conspiracy theory of the 1960’s/70’s — specifically of the CIA activity in S.America. And most of Trumpism is repurposed Leftist rhetoric”. There are lot of old Lefties still hanging around, now with idle hands.
I’m leaving this conversation. Talk to you tomorrow. We’re just talking over each other.
Compose a post, wait at least 15 minutes for a reply, and then reply. Otherwise there is no meaningful communication.
EDIT: You’re fine people, try to get along.
What’s all this about ? I post as I please. I avoid meaningful communication because it implies supervision by the overlords of meaning.
Aha! So you acquiescence that your posting here is but a ruse, only to [fill evil polt here*].
*In a twist, NOT Chomskian.
Gosh, if only I had a plot to guide me, evil or not ! All I can do is lie under the stoep on the chance that someone will walk by, so that I can rush out barking and pretend to bite their ankle. That’s not much of a plot. Too much chance involved.
Or, in the US, “the government”.
@Stu Why especially him ? [Chomsky]
Because (as I thought my “precise phrase” made clear) this is LanguageHat not PoliticalIdeasHat. The idea has been floating around for decades (Turkey 1923, at least); there was a JWB claim here the precise phrase was specific to Trump/Trumpists; I doubted that (he’s not capable of original thought).
By all means if you can pre-date the phrase before Chomsky, (in popular-ish usage/I’m not claiming it was his coinage) I’m all ears.
But let’s not underrate the opportunity to pin stupidity on Chomsky — especially when it then gets turned against him. (I’m pretty sure Trumpists would count public-funded, tenured Professors as part of the Deep State/at least collaborators and supporters).
He didn’t come up with it; someone like Bannon created the Trumpist version.
JWB and V are right about the precise phrase “deep state” being shifted to refer to the US from earlier usage referring to Turkey, although this had already happened before Trump got involved. The OED entered “deep state” this year, with a first citation from 1997 in Turkish Probe, a news magazine published in Turkey:
Calqued from Turkish derin devlet.
Calqued from Turkish derin devlet.
Good tip. That’s the pseudonym I’ll use when I start my QAnon-styled conspiracy theory online. The rubes will eat it up.
one of the more fun parts of the lurianic model of reincarnation / transmigration is that souls are not unique and non-shareable. i haven’t read in that zone recently enough to be entirely sure of my understanding, but i believe it’s more or less a recombinant-fragments model, which makes it easy for any given kabalist to be a simultaneous inheritor of the mystic essence of (say) seth, joseph, samuel, and akiba.
Except for the most important one: there shall be no monarch. That’s what got A.’s uncle killed (A. was a bit more subtle, with the result that after his death both the Senate and A’s heir were unsure about how to proceed — go back to the old Republican mores or follow the exemplum of A (Tiberius’ maior). The resulting frictions were finally resolved by ordering some would be republican senators to commit suicide (another mos maiorum; it seems the Roman nobility would have understood Samurai culture very well).
Meanwhile:
(GT)
Changing the nature of the essence! That’s what I call “profound”!
Defining “people” is an obstacle here, but if we assume (approximate) exponential growth back to a founding couple of modern humans, the number of people alive in the past is bounded to some multiple of the number alive when modern medicine started improving infant survival. The numbers seem to be based on an average annual growth of something like 0.04% per year from 10kbp to 0BCE, going from 4 million to 190 million (which checks out). That gives a sum of annual populations around 500billion, so to get to 100billion individuals you need to assume an average life span of 5 years. So yeah, you have to count the ones who die in infancy, not just the adults.
But anyway, with the number of children being born actually decreasing (even though the total number of people is still rising because demographics), the people currently alive will outnumber the people alive at some point 70-100 years in the future, if not sooner.
“with the number of children being born actually decreasing”
Wait, is it? If you mean “globally”, are not you confusing it with birth rate (per N women/people)?
when modern medicine started improving infant survival
Ahem. Myth put about by medics trying to protect their patch. Infant survival improved through clean water and frickin obstetricians washing their hands.
Yeah, it never ceases to amaze me that doctors refused to wash their hands so stubbornly for so long when the evidence was so overwhelming.
The 1997 usage of “deep state” that ktschwarz points to as the OED’s earliest cite is in the specific context of English-language discourse about Turkey, so does not itself address the question of when the phrase began to be applied to phenomena or alleged phenomena in Anglophone polities that were viewed (perhaps tendentiously) as analogous to the Turkish situation. There may also of course have developed uses of the phrase in English that do not have any intended analogy to the Turkish situation buried in their history but were simply the result of people reading or hearing the phrase w/o much attention to context, thinking it sounded “cool” or (as it were) “deep,” and then applying it to their own country’s politics w/o knowing the Turkish backstory well enough to have intended an analogy.
How normal is “deep” in this meaning for English and are there are older similar depths?
There is “deep web”, but it is younger….
Personally I always found “deep state” an unexpected but impressive metaphor rather than just habirual figurative meaning of “deep”. I don’t know about derin, but this is consistent with a calque.
“Deep web” goes back to 2000, not much younger than the Web itself. The metaphor “deep=hidden” has been very familiar for some time; the abovementioned Peter Dale Scott titled a book Deep Politics and the Death of JFK in 1993. I wonder if Lakoff discusses it?
I have no idea about the semantic scope (including metaphorical extensions) of the Turkish adjective underlying the calque, but wiktionary gives an array of extended senses of “deep” in English of which it seems like several might resonate with the “deep state” notion:
(intellectual, social) Complex, involved.
1. Profound, having great meaning or import, but possibly obscure or not obvious.
That is a deep thought!
2. Significant, not superficial, in extent.
They’re in deep discussion.
3. Hard to penetrate or comprehend; profound; intricate; obscure.
a deep subject or plot
4. Of penetrating or far-reaching intellect; not superficial; thoroughly skilled; sagacious; cunning.
I also get an echo (although this may be idiosyncratic) of the implicature of “deep” in “deeply-rooted” when used metaphorically, i.e. difficult to dislodge or remove even if you think its presence is impeding some worthwhile agenda.
In Russian “deep state” is translated with a word which means “related to depth” rather than “possessing depth” (as a body of water). Thoughts are compared to bodies of water I think.
I think it’s not decreasing just yet, but we’re close. If current trends continue and there’s no Peak Oil or thermonuclear war or suchlike, the global population will begin to decrease before the end of this century.
Re “before the end of this century,” perhaps someone should gather up the various predictions of the world’s demographers circa 1950 (and at some intervals since then) for what the global population would be in 2023 and see if any of them look better than random guessing.
Hm. Like… over the decade after the Great Nuclear War the global population increased from pre-war 20 to 40 billions…
Linear extrapolation, let alone exponential extrapolation, doesn’t look like random guessing, I’d think…
Of the figurative senses listed by Wiktionary, I’d say “hard to penetrate” and “obscure” are the ones relevant to “deep state”, and specifically in this compound implying that it’s hard to see because it’s behind “fronts”. I have a vague feeling that this range of figurative senses has become more prominent during my lifetime, perhaps since the 1990s. The OED did a full revision of deep in March 2023; in their division of figurative senses, I think the most relevant is II.10.b “Of an abstract or immaterial thing: not immediately apparent or accessible…”, which they have since 1856, though it’s not a clear-cut distinction from II.10.a “Difficult to understand or comprehend… abstruse, obscure”, which is since Old English. Also closely related is the linguistics sense II.10.c, due to you-know-who, with “deep structural reasons” from 1957, “deep structure” from 1964.
I see a similar implication that the deep thing is contrasted with the accessible thing in the relatively recent “deep cut” (lesser-known piece of music etc., not the hits that everybody knows), from 1999. There’s also “deep learning” (involving multiple hidden layers), from 1986 but hugely more prominent in the last decade or so, and similarly “deep neural network”.
@drasvi: “peak child” was in 2017. That is the number of children under 5. but that is a good proxy for the number of children being born. If there’s been one person I’d wish an unreasonably long life on, it’s Hans Rosling.
And yeah, maybe “modern medicine” is the doctors stealing the limelight from the midwives. Let’s say “modern maternity care” instead. Or even “modern medical science” since washing your fricking hands was a case of old guard/new paradigm innit?
Wait, did Chomsky in his political mode seize on the “deep state” phrase without proposing a systematic set of so-called “transformations” via which it purportedly “generated” the “surface state”?
BTW, the approximate Algerian analogue to the Turkish “derin devlet” is the rather laconic “Le Pouvoir,” glossed in one source I googled up as “an opaque network of military, political and economic elites who have, despite some variations and turbulence, astutely managed to rule the country without interruption since independence.” Note the sober and non-conspiracy-theorist tone achieved by using “opaque” rather than, e.g., “shadowy” as well as throwing in the compliment “astutely.” I’m not sure if “Le Pouvoir” is used contrastively with “L’Etat” or if some other lexeme is used to describe the “nominal” government that Le Pouvoir deploys from behind its curtain.
“Deep cut” is an interesting example of one of the extended senses, although the “deep” there lacks the sinister overtones that I think are at least in English key to the “deep state” notion. Maybe part of it is a differing sense of whether the obscurity is a bug or a feature in the particular context? While it may in some psychological/sociological sense be true that many music enthusiasts secretly want the deep cuts they champion to remain obscure, they traditionally talk a good game about how it’s a shame and a scandal that the given deep cut they’re touting at the moment isn’t more widely known.
“Shadowy” is appropriate, because a state has a façade.
The network in question is unofficial.
By the way, it would make a nice political regime for science fiction: when people simply don’t know who’s ruling them. No façade whatsoever.
drasvi : That’s arguably the case in Ancillary Justice — The Radch’s center of power is in a Dyson sphere and is not much interested in what happens outside.
@drasvi: I certainly don’t think “shadowy” would have been an inappropriate adjective to use in the thing I quoted: I was just struck by how using “opaque” instead gave a somewhat different feel/register.
an opaque network of military, political and economic elites who have, despite some variations and turbulence, astutely managed to rule the country without interruption since independence.
Sounds like the Illuminati to me.
Oh.
Well then.
I don’t think that’s how it works in Algeria. Instead, the leading figures are mostly the same in depth and on the surface; the difference is the surface pretension that the country is occasionally a democracy (perhaps even with the rule of law) as opposed to a kleptocratic cartel. When the result of an election isn’t published for weeks, people say “the generals haven’t agreed on a result yet”.
@hat: Well, by the time it was the Sixties and you goddam Boomers came along, the old “Bavarian” Illuminati were having branding problems because Bavaria had a stodgy, unhip image. So they reinvented themselves as the *Algerian* Illuminati, gave sanctuary to some high-profile American fugitives (Eldridge Cleaver! Timothy Leary!), and bam, they were hip and cool and groovy again, with no one asking impertinent questions about their domestic human-rights record or suggesting that it might have been a bad thing to have gotten rid of pretty much all of the country’s Jews.
How normal is “deep” in this meaning for English and are there are older similar depths?
(intellectual, social) Complex, involved.
1. Profound, having great meaning or import, but possibly obscure or not obvious.
That is a deep thought!
Deep Thought [1978]
ktschwarz : “JWB and V are right about the precise phrase “deep state” being shifted to refer to the US from earlier usage referring to Turkey, although this had already happened before Trump got involved. The OED entered “deep state” this year, with a first citation from 1997 in Turkish Probe, a news magazine published in Turkey:”
That’s what I said, I remember it being used in English from Tansu Çiller’s time; she was prime minister of Turkey 1993-1996.
Still does – even though living in Munich has become amazingly expensive.
No contradiction there; places where it’s amazingly expensive to live are often stodgy and unhip (e.g., the Upper East Side of Manhattan).
Ahem! The Illuminati were, back in the time of their first (above-ground) flowering, not Munich-based but from Ingolstadt, as every schoolboy once knew. Young people these days …
@J.W. Brewer:
Fnord!
Augustine, Sermons 51.23:
Every moment dies a man, And one and a sixteenth is born.
I’m a little surprised that no one has quoted William Cullen Bryant yet:
All that tread
The globe are but a handful to the tribes
That slumber in its bosom.—Take the wings
Of morning, pierce the Barcan wilderness,
Or lose thyself in the continuous woods
Where rolls the Oregon, and hears no sound,
Save his own dashings—yet the dead are there:
And millions in those solitudes, since first
The flight of years began, have laid them down
In their last sleep—the dead reign there alone.
American kids used to have to memorize chunks of Thanatopsis.
I was one of those kids! But I confess I’d forgotten that one.
@Rodger C: “Thanatopsis” got a very positive response when we read and talked about it in my high school American Literature class. However, “the Oregon” prompted a lot of guffaws. Bryant was young (surprisingly young to be writing about a vision of death), but had he never more than glanced at a map of the Pacific Northwest?
The mistake isn’t his fault. From Wikipedia:
Remember that when he was writing the poem, sometime before it was published in September 1817, the region was run by the Hudson’s Bay Company and had only begun to be explored (by the White Man™, of course); it would be unfair to expect a Massachusetts teenager to know details the President probably wasn’t aware of.
it would make a nice political regime for science fiction: when people simply don’t know who’s ruling them.
That’s the plot background of The Biggest Secret, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and many other works of docufantasy. It appeals to deplorables and wackos, so it’s not really the stuff of sci-fi.
Columbused.
@Stu, what I mean is no discernible façade.
The best answer people can give to questions like “are you a democracy” is “we have no idea”.
What you mean is a widely promoted façade and speculations regarding who exactly might be hiding behind it (not even a claim that “we have no idea who’s actually hiding behind”).
@languagehat: I suppose it may not have been common knowledge, and the name may not have been widely accepted,* but 1817 was nonetheless a quarter century** after Robert Gray*** had sailed up the Columbia River and named it after his boat.
@V: Man, after the Ancillary series jumped the shark,**** it just kept on jumping.
* I’m sure nobody in New England would have called it “Wimahl” or “Nchi-Wana” instead, but I honestly don’t know how people referred to the river over time. I wish marie-lucie were around.
** The reports of his exploration were not delivered until several years later however, as Gray took Magellan’s long way back home.
*** I could have sworn I had recounted my Robert Gray story in a previous comment, but I find no sign of it. Maybe tomorrow.
**** I put the jump at where the first book should have ended.
Gilbert and Sullivan, Princess Ida (1884), a satire on the idea of a woman’s university:
Princess Ida. Who lectures in the Hall of Arts to-day?
Blanche. I, madam, on Abstract Philosophy.
There I propose considering, at length,
Three points – The Is, the Might Be, and the Must.
Whether the Is, from being actual fact,
Is more important than the vague Might Be,
Or the Might Be, from taking wider scope,
Is for that reason greater than the Is:
And lastly, how the Is and Might Be stand
Compared with the inevitable Must!
Princess. The subject’s deep.
Brett : IIRC it was a background detail, worldbuilding not elaborated upon. The Dyson Sphere in Ancillary. Really, read at least the next book — you are right that due to publishing shenanigans she had to cut the book at an arbitrary point.