The Wisdom of Kerbouchard: Restarting Installment

Insert usual 'sorry I took so long' stuff here.

Today's subject is: Poverty and the Charity of Women (AKA 'The Ladies')

This installment is brought to you by Chapter Forty-Three

"Evil comes often to a man with money; tyranny comes surely to him without it.
I say this, who am Mathurin Kerbouchard, a homeless wanderer upon the earth's far roads. I speak as one who has known hunger and feast, poverty and riches, the glory of the sword and the humility of the defenseless....
Hunger inspires no talent, and carried too far, it deadens the faculties and destroys initiative, and I was hungry, although not yet starving.
Women have treated me well, bless their souls, and it has occurred to me that a man need know but two sentences to survive. The first is to ask for food, the second to tell a woman he loves her. If he must dispense with one of the other, by all means let it be the first. For surely, if you tell a woman you love her, she will feed you.
At least, such has been my limited experience.
Yet such a solution was beyond me, for my rags lacked gallantry and rags without firm exciting flesh beneath them excite little compassion and no passion. A woman who will gather a stray dog into her arms will cal the watch if approached by a stray man, unless he is very handsome, but not often even then, for there remains an occasional feminine mind of such a caliber that she might suspect him of more interest in her money than more intimate possibilities...Around me were wealth, luxury and decadence. The two former I did not share, but decadence is the one attribute of the very rich to which the poor have equal access.
Decadence is available to all; only with the rich it is better fed, better clothed, better bedded.
Cities were built for conquest, and I, a vagabond, must conquer this one with what weapons experience had provided.
To a man without money, for I could not cal myself a poor man, the obvious way to riches was theft. Thievery, however, is a crime only for the very ignorant, in which only the most stupid would indulge. There is a crass vulgarity in theft, an indication that one lacks wit, and the penalties far outweigh the possible gain.

{Mathurin considers what he can do in the new city considering his many talents. He decides against acrobat, magician mercenary and physician.}

A storyteller, perhaps? A weaver of tales? Thus far my flights of fancy had been reserved for the ears of women, for long since I had observed that masculine beauty as an enticer of the female is overrated. Women are led to the boudoir by the ears. For one who talks well, with a little but not too much wit, it is no problem.
Where women are concerned it is the sound of the voice, the words that are spoke and the skill with which they are said, especially when combined with a little, but not too much, humility."

Thoughts, fP's?

The Wisdom of Kerbochaurd-Second Installation

I apologize for missing last week, I was away from a computer over the weekend. It is now Saturday again, and we turn our eyes to the inspired work of Mr.L'amour.
Today's topic: WISDOM!

What kind of scholar was I? Or was I a scholar at all? My ignorance was enormous. Beside it my knowledge was nothing. My hunger for learning, not so much to improve my lot as to understand my world, had led me to study and to thought. Reading without thinking is as nothing, for a book is less important for what it says than for what it makes you think.
"A good question...but I am merely a seeker after knowledge, taking the world for my province, for it seems all knowledge is interrelated, and each science is dependent to some extent on the others. We study the stars that we may know more about our earth, andherbs that we may know medicine better."
"You are a physician?"
"A little of one. So far I have had more experience in the giving of wounds than the healing of them."

I put the last bit in just because Mathurin is funny and he is certainly not exxagerating. The man loves to fight. I really like this passage because there are so many great ideas in it. First of all, there is some truth in the idea that admitting ignorance is the beginning of wisdom. Those people who think they are wise are usually not the ones you want to be listening to. There is a humility in recognizing the gaps of knowledge and a strength in pursuing the filling of them. "A seeker after knowledge"...I wish we were all such.
Then there is the idea that all forms of knowledge are related, which is becoming more and more apparent to me. I was recently thinking that if someone were to ask me what my specialty in history was, I would want to say "world history", which isn't really an answer, but no country has developed...no story has come to be that was not in some way connected to another story. We say that this is the age of Globalization, but Globalization is simply the recognition of what has always been the case. The degree of connection has changed, but not the state.

For example, when the colonists from Western Europe arrived in the Pacific Northwest, they traded nails with the Native Americans who only knew of iron because Japanese ships had been blown far off course and wrecked on the Natives' soil. And the Japanese ships wrecked because they would designed not to go too far from Japanese shores and therefore had no rudder. This happened because Japan was locked down at the time because they saw Europe as a threat and wanted nothing to do with them...except for the Dutch, who were allowed to come into a few select ports.
So it is all connected and has been for centuries. Likewise, philosophically speaking, things are linked in various forms and ways. Political theory is tied up in moral and ethical issues, which at times are connected to scientific quesions (human life, cruel and unusual treatment, etc) and of course, all of those are filtered through cultural lenses which leads to socio-anthropology and questions of social structures...this could go in circles and of course this line isn't linear. A great tangled mess really, and college students everywhere tear their hair out trying to grasp the elusive "big picture".
But even just *attempting* to make these connections, to see the lines that are there and try to see how things all fit together is a worthy endeavor, and I think makes us better students and better people.

Thoughts from you?

The Wisdom of Kerbouchard-First Installment

Greetings, fellow philosophers.
I have been running this idea through my head for a while now and am finally getting around to putting it into action. This marks what will hopefully be the first of a weekly installment here in the IF of EH that will bring a smile to your face and perhaps add thoughts to rumble around in your mind.

Louis L'Amour is best known for writing some of the greatest Westerns of all time, and deservedly so. Lesser known among his works is a novel, called The Walking Drum, set in the 12th century about a French Corsair (that's gentleman pirate, for you uninitiated) named Mathurin Kerbouchard who is traveling the world to exact vengeance on the man who killed his father and destroyed his home. Not the most original of plot premises, I know, but what makes this book one of the Greats is the philosophical meanderings that Mathurin goes into regarding all sorts of topics from religion to politics to love. I strongly encourage everyone to read it, but in the mean time, I will be posting some of his tidbits of wisdom here ever Saturday/Sunday (depending on how late at night it is) for your pleasure. Because like Mathurin "...Learning to me is a way of life. I do not learn to obtain position or reputation. I only want only to know."

Tonight's topic: Love! (Okay, so there'll be lots of these, I'm just going with the first one. Mat got around. Freaking James Bond of the Byzantine Empire.)

"What is love? Perhaps for a time I loved her [a woman he courted earlier]; perhaps in a way I love her still. Perhaps when a man has held a woman in his arms, there is a little of her with him forever. Who is to say?
A ruined catle, an ancient garden, a moon rising over a fountain...love comes easily at such a time. Perhaps we loved each other then; perhaps we do not love each other now, but we each have a memory.
Love is a moment of stillness that sometimes a word can shatter to fragments, or love can be a thing that endures, a rich deep current that flows unending down the years.
I do not think one should demand that love be forever. Perhaps it is better that it not be forever. How can one answer for more than the moment? Who knows what strange tides may sweep us away? What depths there may be or twists and turns and shallows? Each life sails a separate course, although sometimes, and this is the best of times, two lives may move along together until the end of time.
Listen to the music out there. Is the song less beautiful because it has an end? I believe each of us wishes to find the song that does not end, but for me, that time is not now."

This has been an IFoEH production of The Wisdom of Kerbouchard. Tune in next time, same place, roughly same time. =)