The Great Man and his “Politics” (re-edited)
He who hangs his own hope on another man's political eloquence, should be everywhere avoided...
St Jerome in the Desert, by Lazzaro Bastiani
For the great man – the man of upwardness, the heights – to condescend his thought and language to the level of the political, to the day’s “discourse” and his neighbor’s easy sentimentality and immature taste, to the doltish buffoonery of the masses with their indistinguishable ideas and ceaseless blather and vulgar familiarity is an act of profanation he cannot frequently endure.
Everything down there is too easy for him, and boring, stultifying: the little inclines, the petty moralism, the blind dogmatic boulders that block the inferiors’ path, the path itself – what a horror that so many hang such lofty hope on the delusions of so few. The longer he subjects himself to such polemical toxins, the more meticulous he must be with his own purifications when at last he returns to his cold and solitary cave.
Loathing the tediousness of such protocol – the endless prayers, the fastidious washings, the fastings – you’ll find the true Aesthetic speak little of government, and hold scant political opinion, and be not easily roused in matters of the state, the rights of its citizens or its ever-devolving jurisprudence.
About
Devil walks into bar. Orders drink. Asks Philosopher sitting next to him: “And what do you do?”
