Elbląg I was speaking with a friend about Rudyard Kipling, who is to most of the people I know (as to me) more of a familiar name than a familiar author. When I explained that his most famous work was probably The Jungle Book, and explained that it contained animal tales often told to children, my friend replied, “There’s no way I would know it then. I hate animal stories.”
can you buy Lyrica at walmart I have now decades of experience with the fact that our aesthetic judgements vary widely, and I consider myself quite jaded on this score by now, but I was taken aback nevertheless. I expect quality in any story, but well-executed animal fables such as you find in Aesop strike me as worthy and difficult literary creations, requiring a neat combination of wisdom and simplicity. This is not to say that other people cannot hate them; I was merely naive in imagining that no one did.
I thought for a moment to say the following: “What about Dame Pertilote in Chaucer? How can you not like that, the chickens in the barnyard quoting Boethius to each other?” But I held my tongue before I said it, because I realized that the person I was speaking with would not at all be impressed by the humor of chickens talking Boethius, because she took no interest in Boethius either. She was not dumb: she was just uninterested in Boethius, the way I am uninterested in modern novels.
As I sat there considering this, I thought that it actually made sense: that the sort of person who took an interest in Boethius would be precisely the kind of person who would read children’s fables in middle age, and take a delight in the most primitive kind of storytelling. The extremity and artificiality of really caring to investigate the religious and philosophical thoughts of Boethius, a man fifteen hundred years dead, because some other men, also long dead, considered him an excellent thinker, creates the need for a counterbalance, some kind of childishness and simplicity. Dumb dancing is a better counterbalance, but fables, because they come printed on a page, almost make the tendency reputable. One of the most completely intellectual people I have ever known loved fishing, “Because,” as he said, “it’s really dumb.”
This appears to be a rule. The existence of one quality will bring about its opposite. The most brilliant people are ipso facto the dumbest. The greatest moral rectitude will produce the most contorted evil. The brighter the light the darker the shadow.
This makes Chaucer’s work in the Nun’s Priest’s Tale – of Lord Chanticleer and Dame Pertilote – all the more impressive. The entire tale is a love-embrace of opposites – complexio oppositorum – a widow’s barnyard where Troy and Hector and Joseph and Pharaoh and Boethius and Macrobius (Macrobius!) all live. It is a picture of the intellectual’s contradictory mind.
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