Cultural Complicities
School can take the place of the family milieubut it depends on which school, of course. Éva Thomassin, as we have seen, daughter of a rich family originally from Argentina, boarder at a Lausanne school frequented by royal children and heirs of great international fortunes, shows that these exceptional private schools replicate this relationship of complicity with the cultural universe. "We took a trip to Italy, from Milan to Naples; all of Italyvisiting museums. I will never forget that trip! The marvelous trains of that era, the paintings I saw in museums. We must have been very, very well escorted, to have succeeded in getting us to like Fra Angelicos at that point. . . Unforgettable! to the point that when I see a picture today, I immediately recognize it. The other day I said: Ah! that is a Filippo Lippi. You don't forget these things." This cultural training always has as a social dimension: it is a question of mastering the culture necessary to efficiently manage the social capital. "They prepared us to go into a salon and know how to converse intelligently, in a cultivated manner." In any case, what characterizes the schools favored by the great families resides in the complementary fashion with which they assure the transmission of all forms of capital: academic, cultural, and also social, symbolic and even physical, by the importance granted to the body and sports. In sum, a complete education for a complete person.
The shape of Britain’s empire reversed every notion of military logic. A properly planned empire, it might be supposed, would expand steadily outward. Its metropolitan core would be carefully guarded by its most trustworthy provinces. Beyond them would lie in graduated succession the less valuable zones and, out on the edge, the buffer-states and client-kingdoms that could be dispensed with if necessary.
But if this was the model of designer-imperialism, the British version of empire was a ridiculous parody. Its head and centre lay only twenty-two miles from what had usually been its most dangerous enemy. Its most valuable territories were not compact provinces arrayed close to the centre but lay on the other side of the world, six months away by sail, and at least three weeks by steam. After 1860, nearly half the British army was stationed in Indian cantonments, many miles and days from the nearest seaport.
"The Joining isn’t necessary, right? I’m a deity. I have an incomprehensible lifespan now.”
“Well,” Casteel drew out the word.
I looked over at him, and then it struck me—what I’d worried about when I first learned that I could be immortal or the closest thing to it. “I’ll outlive you, won’t I?”
“Deities have double the lifespan of Atlantians, maybe even longer if they take the deep sleep,” Casteel explained. I didn’t feel a single ounce of worry coming from him while I was five seconds away from throwing myself onto the floor. “But we have a very long time before we have to stress over that.”
“I’m stressing over it now.”
Ay şimdiden ölüyorum okumaya...Kitabı okudu
In order to enter the Technological Age, the Romantics had to come to the perception that their most frightening problem, the rise of soulless science, was in fact the answer to their greatest need, the rediscovery of mystery.
Just so, in order to enter the coming Atomic Age, was it necessary for Techno-men to realize that what appeared to be their most terrifying problem—the vast new universe revealed by science—was in fact the answer to humanity’s pressing need to escape execution by grim Fate.
and when the stars wrote back,
they would say the most dazzling
and necessary things.
Good Captains never come to an engagement unless necessity compels them, or the opportunity calls them.
