Sunday, July 12, 2009

Ezranomics, cont. (con musica)

"""The Puritans were Bible-crazy, but they did not bring the Hebrew Scriptures only. The culture of Adams and Jefferson is a Latin culture with a mixture of Greek. Otis wrote a Greek Grammar which he destroyed, or which was lost for the lack of a competent printer. During the prosperous colonial era the arts of silversmithing, furniture making, and architecture developed. The houses, although made of wood, were a Greek dream. Numbers of them burned down. From Germany came groups of religious sectarians. They brought with them the art of glassmaking, and organised, at least once a year, a Bach Festival. Monticello is full of refinement. The polygrapher longed for a complete civilization equal to that of an Italian Court, ceremonies omitted, of the Fourteenth Century. He got into debt.

Adams was frugal, and used the weather-boards of his attic study as a handy file for his correspondence. For at least a century New England took as an idea: “Low Living High Thinking”.

Usury spoiled the Republic. Usury has been defined as too high an interest on money. The word finance became fashionable in the bank-paper era. And it is to this that Jefferson alludes in the phrase: “No one has a natural right to be money-lender save him who has it to lend.” With the “financial” era the word usury disappeared from polite conversation.

There is no greater imbecility than to leave one’s own bank-account or one’s own sources of information in the hands of an enemy, or an irresponsible man.

The struggle between the people and the exploiters, in America, was waged around these forms of imbecility.

A handful of people, who lived on little and did not run into debit brought to, and preserved in America, a rather high, severe culture, and a civic sense nourished by the traditions of English legal liberty, that is, by a centuries-long conquest in which the traditions of North European tribes and Roman Law converge.""""


(Ezra Pound,
An Introduction to the Economic Nature of the United States).

To reiterate: """The polygrapher longed for a complete civilization equal to that of an Italian Court, ceremonies omitted, of the Fourteenth Century."" Jefferson the Polygrapher. Yo le gusta.

Domingo-dia de Dios muzak! Stomping at the Savoy. ah yass

1 comment:

J said...

Pound reminds us of the essential rationalism of the Founders--as much from Greek and Latin classics, as ju-xtian tradition. Gravitas (not Google-us).

Pound--linguist, economist, amateur scientist, expert chessman, AND poet-- managed to bridge CP Snow's divide between the Two Cultures of science and literature (though Bertrand Russell may have outperformed him--yet Pound not afflicted with Russell's somewhat naive whig-liberalism).

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