Compared to the unleashed forces of warfare and of faith, Mount Vesuvius was kinder to the legacy of antiquity.
Interpretation
This quote highlights the destructive power of war and belief systems compared to natural disasters like Mount Vesuvius.
In this quote, Stephen Greenblatt reflects on the impact of human conflict and ideology on the preservation of history and culture, suggesting that wars and fervent faith have caused more irrevocable damage to antiquity than even the volcanic eruption of Mount Vesuvius. It underscores the idea that while nature can be catastrophic, human actions often carry a more profound and lasting effect on heritage and civilization.
In practice
In a lecture on the impact of warfare on history, one might quote Greenblatt to provoke thought about human conflict.
I've been at this for 40 years. And, as an academic, I've been content with relatively small audiences, with the thought that the audience I long for will find its way eventually to what I have written, provided that what I have written is good enough.
What I wanted to do was to get that sense of being in touch with this lost world while holding onto what draws readers and audiences there in the first place.
What matters here are the works - finally without them his life would be uninteresting. What matters, that is, are the astonishing things that he left behind. If we can get the life in relation to the works, then it can take off.
The exercise of reason is not available only to specialists; it is accessible to everyone.
The greatest obstacle to pleasure is not pain; it is delusion.
I believe in broken, fractured, complicated narratives, but I believe in narratives as a vehicle for truth, not simply as a form of entertainment, though I love entertainment, but also a way of conveying what needs to be conveyed about the works that I care about.
By what aberration has suicide, the only truly normal action, become the attribute of the flawed?
If freedom makes social progress possible, so social progress strengthens and enlarges freedom. The two are inseparable partners in the great adventure of humanity.
Since the notion that we should all forsake attachment to race and/or cultural identity and be βjust humansβ within the framework of white supremacy has usually meant that subordinate groups must surrender their identities, beliefs, values, and assimilate by adopting the values and beliefs of privileged-class whites, rather than promoting racial harmony this thinking has created a fierce cultural protectionism.
At first it seems obvious, but the more you think about it the stranger the deductions from this axiom seem to become; in the end you cease to understand what is meant by it.
The human being is an unequal creature. That is a fact. And we start off with the proposition. All the great religions, all the great movements, all the great political ideology, say let us make the human being as equal as possible. In fact, he is not equal, never will be.
The greatest advances of civilization, whether in architecture or painting, in science and literature, in industry or agriculture, have never come from centralized government.
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