Where did you find so many stories, Master Ludovico?
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| On gambling
If we can believe Tacitus, the Germans would stake, and lose, their own homes, wives and children while gambling. In any event, right up to our time they have dissipated in card games not only patrimonies, but also inheritances. In the hosts of Cortez there was a soldier who “staked the Sun in a card game”, referring to a strange idol that had fallen to his lot in the division of the loot after a temple was pillaged. The goods acquired by warriors, pirates and gamblers are not destined to be in their possession for very long. On the playing table, the bets pile up with a dizzying speed; in one night prodigious sums are won and lost. The game creates addiction; it is similar to those forms of intoxication whose excitation is based on greed. *** As a result of the French Revolution, gambling stakes were raised to new heights and the outcome was often disastrous. This phenomenon has also found an expression in literature; in Balzac, for example, in his description of the Parisian gambling dens. In the London clubs, games with dangerously high stakes figured among the opportunities for a dandy to exhibit his cold-bloodedness. In this respect, Wellington was no exception. High-stakes gambling is one of the symptoms that characterize the decline of the aristocracy. “At bottom”, the root has begun to rot, but in the kaleidoscope of history, the impression arises that the axe has struck the trunk, and, undoubtedly, due to suspicious existences that have flourished in society. Casanova mentions a man named Schwerin who pawned the Pour la Merité of an illustrious ancestor. Such things will always happen. In every flock there is a black sheep, in every family a prodigal son. The tendency of such things to appear more frequently is not a fact that can be verified statistically. Anyone who is interested in genealogical contexts in the manner of Vehse, in family trees and biographies, will find that, at the turn of the 19th century, the alienation of patrimonies increased and so did marriage for love. *** For many vocations, imprudence is indispensable; it is an existential precondition for their performance. Among soldiers, those belonging to light cavalry regiments, especially hussars, have since time immemorial been famous for their hot tempers. Their mission was to demoralize, to spy on, and to attack and ambush the enemy. They participate in “skirmishes” (plänkeln)—a word that is related to “flash” (blinken).139 The classic charge, the decisive blow reserved to the cavalry, who fought with cuirasses and went into battle with swords held horizontally. They constituted the preferred personal guard of the prince. Tolstoy sketched the figure of the light cavalryman, with his light and shadow, in The Two Hussars; Kleist also introduced him in his stories. The surprise attack of the hussar involved the rapid seizure of loot, bold charges, reckless gambles. He liked to bet everything on a single card. The hussar’s affinity with populations of nomadic horsemen is reflected not only his equipment, but also in his physiognomy. One could imagine Zieten among the Pandurs.140 In many regiments, it was precisely ugliness that was valued. The dazzling element of ambiguity is also present wherever these horsemen erupt into universal history. Blücher, whom Napoleon called the “drunken hussar” and for whom even Léon Bloy professed admiration, preserved his sanguinary temperament until an advanced age. His tenacity in remaining in contact with and attacking the enemy, exemplified above all in the Battle of Waterloo, could take on demoniacal features, which evoke the “Wild Hunt”.141 It is reminiscent of the panting dog hot on the trail of the fleeing prey. Sometimes, he did not seem to be in his right mind and he imagined that he was an elephant that was the cause of so much devastation. Naturally, he was also a compulsive gambler and also a bad risk when it came to paying his debts, besides; there are still families that have kept IOUs with his signature, which have remained unpaid. Blücher, who ran away from home when he was still a teenager to enlist in the Swedish hussars, was not an educated man; his strong suit was not knowledge, but character and temperament. His toast at Wellington’s diplomatic table, “May the pens of the diplomats not again spoil all that the swords of our brave armies have so gloriously won!”, remained proverbial for a long time. People with such gifts seldom lack that natural flair that enables them to hit the nail on the head, as Blücher did in many of his sayings. Thus, for example, the following saying concerning the Prussians, written after 1815, when he returned from a health spa, with his health in tatters: “The State does not possess a constitution that is any healthier than mine; in war we remain fresh, in peace no one wants to walk on his own two legs”. Zieten knew how to engage in brilliant repartee, in general his lives are more accessible. Insolent speech is characteristic of the soldier of the light cavalry; both Zieten and Blücher were expelled by Frederick due to their arrogance, but they were also readmitted to the service. The great leader of cavalry troops in the Seven Years War was Seydlitz; he got his start in the cuirassiers. *** Dangerous traits rise to the surface in civil wars and similar situations. Then the hussar can arrive on the scene, playing the role of the type who does not pull any punches. He is quick to hang or shoot, like Blücher when he had to deal with the Saxons who mutinied in Lütich, when the news was announced from the Congress of Vienna that their country would be partitioned. Just before the executions were to be carried out, the Prussian general Borstell hesitated for reasons of conscience and was dismissed. He was, it is true, an old cuirassier. Gallifet also faithfully represented this type, with his jagged and rough way of life. In his name the song of the “rooster” was played on the trumpet, which, at the gates of Sedan, summoned the cavalry to its last famous charge. It was said that one could even smell the gunpowder smoke on the bodies of the fallen. Memories that would have annihilated a man of the stature of Borstell, would obviously not even have been a major burden for Gallifet. “Voilà l’assassin”—this is how he was later presented as the Minister of War in the legislative chamber. He displays some Mexican traits, including memories of the brutal massacre of Sebastopol, the model for the future battles of materiel. Rochefort, in his journal, Laterne, the model of all those weeklies bound in red cloth which were as blunt as a bullet, recounts a dangerous encounter with Gallifet. The man of letters escaped by a hair from the man who did not pull any punches. The behavior of Gallifet in the Dreyfus Case, which earned him the hatred of the conservatives, was, in this sense, atypical. It is undoubtedly fair to say that, in the 19th century, generals were effectively under control, with the exception of South America. Monarchs or Parliaments held the reins. Now, generals are taking the reins everywhere, and not only in Africa. Where arguments are no longer convincing, it is but one step from the terrible simplificateurs to the simplificateurs terribles. Tolstoy, who was familiar with the characters of war and peace, provides some details. A colonel in a front line regiment, who had fascinated a young officer at a dinner party due to his modest humanity, shocked him on the following morning, by virtue of the zeal with which he watched a sentence of corporal punishment being carried out. It is understandable that along with horses and horsemen, so too has gambling, in its old forms, fallen into disuse. The father to whom the son confesses his gambling debts has disappeared even as a character in novels. Likewise, the son who shoots himself in the head or washes dishes in America, because he abided by his word of honor. “Gambling debts are debts of honor”—a rhetorical flourish which has caused much misfortune, but which has now lost all its value. On the gaming table, fate is cheapened; these days, the “word of honor” is an expression whose value has fallen to rock bottom prices. Everything becomes cheapened to the extent that it is reckoned in numbers. At the end of the [nineteenth] century, however, unfortunate incidents still abounded and so did the trials that followed in their wake. Power and patrimony—Circulation and capital Money in motion produces stratification, money immobilized produces concentration. Here, a qualitative difference is manifested, that is, a difference between mechanical increase and organic growth. It is not enough to increase the balance in a savings account to create a patrimony. From a quantitative point of view, a patrimony can be small, even as paltry as that of a petty bondholder in Munich on the eve of the First World War. Its value is not concealed behind numbers, but in the leisure and, contrary to all acceleration, the peaceful security that it concedes. Perhaps one can enjoy oneself more in a small garden than in a spacious park, even when its cultivation does not exclude hard work. A dynamic society stratifies, although not in accordance with its patrimony, but in accordance with the income that is conceded by the power of possession. The latter for its part redounds to the benefit of hyperactivity—the possession of a greater quantity of power, the abolition of space by way of telecommunications, capital in general, a process that is also forwarded by investment. Advertising belongs to this tendency; the importance of a book is not estimated by its value, but by the number produced. One must also consider the fact that the power of possession is not always in the hands of those who have obtained some income and deserve it. Its power can also be transformed into the capacity for administration. There is a rude awakening that is characteristic of those mornings after triumphant revolutions. When the time came for redistribution, certain types appeared who had not fought on the fronts or on the barricades. Behind the liquidation of the first uniform is concealed a kind of legality, perhaps even a kind of reason. The matter acquires a more frightening aspect, when we note the fates of every one of the exceptional personalities, for example, the fate of the Social Revolutionaries, before and after the October Revolution. Prussians and war Their fondness for war forms part of the black legend of the Prussians. In fact, however, the disorder of war instills them with an instinctive fear. Compared to Louis XIV, the Great Elector of Brandenburg is a normal monarch, and Frederick is the brilliant exception. In his old age he regressed to the type and was incorporated into the popular consciousness as “Old Man” Fritz, not under the aspect of a young man in blue armor, as he was depicted by Pesne. They are more soldiers than warriors, they are fanatics of order—order must “prevail” in the economic and social fields, and the military field, naturally, as the preferred field, because at the front order is concretized in a synoptic model. Frederick Wilhelm I is the original Prussian; he represented the type right down to the smallest details. Having become involved, against his will, in the Nordic conflicts of Charles XII, he did not, at the time, fight any war, despite the fact that there was no lack of good opportunities. The reason why the Prussians do not love war is their mistrust of the elemental forces; they create disorder. They esteem synoptic frameworks: the State as a large estate, the order of the armory. The failure of their firing line formation tactic was a catastrophe for them. At Valmy, just as on the Marne, their nerve failed them. Nolentem trahunt—there is a secret power of history that acts by retarding the pace of events; Goethe had seen it in situ more clearly than the generals. Frederick Wilhelm II was neither a soldier nor, by the way, an eminent military tactician; he was a weak character, but one with an enigmatic personality, as the excellent portrait by Anton Graff has captured so well. Frederick Wilhelm III had to be led to war like a dog to the hunt. “Whatever I said”, he was still capable of saying even in 1813, when he had already experienced a few setbacks. He opposed the autonomy of York, although the latter injected new life into the monarchy. Frederick Wilhelm IV allowed major opportunities with regard to domestic and foreign policy to slip through his hands. The “Pan-German Solution” was one such opportunity. The imperial crown emitted, in his view, the “carrion odor of the revolution”. The title of emperor made Wilhelm I think of himself as a kind of “moral commander”. He, under whose reign only successful wars were waged and who was a good monarch, demonstrates typical Prussian traits: enthusiasm is foreign to him, and even repugnant. When, after 1864, the victorious regiments put roses into the barrels of their rifles, he displayed his outrage; likewise, when Hohenlohe presented himself in 1870, in a helmet that had been grazed by a bullet at the battle of Sedan. When, after Saint Privat, he saw a fallen hussar in a red uniform on the square, he realized that the dead soldier’s coat was still in good condition—someone should take it to the quartermaster’s storeroom. The saying attributed to a Prussian sergeant, “It’s time to put an end to the Jesieje”, was on the mark, like every good anecdote, in expressing the heart of things. They do not like volunteers. Their inclination to gamble is strong, but only slightly developed; it is directed towards automatic perfection. The march of the guard at Potsdam exhibits an almost unreal character, which has not gone unnoticed by intelligent travelers from other countries. No deep ancestral lineage, a small native land, but much State and homeland. Perhaps this has determined their sober judgment in questions of power, which distinguished the Prussians in their best times. Hitler had to remove them from the administration and the army, before he could do just as he wished. From the beginning there was mutual antipathy between them. Wilhelm II, who enjoyed in a romantic and almost literary way the terror that emanated from fortifications and weaponry, became almost invisible during the war. That war was not for him a means like the cavalry charges or the great sea battles of the past. Waldersee, Bülow, the younger Moltke—in personal matters he had, unlike his grandfather, a bad hand. The aspiration was shifted to the phenotype, from being to appearance. It is not impossible that he will be rehabilitated. It is probable that, like Frederick Wilhelm IV, he was too gifted for a job in which intelligence mattered less than character and charisma. It is inevitable that we should compare him with King Gunther and Hamlet. Perhaps some day he will be understood as a tragic figure. This claim is not so bold since it can be applied to any man, but almost always we lack a Shakespeare, or at least a Georg Büchner, to reveal what was hidden behind the mask. What the Prussians have been reproached for is not so much their warlike spirit, as their resistance to time and its transformative power. They were the last stronghold of obstinate opponents of progress to dissolve in Europe. If one thinks of what came after them and what, perhaps, is yet to come—maybe then we will judge the suspicion under which they have fallen differently. Books and readers Among the monuments of the imaginary city, there must be one that the unknown reader dedicated to the anonymous author, as a display of gratitude for the genius that helped him to achieve a second, more buoyant existence. In any case, it almost seems to me as if, during the long road we have traveled, that we have lived more intensely in books than in our interval of time. I did not travel from Leipzig to Halle, but from one chapter to another. Between them was the rhythmic, tedious banging, and the monotony of railroad ties and rails lined by telegraph poles, the emptiness of the technological world. That is the way it was when I was in school, and then in the army—a life in installments. The palace of the reader is more durable than any other. It survives peoples, cultures, religions, even languages. Earthquakes and wars do not shatter its foundations, nor is it threatened by the burning of libraries like the one at Alexandria. Markets, villages of fellahin, colossi, skyscrapers, countries and islands grow until they disappear into the sky, as if the rain will always water them. Reality is enchanted; dream becomes a reality. The door is open to the magical world. I think that I have already mentioned the Mandarin who wandered into a line of criminals awaiting execution, profoundly absorbed in a book, while ahead of him in line the decapitations proceeded. Most of the time, the reader is engrossed, but not because he is incapable of dealing with his environment, but rather because he considers it to be of minor importance. And this is the way it is, above all when the world lowers the price and what it supplies is diminished in value. Fontane’s Irrungen, Wirrungen has left an indelible mark on my memory. I can recall details of its contents more precisely than I can recall the details of the day when I was first introduced to the story. It was the day when the Otago-Rifles arrived, fresh as a daisy, from New Zealand, to fight against us, and the mutual exchange of machine gun and artillery fire commenced. During the pauses I returned to the lakes of the Mark in the crisis of 1870. I began to read The Thousand and One Nights—that unfading gift of the magical world to the West—when I was nine years old, in June 1904; that month I had found the book on the table, a birthday present from my mother. It was Gustav Weil’s translation in four volumes, which always offered me refuge, again and again, like an oasis in a desert, until I passed on to reading Littmann’s translation in twelve volumes. The stories were deeply etched in my memory, as were the images from the richly illustrated edition. Now I have come to feel these sensations in Taroudant, in a Moroccan city that, despite its proximity to the coast, still exhibits a strong Eastern imprint. The Thousand and One Nights: the model of authorship that is both collective and anonymous. The work could be the invention of a demon—constructed overnight like one of those fantastic palaces. We should also think of the mother-of-pearl of a seashell—a cerebral trace that has hardened with iridescent incrustations. Illness and demonic power142—News about Walter’s misfortune Illnesses come and go; they appear and disappear like comets, after having caused calamities. Thus, malaria, whose power is now limited, but not eradicated. As an illness of the swamps it is now receding. A doctor, Ernst Thonnard, devoted a study to it about thirty years ago, one that went beyond the bounds of his discipline. Great epidemics are like wars, although it is difficult to separate them spatially and temporally. Their victims are just as numerous, but anonymous. The “nameless” designates an ensemble of powers that are hard to recognize and to endure. They can manifest themselves, often almost imperceptibly, like great political powers that have developed neither armaments nor armies. Malaria ended with the Crusades, sieges and pilgrimages to Rome. Five German emperors died of malaria in Italy. The Indians were familiar with it; they had already called it “the queen of maladies” three thousand years ago. Dreams, ecstatic intoxication and fevers were related to one another; their home is the swamps. The rise in the temperature of the blood by two or three degrees is sufficient to open the doors to a new world of images; the feverish patient begins to dream, as if his spirit had drawn open a curtain for him. Life becomes more passive on the outskirts of his airless lowest depths; existence adopts vegetative traits. More than one sick person recovers his health reluctantly. The Greeks believed that the lotus and the water lily flourished in the swamps, under the light of the Moon, which disappears with the dawn. They told how the Nymph, Lotus, had metamorphosed into this flower, when Priam was pursuing her. Among the Indians, Lakshmi, the goddess who was the daughter of the ocean and the night, rows over the abyss of time in a lotus petal. The Lotus Eaters, inhabitants of the swamps that produced their food, had gained fame as sleepers for having lost their memory, without affliction. In Book Nine of the Odyssey Homer describes the encounter of the Greeks with this people of a benevolent, but dangerous, spirit. Odysseus had dispatched two explorers to the heart of the island, accompanied by a herald: “… and they had a third man under them. They started at once, and went about among the Lotus-eaters, who did them no hurt, but gave them to eat of the lotus, which was so delicious that those who ate of it left off caring about home, and did not even want to go back and say what had happened to them, but were for staying and munching lotus with the Lotus-eaters without thinking further of their return….”143 This depicts one of the most ancient encounters with vegetative contentment, even with the temptation of addiction, that can be found in the history of political consciousness and responsibility. Odysseus, who always had a remedy, opted for a disintoxication cure: he ordered the men to be captured and forced them to sober up, tying them to the benches of the ship. Palus: swamp, stagnant water—the word is also applicable as a name for the Stygian lake, Avernus. The swamp is an intermediate realm, neither land nor water, miasmatic and shadowy. Malaria is bad air, unhealthy just like the name of that illness that leads to an early death or to a lethargic existence. It is interwoven with the fate of the European not only in the tropical colonies, but even on the margins of his own continent. Energy is extinguished, the quantity of red blood cells is diminished. Children born with malaria waste away; many die immediately after they are born. I saw them, delicate and pale like starved buds, during my first visits to Cerdeña. Naturally, the islanders had obtained some relative insurance against it at least by “pre-immunization”—the expression is derived from the theory of tuberculosis and means protection by re-infection with the organism. Resistance has been acquired over the course of generations, as an inherited advantage. The power of the disease has been attenuated, little by little, like that of a wave that goes to die on the surface of the beach. The foreigner does not enjoy this advantage. The Roman official who moved to Cerdeña expected to last for three years; his coffin was shipped along with his baggage. Even in our century there were neighborhoods in Rome where, during the dog days of summer, malaria came; a walk through the foreigners’ cemetery near the Pyramid of Cestius is instructive in this regard. In Baedeker’s Guide it is recommended that one should keep one’s windows closed when the train is passing through the countryside. The great era of the swamps passed when the birds and the mammals arrived and the number of volcanoes declined. Skin and plumage now had to supply what the earth had provided in the past from its own bosom. Food was abundant in the warm lands, where dragons and monsters lived, and above all the serpent, as a symbol of the power of life that also embraced death. It lay under the great hemlock or on the dead roots of the mangrove, bathed in the light of a pale sun. The swamp is hostile to consciousness and history, but not to the life force. In the swamp there are neither ancestors nor heroes nor complex organizations. For history, with its consciousness of time, to be able to proceed, it was necessary that first the heroes should drain the swamps and clear the land. Cultivation followed them into the gullies and ravines, after they killed the monsters that lived there. This is merely one example of the great transformations that spread over the sea and the mountains; the brilliant light came with Aries—as a solar sign it dissolves the sign of Taurus, whose nature is entirely telluric. Directory: files files -> Answer True False 2 points Question 2 files -> Integer programming and game theory files -> 4 Integer Programming files -> Bpa vehicle Window Repair Scenario #1 task: Procure vehicle window relacement. Objective files -> Pop Warner History files -> North Carolina Inclusion Initiative Mapping Where Children with ieps are Being Served Purpose files -> Fall 2013 Spring 2014 Program Data: Standard 1 Exhibit 4d files -> Hanban – asia society confucius classrooms network 2010 request for proposal files -> Northern England’s set-jetting locations Download 1.06 Mb. Share with your friends:
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