Forum / Cousin Ambrose Rides Again!

  • Photo_00020.thumb
    strannikov
    Sep 07, 11:31pm

    I made my day earlier with my very first read of Ambrose Bierce's blistering "Ashes of the Beacon" (1909).

    Vastly and wildly entertaining, occasionally spot-on prophetic, and arguably one of his most restrained pieces. (A longish tale, it lacks the verve and concision of a rollicking piece like "Oil of Dog", but it retains charms all its own.)

    Conveniently located in the Library of America edition of Bierce's work published in 2011, S. T. Joshi, editor.

    Highly recommended.

  • 028934-753x1024.thumb
    mxi wodd
    Sep 08, 01:42am

    "The ancient Americans were a composite people; their blood was a blend of all the strains known in their time. Their government, while they had one, being merely a loose and mutable expression of the desires and caprices of the majority--that is to say, of the ignorant, restless and reckless--gave the freest rein and play to all the primal instincts and elemental passions of the race. In so far and for so long as it had any restraining force, it was only the restraint of the present over the power of the past--that of a new habit over an old and insistent tendency ever seeking expression in large liberties and indulgences impatient of control. In the history of that unhappy people, therefore, we see unveiled the workings of the human will in its most lawless state, without fear of authority or care of consequence. Nothing could be more instructive."

    --Morose Ambrose

  • Photo_00020.thumb
    strannikov
    Sep 08, 12:53pm

    I seem to've liked this part, since I took pains to underline it in its entirety instantly upon reading (among several others, I must add):

    "Happily for humanity, the kind of government that does not govern, self-government, 'government of the people, by the people and for the people' (to use a meaningless paradox of that time) has perished from the face of the earth.
    "An inherent weakness in republican government was that it assumed the honesty and intelligence of the majority, 'the masses,' who were neither honest nor intelligent. It would doubtless have been an excellent government for a people so good and wise as to need none . . ."

    --as on the following page, Bitter Bierce's narrator quotes from his sources:

    "In the words of Golpek, 'The early Americans believed that units of intelligence were addable quantities,' or as Soseby more wittily puts it, 'They thought that in a combination of idiocies they had the secret of sanity.'"

    It's comforting to learn that the country you've been born and raised in was at least once (though for so brief a spell) beheld so unambiguously and so charitably.

  • Photo_00020.thumb
    strannikov
    Sep 08, 04:54pm

    Sharing my enthusiasm for Bierce's satire with Professor Cowen, he alerted me to a more broadly conceived analysis of relations between fiction and economic modeling:

    http://www.gmu.edu/centers/publicchoice/faculty%20pages/Tyler/Model.pdf

    which I found rewarding and not overly technical in terms either of formal economics or formal literary theory (id est, I read right through the perplexing mathematical asides). Although he did not specifically address satire as a literary mode, he did conclude by alluding to Vico, even though somewhat dismissively. Still . . .

  • Frankie Saxx
    Sep 08, 09:11pm

    http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/13541

    Includes Ashes of the Beacon, which I have never read.

    I've downloaded it & as soon as I finish 2001...

  • You must log in to reply to this thread.