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Post by Nalkarj on Mar 28, 2018 21:16:12 GMT
This query has absolutely nothing to do with movies, so forgive me for putting it here: I’m just wondering if anyone here happens to know it!
In the great G.K. Chesterton’s Orthodoxy, a wonderful passage runs thus: Now, I recognize three of GKC’s five references here: Pandora’s box, Psyche and Eros, and the Garden of Eden.
But I’m not quite sure about the plucking of the flower or the city destroyed by forgetting a word. The former seems vaguely familiar; for the latter, I could only think of the Biblical Sodom and Gomorrah, which doesn’t fit the scenario. Does anyone know these? (I’ve tried looking them up, to no avail thus far.)
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Post by BATouttaheck on Mar 29, 2018 3:31:27 GMT
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Post by Nalkarj on Mar 29, 2018 14:26:47 GMT
Great idea, BATouttaheck , and I’m kinda ashamed it didn’t come to mind... My only reservation would be that GKC writes “human lives,” in the plural, whereas only Beauty’s father’s life would be forfeit if he or Beauty didn’t return. But he does refer to the story elsewhere in the chapter, so it may well be the one. Mille grazie!
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Post by alfromni on Apr 23, 2018 1:22:37 GMT
Nalkarj --- Try these... 1. "A box is opened, and all evils fly out" --- Pandora. 2. "A word is forgotten, and cities perish" --- Possibly relates to the Tower of Babel. The Sibyl makes mention of the tower, and of the confusion of the language, when she says thus:-- "When all men were of one language, some of them built a high tower, as if they would thereby ascend up to heaven; but the gods sent storms of wind and overthrew the tower, and gave everyone a peculiar language; and for this reason it was that the city was called Babylon." It also means that the start of competing cultures, nations, and thus war and destruction of cities etc. 3. "A lamp is lit, and love flies away" --- could be explained by the old tradition of keeping a light burning in the window to show someone who perforce has left the hearth, the way back home. 4. "A flower is plucked, and human lives are forfeited" --- Could this be related to the "abduction" of Helen of Sparta/Troy and the following costly 10 year long Trojan wars? 5. "An apple is eaten, and the hope of God is gone" --- Obviously Adam and Eve. ----------- Can't quite see how Psyche and Eros fit in. Explanation required. That's my brain exhausted for a good few hours.
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Post by Nalkarj on Apr 23, 2018 1:37:07 GMT
Thanks kindly, alfromni. As for #2, I don’t think the Babel story fits—it’s no single word that’s forgotten, as GKC seems to imply (I think). For #3, Psyche’s sister convinces her that her lover, whom she has only seen in the dark, is not a god, as he claims, but rather a monster. “One night after Cupid falls asleep, Psyche carries out the plan her sisters devised: she brings out a dagger and a lamp she had hidden in the room, in order to see and kill the monster. But when the light instead reveals the most beautiful creature she has ever seen, she is so startled that she wounds herself on one of the arrows in Cupid's cast-aside quiver. Struck with a feverish passion, she spills hot oil from the lamp and wakes him. He flees, and though she tries to pursue, he flies away and leaves her on the bank of a river.” Because Cupid/Eros is the anthropomorphic personification of love, Love quite literally flies away. For #4, I see that Helen was supposed to be carrying elecampane flowers when she was abducted—unless you meant that Helen was herself a ‘flower plucked’? Both are possible explanations, though I’ll do a little more searching; both of these would make this one a bit more indirect than the others. Again, thanks for looking into this!
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Post by alfromni on Apr 23, 2018 1:54:11 GMT
NalkarjBabel would fit if you consider that the Bible is often referred to itself in a plural fashion as "The Word". i.e. the Word of God. Thanks for the Psyche explanation. Yes I can see how that would fit better than my effort. I was thinking as Helen herself being the flower. Didn't know about the elecampane flowers.
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Post by Nalkarj on Feb 25, 2019 18:32:29 GMT
This question came to mind again earlier today, and after doing a bit of research I think you were right with “Beauty and the Beast” for “a flower is plucked,” BATouttaheck. Chesterton was a big fan of Andrew Lang’s fairy-tale books, published around the same time, and “Beauty and the Beast” is in the first volume. I still have no idea about the forgotten word that destroys a city.
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Post by Nalkarj on Feb 25, 2019 18:34:21 GMT
In “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves,” which Lang also includes in The Blue Fairy Book, Cassim forgets “open sesame” and in consequence can’t enter Ali Baba’s secret cave, but it doesn’t make a city perish.
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Post by alfromni on Feb 25, 2019 18:55:02 GMT
NalkarjJust received your "like this" notification. I'd forgotten all about this interesting thread. As I look through it again another idea has sprung forth re #2 "A word is forgotten, and cities perish". i.e. Sodom and Gomorrah. "Sodom and Gomorrah have become synonymous with impenitent sin, and their fall with a proverbial manifestation of divine retribution." (Wiki) "A word is forgotten " could relate to the forgotten word of God (or the gods) Alternatively, but a little more obscure, #2 could relate to the Flood which again was supposedly retribution of God. Comments?
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Post by Nalkarj on Feb 25, 2019 19:04:06 GMT
Nalkarj Just received your "like this" notification. I'd forgotten all about this interesting thread. As I look through it again another idea has sprung forth re #2 "A word is forgotten, and cities perish". i.e. Sodom and Gomorrah. "Sodom and Gomorrah have become synonymous with impenitent sin, and their fall with a proverbial manifestation of divine retribution." (Wiki) "A word is forgotten " could relate to the forgotten word of God (or the gods) Alternatively, but a little more obscure, #2 could relate to the Flood which again was supposedly retribution of God. Comments? Thanks, Al! Sodom and Gomorrah came to mind for me as well (I think I mentioned them in the OP), but, just as with Babel, I can’t help but thinking that GKC is being more literal here. His point is that the condition in fairy tales is incomprehensible—whereas, if we say “word” is “the word of God,” punishment for disobeying the word of God logically follows in these stories. Even with “a lamp is lit, and love flies away,” Chesterton is being literal: Eros/Cupid is literally the personification of love. Something else that came to mind is C.S. Lewis’s story of Charn in The Magician’s Nephew. In it, everyone in the city of Charn perishes because Queen Jadis learns and then utters a secret word. Now, of course, Lewis was inspired by Chesterton and wrote his story a half-century afterwards, but I was wondering if Lewis could have been inspired by the same source.
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Post by Nalkarj on Feb 25, 2019 19:26:03 GMT
Sent a quick e-mail to the American G.K. Chesterton Society, just on the off chance that they have some idea.
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Post by alfromni on Feb 25, 2019 19:32:37 GMT
Nalkarj - Thanks. Yes you did mention S & G. I missed it. I'm really not in the state of comprehensibility with Chesterton’s words "In the fairy tale an incomprehensible happiness rests upon an incomprehensible condition. What kind of condition?
The magic and comprehension of the incomprehensibility of fairy tales is mostly lost on adults as they have forgotten or can't see through the window of a child's mind.
Is he comparing Biblical history to fairy tales?
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Post by Nalkarj on Feb 25, 2019 19:45:49 GMT
Nalkarj - Thanks. Yes you did mention S & G. I missed it. I'm really not in the state of comprehensibility with Chesterton’s words "In the fairy tale an incomprehensible happiness rests upon an incomprehensible condition. What kind of condition?
The magic and comprehension of the incomprehensibility of fairy tales is mostly lost on adults as they have forgotten or can't see through the window of a child's mind.
Is he comparing Biblical history to fairy tales? I think his point is that the consequence doesn’t logically follow from the action (or inaction). That is to say, there’s no reason that opening a box should bring evil into the world—the logical consequence is that the box is open. Yet, in the myth, it does bring evil into the world. It’s the same thing with the flower in “Beauty and the Beast.” The father picks a flower—so that means his life is forfeited to the Beast? What sense does that make? I think his point is largely the same as yours, then: to understand the fairy-tale, we have to accept the incomprehensible condition. In context, he’s comparing this kind of “liberty” to one Yeats proposes and finds that “elfin” liberty is not lawlessness because it’s bound by this incomprehensible conditionality. As for the Bible and fairy-tales, I’m not sure. He was, obviously, a Christian apologist, but he wasn’t a biblical-literalist (nor was Lewis). He might have believed that much of the Old Testament were stories designed to express truths, rather than to record history, something with which Lewis probably would have agreed.
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Post by alfromni on Feb 25, 2019 19:51:13 GMT
Salzmank - Re emails I'd be interested in their views. I'll have to revise the Magician's Nephew as it's such a long time since I read it.
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Post by Nalkarj on Mar 11, 2019 20:29:41 GMT
Received an uninformative e-mail from the GKC Society people: I can’t agree with Miss Korman, as it wouldn’t make much sense for GKC to have half of the entires on a list be specific stories and half be generalizations.
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