Uncrossing
"A great city is a great solitude"
- Francis Bacon
Somewhere blues pretend to
be lost. A busy restaurant
puts the AC on high.
Our non-existent baby feels
cold. We rush out to buy
balloons. We need to change
the gun laws. A lawmaker
shoots solitudes in my city.
A sound pretends to be
heard. A long loneliness
lifts its sleepy head filled
with longings. A referendum
waits for a dream country.
Somewhere I lose all maps.
The Dream -- Henri Rousseau
Francis Bacon was one of the most learned men of his time. His
ReplyDelete"Novum Organum, sive indicia vera de Interpretatione Naturae" (New organon, or true directions concerning the interpretation of nature), published in 1620, detailed the importance of observation and induction as the basis of the scientific method. In 1626, when he was 65, while studying the effects of freezing on the preservation of meat, he contracted pneumonia and died. Three months later his work on natural history "Sylva sylvarum" (Forest of Materials) was published, containing an unfinished 1623 novel, "New Atlantis," about a lost crew's discovery of Bensalem ("Son of Peace"), a fictitious island west of Peru where "generosity and enlightenment, dignity and splendor, piety and public spirit" were the hallmarks of its inhabitants. "There is not under the heavens so chaste a nation as this of Bensalem; nor so free from all pollution or foulness. It is the virgin of the world.... Know, therefore, that with them there are no stews, no dissolute houses, no courtesans, nor anything of that kind." On the last page Bacon called it "God's bosom, a land unknown."
But he began his literary career in 1597 with the publication of "Essayes. Religious Meditations. Places of Perswasion and Disswasion. Seene and Allowed." Its 10 essays were augmented with another 28 in its 2nd edition (1612), and "Essayes or Counsels, Civill and Morall" was published in 1625 with 58 essays. The 2nd edition contained "Of Friendship," which was rewritten 1625. In it he wrote, "A crowd is not company, and faces are but a gallery of pictures; and talk but a tinkling cymbal, where there is no love. The Latin adage meeteth with it a little, 'Magna civitas, magna solitudo;' because in a great town friends are scattered; so that there is not that fellowship, for the most part, which is in less neighborhoods. But we may go further, and affirm most truly, that it is a mere and miserable solitude, to want true friends, without which the world is but a wilderness. And even in this sense also of solitude, whosoever in the frame of his nature and affections is unfit for friendship, he taketh it of the beast, and not from humanity." The Latin adage he referred to was taken from the "adagia," annotated collections of Greek and Latin proverbs by Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus. (The first edition, "Collectanea Adagiorum," was published in Paris in 1500, with about 800 entries, but by 1508, after his Italian sojurn, the "Adagiorum chiliades" [Thousands of proverbs] had over 3,000 items; by his death in 1536 in had 4,151 entries.) The proverb began in Strabon's "Geographika," which he finished in the last year of his life (23) as the Greek "Eremia megale 'stin he megale polis" (The great city is a great desert), but "solitudo," the Latin translation of "eremia" meant either "solitude" or "a place of solitude." Erasmus gave it its final form, which Bacon then employed for his own purposes.
Bacon : "