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Oct. 21st, 2004 02:08 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tylikWell, my first really long day went pretty well. Very well if you count that I was a bit sick. (Yes, I'm still a bit sick. It was getting better, so I figured I'd go off the steroid inhaler... and so I spent all of yesterday coughing. Gah. Sometimes I really dislike my lungs.) I did have to sit out a bit the second half of the Chen class... but it was just accumulated fatigue, making me all achey. (And hey, I was at least two and a half hours in by that point. Not exactly something to complain about.) Though between the plyometrics Tuesday and coughing all of yesterday, my ribs hurt in odd ways.
Today is all about being quiet, I think. Some cooking, some homework, maybe working on my Samhain cards... And gentle stretching. Yeah.
Thinking again a little about value trade offs between things like works of art, or irreplacable books, and human lives. There was a segment on NPR about students in Buenos Aires going into the ruins of the Center of Jewish studies soon after a terrorist bombing ten years ago, and trying to salvage the library. Now, rescue efforts got priority, not to mention overt support, while the students were mostly on their own and had ambiguous relationships at best with the authorities (however, they managed to salvage 70% of the library, including a lot of unique material than came out of Eastern Europe in the wake of WWII.) But one of the students said "I felt like when I saved a book, I saved a life." Which really resonated with me, and has me thinking...
It's *not* a simple question. As many of you know, one of the things that started really bothering me when I was doing research on the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution in China is that there seems to be so many more people wringing their hands and weeping and wailing about how badly intellectuals were treated during the Cultural Revolution (I'm not saying that this isn't true, there was a lot of pretty gruesome stuff going on, and I have close friends whose lives were pretty much put on hold for twenty years)... and yet not nearly so much writing or indignation wrt the Great Leap Forward, even though the latter had by far the larger body count. (Even if you assume that bad weather played a major role.) Oh, but those were peasants?
And my gut does say, if the building is burning, get the people out, worry about the other priceless works of art later.
But the artistic and intellectual works of mankind are the things that have the potential of being immortal. Though I think we have other responsibilities than tending the past...
Today is all about being quiet, I think. Some cooking, some homework, maybe working on my Samhain cards... And gentle stretching. Yeah.
Thinking again a little about value trade offs between things like works of art, or irreplacable books, and human lives. There was a segment on NPR about students in Buenos Aires going into the ruins of the Center of Jewish studies soon after a terrorist bombing ten years ago, and trying to salvage the library. Now, rescue efforts got priority, not to mention overt support, while the students were mostly on their own and had ambiguous relationships at best with the authorities (however, they managed to salvage 70% of the library, including a lot of unique material than came out of Eastern Europe in the wake of WWII.) But one of the students said "I felt like when I saved a book, I saved a life." Which really resonated with me, and has me thinking...
It's *not* a simple question. As many of you know, one of the things that started really bothering me when I was doing research on the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution in China is that there seems to be so many more people wringing their hands and weeping and wailing about how badly intellectuals were treated during the Cultural Revolution (I'm not saying that this isn't true, there was a lot of pretty gruesome stuff going on, and I have close friends whose lives were pretty much put on hold for twenty years)... and yet not nearly so much writing or indignation wrt the Great Leap Forward, even though the latter had by far the larger body count. (Even if you assume that bad weather played a major role.) Oh, but those were peasants?
And my gut does say, if the building is burning, get the people out, worry about the other priceless works of art later.
But the artistic and intellectual works of mankind are the things that have the potential of being immortal. Though I think we have other responsibilities than tending the past...
