Saturday, 13 June 2009
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Wisdom for the Weekend...
"A continent ages quickly once we come. The natives live in harmony with it. But the foreigner destroys, cuts down the trees, drains the water, so that the water supply is altered and in a short time the soil, once the sod is turned under, is cropped out and, next, it starts to blow away as it has blown away in every old country and as I had seen it start to blow in Canada. The earth gets tired of being exploited. A country wears out quickly unless man puts back in it all his residue and that of all his beasts. When he quits using beasts and uses machines, the earth defeats him quickly. The machine can’t reproduce, nor does it fertilize the soil, and it eats what he cannot raise. A country was made to be as we found it. We are the intruders and after we are dead we may have ruined it but it will still be there and we don’t know what the next changes are. I suppose they all end up like Mongolia."
—Ernest Hemingway, Green Hills of Africa (1935)
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Comments (6)
Awesome.
It does sort of leave me to ponder the bit about foreigners, though. Though the native inhabitants of a land would tend to have more respect, I think the exploitation comes more from the mechanized devil-spawn capitalism. It's really the system that drives this arrive and conquer mentality, anyway. I suppose the difference is that we aren't so much talking about foreign labor as we are talking about foreign investors and the like.
@distractedbyzombies - Bear in mind that Hemingway was speaking of parts of the world that had bristled under the colonial yoke...so that qualifies the "foreigner" bit somewhat.
In modernity, though, I think you're totally right that the real monster here is indeed mechanized capitalism and the exploitation of less-developed nations by foreign corporations.
Hemmingway's word, like those of Rachel Carson, or Alan Weisman in his book, the World Without Us, catch our attention for the moment; about the span of time it takes to expel a popcorn fart. We know what is true, yet we deny the truth. Each generation relies upon its own wisdom, in part I think, because in the past there were more questions than answer,so wanting answers, we neglect the questions. Above, Hemmingway gives an answer, yet we don't teach Hemmingway beyond The Sun Also Rises or The old man and the Sea. He is the Lost Generation, and thus we largely dismiss dismiss him by the end of the Roaring 20's, in a review of 20th century literarure. What could an old drunken bastard like that have to say to us in the 21t century, after all?
I love the quote, and that you found it, and shared it, and made certain we could understand that it is a relevant to 2009 as it was to 1935; to America as it was to Africa; indeed, to the world.
@jrmaxwell - Glad you approve! I feel that as a reader and as an historian, I have a responsibility to share this sort of thing whenever I find it.
Taken completely out of context, this gives me shivers to think about. Thank you for sharing. I don't have time to elaborate now, but I will try and do so later.
@CatastrophicKitten - Well, that certainly piques my interest...