The Colossus Of Rhodes (Happy Birthday John Mendelssohn)

Why man, he doth bestride the narrow world
Like a Colossus, and we petty men
Walk under his huge legs and peep about
To find ourselves dishonorable graves.


William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar (I,ii,135–38)

To you, o Sun, the people of Dorian Rhodes set up this bronze statue reaching to Olympus, when they had pacified the waves of war and crowned their city with the spoils taken from the enemy. Not only over the seas but also on land did they kindle the lovely torch of freedom and independence. For to the descendants of Herakles belongs dominion over sea and land.


Dedication inscription for the Colossus of Rhodes (from the Anthologia Graeca 4, 171 H. Beckby, Munich, 1957)

Illustrations:

Upper:  Colossus of Rhodes, constructed c. 294–282 bc, wood engraving reconstruction by Sidney Barclay, c. 1875.

Center:  Mandraki Harbor, where the Colossus of Rhodes stood, at sunrise.

Lower:  Colossus of Rhodes, imagined in a 16th-century engraving by Martin Heemskerck, part of his series of the Seven Wonders of the World.

Sermon: Comparisons Are Invidious

     Before I break down, lose all my cool, and prepare a blog based around The Kinks song “Where Have All The Good Times Gone,” I thought it would be preferable and possibly therapeutic to examine why "comparisons are invidious."  

      I use that expression (become sort of a cliché) often because it seems frequently to apply these contentious days where the worst are definitely filled with passionate intensity and popular humor has devolved into endless repeated expressions of dark-hearted sarcasm and assertions of personal and "affinity group" superiority. 

      It’s difficult to imagine how cerebral, sometimes surreal, comedians like George Burns and Gracie Allen, Jack Benny and even Jackie Gleason (who combined delicately robust physicality with humane, socially conscious, character humor) would be able to find audiences in this ur-ugly time. 

      When I say a comparison is invidious, it's usually triggered by someone's apples/oranges analogy mistakes, but I am also sometimes telling my daughter, who is at the stage where kids compare their lot in life to everyone else’s and find fault at home, that it is generally better to shelve those thoughts because they’re unreliable and impractical.


      That being said, “physician, heal thyself,” applies to me as much as to anyone else and during this straitened, enervating period I am hardly illusion or envy-free.

  Therefore, when I discovered the other day that a local person I have known for years, someone who on paper might arouse all sorts of personal and professional jealousy, is in a hideous amount of personal and professional trouble, his name daily typeset  large all over the agora, trouble that is likely to ruin him, I was nonplussed.  

      As always is the case, the signs (which in retrospect appear as large as roadside billboards) were there all along that trouble was waiting for him.  Now that it has arrived in a first-class carriage and exploded, I wonder how we’ll all feel once the big bang shock has worn off?


  Personally, I already feel a little wiser and more secure about myself and my own instincts, ethics, and capacity to self-generate  appropriate apprehensions of fear and a sense of consequences. 

 

       As for the small but significant horde who formerly danced attendance on this man, some are already probably looking for new sources of gossip and backs to stab and bite; others will simply deny the significance of their prior relationship or claim they were never ever deceived.


  Say your prayers.   Amen.