Friedrich Becker-B.

Delphine Lancel🗽 @dlancel · 2d

"La gauche a apporté la pire des répressions, la pire des tyrannies avec des sentiments parfaitement généreux (...) Vous pouvez croire dans vos rêves, mais ne me les imposez pas !" Yves Montant

Un Grand Monsieur !

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Leon Rinaldetti Verified account @lrinaldetti · 3d

The stars are dead; the animals will not look:
we are left alone with our day, and the time is short and
history to the defeated
may say Alas but cannot help or pardon.

Wystan Hugh Auden, Spain 1937

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Edward W. @edwardW2 · 6d

guy Fawkes night is an apotropaic ritual to destroy traitors and ward off foreign influence send tweet

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Iva Apostolova Verified account @Pergament_F · Nov 4

Thinking Zone. Wednesday morning in my little Black Sea village, I am drinking my coffee and reading Book IX of Pliny the Elder's Natural History, in which a Roman scholar arrives at a magnificent explanation for the prosperity of ancient Byzantium: the eyesight of tuna fish.
According to Pliny, tuna enter the Pontus along one shore of the Bosporus and leave along the other because they see better with their right eye. Near Chalcedon, on the Asian shore, an exceptionally white underwater rock supposedly frightens them into swimming towards Byzantium, whose fishermen consequently enjoy abundant catches while their neighbours across the strait are left at a disadvantage.
I imagine Pliny attending a modern conference on marine biology, listening with scholarly composure as his theory of one-sided tuna vision receives the requisite scientific scrutiny.
Yet his reasoning interests me more than its zoological accuracy. He attempts to connect the movements of fish, the peculiarities of a coastline and the commercial fortunes of a city within a single explanation. The fish, the rock and the market all belong to the same account of nature, in which geography and human history are inseparable.
He also maintains that fish grow particularly quickly in the Black Sea because its rivers bring in so much fresh water, and describes their seasonal migrations alongside claims that would leave a modern zoolog considerably less enthusiastic. That mixture of observation, inherited testimony and unsuspected error is precisely what makes Pliny so absorbing.
His Natural History runs to thirty-seven books. In the preface he claims to have assembled about twenty thousand facts from some two thousand volumes, drawing on a hundred principal authors. He even provides lists of sources, an impressive bibliographical undertaking in a world without searchable catalogues.
His working methods deserve a book of their own. Pliny the Younger tells us that his uncle listened to books while eating, travelling and being rubbed down after bathing; in winter, his secretary wore gloves so that his fingers could continue taking notes. When a guest interrupted a reading to correct a mispronounced word, Pliny complained that they had lost more than ten lines.
This particularly amuses me. A man determined to describe almost the entire known natural world could apparently tolerate an error of pronunciation more readily than the loss of ten lines of reading time.
Behind this astonishing productivity, of course, were readers, scribes and other people's labour, a detail easily overlooked when celebrating the solitary genius of Roman scholarship. Pliny the Younger also describes 160 volumes of notes, written on both sides in such tiny script that their contents were effectively doubled. They have disappeared, but their scale remains astonishing.
Looking at my Black Sea this morning, I think about the peculiar fortunes of knowledge. Pliny preserved observations from authors whose works no longer exist, and faithfully carried some of their misconceptions into posterity. Without them the history of human curiosity might look more orderly, though considerably less interesting.
I rather like beginning Wednesday with a Roman encyclopaedist, crossing the Bosporus in my imagination, reaching the dazzling underwater rock of Chalcedon and ending up with a fish which, according to Pliny, sees better with its right eye.
Byzantium would become Constantinople, survive empires, sieges and upheavals, and leave behind, among countless other things, this remarkable ancient explanation for its fisheries.
Not a bad form of literary immortality for a frightened tuna fish.
☕️📖🪻
Good morning

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