"Everything has been said, and we are more than seven thousand years of human thought too late."
Jean de La Bruyère (1645-1696)
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Overspill of an irreverent mind
The Very Best of Froogville
Pick of the Month: a random recommendation from the archive
The Barstool
Yang Rui must GO!
A leading presenter on China Central Television's English-language channel has revealed himself to be a xenophobic hate-monger. WHY does he still have a job? Lobby for his dismissal - by any and all means.
Days Ai Weiwei was detained
80
With ironic, sinister symmetry, the celebrity artist/activist was incarcerated on the same day that my friend Wu Yuren was finally released from 10 months' detention.
Now, like Wu, he's been released on extremely restrictive 'bail' terms - but could face re-arrest at any moment. He was detained incommunicado from April 3rd to June 22nd 2011.
Days Wu Yuren was in prison
307
"Released on parole" after 10 months; "parole" lifted another year later. The original charges against him were apparently dropped without his trial ever being formally concluded.
Why was Wu Yuren in prison?
Why do I care about Wu Yuren?
How you might have helped Wu Yuren (and the many others like him in China)
Remembering the Tiananmen protests of 1989
About Me
- Froog
- Froog is an escaped lawyer - but there is no need for alarm; he is only a danger to himself, not to the general public. An eternal wanderer, he now lives in an exotic city somewhere in the 'Third World' *, where he is held prisoner by an unfinished novel (or, more precisely, an unstarted novel). He spends a lot of time running, writing, taking photographs, and falling in love with women who fail to appreciate him. He also spends a lot of time in bars. [* OK, I'll come clean: I've been living in Beijing since summer '02.]
Who is this Froog person anyway?
What does Froog look like?
Why can't I be Froog?
How did I come to be a blogger?
A statement of principle
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Beating China's Net Censorship
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Competitions, etc.
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Secrets of the Universe
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Leave your bar jokes here
Leave your 'bad' jokes here
Pick of the Archives
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FRIENDS - doing business in China
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8 comments:
Do you think that this actually means something? If so, what?
I think it means that 'originality' is a delusion - an unimportant but often rather frustrating one.
And if the situation was depressing enough in the 1680s, how much worse is it today after another 300 and some years of bon mots.
Oh, is that what it means?
Very few of Jean de La Bruyère's epigrams are worth quoting: most of them seem to be meaningless, banal, obscure or just untrue. Perhaps they do not translate well.
I don't claim the familiarity with his work that you do, Teddy, but in general I rarely find any problem with translating French into English. (It is essentially the same language with different words. Chinese, Latin, Greek, even Russian seem to pose far more problems.)
This one, at least, seems good to me, and effectively translated.
I'll have to dig out some more, to check whether you are just talking out of your bottom.
I am not really familiar with de La B's works, but a quick scan through these quotes suggests that he was no Oscar Wilde. The one you have selected appears to mean that no-one has said or thought anything new and worthwhile since 5000 BC. This is as arrogant and fatuous as Francis Fukuyama's remark about the End of History.
Well, I take the chosen time period as a humorous overstatement. Though who knows what countless shrewd remarks may have gone unrecorded back in old Mesopotamia - maybe that really was a golden age of wit and philosophy.
I agree that J de la B was "no Wilde". Poor old Oscar was a hopeless crowd-pleaser, slave to the punchline always. Some of these lines from 200 years earlier are much better than anything of his.
I may well torture you, "Teddy", with a year of regular bons mots from from the French sage.
I think not. Farewell.
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