DATA, by Aris Grandman: 2014-02-16

So familiar, so foreign

—The language in which we are speaking is his before it is mine. How different are the words home, Christ, ale, master, on his lips and on mine! I cannot speak or write these words without unrest of spirit. His language, so familiar and so foreign, will always be for me an acquired speech. I have not made or accepted its words. My voice holds them at bay. My soul frets in the shadow of his language.

James Joyce (1882-1941) in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, ch. 5, explains, from the point of view of a (non Gaelic) Irishman what it feels like to speak in English. In today's globalized world, for someone speaking a language of minor diffusion, like Greek, the feeling is exactly the same.

The Right to be Lazy

If, uprooting from its heart the vice which dominates it and degrades its nature, the working class were to arise in its terrible strength, not to demand the Rights of Man, which are but the rights of capitalist exploitation, not to demand the Right to Work which is but the right to misery, but to forge a brazen law forbidding any man to work more than three hours a day, the earth, the old earth, trembling with joy would feel a new universe leaping within her.
But how should we ask a proletariat corrupted by capitalist ethics, to take a manly resolution ...

Paul Lafargue,
The Right to be Lazy, 1883.

DATA, by Aris Grandman

Pages

Wednesday, 19 February 2014

The way of the sea (A portrait of Aris M. as an old man)