Tuesday, December 13, 2011

Here's To Your Health


  

                                                                          



Observing the disc golfer on a beautiful day in the park is outright poetic.  So I'll end with this nice excerpt from the 1987 book on a long-standing debate concerning the Elgin Marbles. Author Christopher Hitchens brings the words of a poet into the arena.


In his book titled "Imperial Spoils The Curious Case of the Elgin Marbles" publishers Hill & Wang/1987,  Christopher Hitchens states, "Two unforgettable sights for travelers are the Parthenon in Athens and the Elgin Marbles in London. But why are half of the Parthenon's sculptures and friezes in the British Museum instead of in Greece? Are these sublime emblems of the Periclean Age a 19th-century British lord's oxymoronic legitimate pillage, or should they be recognized by now as a part of Britain's cultural heritage? Does it matter to people elsewhere in the civilized world that when work on the Parthenon began, Sophocles and Euripedes were at the height of their dramatic powers and Socrates as a young man watched the Parthenon rise - and probably helped to build it since he was a stonemason and sculptor by trade?
Lord Byron thought that removing the 5th century B.C. sculpture from the Parthenon was criminal and said so in measured verse in ''Childe Harold.'' In a stanza about his countrymen that was suppressed by his publisher, he began, ''Come then ye classic Thieves of each degree. . . Come pilfer all that pilgrims love to see.''










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