I'm sorry, I must have misread you. You said that I egregiously struck the balance in the wrong direction. I assumed you meant the balance between JonMon and his victims or between their respective worthiness of compassion. So between what and what did I strike the wrong balance?
All of these accusations and counter-accusations of misreading reminded me of a passage that i read many years ago and that has stuck with me. I think it worth repeating (it's from Harold Bloom's "Poetry and Repression"):
"Any poetaster or academic impostor can write a poem for us that oozes a plenitude of "meaning," an endless amplitude of significances. This late in tradition, we all come to one another smothered in and by meaning; we die daily, facing one another, of our endlessly mutual interpretations and self-interpretations. We deceive ourselves, or are deceived, into thinking that if only be could be interpreted rightly, or interpret others rightly, than all would yet be well. But by now--after Nietzsche, Marx, Freud, and all of their followers and revisionists--surely we secretly--all of us--know better. We know that we must be misinterpreted in order to bear living, just as we know that we must misinterpret others if they are to stay alive, in more than the merely minimal sense. The necessity of misreading one another is the other daily necessity that accompanies sleep and food, or that is as pervasive as light and air. There is no paradox in what I am saying; I but remind myself of an obvious truth, of ananke, or what Emerson called the Beautiful Necessity."
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Date: 2013-05-23 11:38 pm (UTC)All of these accusations and counter-accusations of misreading reminded me of a passage that i read many years ago and that has stuck with me. I think it worth repeating (it's from Harold Bloom's "Poetry and Repression"):
"Any poetaster or academic impostor can write a poem for us that oozes a plenitude of "meaning," an endless amplitude of significances. This late in tradition, we all come to one another smothered in and by meaning; we die daily, facing one another, of our endlessly mutual interpretations and self-interpretations. We deceive ourselves, or are deceived, into thinking that if only be could be interpreted rightly, or interpret others rightly, than all would yet be well. But by now--after Nietzsche, Marx, Freud, and all of their followers and revisionists--surely we secretly--all of us--know better. We know that we must be misinterpreted in order to bear living, just as we know that we must misinterpret others if they are to stay alive, in more than the merely minimal sense. The necessity of misreading one another is the other daily necessity that accompanies sleep and food, or that is as pervasive as light and air. There is no paradox in what I am saying; I but remind myself of an obvious truth, of ananke, or what Emerson called the Beautiful Necessity."