On Fri, 1 Jul 2005, andie nachgeborenen wrote:
> "Dirt" was really good, actually. In my biz, we call it "real" estate,
> actual weath, as opposed to mere personal property like gold and jewels
> and stocks and bonds.
True, although occasionally tax lawyers and corporate lawyers mock and demean real estate law as "dirt law," implying that it takes no intellectual firepower to master it.
> "Spacious in the possession of dirt," Hamlet dismisses Oscric -- but he's
> insulting Osric's syncophancy and stupidity, not his wealth.
Hamlet also deliver's one of Western literature's most wonderful expressions of the idea that we are dirt, as part of his "Alas dear Yorick" soliloquy:
URL: http://www-tech.mit.edu/Shakespeare/hamlet/hamlet.5.1.html
HAMLET
To what base uses we may return, Horatio! Why may
not imagination trace the noble dust of Alexander,
till he find it stopping a bung-hole?
HORATIO
'Twere to consider too curiously, to consider so.
HAMLET
No, faith, not a jot; but to follow him thither with
modesty enough, and likelihood to lead it: as
thus: Alexander died, Alexander was buried,
Alexander returneth into dust; the dust is earth; of
earth we make loam; and why of that loam, whereto he
was converted, might they not stop a beer-barrel?
Imperious Caesar, dead and turn'd to clay,
Might stop a hole to keep the wind away:
O, that that earth, which kept the world in awe,
Should patch a wall to expel the winter flaw!
But soft! but soft! aside: here comes the king.
<end quote>
So when you look at it that way, the idea that we become dirt is really irrefutable. Even if we get burned or buried at sea, we still become species of dirt, ash and mud respectively.
And the idea that we are made out of dirt is hard to avoid even today if we accept that "being made out of chemicals" is just a fancy way of saying "being made out of things you find in the earth."
The more you think about it, the more the recurrence of this idea of autochthonous creation in primitive myths all over the world seems basically explicable as the obvious conclusion that anyone who sat down back then and thought about it would reach -- as much the begining of science and philosophy as the beginning of religion.
Michael