Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
The Best of Times
We should reserve a portion of our nightly prayer to thank God that we were born into this time, this place. We live like kings. No, that’s not right. The original one percenters — the kings and queens, dukes and barons, princes and princesses, and the rest of their ilk — led lives of severe deprivation compared with our lives.
I live in a cozy warm home heated to 72 degrees in the winter. Henry the Eighth lived in the cold and drafty Hampton Court, the most modern and sophisticated palace in Europe at that time. Henry probably spent more time warming his royal bum in front his fireplace than he did chasing his future wives around the place.
I eat blueberries from Chile (for my yogurt and cereal), oranges and avocados from Southern California (for my salads), bananas from Guatemala (for my smoothies), and even a few dates from the Near East.
Henry IV’s feasts might have been large and scrumptious, fit for a king, but he also had no fruits and vegetables out of season, no oranges, bananas, avocados, and kumquats at all. Poor Henry.
I get from place to place in a cozy, quiet Prius, listening to Fats Domino and Leon Redbone along the way. Louis XIV, the Sun King, traveled in a gilded carriage, very prettily carved with cherubim. But his ride from Versailles to the Paris hotspots was also slow, bone-jarring, and cold.
I have perfectly fitting false teeth that can chew everything in sight. Apples fear me. Queen Elizabeth I was missing a number of teeth, so when she made public appearances, she disguised her missing teeth by stuffing bits of white cloth into the gaps.
The usual method of replacing teeth (but only for the rich) was to carve a tooth out of ivory and wire it to any remaining teeth. That left an ugly and shifting set of teeth that often fell out.
When I near my end, I will be administered morphine to alleviate any pain before my lights go out. When Charles II of England lay dying, he was surrounded by a crowd of the best doctors in the land, all of whom inflicted, not balm, but distress and suffering, on the Merry Monarch.
The first thing they did was bleed the poor guy in order to relieve what they believed was an excess of blood, one of the four “humours” in the body (blood, phlegm, black bile, and yellow bile). So Charles was bled until his face was ashen. The doctors did this by raking his skin with a scarifier (a device with multiple blades); they punctured his veins to let out blood; and they applied cupping glasses (heated so that a suction was created) to his skin to draw the blood up through his skin.
In all, the hovering doctors gave poor Charles 58 different drugs of various concoctions, some of which blistered and scalded his tongue. The doctors also blew sneezing powders up his nose to relieve the pressure of “humours” on his brain. And they used a red-hot iron to blister his head, once again to force out the excessive humours.
Charles was encouraged to swallow various emetics to induce vomiting and purgatives to evacuate his intestines.. They fed him pig urine to fight his fever.
After a few days of this torture, Charles died, wracked in pain. His own screams may have been the last sound he heard.
So tonight in your prayers, send up thanks for the good fortune that allowed you to be born in this time.
Oh, while you’re at it, you might also include thanks in your prayer for being born not just in this time, but in this place. You might have been born in Somalia, after all, or Venezuela or Nigeria or Russia or Costa Rica or Baltimore. (Just kidding, Baltimore.)
We live, in Voltaire’s undying phrase, in the “best of all possible worlds.” Since gratitude is said to increase happiness and decrease depression, it’s probably good for our psyches to remind ourselves of that fact every now and then.
Published in General
Your post is excellent, and a most germane exhortation.
Voltaire was correct in this quote, and yet. And yet, I know I’m not the only one that is regularly dissatisfied with this or that. Whine, complain, pout. Shame on me.
You’re OK, Mr. Uptake. You’re only human. I would work on your gratitude, though. Try to be more like Shirley Temple.
If I could find blueberries that tasted like chili I might buy more of ’em. Certainly if I ever find ’em in my chili I’ll remove them.
Now I feel bad about myself. I hope you’re happy! I’ll go back and correct that problem. I’m not sure that will help my mood, though.
Concur. I often tell people that merely the ability to take a hot shower whenever we feel like it makes us privileged compared to most humans who ever walked the earth.
So sorry. I thought to make you laugh. Now I’m looking for sackcloth, dust & ashes.
Which life was more exciting?
You can buy them on Amazon.
Materially, our lives are better than ever before. Morally, modern life is more complicates than ever before.
Through nearly all of human history, social roles were generally inherited. Your father’s profession was your profession. Or else you were apprenticed in a trade before you were a man. Women also repeated the life tracks of their mothers and were assigned by their parents.
Centuries ago, the notion that every citizen should be informed about politics and directing policies would have been absurd. Citizens focused on their own lives and neighborhoods.
People didn’t need to personally begin every ethical decision from scratch because they acknowledged moral guides, like priests and rabbis with millenia of developed wisdom. Radical indepedence comes with radical responsibility.
Technology is power. Modern Westerners are incredibly powerful, from being able to communicate instantly with foreign persons and communities to being able to drive fast but potentially deadly machines. With power comes responsibilities.
The interplay of cultures from all around the world means people are regularly challenged to judge their own cultures and adopt their preferred customs as never before. That was once a challenge reserved for capitol cities, and that was before multiculturalism.
We have access to countless foods, products, and services. So, unlike most peoples who just consumed as everybody else did and had for generations, we must constantly make judgments about the things we buy and use amid conflicting information.
Despite the omnipotence of rulers in previous centuries, surveillance of citizens and interaction with them was much less common and more difficult for government. Now all of life is “regulated” and tracked.
Basically, modern Westerners must make more decisions with more conflicting information and more expectations than most humans in history. When a child becomes an adult, freedom (opportunity) comes with unavoidable challenges and responsibilities. The more citizens are empowered, the more they are challenged to utilize that power in productive ways, hopefully not destroying themselves with it.
It was back when I was reading a lot of C.S. Lewis that I got to wondering why academics have such boring biographies. Lewis sometimes wrote about adventure and excitement, but his personal biography is not terribly interesting, though not as boring as his professional biography. (I’ve listened to a lot of boring biographies of academics as they were being introduced to their lecture hall audiences. Their lectures were often fascinating, but their biographies were boring.) And that made me think about how the trend in my own family history, as far back as I know it, has been for more boring biographies with each succeeding generation.
Amen to that!
yep. Shame on those that choose not to learn history and be thankful for our riches.
Antoine de St-Exupery had some relevant thoughts:
There is a density of being in a Dominican at prayer. He is never so much alive as when prostrate and motionless before his God. In Pasteur, holding his breath over the microscope, there is a density of being. Pasteur is never more alive than in that moment of scrutiny. At that moment he is moving forward. He is hurrying. He is advancing in seven-league boots, exploring distance despite his immobility. Cezanne, mute and motionless before his sketch, is an inestimable presence. He is never more alive than when silent, when feeling and pondering. At that moment his canvas becomes for him something wider than the seas.
Gratitude in your last line is a good lesson and reminder, not just in the age of entitlement, but that gratitude can’t co-exist with despair. Thank you for that reminder, especially on this politically cloudy day.
Whereas your average Medieval peasant who needed sackcloth, dust & ashes had to walk miles to a village large enough to have a Bed Bath & Beyond.
This is something I think about often, and I love this suggestion about adding it to our daily prayers.
I always say I’ve won life’s lottery to be born in this country.
A very interesting, and entertaining, original post and comments. Thank you, everyone.
(This is the sort of thing I log onto Ricochet for; I haven’t found it anywhere else.)
It is hard to be grateful when there is so much to be grateful for, but dyspepsia and apathy are among the wages of the glutton.
Now you can buy your gunny sacks on Amazon. Although I don’t recall actually having to pay for them when I was a kid. They just seemed to be around.
It depends who is writing the biography and for what purpose. I could have the most exciting or the most boring biography in the world.
Boring:
Not so boring:
I agree, Kent. We need to know how lucky we are and how well off we are. We are a rich people. We also need to be grateful and recognize the source of our blessings.
Those people who say I wish I’d lived when … should remember what Gore Vidal said, “I wouldn’t care to live at any time prior to the perfection of anesthesia.”
I know of which you speak.
Exactly so. I almost included a section on anesthesia, but I was striving for brevity in this post. Anesthesia is a godsend. It’s hard to imagine having your limb sawed off or your body cavity opened up without anesthesia. Liquor and a piece of rawhide to grip in your teeth just doesn’t do it.
Unless you’re in California and want to do your laundry, I’m hearing.
Thanks for your comment, Arahant. I can always count on you for a comment or help with navigating the Ricochet site. I still don’t know how to get to the place where one signs up for a quote post. I can only get there when a hot spot shows up.
Two words: surgical restraints.
Thanks, Jim. Me too. (That is, other people’s posts and comments.)
I’m reading a book about the battle of New Orleans: The Greatest Fury, by William C. Davis. There’s a vignette where a British surgeon is amputating an American prisoner’s leg, and hands a fiddle to a second prisoner so he can play loudly and distract the patient. The fiddler breaks into “Yankee Doodle,” and the surgeon breaks the fiddle over the second prisoner’s head.