Considering two assholes.

The course about which this blog was started was made had a flurry of assigned readings but two of them stick out in my mind as have peculiar similarities while being absolutely divergent when all is said and done.

William Biddulph and Sir Henry Blount are both without question assholes. This term carries a generally negative connotation. I however don't parley with such boring opinions, to quote one of my best friends "Some of my best friends are assholes." This is not to presume all assholes are pleasant or bearable and it is perhaps worth clarifying the term. An asshole, as best I can tell, is someone who has a large ego. The dividing line between whether these people are in the end pleasant tends to fall upon how aware they are of their ego.

William Biddulph seems in the long run to be a very small man with an ego so large as to not be seen around. His writing is only a step above an annoying friend explainign what tea they had this morning. Whereas Blount clearly casts himself as not only observant and able to give real analysis but was able to crucify his ego and leave it on the hill while he quietly and humbly through the populace of his writing then returned to said ego to write what he had seen. so onto the respective journals.

Biddulph under the guise of some unknown friend who had collected his "friend's" letters insisted on printing. This is of course the first betrayal of the pretense and pompous nature of our deal English man. He then opens his chapter by listing every great philosopher who ever traveled so as to try to associate him with greatness. He then after a bit more wandering finds his way to explaining his journey in which he goes about the task of berating anything that does not seem overtly English; the poor were inevitably simple and ignorant, the rich indulgent and base. He in several cases take an opportunity to go into great detail about the food he ate, the precise number of trees he saw and another number of numbingly inane details. He concludes in condemning the faith of Islam and speak to the sentiment that the Christian church was overjoyed to project, a land of barbaric people living in sinful ways.

In Blount we find a recount flavored strong by a man who I would suppose was an atheist of some devotion. At the least he is very observant and not afraid to speak against the state, culture, or religion of others and I would suspect his own. His introduction is marvelously clear and direct and yet somehow almost elegant. He details his hopes to go to a truly foreign and prosperous land. He then proceeds to analyze from a rather detached and pleasantly rationale perspective the culture and operation of the Ottoman Empire. Some might claim that he berates the Ottomans when he talks about their religion but since I am personally an atheist I see in it more an analysis and perhaps respect of how effectively the religion was at creating a civil society and willing army. When reading this journal it is hard to not feel like you are reading a guide on how to build an empire.

And so we have two men who are very outspoken, harsh, and direct but the line between being an admirable jackass and a boring git separates them. Biddulph would be the sort of man I could casually knock off the deck of a boat in mid-sea and Blount was the sort that I would dive in to rescue.

----------------
Now playing: The Polyphonic Spree - Section 14 (Two Thousand Places)
via FoxyTunes