Back to crime — tomorrow, maybe

I was going to get back to crime fiction today, but I keep coming across wise and striking observations from The Way of the World. Here are two more.

The first is that nothing remains of true Islam "now that fanaticism has re-emerged." Predictable stuff today, or at least up until recently, but Bouvier wrote those words in 1953. And this:

"Alexander, a recent coloniser, brought Aristotle to the barbarians; thus the widespread mania for believing that the Graeco-Romans invented the world; and thus the contempt — in secondary education — for things Eastern (just a bit of Egypt, Luxor and the pyramids, so that children can learn to draw shadows). The Graeco-Romans themselves — see Herodotus, or the Cyropaedia — were not so chauvinistic. They greatly respected Iran, to which they owed much: astrology, the horse, the postal system, many gods, a few good manners, and no doubt also that carpe diem of which the Iranians are such past masters."

© Peter Rozovsky 2010