| CARVIEW |
In Germany it is included in schoolbook anthologies. The poet is popular.
Don’t read poetry, my son; read the timetables
For they are more exact. Roll up the maps of the sea
Before it is too late. Be alert, don’t sing.
Those encyclica are useful to start a fire
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Lies keine oden, mein sohn, lies die fahrpläne:
sie sind genauer. roll die seekarten auf,
eh es zu spät ist. sei wachsam, sing nicht.
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Wikipedia biography at https://tinyurl.com/de39kt
soll der geier vergissmeinicht fressen?
was verlangt ihr vom schakal,
was guckt ihr blöd aus der wäsche
auf den verlogenen bildschirm?
Is the vulture to feed on daisies?
and the last two lines very freely translated are:
what about your stupid faces watching the mendacious screen?
It is so rude that the effect is almost funny, mainly because those of the “stupid faces” are so many that statistically speaking, imagine, since Enzensberger is so popular, among them would be his readers.
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There: she sits on the right, in a light blue dress, with both her hands on her lap and her head turned towards the proceedings. As far as anybody can know, she will not be next. This is her father’s coronation as Felipe VI. He is now the king of Spain and her sister Leonor is the crown princess, the next in line.
The two little girls sat there, just like that, for two hours, silently, barely moving, Leonor not moving at all. I will never find out how that was possible. Is their mother a gifted educator? More probably their grandmother. But how? The complete proceedings lasted more than four hours.
On those chairs, in that spot and watched all the time by their mother and the whole world: imagine! Leonor never moved at all. Her sister kept turning her head to see what was going on or who was speaking…. She could not possibly understand, and yet she seemed to be having fun, like a cat watching a ballgame on TV.
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Lots of thought has been given to the riddle of his real identity, since he cannot have been just a common crocodile or a hippopotamus. —
He seems to be the king of all nature, and no man could subdue him, can’t even get near him.
All the animals come down from the surrounding hills to bring him food, and the trees on the riverside offer him their shade.
And as Behemoth was not always visible, he became a poet’s symbol for hidden truth, especially if that truth were of a somber kind.
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It says that his heart was as tough as the lower millstone.
In the past, to make flour from wheat, they used two stones, one on top of the other. The lower stone was stationary and is called the bedstone, while the upper stone or runner was made to go round and round manually or with the help of a donkey.
It was a very slow and difficult way to get bread.
As the lower millstone had to take most of the wear, it had to be especially resistant, and that is Behemoth’s heart.
The millstone of the photo is from this American website on Appalachian technology. August 26 2015 not available
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The Behemoth appears in the Book of Job where the Creator is speaking about his work:
Look at the Behemoth!
I made him along with you
and he feeds on grass like an ox.
For more than a thousand years these things were studied and known mainly in Latin,
Ecce behemoth quem feci tecum,
fœnum quasi bos comedet.
but long before that they existed in Hebrew or in some other language of the Middle East.
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The author´s name is not known but he was one of the greatest poets of all time. He was not Jewish.
The story is very old, 3000 years old or older, as maybe it can be traced back to Sumer.
The map is from Putzger, an old atlas of history at https://www.maproom.org/
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Another possibility is that the author lived in the Kingdom of Edom, the yellow patch on the map below:
Link to source text in English, Hebrew, Greek, and Latin
https://www.sacred-texts.com/bib/poly/job040.htm
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The story traveled around in Latin as part of the Bible for 1000 years or more, though later also in English and in all the other great languages. It is about the meaning of pain.
Job lost everything, his children, his possessions and his health and he asked God what the meaning of it was.
So it can’t be read like yesterday’s news.
It is more like one of those old drawings on vases from the Middle East.
The Behemoth lived in the river and rested under the lotus flower.
Lotus has been legendary and sacred in many places, surely the world’s most storied flower.
It looks like a water lily, the white lily called Nenuphar.
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Look what they saw
from Apollo:
https://images.jsc.nasa.gov/luceneweb/caption_direct.jsp?photoId=AS11-44-6549
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In the past they had to make the best of little bits and pieces of information obtained from people who had traveled or had read old manuscripts:
Here is a map made by Hecataeus in the fifth century bC, that is 2500 years ago:
This map is in public domain at https://www.livius.org/a/1/maps/hecataeus_map.gif
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And this is how Herodotus imagined his Earth, also in the fifth century bC :
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The map of Herodotus reconstructed and released to public domain by bibi saint pol at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Herodotus_world_map-en.svg
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Isaac Azimov wrote and illustrated a story on the shape of the Earth, in public domain at https://www.arvindguptatoys.com/arvindgupta/earthpix.pdf
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The Greeks
saw that ships on the sea appear as if they came up from somewhere behind and below the horizon. They deduced that the Earth had to be round, but they had a hard time trying to explain why things don’t fall off.
( By the way: why don’t things fall off? : )
Elsewhere some thought that the Earth rested on pillars, and a much older passage in the Bible says that God suspended the Earth from nothing.
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Socrates too
had a theory and before he died he explained why he believed that the Earth probably looked like a sphere of luminous colour patches. He reasoned that those colours had to be brighter and purer than any you can see on Earth. That was about 2400 years ago :
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And Aristotle
said that from Egypt you could see stars that were not visible from Greece. He concluded that the Earth had to be round and not very large.
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Saint Isidore
drew the next map in Seville, Spain:
It is in public domain at https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Karte_Isidor.jpg
Saint Isidore lived in Seville some 1500 years ago. He was a bishop and a scholar who was influential and world famous for several hundred years.
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And this map is from the 15th century, in theory 2000 years closer to us than Hecataeus, but progress was not continuous. Recent changes have been immense.
500 years ago the Earth was (again!) known to be spherical, but you could not get to the other side because you would risk falling off the Equator.
In the upper part of this map there seems to be a ship on a mountain. It must be Noah’s ship, for the map was still largely a story-telling device.
The map is in public domain at https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5f/T-O_Mappa_mundi.jpg
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Some of the maps tried to show all of the available knowledge:
It is called the Ebstorfer World Map and was destroyed in WW2, but put back together from fragments. There is a 5 mega version at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ebstorfer-stich2.jpg.
It is similar to a modern film director’s storyboard showing what and where and when everything took place.
In the center of the map, if you look up the larger version, you will find Jerusalem, because at the time most of the information still came from the Bible, and Jerusalem was the center of the world and also of the universe.
There are also animals on this map:
Published by Kolossos under a GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ebstorfer-stich2.jpg.
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Some maps included information about the monsters that the sailors had met at sea, and the information is in Latin to give it the desired scientific look.
On the original map at Wikipedia you can see the monsters one by one, but it is a very large file : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carta_Marina
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Below is the map with
the most illustrous copyright owner :)
According to Wikipedia, it may have been drawn by Christopher Columbus and his brother Bartolomé.
Now it is in public domain with a larger version published at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:ColombusMap.jpg.
They drew it to figure out how to navigate around the globe.
They had studied the Bible and other books expensive to obtain and often prohibited at the time and they wrote their observations in the margins:
Notes by Columbus on a text by Marco Polo in public domain according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:ColombusNotesToMarcoPolo.jpg
The ships that were built for Columbus to cross the Ocean are lost, but exact replicas have been made, and the photo shows them sailing past Cape Canaveral spaceflight center.
School kids now learn their names: Pinta, Niña, Santa María.
and Wikipedia knows all about them https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinta_%28ship%29 —
most typically even that those were not their real names :-(
The photo is freely available for non-commercial use from NASA at https://mix.msfc.nasa.gov/IMAGES/HIGH/9265044.jpg
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World maps were based on imagination, tradition, and hearsay, and there was room to include castles and people, animals, and ships.
This map was a puzzle sold online, but the page is no longer available.
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This map shows the Pacific Ocean. They still did not mind proportions. You can see individual people, the sailors on that ship and also a winged creature with a red skirt: maybe it is an angel.
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The point
is that in the past there were many divergent ideas on what the Earth was like. Even Socrates’ famous view was just one of many. They had to make the best of little bits and pieces of information obtained from people who had been abroad and from the poets.
Everybody could have a try, and they did. —
Now there is only one theory, and everybody knows about it, but very few can understand it really.
The upper drawing is one of Chris Madden’s science cartoons but the other one I don’t know. It’s a man looking at the Earth from his office on Mars.
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And they sent up a laser beam to create a referent for photography in the Milky Way.
Photo by ESO/Yuri Beletsky under CC Attribution 3.0 Unported license at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Laser_Towards_Milky_Ways_Centre.jpg
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