A member of the northeastern seaboard intellectual elite pays a magnanimous visit to the southern colonies:
At one point (Paul Theroux) is talking to a black clergyman who introduces himself as Bishop Palmer. Theroux says: “I think of a palmer as a pilgrim, bringing a palm from the Holy Land. Like the line in Chaucer.” Bishop Palmer seems confused, so Theroux says: “Canterbury Tales. ‘Palmers for to seken straunge strondes.’ ” Theroux whispers to the reader, “He smiled as people sometimes do when hearing an unintelligible language brazenly spoken, or a dog with an odd bark.”
Or a ponce riding in the fold-and-smooch position on his great charger.
First link h/t
Paul Theroux seems like kind of a d*uchebag.
Theroux is not a bad guy. He has written extensively about the failure of foreign aid and philanthropy in third-world countries. He says it’s done more harm than good. In your quote, I don’t think he’s mocking the black clergyman from the rural Deep South. I doubt most of the readers of this blog would get that obscure reference to Canterbury Tales.
Let me amend that to “some readers of this blog.” Do they still teach Chaucer in school?
In my freshman year of high school – 1997 – we read the Canterbury Tales. We mostly focused on the modernized version, but our textbook had the Middle English version side by side with the modern.
We had to memorize and recite part of it as well. Whether they still teach it or not, I have no idea.
I wonder if Theroux got the biblical references the bishop undoubtedly used.
I’m old enough to remember that globalization and offshoring jobs started out as an aggressive far-left initiative. Pierre Trudeau piped in with something along the lines of “third world living standards have to come up and ours has to go down”. If, under pressure, the real world took it and ran with it, with unintended consequences, it’s still the fault of the political camp who forced it on us. Now they’re on a huge global government push…
“He smiled as people sometimes do when hearing an unintelligible language brazenly spoken, or a dog with an odd bark.”
Or perhaps we has silently amused at the stark irrelevance of the detached romantic idealism of the detached academic class – as we all are – and he was left in befuddlement as to how something so stupid and immaterial could come from someone claiming a monopoly on wisdom.
Once again proving to “the folks” – that knowledge is not necessarily wisdom, and wisdom does not always reflect truth or reality.
Theroux never even left his room I’ll bet.
Sorry Kate, I appologize.
I was doing well for a while there.
That was a very interesting article. Don’t miss it. Exposes the elites for the hypocrites they are.