[Beauty] Dan Muroshi / Wen Xiao Yizhi / Translation
Professor Dan Muroshi's "Eighty Books Around the World" is both a reconstruction of the territory of world literature and the establishment of a palace of memory on paper for human culture. When the virus was circulating, some people read and wrote at their desks, lit lamps for heaven and earth, and gave the world a hope.
Week 12 Day 1
Brazil Thomas Mohr Utopia
This week we crossed the Pacific Ocean to what Europeans call the "New World." Felia Falk boarded a ship from Japan and sailed to San Francisco, but our trip would continue to where he had not set foot. We will travel to South America and follow the route that one of the first European explorers, Amerigo Vespucci, is now legendary.
After exploring the coastal areas of Brazil between 1499 and 1502, Vespucci (or someone else in his name) published his own account of his expeditions, boldly titled Mundus Novus. The title announces to the world that what Columbus accidentally discovered a decade ago was not Asia, but a "new world" through and through. In 1507, the cartographer Martin Waldseemüller named the entire continent "America" in honor of Vespucci. European custom is to treat the state as female, hence the use of the feminine form here).
According to Thomas More, a young British lawyer, One of The Vespucci crew members, Raphael Hythlodaeus, disembarked in Brazil and headed inland. Eventually he crossed Brazil to the coast on the Pacific side, where he found a unique society on an island called Utopia. In 1515, Heislad returned to Antwerp and told a group of friends about his discoveries, including the English guest Thomas Mohr. More's Utopia (1516) represents a new kind of world literature, as it was the first major literary work to reflect the dizzying expansion of the world at the time. At that time, people all over the world were going to find their place in a new world that their parents' generation could not have imagined. In the popular imagination, Weispucci and explorers like him were pioneering a virgin land where the aging European "Old World" could be revived by encounters with the New World. As we can see in Jan van der Straet's Vespucci Awakening America (1589). In the painting, Wespucci, armed with religion and science (with a cross in one hand and a sextant in the other), is talking to a submissive Brazilian virgin who is about to rescue her from a group of cannibals who are barcuing the thighs of their enemies in the background.
Based on early fantasies about the New World, More's Utopia brought the adjective "utopian" to the world, and gave birth to the entire category of utopian fiction. The erotic paradise of Charles Fourier's Le nouveau monde amoureux (1816), where gender equality allows people to polygamy and even "group marriages," the socialist William Morris's News from Nowhere (1890), and Margaret's Margaret Atwood's dark dystopian novels The Handmaid's Tale and The Testaments fall into this genre. Whether More was serious when he conceived of an ideal society of social equality, communal property, and religious freedom is an inconclusive question. Utopia means "land of non-existence" in Greek, and Hythlodaeus, who is said to be the source of Mohr's news, has his name in Greek as "the man who speaks nonsense.". Even the famous critic C.S. Lewis suggested that we should think of Utopia as a fantasy game.
However, the utopia conceived by Mohr is a powerful medicine to cure social ills. Communitarianism on the island of Utopia offers a way out of the growing inequality in British society. Much of Utopia is about imagining solutions to two problems that come with: the conspicuous consumption of the aristocratic—one percent of the top percent of society in The More's time—and the miserable poverty of the peasants who support the nobility. That's why in utopia everyone has to work, but only six hours a day, and everyone has to take turns working. Liberated from poverty and toil, utopians live for pleasure—the pleasure of reason, but still undoubtedly pleasure. People from all over the community gather in the sprawling ballroom for sumptuous banquets and fun conversations. Utopians love knowledge, and they are naturally good at learning Greek, and their own alphabet is very much like Greek, as we can see in the alphabet conceived by Mohr:
Music was also popular in utopia, as was the case in Mohr's house. More was married twice and taught his two wives to play the instrument. Utopian marriage is not just a pragmatic economic decision. Unmarried men and women are allowed to meet naked, thus ensuring that marriage has a basis for physical attraction.
Both a "non-existent place" and a wonderful place (utopia can also be interpreted in Greek as eu-topos, a beautiful place), utopia is an earthly paradise, governed by elected officials called syphogrants, who are democratized versions of Plato's philosopher-kings. However, this New World Society is not a New Era commune. The New Age movement began in the 1970s with a mixed content involving various religious elements and environmentalism, weakening organizational order, and emphasizing individualized spirituality.) Fixed classes bring order, so that everyone is clear about their place and purpose in life. Children obey their parents, wives obey their husbands, and sons inherit their father's profession, just like More himself. The most neglected work was done by slaves. Some of the slaves were convicted criminals, while others— an astonishing imperialist fantasy — were volunteers who volunteered to come to the island in pursuit of a better life on the mainland than they had in the past.
Yet the serpent seems to have entered heaven. What were these criminals going to do before they were taken prisoner and turned into slaves? Some criminals are undoubtedly driven by ordinary greed, but there is an undercurrent in More's entire narrative that has been worried about another problem: the possibility of separatist forces tearing apart the island nation. It was not long before England emerged from the Long War of the Roses, which resulted in henry VII establishing the Tudor dynasty, a greedy and hated king. But his son, Henry VIII, who reigned seventeen in 1509, was a more promising monarch—fluent in four languages, good at playing instruments, and a lover of books and ideas—but it was too early to say whether the young king could unite the kingdom. Against the backdrop of growing religious divisions on the continent, this task will become more difficult. Protestantism was a natural consequence of Renaissance humanism's emphasis on free exploration and individual morality, but for loyal Catholics like Mohr, a growing number of Protestant denominations would only be a source of heresy rhetoric and civil war.
And when they give orders in the utopian ballroom, the regents make sure that everyone is always in their field of vision. This unexpectedly predicted Orwell's dystopian novel 1984, in which Big Brother would keep an eye on you. Throughout Utopia, the regents eliminated any opportunity to meet privately, plot and plot misdemeanors: it was difficult for people to move from city to city, taverns were forbidden, and there was no real private time or space anywhere on the island. Even when More declared that utopians were happy to live in the best polity, he expelled atheists, or anyone (most likely a Jew), who did not want to believe in eternal life after death, for a chilling reason. Utopians claim that only those who fear punishment after death can control their desires and live a moral life. It is fear that ultimately dominates the utopian rational, cheerful community society.
In the years after the publication of Utopia, when his friend and benefactor Henry VIII severed ties with Rome and established the Church of England, More's own fears became a reality. Henry VIII's purpose was partly to divorce Catherine of Aragon and marry his lover, Anne Boleyn, and partly to gain better control of power by allocating the church's estates to his favorite nobles. Shocked, More resigned his position as chancellor and tried to stay away from the court. He even booked himself a tombstone in his parish church with a long inscription declaring that he wanted to retire and devote his remnants to research and prayer after years of faithful service to his beloved king. No one could be deceived by this futuristic tombstone: Mohr refused to attend the coronation of Anne Boleyn and to recognize Henry VIII's status as head of the Church of England. His reputation is too prominent to be avoided even in silence. Mohr was arrested and then interrogated several times. When his interrogators were unable to deceive him into speaking out of treason, he was convicted of perjury.
Utopia could not be farther away from Britain. Despite serving the king for twenty years, Mohr was beheaded in July 1535. Unlike the Utopians, More was not afraid of what awaited him after death, and he even joked with the executioner as he boarded the execution table ("I beg you, Mr. Officer, to send me up safely.") As for how I'm going to get down, I'll let myself figure it out when the time comes.").
More's tombstone contains political hints for the king's spies, but the inscription ends on a more personal subject, mentioning the women who were to be buried around him: his wife Joanna, who died at the age of 23 after giving mole four children, and his second wife, Annne, whom Mohr married less than a month after joanne's death. Although Jesus declared that there would be no marriage in heaven, More hoped that this would not be the case, and as he revealed in the last paragraph of the inscription, even a utopian libertarian like Fourier might agree with This passage from More:
Buried here is my beloved wife Joanna Thomas Mohr, and I and my wife Anlith are scheduled to be buried in this tomb; Joann married me and gave birth to three daughters and a man for me when I was young, and Ann lily treated the children of my first wife (a rare virtue among stepmothers), and no one can do anything to her own children. Joanna had lived happily with me, and Alice was now living happily with me, and it was difficult to decide whether her deceased wife or her current wife was closer to me. If fate and religion had allowed it, the three of us could have comfortably entered into marriage and lived together. But I plead with God that this tomb and heaven can keep us together forever. Death can give us what we cannot get when we are alive.
Along with Alice and Joanna, More was finally able to set foot on the shores of Utopia after his death.
Editor-in-Charge: Zheng Shiliang
Proofreader: Zhang Liangliang