I didn't know that one, it's great. Most economists teach a theoretical framework that has been shown to be fundamentally useless. -- James K. Galbraith
"When I was a young student in Latin American schools, we were constantly being asked to define the boundary between the Middle Ages and the Modern Age. I always remembered a grotesquely famous Spanish play in which a knight in armour unsheaths his sword and exclaims to his astonished family: "I'm off to the Thirty Years' War!"
"Did the modern age begin with the fall of Constantinople to the Turks in 1453, the discovery of the New World in 1492, or the publication of Copernicus of his Revolutions of the Spheres in 1543? To give only one answer is akin to exclaiming that we are off to the Thirty Years' War. At least since Vico, we know that the past is present in us because we are the bearers of the culture we ourselves have made.
"Nevertheless, given a choice in the matter, I have always answered that, for me, the modern world begins when Don Quixote de la Mancha, in 1605, leaves his village, goes out into the world, and discovers that the world does not resemble what he has read about it."
It only gets better. The Fuentes book that this and other essays are in is named Myself With Others(1988). Never underestimate their intelligence, always underestimate their knowledge.
Frank Delaney ~ Ireland
"Did the modern age begin with the fall of Constantinople to the Turks in 1453, the discovery of the New World in 1492, or the publication of Copernicus of his Revolutions of the Spheres in 1543? To give only one answer is akin to exclaiming that we are off to the Thirty Years' War.
