“Dancing with the wind: the fire burns, the water drowns.”
Dancing with the wind (Red - 2003).
Lyrics
Né spegner può, per starne l'acqua, il fuoco,
Né può stato mutar, per mutar loco.
Canto XXVIII, stanza 89 (tr. W. S. Rose)
Orlando Furioso (1532)
Né spegner può, per starne l'acqua, il fuoco, Né può stato mutar, per mutar loco.
Orlando Furioso (1532)
“Dancing with the wind: the fire burns, the water drowns.”
Dancing with the wind (Red - 2003).
Lyrics
“Rich Cloaths, nor Cost, nor Education can
Change Nature, nor transform and Ape into a Man.”
Fab. LV: Of an Ægyptian King and his Apes
The Fables of Aesop (2nd ed. 1668)
Source: Before Galileo, The Birth of Modern Science in Medieval Europe (2012), p. 287
“Man’s ideas change, but not his inherent nature.”
On Growing Up Tough (1970), "The Purple Lodge & The Hippies"
1970s-
Context: We, perhaps, have corrupted our children and our grandchildren by heedless affluence, by a lack of manliness, by giving the younger generation more money and liberty than their youth can handle, by indoctrinating them with sinister ideologies and false values, by permitting them, as young children, to indulge themselves in imprudence to superiors and defiance of duly constituted authority, by lack of prudent, swift punishment when the transgressed, by coddling and pampering them when they were children and protecting them from a very dangerous world — which always was and always will be. We gave them no moral arms, no spiritual armor.
In reality.... the nature of human beings never changes; it is immutable. The present generation of children and the present generation of young adults from the age of thirteen to eighteen is, therefore, no different from that of their great-great-grandparents.
Political fads come and go; theories rise and fall; the scientific ‘truth’ of today becomes the discarded error of tomorrow.
Man’s ideas change, but not his inherent nature. That remains. So, if the children are monstrous today – even criminal – it is not because their natures have become polluted, but because they have not been taught better, nor disciplined.
“Life could not change the sun or water the desert, so it changed itself.”
Pt. 3
Travels With Charley: In Search of America (1962)