![]() ![]() ![]() Many died, their bodies dumped into that vast gray-green graveyard called the Atlantic Ocean. Sailors fell from the rigging, suffered hernias while lifting heavy cargo, caught malaria and other debilitating diseases, and lost fingers to rolling casks. Naval warfare of the era featured cannonballs blowing up wooden ships, sending an explosion of splinters and chunks of wood that blinded and severed the arms and legs of mariners. Pirates of the “Golden Age,” who marauded on the high seas from 1660 to 1730, were almost all common working sailors, poor men from the lowest social class, who crossed the line into illegal activity, most of them bearing the scars of a dangerous line of work. Like all myths, it contains a small but essential element of truth. ![]() The image is a myth, but it is no less powerful for that. From Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island to Hollywood films, such as Pirates of the Caribbean, this image of the pirate has for centuries now suffused an American, and increasingly global, popular culture. He is rough, coarse, sometimes humorous, sometimes terrifying. The image that comes immediately to mind is a man, disabled in various ways, with a peg leg, a hook for a hand, a patch over one eye, and a parrot on his shoulder. ![]()
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![]() ![]() ![]() Then there are the gods, who depend on believers for their power and reality. Then there are the divine underlings that actually did create the world(s), but they don’t get involved after that. His views appear to be, there’s a supreme being, but he didn’t create the universe because if he had, he wouldn’t have done such a lousy job, and you wouldn’t want to address him in prayer lest you draw his attention to the sad state of things down here. ![]() The thirteenth Discworld adventure appears to be Pratchett’s agnostic jab at organized religion. ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Gabriel preaches about Irish hospitality in his after-dinner speech but does not realize that he will grapple with a stranger of sorts later that night. It takes place chiefly at a party in the home of the elderly Morkan Sisters on the Feast of the Epiphany, and fittingly its central character, the Morkans’ nephew, Gabriel Conroy, will have his own epiphanic experience by the story’s end. His efforts to rectify this omission resulted in “The Dead,” the book’s final story. In 1906, presumably finished with his short story collection Dubliners, James Joyce wrote to his brother with dissatisfaction that, though he set about to create a comprehensive portrait of Ireland’s capital city, he had not managed to render its famous, unrivaled hospitality. ![]() |