The Pavellas Perspective

7,000 Years of Seafaring, Warfaring, Siege, Survival and Cultural Heritage: The Island Nation of The Republic of Malta

Eva and have friends who have moved from Sweden to Malta, and with whom we recently stayed for several days. I was familiar with attributions commonly connected to the name Malta: Maltese Cross, Maltese Falcon, Knights of Malta. But my knowledge before visiting this country of 316 square kilometers was so poor that I imagined it to be just another little place where northern people go to relax and sun themselves. How wrong I was.

From Google Earth

The land that is now Malta, Gozo and Comino emerged from beneath the seas around fifteen million years ago. The land was then a southern extension of the Euro-Asian continental mass, bridging Sicily and Malta to what is now Tunisia. The land bridge subsided some fifteen thousand years ago leaving this three-island archipelago.

It was left uninhabited for thousand of years. The original inhabitants of the Maltese islands probably crossed over by sea from Sicily, which lies 58 miles to the north, sometime before 5000 BC. The temple builders were farmers who grew cereals and raised domestic livestock. They worshipped a Mediterranean mother goddess, uniquely large statues of which are found on Malta.

Phoenicia was an ancient civilization centered along the coast of modern day Lebanon, Syria and Israel. Phoenician civilization was a maritime trading culture that spread across the Mediterranean between the period of 1200 BC to 900 BC, including to the three islands that now comprise The Republic of Malta .

Mosaic of a Phoenician Trading Ship

The timeline of major events in Malta’s history:

The Neolithic Period, 5000–4100 BC
The Temple Period, 4100–2500 BC
The Bronze Age, 2500–700 BC
Phoenicians and Carthaginians, 700–218 BC
Romans, 218 BC–535 AD
Byzantines, 535-870
Arabs, 870–1127
European Domination, 1127-1530
Knights of St. John, 1530–1798
French, 1798-1800
British, 1800-1964
Member of the British Commonwealth, 1964-1974
Independent Republic, 1974
Member, European Union, 2003
Currency changed to the Euro, 2008

The Internet has unlimited information about the nature of the periods outlined above, and anything else you wish to know. I will not repeat too much more of what I have found there and in books available about the country. In going to a favorite reference source, the World Factbook of the CIA, I see that Malta is in the top ten out of 221 countries in having a low infant death rate (0.38%), along with Norway, Finland, France, Iceland, Hong Kong, Japan, Sweden, and the leader, Singapore.

Prehistoric Temple at Mnajdr, Malta, predating the monuments at Stonehenge by many centuries

Malta, even with only slightly more than 400,000 residents, is also in the top ten countries with the highest population density: Macau, Monaco, Hong Kong, Singapore, Gibraltar, Gaza Strip, Holy See, Bermuda, and Malta at 1,192.5 people per square kilometer.

Our friends live a short bus ride from The city’s capital, Valletta, a fortress where the church of St. John resides. The foundation stone of Valletta was laid by the Grandmaster of the Order of Saint John, Jean Parisot de la Valette, on 28 March 1566; The Order (which was the long-time ruler of the city and the island) decided to found a new city just after the end of the Siege of Malta by Ottoman Turks in 1565. Here is a view of the port from The fortress walls:

Again from the CIA’s World Factbook, the major industries of Malta are tourism, electronics, ship building and repair, construction, food and beverages, pharmaceuticals, footwear, clothing, and tobacco.

In that Malta’s great value to the world has been primarily its strategic location, it is not surprising to see that it is a world-class port.

Merchant marine, total: 1,281 ships.
foreign-owned: 1,197 (Austria 1, Azerbaijan 3, Bangladesh 3, Belgium 10, Bulgaria 15, Canada 15, China 13, Croatia 12, Cyprus 15, Denmark 10, Estonia 7, France 4, Germany 67, Greece 448, Hong Kong 1, Iceland 7, India 3, Iran 24, Israel 21, Italy 45, Japan 3, South Korea 3, Latvia 36, Lebanon 12, Libya 3, Monaco 1, Netherlands 3, Norway 71, Pakistan 2, Poland 25, Portugal 3, Romania 10, Russia 66, Slovenia 3, Spain 1, Sweden 1, Switzerland 22, Syria 4, Turkey 143, Ukraine 28, UAE 10, UK 12, US 11)
There is so much more to say about Malta: the influence of Catholicism in its very many churches and chapels; and, the heroism of the Maltese people in the various sieges and invasions over the centuries, including especially their role in World War 2. Please go to the Internet to read about their fabulous history and incredible bravery. Here are some places to begin:
Sacred Destinations
New York Times
Wikipedia

Writing about writing and arguing for God—a very difficult book

ScreenHunter_149 Jul. 03 10.35 The book is The Broken Estate, by James Wood.

I have long wanted to learn more about some of the authors and historical figures (often one and the same) whom this author presents: Sir Thomas More, Jane Austen, Gustave Flaubert, Virginia Woolf and so on. And, I learned about others new to me. I am in debt to the author for educating me.

However, I am also exhausted from the reading of this difficult book. I cannot fully put my finger on the reason or reasons, but the following are thoughts my forebrain reveals.

James Wood is upset by the trivialization of God that most authors offer in their novels. Herman Melville‘s Moby Dick is one of the exceptions. He also likes Jane Austen for introducing the inner dialog of the main character in a new and useful way, but this doesn’t seem to have anything to do about the “God” issue that underlies this collection of essays.

To justify my having said the foregoing, here is an excerpt, regarding the free-will argument, from the final paragraph of the book in the final chapter entitled The Broken Estate: The Legacy of Ernest Renan and Matthew Arnold:

…(A) world of limited freedom and absolute transparency of knowledge, in which not one of us is in any doubt about our creator, would be a limited, useless place. But it would not, presumably, be useless to God. It is what heaven would be like; and why, before heaven, must we live? Why must we move through this unhappy, painful, rehearsal for heaven, this desperate ante-chamber, this foreword written by an anonymous author, this hard prelude in which so few of us can find our way?

The above ends the book.

As an aspiring writer, I am eager to learn from such a master of language and from his criticism of literature. But what is literature as compared with just “writing,” which is what I think I am doing? Answers.com tells us this, in part, about the definition of “literature”:

• Imaginative or creative writing, especially of recognized artistic value: “Literature must be an analysis of experience and a synthesis of the findings into a unity” (Rebecca West).

• The art or occupation of a literary writer.

I take this to mean that writing has artistic value when it is deemed such by those who consider their own writing to have artistic value such as, presumably, Rebecca West.

Rebecca West, 1892 – 1983

As for literary writer, I find no direct definition on the Internet. No doubt it exists somewhere, but I will attempt my own here: a literary writer is one who, in his writing, refers, implicitly or explicitly, to other writers and their work. T.S. Eliot’s poem The Waste Land is a solid example of this, in my view. One cannot understand his poem without first having read and understood a great number of other works of other authors and philosophers, including The Bible.

I have a bias, as may be perceived here, against those who hold themselves out as “experts” in telling us how good or bad, and why, a given piece of writing or art may be.

James Wood doesn’t tell us how we should think; he is telling us what he thinks, and he thinks very deeply. I agree that the notion of God or, more to my taste, the notion of a power beyond us and beyond our understanding, a Life Force (or, as I use in my poetry, The Great Everything), does in fact exist. I believe he is arguing that for the last several hundred years man has undertaken to describe the universe in his own terms through the use of the written word and has reduced God or The Life Force to an abstraction, something less relevant than before.

I will keep this book. This means I will read it again, perhaps ten years from now when I am 81 and will have had more life experience. I may find it less daunting reading then, as I recently found with Plato’s Dialogues, despite their being opaque to me when I was 25.

May the Force be with you.

[response] And also with you

END

The Pavellas Perspective

7,000 Years of Seafaring, Warfaring, Siege, Survival and Cultural Heritage: The Island Nation of The Republic of Malta

Writing about writing and arguing for God—a very difficult book

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