Clotho Forbids

Day 215 of A Year of War and Peace

Napoleon is of two minds about bodies today. On the one hand he’s rather humble about the treatment of his own body. Conversely, he seems to believe he can influence, with the utmost precision, the hundreds of thousands of bodies of his army.

Concerning his own body he takes a rather stoic and, perhaps, Tolstoyan view of things. He’s got a little cold and the medicine he’s been prescribed, lozenges, don’t seem to be working. He raps to one of his generals that the body will do what it will do and no medicine is necessary. The body is a machine for living, he says. It will take care of itself.

He cannot apply this humble wisdom to the larger body of his military. He spends a sleepless night before battle making sure everything has been attended to. He ensures the troops have been fed the proper amount of rice, as if rice consumption, will be the deciding factor in a complex battle. This is a woefully prideful conceit on his part. I think Tolstoy would agree that it would probably be more realistic for Napoleon to reverse his treatment of bodies. It’s probably more likely that the individual exercises more power over his own body than over those hundreds of thousands of bodies on the battlefield.

DAILY MEDITATION