Napoleon Bonaparte Quotes: "A picture is worth a thousand words.
Napoleon Bonaparte " I must have known that it was he who said this, but I never actually realized it. Truly the Modern Man, eh? Of course he slipped back, but then that's my Gadamer quote...demagoguery being one of those things that remain the same. So Napoleon never slipped anywhere but just continued despite being Beethoven's New Man, at least for a time. (I shall have to search out the Gadamer quote, it's on another hard drive...)
Probably why I never connected is the pictures, of course. Pace Beethoven, what I think of when I think of Napoleon the man is the picture: the coronation, the investiture, even the anecdote about him perferring to crown himself over having the Pope do it. Those are all pictures. And yes, to Napoleon at least,worth 1,000 of even Beethoven's subsequently retracted notes. So, aesthetically, it was Beethoven who was not the Modern in this case. Or at least not PM? Repudiation, retraction, after all, is not Modern; rather its opposite: appropriation, acceleration. Interpolation. It was not Bartleby who was the Modern.
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