Slow Havamal: 2

In the second verse, the host hears a man greet him from the threshold, and sees him waiting impatiently to come in. He wonders where to seat him.

We start with an interesting shift of perspective. In the first verse, it’s the guest outside who is addressed. Now, we see the same guest from the host’s point of view as he is hailed, and wonders what to do with the man who waits at the threshold—possibly, “on the firewood,” according to a difficult translation of the word “brondum,” which Crawford notes probably refers to someone sitting outside on the woodpile waiting to be noticed. I’m not sure if this shift is an artifact of the original Norse, or the translation. The first verse could be seen as the host mulling over advice to a real or imagined second person, then speaking of a specific man in the third. But Crawford’s translation reminds me to see things from both perspectives: the seeker and the receiver.

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005: The Wheaton Scale

The theory of logical types I summarized in this post opens up a lot of useful doors once you understand that it’s an error to try to compare a member of a class with its class—for example, an individual’s behavior with his family’s behavior, or the family’s with the community’s. It’s not that they’re different, it’s that they exist on an entirely different order of magnitude. The system “Paul” is not composed on the same components nor subject to the same feedbacks as the system “Paul’s family including Paul.” They are playing on very different fields, and by very different rules.
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