Character Sketch of Napoleon...

A character who mocks his own mocking. Napoleon inhabits a world tracing his own private mythology, overcoming his diminutive stature, becoming a play-actor of his own ideals. As Spengler asserts, Napoleon is a Romantic as his idol Alexander The Great. Both characters are eschatalogical in temperament and with proleptic imaginations - They see their own fates synonymous with destiny and relate their own idiosyncratic problems as problems and flaws within the universe itself. Before they have reached maturity they see themselves devouring the world as time and space receedes before them. Their personalities come as comets from afar which leave a burning tail before them and wherever the eye peers. The comet coalesces and cools forming a rigid character structure forever seeking its own dissolution in apprehension, and seeking merit in action.

One wonders if these 'comets' see with eyes of impunity (As some shakespearean characters believe in their suffering more than others.) or with eyes that seek cures to their own sufferings? (As one devises cures to injuries.) - Such a height of consciousness must rebel and disdain the subservience of itself to mortality - This tragic fact gives rise to the annihilation instinct, or the capacity for self destructive, non rational behaviour (as opposed to the biology or self presevation.) One can merely speculate on what desires and motivations consume such men, but it is erroneous to subtract and reformulate paragons of genius and will by reductive factors. Within such men lie ironical standpoints, a disconcerting fact which aligns such men to poets, such is the human stain. (as opposed to modern bureacrats and mandarins in life and goverment.) It is no wonder that Hamlet identified the solution to his own problems as an identification with Fortinbras.

Led by a delicate and tender prince,
Whose spirit with divine ambition puff'd
Makes mouths at the invisible event,
Exposing what is mortal and unsure
To all that fortune, death and danger dare,

I would suggest that such men in action or in brooding petrification, are seeking in thought or in action the solution to the psyches tension which must lie in the cessation of the tension and motivates the discharge of the personality as a biological necessity.

When I reflect on such personalities, I tend to think this presupposes that 'peace is not an absolute good.' and is merely an abstract moralism which has no grounding in the historical record nor in human desire itself. An inescapable fact which mocks logic, ethics and conscious desires - namely, maximum pleasure, minimise pain, because if humans did desire such axioms, then human nature itself would fit into a socialist system, a phalanstery and economic determinism. This itself is refuted by history and the living processes. A thymos, or a meglothymos. The earth is a sepulcher to great men. This is the pathos and irony underlining Hamlet's graveyard scene.

Alexander died, Alexander was buried,
Alexander returneth into dust; the dust is earth; of
earth we make loam; and why of that loam, whereto he
was converted, might they not stop a beer-barrel?
Imperious Caesar, dead and turn'd to clay,
Might stop a hole to keep the wind away:
O, that that earth, which kept the world in awe,
Should patch a wall to expel the winter flaw!

One can see this as Hamlet's answer to 'What is this quintessence of Dust?' - And reflects Hamlets own anger and ambivalence to his own personality as subservient to the dictates of mortality - ending in a meaningless, that this personality becomes a corpse and wittily associates Caesars and Alexanders own 'corpse - making' as an auxiallary to their own corpses as the earth and wind are a staging and burial ground to men.