Material World - v. Ideal World - in Gargantua & Pantagruel

After all the violence and tumult, the end of Book 1 of Francois Rabelais's Gargantua & Pantagruel is very sweet and thoughtful and in fact would make good required reading for many political hawks and myopic military leaders - as Gargantua's father and Gargantua both discuss and reflect on why it's better to sue for peace, even if you're the more powerful nation or army, why the world is most prosperous and healthy if nation's live within their borders and maintain friendly relations with their neighboring states - excellent, humane advice much needed today, maybe more so than back in teh 16th century. At the end of the book we do see clearly the conflict of world views that I've referenced in a few other posts: after many scenes of carnage and bestiality, horribly gruesome battle scenes, perhaps meant to be comic and certainly meant to be over the top (as are other scenes of ingestion and defecation), we get this philosophizing about international relationships and peace among nations: in a way, that's the medieval view v. the modern world view, but it's also the body v the mind, person as animal v person as reasoning being, the physical v the ideal, and a world in which relations are built on strength, power, and authority v a world in which relations are built on assessment of mutual interest. Yes, there's a lot in this book, and at times it's very entertaining as well, but to our modern tastes - or mine - in which we expect character and plot in a work of this length (700 pp. or so), G&P is more of an artifact of its era: invaluable for understanding its time and place, a forebear of other great European novels (DQ, Tristram Shandy, Tom Jones) about the birth and life of out-sized characters (also Gulliver's Travels, about proportion and perspective as fictive device) - but it also shows its age - so I won't be going farther than Book 1 at this point, anyway - and I realize I'm quitting before Pantagruel even enters the scene. Few will finish reading this novel today, I think, but it's worth dipping into even randomly to find a few hilarious passages.