The world has long sought to explain the mysteries of madness and genius and has largely failed to do so. Perhaps the better idea would be simply to allow madness and genius to go on explaining the world’s own mysteries to itself… Today’s offering in our Timeless Essay series affords our readers the opportunity [...]
The “beautiful violence” of Old Masters painting, a magnificence rooted in the study of Light and Dark as technique, as style, but most of all as a symbolic representation of the very essence of life on earth, remains timeless for its sublime understanding of that which for each human soul cannot be explained… “To [...]
More than just the ultimate inflation hedge, the wealth of Nature—gold, forests, land, agriculture—and the cautious stewardship of these tangible assets over easily-inflated government “IOU’s” is what distinguishes wealth from riches… When King Louis XII, in the year 1499, formed the project of taking the Dukedom of Milan, to which he thought he had a [...]
Only where Democracy and Aristocracy are harmonized and unified culturally can a nation really be healthy and advanced; its history becomes the awe of the world… “Be it known to you that a son is born to me; but I thank the gods not much that they have given me him as that they [...]
To understand the journey of the human imagination across civilizations and centuries, one must grasp how the utterly fascinating Hellenic invention of the “democratized” concept of moral judgment in the afterlife came into its beautiful philosophical maturity... And so they came to Rome —Acts IV. “I was not, I was, I am not, I do [...]
Sphinx-like Lebanon—best known for its businessmen, bankers, and civil wars—is the ultimate example in explaining the inexplicable in the Mideast… If the dog now wants something, he wags his tail; impatient of Master’s stupidity in not understanding the perfectly distinct and expressive speech, he adds vocal expression—he barks—and finally an expression of attitude—he mimes [...]
Is Time itself best understood by those things in life which are Time-less? Such is the main question posed in The Habsburg Manifesto. Habsburg is not a political play but a philosophical one, whose main theme is the inner nobility of the individual as that which withstands and transcends all politics, all ideology, all [...]
There is that special category of exquisite, practical gift that, by the very nature of its fussy simplicity, imparts an unusual kind of sensuousness to the beholder, who thus becomes the proud owner of a refined bit of utility not otherwise considered over the course of one’s quotidian self-care. By this we mean those [...]
The narrative quality of yacht-building—the poetry, the lore—does not exist today. Lost is the craft of designers like William Fife III, who bestowed the ever-changing, fickle waters of the sea with modern meaning and contemporary epic… “Moonbeam III” To face the elements is, to be sure, no light matter when the sea [...]
"The East is another name for the West"—Sufi proverb In Memory of Stephen J. Masty When, in happier days, she was inscrutable "Arabia," and felix the plucky cognomen-ex-virtute honoring a mythological lineage of Sheban queens, Roman misadventure, and flourishing trade routes scented in cinnamon and frankincense, the greatest of English explorers submitted to her virgin [...]
It has been said that the Germanic soul and the forest are one and the same thing. A sense of “Being” is what the Forest is all about to the Faustian: the Mystery that inspires imagination—the most intense Reality that there is. “Deep roots are untouched by frost.” —J.R.R Tolkien It has been said [...]
“A post-mortem examination of the brain of Nietzsche might conceivably show us the particular atypical form of paralysis from which he died. But what would this have to do with Zarathustra?” — Carl Gustav Jung Ezra Pound The City of Washington DC is Philosophy itself, spiritually and physically a child of the Enlightenment, [...]
For my brother Rather, I would have liked that we had been golden siblings, arm-in-arm along the lakeshore, or hair flying on white bicycles, past the haunted mansions, past the boat clubs and peaks of clean sail fluttering on blue sheets of broken diamonds. No words are needed when there is much to say, [...]
“… then Perceval was told that because he did not ask why the Lance bled or whom the Grail served, his land would become even more waste and desolate…” —Arthur C. L. Brown, The Bleeding Lance (1910) Once upon a time the luminous oracle of Virgil’s Fourth Eclogue consecrated the birth of a lonely and [...]