In the music of Shostakovich, the two sides of the twentieth century are revealed—the absurd and the tragic. It is impossible to tell in his works whether the absurd is the tragic or the tragic is the absurd, just as the events of The Century made it impossible to distinguish between the two. Whatever hope [...]
—Yet when we came back, late, from the Hyacinth garden, Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither Living nor dead, and I knew nothing, Looking into the heart of light, the silence. —T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land When you were [...]
Lorenzo ‘Il Magnifico‘, on his death bed, turned his face away from Savonarola to look outside at his City as the priest exhorted him to repent of Florence. The prince refused to answer, gazed at the Duomo, sighed and died. —Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, 1860 It was an excellent friendship [...]
“Listen to me, Mr. Ambassador, F— your parliament and your constitution…. If your prime minister gives me talk about Democracy, Parliament and Constitution, he, his Parliament and his Constitution may not last very long” —President Lyndon Johnson to the Greek Ambassador, circa [...]
If, on your next trip to Vienna, you set out to understand the personality of this lovely world-capital-that-is-not-a-city, there are three must-sees during your time here that will give you the proper sense of a Durrellian spirit of place. First, go and pay respects to the circumcised foreskin of Jesus von Nazareth at St. Stephen’s [...]
Oh! What a Revolution! And what a heart I must have to contemplate without emotion that elevation and that fall! —Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France On the 20th of July in the year 20– of our Lord, Savior and shadow Secretary of War, the city of Detroit officially wrested itself free from [...]
Sir John Carew Eccles “The Nature of Man is the ultimate quest of Science.” —Sir John Carew Eccles “Let us kill Mind!” Otto Neurath declared in 1921. Such was the mental death warrant the West went and issued against itself four centuries after the first modern philosopher declared the triumph of Mind as the [...]
“Abbey in an Oak Forest,” by Caspar David Friedrich (1809-1810) Deep roots are untouched by frost. —J.R.R Tolkien It has been said that the Germanic soul and the forest are one and the same thing: the mythological Forest that contrasts the splendid isolation of man in his solitude against the infinity of nature. [...]
Everywhere Western man longs for Constantinople and nowhere has he any idea how to find her. To unearth this Byzantium, this “heaven of the human mind,” as Yeats dreamed her, is not to go searching through histories and legends, glorious ruins or immortal poems. “Le grand absent—c’est l’Empire” C. Dufour, Constantinople Imaginaire Everywhere Western man [...]