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The David Copperfield Community * Writing Community * Translated Greek Poems Illicit love What marks Tristan as a work of its time is the crime
that the lovers commit; the intensity of illicit love is intense because
illicit - it is not "normal" to feel so much. Hans Sachs - perhaps
Wagner's only truly sympathetic character, and just a man - will mock boundless
love in Die Meistersinger. But in Tristan, Wagner sought to
express Eros without restraint in an era when people believed in moral
discipline. No transforming love without transgression, then: this was the
conundrum written out in the pages of Anna Karenina, sounded out in this
amazing opera. Jazz Gallery John Coltrane tried to apply Einstein's theory of relativity to
his music. Both men were searching for the same thing, what Coltrane called the
"essence", the ultimate vibration. I hope you feel that energy, that
vision when you gaze at my drawing of him. A WIRELESS, SOULLESS FUTURE? Mobile communications technology was supposed to be
the great liberator. Freed from the artificial boundaries of the office, workers
could do their job anytime, anywhere without having to suffer the tyranny of
nosy supervisors or the limitations of the structured corporate workday. The
reality, however, could not be further from the truth. A new study finds that
"untethered" workers tend to labor longer hours and under more intense
pressure than their traditional office-bound counterparts. For many, mobile
communications technology has done nothing more than extend the rat race to new
and more stressful levels. (...) there isn't much uniquely human genetic
material to build the prefrontal brain structures underlying human mental life.
Instead, I think that an important clue to the human mystery lies in the fact
that virtually all prefrontal capacities -- working memory, theorizing about
other people's minds, our sense of self -- unfold gradually over the first two
decades of life. So too, the human prefrontal cortex is distinctive in how long
it takes to develop, continuing well into adolescence. I suspect that the key to
building a human lies in letting the world help build the prefrontal cortex as
it experiences the world. If this is so, then the interaction between brain
and world is a far richer one than ever imagined, and crucial to understanding
who we are. For I am nothing if not critical Even the best-intentioned academics are strained
and hampered in the relations with Shakespeare. Certain issues, especially
political issues, and certain plays, especially the history plays, remain
radioactive; Shakespeare's challenges to contemporary ideas of liberalism,
democracy, and equality are more profound than these critics are willing to
acknowledge. Past critics, less anxiously involved with their political
principles, were more supple in their approach to these problems; and perhaps
only an unsponsored imaginative writer, like Keats or Hazlitt, can truly do
justice to Shakespeare, or understand him on his own terms. When the student is first acquainted with the myriad ideas of medieval thought, they may appear to him widely elusive, hopelessly incoherent, and even self-contradictory. It is the taunting, tantalizing challenge of the history of philosophy to discover the overall pattern of interrelated meaning. With this insight one can savor the distinctive contribution of each man or movement. In understanding the meaning of philosophical ideas, one has not only factual information but an appreciation of what philosophizing meant for Augustine, Thomas Aquinas and William of Ockham. What better way is there to learn to philosophize than to observe the great philosophers of the past? This history of philosophy is intended as an introduction to the process of philosophizing itself. With adequate knowledge of the history of philosophy, one can share in the collective enterprise of philosophizing which has occupied the mind of Western man for twenty-five centuries. To disclose effectively the pattern of meaning in the history of medieval philosophy, the historian of philosophy must keep in mind two aims. First, he must discover the spirit of an age by fathoming the full depth of its men and movements. To do so within a reasonable compass, he must be highly selective, concentrating on the preeminent philosophers and chief tendencies of the medieval Western period. With this purpose in mind, near Eastern Islamic and Jewish thought will be introduced to the extent that it influenced Christian thinkers in the West. This, in turn, contributes to the accomplishment of
the second purpose; to identify as clearly as possible the main currents in
the continuing flow of philosophic thought. The author has written this
history particularly for students "who are looking for the main thrust of
the development of thought among philosophers in the Middle Ages. Strictly speaking, then, the history of haiku
begins only in the last years of the 19th century. The famous verses of such
Edo-period (1600-1868) masters as Basho, Yosa Buson, and Kobayashi
Issa are properly referred to as hokku and must be placed in the
perspective of the history of haikai even though they are now generally
read as independent haiku. The difficulty with Hegel Kierkegaard saw something essential about Hegel
when he noted that he and his philosophy “constitute an essay in the comical.”
Hegel, Kierkegaard said, was like a man who had built a palace but lived in the
guard house. His elaborate “System” of philosophy promised to chart the
necessary development not only of consciousness but also of world history and
even of nature— indeed, for Hegel, there were no hard and fast distinctions to
be drawn among these realms. Art Form for the Digital Age Games do matter, because they spark the
imaginations of our children, taking them on epic quests to strange new worlds.
Games matter because our children no longer have access to real-world play
spaces at a time when we’ve paved over the vacant lots to make room for more
condos and the streets make parents nervous. If children are going to have
opportunities for exploratory play, play that encourages cognitive development
and fosters problem-solving skills, they will do so in the virtual environments
of games. Multi-player games create opportunities for leadership, competition,
teamwork and collaboration—for nerdy kids, not just for high-school football
players. Games matter because they form the digital equivalent of the Head Start
program, getting kids excited about what computers can do. The encounter of a typically German idea such as
that of Bildung, with the rebirth of the Ciceronian idea of cultura
animi and of the Greek Paideia gives us the possibility of explaining
the richness and novelty of German culture at the end of 18th century. Not facing facts "God Almighty, Franny," he said. "If
you're going to say the Jesus Prayer, at least say it to Jesus, and not to St.
Francis and Seymour and Heidi's grandfather all wrapped up in one. Keep him in
mind if you say it, and him only, and him as he was and not as you'd like him to
have been. You don't face any facts. This same damned attitude of not facing
facts is what got you into this messy state of mind in the first place, and it
can't possibly get you out of it." ... The Sound of Philosophy Philosophy is not science, and we do not evaluate
philosophers simply in terms of the truth of their views. (Doing so would reduce
the philosophical canon by a worrying degree.) Instead, we value philosophers
because they are interesting thinkers: because they develop compelling visions
of the world, or of humanity’s place in it, and because their arguments,
though sometimes wrong, are tempting, or instructive, or otherwise rewarding to
think about. (Occasionally, of course, we like them because they are right.
But even here they tend to be more right about why their predecessors were wrong
than about how things actually are.) Babbitt and Cage fit neatly into this
tradition of compelling speculations: each propounded radical, extreme theories
about the world and music’s place within it, and each managed to live those
ideas, changing the musical world in the process. Furthermore, Babbitt’s and
Cage’s views push us to think very deeply about music (or more generally, art)
and its place in our society. Indeed, I would venture to guess that most
contemporary composers have thought seriously about Babbitt or Cage, and that
many of these have had their views about music changed in the process. The Environment: A Global Challenge The web's most comprehensive site on the
environment. With 400 articles and 811 pages, the site covers every aspect
of the environment and provides many interactive features.
Letter from Yale In a class on The Canterbury Tales, the
secondary literature dwarfs the Tales. We are asked to review books on
Chaucer, and even review reviews of books on Chaucer. I see an infinite sequence
of mirrors into which Chaucer has disappeared. The Archaic Torso of Apollo Unlighted, only stunted marble stands- The unreliable guru Russell’s ethical writings are best understood as
representing an attempt to adapt 19th-century radical liberalism to the modern
world. He held a rather pessimistic view of human nature and so never subscribed
to utopian socialism. The challenge before modern society, he believed, was
finding ways of deflecting innately aggressive and competitive instincts. Turmoil in Palestine: The Basic Context What will come of this latest violence is unclear. Certainly the
dire poverty in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, the repression by Arafat's police,
and the hopelessness of the Oslo process are factors which make another intifada
possible. And Barak has made clear how he would answer any such uprising: the
Israeli military would use "all means at their disposal" and they
would do so "[e]ven if it is against the whole world." (Karin Laub,
Laura King, both AP, 7 Oct. 2000) And indeed Israel is unlikely to concern
itself with international pressure as long as the United States continues to
flak for Israeli barbarism. U.S. officials may work to quiet outbursts of
violence, but they still fail to insist that Israel offer justice to the
Palestinians. Peace and justice in the Middle East will never occur until
Washington stops giving Israel a blank check. And that will require decisive
action by the American people. Common sense There are certain things you can get out of a device by having
speech recognition and all that. But, if somebody is saying, okay, now it's time
we can just skip this whole literacy thing, I really disagree with that. The
fundamental benefits of having a tool like this, 99 percent of the benefits come
when you've provided reasonable health and literacy to the person who is going
to sit down and use it. (...) These 'get it' things are really quite faddish,
I've never been a 'get it' kind of guy. I apologize, if that's the political
test, then what I get is that there are things those people need at that level
other than technology. Look Homeward, Angel was rejected by three publishers and finally turned
up at Scribner's where it aroused interest and dismay over length and
"other problems." The dismay, already mentioned, the editing,
extensive, took on a life of its own, and the book brought Maxwell Perkins into
the light with the result that more has been written about his struggle and
friendship with Wolfe than about his professional work with Fitzgerald and
Hemingway. The reviews of the book were favorable, but they do not bring to
memory the affection remembered by those who first came upon it in their youth. See also: Dixieland, Thomas Wolfe's Old Kentucky Home The Coming Revolution The World Wide Web will destroy the filters that
have traditionally separated publishable work from the surrounding chaos. But
the profound human instinct by which people have always created order,
distinguished value, and sustained markets amid multitudinous babble will create
new filters. Distinguished and useful websites will prevail over inferior
competitors and readers will find their way to desirable goods as they have
always done. New technologies alter the forms of production but they do not
annihilate human nature. In a meander from Athens to Delphi, visiting temples, tombs and tumbled forts, it's easy to believe legend is history Tiryns, the "birthplace" of Hercules, was a few miles
up the road, and just beyond that, "Golden Mycenae," home to
Agamemnon, who survived the siege of Troy only to be murdered by his wife,
Clytemnestra. Immersed in a world 3,500 years old, we arrived at Tiryns in the
gray morning light; we were the only ones there. It was easy to believe that the
Cyclops built this citadel; only giants could move those stones. (The largest
block weighs more than 15 tons.). See also: Travels without My Herodotus
Hallmarks of Frank Gehry's work include a
particular concern that people exist comfortably within the spaces he creates,
and an insistence that his buildings address the context and culture of their
sites. This aspect of Gehry's work makes him a particularly appropriate choice
for a large-scale structure located on the waterfront in Lower Manhattan, where
the context of the surrounding skyscrapers, the constraints of the river site,
and the needs of the community create a unique and challenging environment. Francis Poulenc (1899 -1963) A Comparative Discography Poulenc's music has an immediate impact on the listener, but
goes beyond a mere surface charm as almost all of his vocal music testifies,
whether the Apollinaire or Eluard song cycles, or Aragon's "C", or the
composer's only full-length opera, Dialogue des Carmélites. As Poulenc
matured, he developed a religious streak that gave rise to a number of sacred
choral works that are often performed, only the late Sept Réponses de Ténèbre
not yet in favor, perhaps because the solos devolving to a boy soprano are not
nearly so juicy as those of the Stabat Mater or the Gloria. This
is a work that merits more than the two recordings it has had to date. An Interview With Nikolaus Harnoncourt It was Karajan who, in 1952, picked him from 40 aspirants to
play in the Vienna Symphony Orchestra. At the audition, with Alice at the piano,
he played the first movement of the Dvorak concerto. "I heard later that
Karajan said immediately, 'That one - I like the way he sits down. I'll take
him.' " They remained on friendly terms until Karajan took command of
Berlin, Salzburg and the Vienna State Opera. Stravinsky: Pastorale Click to download now: Performers: Wilson, Julia (Oboe) The Computer Delusion I see a parallel between the goals of "Sesame
Street" and those of children's computing. Both are pervasive, expensive
and encourage children to sit still. Both display animated cartoons, gaudy
numbers and weird, random noises.... Both give the sensation that by merely
watching a screen, you can acquire information without work and without
discipline. Kermode and Almereyda on Hamlet Shakespeare's Hamlet escapes the prison of language
in the end -- just as he escapes what he calls the "prison" of Denmark
-- somehow learning, between Acts 4 and 5, to make peace with multiplicity and
uncertainty. For Hamlet (and, it would seem, for Shakespeare), the Word cannot
be trusted -- it can be two or more things at once -- and yet somehow this
master of words and wordplay finds it within himself to look into language's
abyss, the abyss of ambiguity, and to utter a simple, mysterious, and finally
inexplicable "Let be." This is perhaps the play's finest and most
ironic bit of wordplay, Hamlet's most outrageous and profound turn of wit: a
seemingly alchemical transformation of "to be or not to be," a
resolution of the unanswerable, into the simplicity of an almost beatified
statement of oneness. Martin Scorsese on MaxiVision We have rules (frequently ignored) about
how quickly any given lens can be panned, or how quickly an object can be
allowed to travel from one side of the frame to the other in order to prevent
these motion distortions. We are forced to "pan moving objects (which keeps
them stationary in the frame) in order to prevent this strobing, or accept these
distortions and hope that sound effects will carry the viewer's
suspension of disbelief past these visual anomalies. Sometimes these motion
distortions are desirable, as in many moments in the opening of Steven
Spielberg's "Saving Private Ryan," when they were actually exaggerated
for specific aesthetic reasons. But new aesthetic possibilities would emerge if
we could do the reverse of that and capture near perfect, lifelike motion and
more of the inner life of actor's performances. We could still introduce motion
distortions anytime we thought it would add to our creative interpretation, but
with MaxiVision48, we would have that choice and new, visually compelling
opportunities. Enquivering If you are a believer, then Martin Heidegger was an
unparalleled modern thinker, whose profound diagnosis of the condition of
mankind in the twentieth century rightly dominated large tracts of culture, and
directed the finest subsequent work in the humanities. If you are not, then he
is a dismal windbag, whose influence has been completely disastrous, and whose
affinity with the Nazis merely indicates the vacuum where, in most other
philosophers, there would have been a combination of common sense and common
decency.
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The Culture of Liberty By M.V. Llosa In reality, globalization does not suffocate local cultures but
rather liberates them from the ideological conformity of nationalism. The Anxiety of Prosperity Conservatives are comfortable when the maladies they identify
can be attributed to the overreach of government. But when problems originate
from outside the political sphere, they tend to follow impassioned denunciations
with an odd silence. This has been particularly true of conservative critics of
capitalism. Daniel Bell ended Cultural Contradictions by calling for the
development of a new public philosophy, one which would seem to involve a
greater role for the state, but he strenuously avoided mentioning the state or
specifying its role. Elsewhere he and others, including Novak and Kristol, have
made hopeful predictions of a new Great Awakening, which is usually vague in its
theological content but consistent in its rejection of excessive materialism.
D’Souza echoes this hope with talk of an imminent "spiritual
renewal." He is more optimistic than most, believing that this renewal will
be engendered by prosperity itself, which has made possible the luxury of
reflecting on its inadequacies. But this talk is ultimately only speculative.
All conservative social critics run up against a fundamental barrier: that the
principal instrument at our disposal for achieving social change is the state.
And the state, for a variously weighted combination of its inefficacy and its
coercive tendencies, is more horrible to conservatives than the cultural
deficiencies they lament. This dilemma has not disappeared with the new
affluence, nor is it likely to be resolved any time soon. W. V. Quine, Philosopher Who Analyzed Language and Reality, Dies at 92 Roger F. Gibson Jr. wrote that if Mr. Quine's project could be
summed up in a single sentence, that sentence would read, "Quine's
philosophy is a systematic attempt to answer, from a uniquely empiricistic point
of view, what he takes to be the central question of epistemology, namely, `How
do we acquire our theory of the world?' "
Violent Entertainment (...) But as the politicians castigate TV, music, movies, and video games for causing all sorts of social problems, citizens would do well to question both the supposed link between fictional and real-word violence and the implications of government regulation of the entertainment industry. While there's no question that popular culture has been getting increasingly violent and lurid every year, it's absolutely unclear what the actual effects are on society as a whole, or on kids in particular. The relationship between such fare and the real world is far from obvious. Consider this: According to the most recent National Crime Victimization Survey, violent crime is at its lowest point since the federal government started tracking crime trends in 1973. When it specifically comes to kids, the same government data show sharp and steady declines in serious violent crime committed by or against kids since 1993; crime at schools has dropped by more than 1/3 over the same time. Would that be happening if Eminem is really Public
Enemy Number 1 ? A faster Net will save old media (...) Zap! Encryption exists to be defeated. Movies, television, recorded music, and the texts of books will be essentially free. But here is the crucial point: They will be free in their digital forms. This will inspire a wholesale move by the entertainment industry back into analog and physical media, and into live performance. You can't digitize a live concert. You can download
all the words in a book, but you can't digitize the feeling of holding one in
your hands. You can trade MP3 files, but vinyl record stores get top prices for
classic LPs, and buffs claim that vinyl sounds better than CDs. You can see a
movie on a big video screen, but you can't digitize the smell of popcorn and the
roar of the audience. (...) The point about pornography
There's
a conservative tradition which I think I'm part of which is hostile to fantasy
as such -- fantasy as a flight from reality, "fancy" in Coleridge's
term as opposed to imagination. It's the difference between the escape from
things into a world where you control everything -- which is essentially what
pornography is, even if it's only with a switch -- and the imaginative
re-creation of things, which enables you to confront again the real human being.
The point about pornography is that it depersonalizes the human being and
therefore impoverishes one's ability to confront human beings as they are.
One
Criterion The
extent of my daring is to suggest one criterion, by which it may be rationally
conjectured before-hand, whether or no a reader would lose his time, and perhaps
his temper, in the perusal of this, or any other treatise constructed on similar
principles. But it would be cruelly misinterpreted, as implying the least
disrespect either for the moral or intellectual qualities of the individuals
thereby precluded. The criterion is this: if a man receives as fundamental
facts, and therefore of course indemonstrable and incapable of further analysis,
the general notions of matter, spirit, soul, body, action, passiveness, time,
space, cause, and effect, consciousness, perception, memory, and habit; if he
feels in his mind completely at rest concerning all these, and is satisfied, if
only he can analyse all other notions into some one or more of these supposed
elements with plausible subordination and apt arrangement: to such a mind I
would as courteously as possible convey the hint, that for him the chapter was
not written.
The Peasant Marey SUDDENLY,
amid the deep silence, I clearly and distinctly heard a shout: "There's a
wolf!" I screamed, and, beside myself with terror, crying at the top of my
voice, I ran out into the field, straight at the plowing peasant. It was our
peasant Marey. I don't know if there is such a name, but everyone called him
Marey. He was a man of about fifty, heavy- set, rather tall, with heavy streaks
of grey in his bushy, dark-brown beard. I knew him but had scarcely ever had
occasion to speak to him before. He even stopped his little filly when he heard
my cry, and when I rushed up to him and seized his plow with one hand and his
sleeve with the other, he saw how terrified I was. "It's a wolf!" Escaping the transcendental CRIMES
AND MISDEMEANORS, which explicitly references Dostoevsky throughout, is the
story of Judah Rosenthal, who commits a murder, after which he is haunted by
sparks of his long-suppressed religious upbringing, and stands on the verge of
confessing his crime. But if Dostoevsky's novel argues that, in God's absence,
man's conscience will assume the vacancy (that the novel is marred by an
embarrassing, tacked-on Christian ending is another story), Allen's protagonist
stifles his guilt, and gets off scot-free. Except, according to the unstated
tenets of tragedy, which moves from the specific to the universal and dictates
that the choices a protagonist makes affect not only himself, but the very
nature of the universe, Judah's world is forever altered. "All his worst
fears about the world are realized," Allen's character says at one point,
and the tragic irony of the film is that unbeknownst to himself, Judah has
transformed his world into one no one in their right mind would want to inhabit.
"The universe is a cold place," says one of Allen's characters -- a
philosophy professor who plays the same dramatic role assigned Lear's fool, and
disappears midway through the action by jumping out a window. "And it is
we, with our capacity to love, that infuse it with meaning." Through the
choices he makes, Judah infuses the world with the most terrible of meanings.
"Oedipus," Allen has a buffoonish producer say at one point, "Now
Oedipus is funny! Who did this terrible thing to the city? Oh, it was me!"
Stripped of the tragic dimension, the film ends, like all archetypal comedies,
at a wedding. Class distinctions Modern
and cultured persons, I believe, object to their children seeing kitchen company
or being taught by a woman like Peggotty. But surely it is more important to be
educated in a sense of human dignity and equality than in anything else in the
world. And a child who has once had to respect a kind and capable woman of the
lower classes will respect the lower classes for ever. The true way to overcome
the evil in class distinctions is not to denounce them as revolutionists
denounce them, but to ignore them as children ignore them. Liberty in education [...]
what exactly does it mean to have "liberty" in education? Does it mean
that all the manuscripts that reach me should be published, funded, the authors
given professorships, etc.? It's a finite world; we can't avoid choices. Slogans
are easy, choices harder.
Part-time readers To
learn by heart, to transcribe faithfully, to read fully is to be silent and
within silence. This order of silence is, at this point in western society,
tending to become a luxury. It will require future historians of consciousness
(historians des mentalites) to gauge the abridgements in our attention span, the
dilutions of concentration, brought on by the simple fact that we may be
interrupted by the ring of the telephone, by the ancillary fact that most of us
will, except under constraints of stoic resolve, answer the telephone, whatever
else we may be doing. We need a history of noise-levels, of the diminution in
those natural masses of silence, not only nocturnal, which still enfolded the
daily lives of Chardin and his reader. Recent studies suggest that some
seventy-five per cent of adolescents in the United States read against a
background of sound (a radio, a record-player, a television set at one's back or
in the next room). More and more young people and adults confess to being unable
to read a serious text without a background of organized sound. We know too
little about the ways in which the brain processes and integrates competing
simultaneous stimuli to be able to say just what this electronic input does to
the centres of attention and conceptualization involved in reading. But it is,
at the least, plausible to suppose that the capacities for exact comprehension,
for retention and for energetic response which knit our being to that of the
book are drastically eroded. We tend to be, as Chardin's philosophe lisant was
not, part-time readers, readers by half. Wilde at heart If Wilde had been more truly radical, he might have
abandoned his Christian piety entirely, for better and for worse, as Nietzsche
did. At moments, especially in his essay, Wilde does seem like a dandified
Nietzsche, proclaiming the relativity of all moral judgments and the total
indifference of art to ethics. But Wilde was never able to move completely
beyond good and evil. In De Profundis, he wrote: "I now see that
sorrow, being the supreme emotion of which man is capable, is at once the type
and test of all great art." He thought it was a new discovery, a rejection
of his whole literary ideal. In fact, it was merely a return to the Christian
insight of The Happy Prince.
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Essays on the Philosophy of Technology An excellent resource.
The Symphony - An Interactive Guide An educational website dedicated to the orchestral
symphony.
See especially the encyclopedia. Clone
The recent cloning developments have created a
large scale debate on the morality and ethics of duplicating humans and other
creatures. Enter the reactions section to learn about common cloning
misconceptions, views from both sides of the cloning debate, and what the
government is doing to prevent human cloning research. SYMBOLS.com contains more than 2,500 Western signs,
arranged into 54 groups according to their graphic characteristics. In 1,600
articles their histories, uses, and meanings are thoroughly discussed. The signs
range from ideograms carved in mammoth teeth by Cro-Magnon men, to hobo signs
and subway graffiti.
The myEUROPE Schools Network is a group of
more than 300 schools. They form a unique community of teachers who work for the
development and the enhancement of our common European identity. THE
HUSSERL Page.
Why, why, does everyone go on so about the brain? I'm old enough not to be surprised when people are interested in
things that seem to me not to be interesting: Golf, the music of Andrew Lloyd
Webber and the adulteries of politicians are three examples in a plethora.
Since, in most such cases, we're not competing for resources, I don't mind at
all. But science is different. Science is expensive, and it's largely publicly
funded, and there's never enough money to do all the research that might be
worth doing. In particular, brain imaging is expensive compared to other ways of
trying to find out about the mind. If you put your money (which is to say: our
money) into the elaborate technology required to establish neural localisations
of mental functions by imaging techniques, you almost certainly take it out of
other kinds of psychological research. Nietzsche's Styles Every writer, finally, even when he or she is no stylist in
Nietzsche's league, is caught in the web of style's paradoxes. To write is to
insist, to crave agreement—whether in commentary, or commentary on commentary,
or review of commentary on commentary. Nietzsche's continuing relevance in some
ways has little to do with anything he said about life, strength, morality, or
the future. It has far more to do with the fact that he said it the way he did,
that he said anything at all, that he made its saying his deepest and most
ineluctable philosophical subject—and in so doing made it ours. The Biographer's Art And yet, after being in Coleridge's presence for
several weeks and some 800 pages, I feel I know him more deeply than I know my
friends or even my husband. It is ironic that a rich, detailed biography brings
me closer to a person's inwardness than I can hope to achieve in living
relationships. The artful biographer gives me the satisfying illusion that
Coleridge is thinking out loud in my presence. "Subjects sprout up with the
tropical speed and variety of jungle plants: 'Why is True Love like a Tree?';
'Essay in Defence of Punning'; 'What was the origin of philosophy?'; 'When did
Time begin?'; . . . 'Property clearly natural to man . . . manifest in
animals-the Swans on Hawkshead Lake'; 'Absolute Truth is always a
mystery.'" He is a wonder-full man. Rimbaud and Orwell So Rimbaud gave up poetry when it failed to change
the world. Orwell at the end must have had his doubts about language, too, or he
wouldn't have dreamed up Newspeak. Neither is remembered for his hard work at
identity-making. Instead, the poet's name is worn by freaks, geeks and
videodrones as if it were a logo on a T-shirt or a jet-propelled sneaker, and
the novelist is propped up on a horse like the dead El Cid to frighten the
Moorish hordes. They have both been turned into the standard-issue celebrity
flacks of this empty, buzzing time, selling something other than themselves,
unattached to honor, glory, kingship, sainthood or genius. They join a talk-show
parade of the power-mad, the filthy rich and the serial killers, the softboiled
fifteen-minute Warhol eggs, the rock musicians addled on cobra venom, the war
criminals whose mothers never loved them and the starlets babbling on about
their substance abuse, their child molestations, their anorexia and their
liposuction. "I have never belonged to this race," said Rimbaud. Letter from Europe: Crossing many bridges... The third time I went across the bridge
was to see the Peter Greenaway exhibition, 'Flying over Water,' at Malmø
Konsthall. The exhibition questions the story of Icarus in Ovid's Metamorphoses.
Icarus was the son of Daedalus who built the Labyrinth in Crete for King Minos,
where they were later held prisoner. To escape from the Labyrinth, Daedalus
constructed wings of feathers that he glued together with wax. In his joy,
Icarus flew too close to the sun...the wax melted and he lost his wings and fell
into the sea. In the exhibition, Greenaway asks questions like: What kind of
birds, and how many died for Icarus' wings? How long would it have taken him to
reach another shore? How did the sea receive him? Greenaway invites us to follow
our own path in interpreting the myth...Did Icarus really drown or is he still
flying over the water preparing for a perfect landing in the new Millennium??? Belief without belonging Brown, who is Reader in History at the University of
Strathclyde, argues that Britain's core religious culture has been destroyed.
But he challenges the view that secularisation has been a long and gradual
process, proposing there has been a catastrophic and abrupt cultural revolution.
Personal Christian identity broke down suddenly in the "swinging
Sixties" when new media, new gender roles and the moral revolution
dramatically ended people's conception that they lived Christian lives. He
predicts the same fate faces the whole of western Christianity.
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