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In fact, when I think about my real childhood I am unable to recall much about it at all except a sad jumble of objects:
It was an entirely random decision which, as you will see, turned out to be quite fateful.
And the nights, bigger than imagining: black and gusty and enormous, disordered and wild with stars.
“The great romantics are often failed classicists.
For if the modern mind is whimsical and discursive, the classical mind is narrow, unhesitating, relentless.
think of a tactful way to withdraw, when my eyes met his and suddenly I thought: Why not?
(“Work?”
Work?” he said to me once, astonished, when I referred to our classroom activities as such. “Do you really think that what we do is work?” “What else should I call it?” “I should call it the most glorious kind of play.”)
“Cubitum eamus?” “What?” “Nothing.”
“All right,” said Julian, looking around the table. “I hope we’re all ready to leave the phenomenal world, and enter into the sublime?”
“Why does that obstinate little voice in our heads torment us so?” he said, looking round the table. “Could it be because it reminds us that we are alive, of our mortality, of our individual souls—which, after all, we are too afraid to surrender but yet make feel more miserable than any other thing? But isn’t it also pain that often makes us most aware of self? It is a terrible thing to learn as a child that one is a being separate from all the world, that no one and no thing hurts along with one’s burned tongues and skinned knees, that one’s aches and pains are all one’s own. Even more
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“And how can we lose this maddening self, lose it entirely? Love? Yes, but as old Cephalus once heard Sophocles say, the least of us know that love is a cruel and terrible master. One loses oneself for the sake of the other, but in doing so becomes enslaved and miserable to the most capricious of all the gods.
Julian laughed. “And how many years has it been since the gods have intervened in human wars? I expect Apollo and Athena Nike would come down to fight at your side, ‘invited or uninvited,’ as the oracle at Delphi said to the Spartans. Imagine what heroes you’d be.” “Demigods,” said Francis, laughing. “We could sit on thrones in the town square.” “While the local merchants paid you tribute.” “Gold. Peacocks and ivory.” “Cheddar cheese and common crackers more like it,” Bunny said.
objects such as corpses, painful to view in themselves, can become delightful to contemplate in a work of art.”
“Death is the mother of beauty,” said Henry. “And what is beauty?” “Terror.” “Well said,” said Julian. “Beauty is rarely soft or consolatory. Quite the contrary. Genuine beauty is always quite alarming.”
we began to talk about the madnesses induced by the gods: poetic, prophetic, and, finally, Dionysian.
dark, chaotic, inexplicable.
“And it’s a temptation for any intelligent person, and especially for perfectionists such as the ancients and ourselves, to try to murder the primitive, emotive, appetitive self. But that is a mistake.”
One is quite capable, of course, of working out these destructive passions in more vulgar and less efficient ways. But how glorious to release them in a single burst! To sing, to scream, to dance barefoot in the woods in the dead of night, with no more awareness of mortality than an animal!
Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it.
Forgive me, for all the things I did but mostly for the ones that I did not.
