Tag Archives: Friedrich Nietzsche

petronius redux

Petronius’s Satyricon and Fellini’s film version. Two versions of a pagan world as it was in Nero’s time and may be in ours… For Fellini, Satyricon is not crude melodrama or pure fantasy, but a view of paganism as it … Continue reading

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cannabis: our reefer sadness

Life with a spliff more surreal, exciting, profound? Recapturing the moment before the soul came into the world when it was sky-high. Maybe cannabis and other psychotropics open doors as Aldous Huxley asserted or Carlos Castaneda, but its a high … Continue reading

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the almighty is not interested in creating paintings

Andre Malraux’s Metamorphosis of the Gods and the making of the personal deity for an agnostic secular society. After the Enlightenment, the Gods engaged in popular bourgeois culture. us and them became increasingly us with them circling around us in … Continue reading

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malraux: not stung to austere ecstasy

Andre Malraux and his Metamorphosis of the Gods. Maybe more not what he said, but how it was delivered…. …What made Andre Malraux’s La Metamorphose an especially haunting work is not originality in the usual sense. Some of Malraux’s seemingly … Continue reading

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Judgements of Joan

Her trial and execution were only the beginning. In the centuries since, the Maid has continued to provoke anger and adoration, skpticism and awe… “You have heard the last of her,” says her Executioner to the Earl of Warwick in … Continue reading

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just one in every crowd?

It’s tough to kick the habit. The old reflexes; centuries of old European anti-Jewish prejudice:  stereotypes of Jewish control of government, international conspiracy, the media, international trade and the entire money and banking apparatus. The old attacks now mingling with … Continue reading

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how much is that slave in the window?

As a commodity, slaves created peculiar problems for the merchant. Apparently in the larger cities there were a few shops where slaves could be bought: in Rome in Nero’s time they were concentrated near the temple of Castor in the … Continue reading

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avoiding the seductive charms of despair

“Returning form Syracuse?” ….Four hundred years ago, the French “politiques” advanced the novel, and totally subversive notion of the time that people of different religious persuasions could live together, in peace, in the same country and under the same sovereign. … Continue reading

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sunset of a new dawn

The Enlightenment. Its the basis of our secular society and ints values underpin much of the consumer economy. Its values have dominated the public sphere since the dawn of the industrial age. This liberal, rational, humanitarian way of thought has … Continue reading

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enlightenment by design: build a better world?

The Enlightenment. This is our tradition. Our world view. The liberal, rational, humanitarian way of thought that have persisted since Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, the French Revolution and had earlier seeds in the likes of Spinoza, among others. It … Continue reading

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