Sam Dresser

What a lovely, memorable piece! I was moved by the line from the Odes: “we’re ready/to trek the final journey as companions.” Oftentimes the ancients can seem so remote and austere, but Horace’s poetry in particular has a way of illuminating the human in them, and suddenly they’re not so distant anymore.

I wonder about a comparison with Lucian’s view on friendship and I’d be curious to hear what people think. I might be getting this wrong, but it seems for Horace friendship is found in repose: guys hanging out after work or a war with a bottle of wine and some good jokes. For Lucian, in his dialogue Toxaris, friendship is much more martial and involves big, heavy things like loyalt...

It seems that to answer this question we have to apply the apparatus of disinterested reason to the formlessness of feeling. What should we fear? We should only fear something when it is ‘reasonable’ to do so. And what is ‘reasonable’? That’s a philosophical black hole I have no wish to dive into, but perhaps we can say that a reasonable fear is one for which there are clear and identifiable harms that one would be subjected to if the object of fear came to pass. There should also be a clauses about the immediacy of what is feared, and the proportion of fear to its object. You see what I’m getting at.

As Mark has written, the fear of death and the fear of dementia will var...

My most dangerous experience while abroad was my fault. I simply shouldn’t have put myself in the silly situation that I did. On the way back from a pub in Prague, surely at some debauched hour, I got into what’s meanly called a ‘gypsy cab’. ‘Gypsy cabs’, for those that don’t know, are unlicensed taxis – that is, some guy in his car giving rides for whatever price he pleases. I was, ashamedly, not entirely aware of what I was getting myself into. When the car finally pulled up to my place, the price rather shocked and a gentlemanly disagreement ensued, which is a euphemism for him pulling a gun on me. At that point, it seemed to me he had a point. Any price was more or less acceptable, so...

Yes, I agree with Peter, specifically that language - words - can enhance my understanding of music while never really capturing what it means to me. For instance, understanding, however partially, what complexity is involved in the fashioning of a fugue can make that of music far more beautiful because you can hear the voices interact in a new and deeper way. Perhaps this is akin to knowing the context of a work: Contrapunctus XIV may be moving in its own right, but it becomes all the more so when you know that Bach died writing it.

This all raises a more general question o...

In lieu of whatever transcendent experiences I may have had, here’s Vaclav Haval’s description of his. Have always enjoyed this:

Again, I call to mind that distant moment in [the prison at] Hermanice when on a hot, cloudless summer day, I sat on a pile of rusty iron and gazed into the crown of an enormous tree that stretched, with dignified repose, up and over all the fences, wires, bars and watchtowers that separated me from it. As I watched the imperceptible trembling of its leaves against an endless sky, I was overcome by a sensation that is difficult to describe: all at once, I seemed to rise above all the coordinates of my momentary existence in the world into a k...