The Listener’s editor when I first joined was Russell Twisk, a surname of such surpassing beauty that I would have written pieces for him if he had been at the helm of Satanic Child-Slaughter Monthly.
Green fingers are better than gold.
Could they remember the first time they felt the sweeping rush of love? Love came to peasants, kings, and even gods. Love made all equal. Love deified, yet love leveled.
Unlike musical notation, paint or clay, language is inside every one of us. For free. We are all proficient at it. We already have the palette, the paints and the instruments. We don’t have to go and buy any reserved materials. Poetry is made of the same stuff you are reading now, the same stuff you use to order pizza over the phone, the same stuff you yell at your parents and children, whisper in your lover’s ear and shove into an e-mail, text or birthday card. It is common to us all.
Ixion had committed one of the first blood murders; unless he was cleansed of his transgression, the Furies would pursue him until he went mad. The princes, lords and neighbouring landowners of Thessaly had cause to dislike Ixion and none offered to perform the catharsis, the ritual process of purification that would redeem him.
The Olympians enjoy the mauling and brawling of their playthings, their little human pets.
Unless you are curious, in which case I love you, for curiosity about the world and all its corners is a beautiful thing.
A point of view, a single way of thinking that encompasses all elements of a subject, allows essays more or less to write themselves.
Sisyphus is still there in the halls of Tartarus, pushing that boulder up the hill and getting almost to the top before it rolls back down and he has to start once again.
Men! It’s not that they’re brutish, boorish, shallow and insensitive – though I dare say many are. It’s just that they’re so damned blind. So incredibly stupid. Men in myth and fiction at least. In real life we are keen, clever and entirely without fault of course.
He had just reached the pavement and gave now the smallest, quickest of glances back up the hill, in our direction. Our eyes didn’t meet, but I saw that he was even more beautiful than I had supposed. Even more beautiful than I had ever imagined it was possible to imagine imagining beauty. Beautiful in a way that made me realise that I had never even known before what beautiful really meant: not in people, nature, taste or sound.
If that she-bear had eaten the baby it found o n the mountaintop instead of nursing it, how different the world would now have been.
His humans were happy, yes; but to Prometheus such a safe, unchallenged, and unchallenging existence had no zest to it.
If only at school, geography teachers, surely the most scoffed and pilloried class of pedagogue there is, if only they had concentrated less on rift valleys, trig points and the major exports of Indonesia and more on the fact that geography could promise a classy royal society with the sexiest lecture theatre in the land.
That’s an interesting point,′ said Adrian, ’in the sense of not being interesting at all.
Think springs of water. Think wells and spas and sources. Well-springs in the widest and loveliest sense. Jerusalem, for instance, is a spring of religiosity. One small town in the desert, but the source of the world’s three most powerful faiths. It is the capital of Judaism, the scene of Christ’s crucifixion and the place from which Mohammed ascended into heaven. Religion seems to bubble from its sands.
I’ve suffered for my art, now it’s your turn.
I could spend thousands now on the highest end hi-fi in the world and know that, for all the wattage and purity of signal, the music would never quite touch me again as it did then from that primitive monaural system. But nor could anything quite touch me now as it did then.
This is what you have to understand. You grew up, you went to this school and that one, you made these friends and those. It was nothing. The future is a much bigger deal than the past, Adrian, a much bigger deal. Not just because it has babies in it, but because there are better people in it, who are better behaved and more fun to be with, the scenery is better, the weather is better, the rewards and thrills are better. But I really am not sure that you will ever...
I don’t think we should be unafraid not to discuss the gay dialectic as an energy and the homophobic constraints that endorse its marginalisation as a functionally reactive discourse.