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"Every author is creating his own pedigree,"
says Jorge Luis Borges. Like the hero in the illusory Approach to Al-Mu'tasim I
could see myself on a mission trying to find my true identity behind
the veils of our
existence.
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Noah
is the second founder of life on Earth, like honest Abe is the second
founder of the Union. We certainly owe the old sailor a debt of
gratitude, not only for our existence, but that he was no
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“The
bright sky at night, burning with an infinite number of stars, does no
longer spread its golden tent above the emigrant’s heads; instead they
take cheer from the light in the skies at day, when an uncountable mass
of their people is beating a path through the badlands” (Johann
Wolfgang von Goethe).
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In
the Book of Judges, a
promiscuous drifter with no family to return to pays the occasional
visit to his wife from a foreign nation. In between he has many
affairs. In other words Samson was one of the disgruntled have-nots who
looked for opportunities to opt out from the matriarchal economy of his
period.
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King
David is supposed to be the “man
after God’s heart,” but my loyalties rather lie with the man he
betrayed. Surrounded by traitors, King Saul’s task was to forge a new
nation and free them from the Philistine’s yoke. He was truly an
aristocrat, but the Good Book doesn't like aristocrats.
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"No other nation inside of their own circle
was as omnipotent as the Roman’s; yet in no other nation did the
blameless citizen live in such absolute and legally guaranteed security
from intrusions by his fellow citizens and even the state itself"
(Theodor Mommsen).
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I
see Jeremiah as a kindred spirit; he's also the best documented
personality in the entire book. A rare fluke has the otherwise
fragmented sources and the archaeology from Mesopotamia, Judah and
Egypt fall in sync for the same decades of his activity.
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Prophets and
“saviors” come a
dime a dozen; we can reinvent Einstein and the infinitesimal calculus,
if we have to, but the combination of circumstance and character in
Sappho’s work gives testimony to a unique sensitivity, almost
obliterated by censorship and persecution of her work.
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"Everywhere, at home and abroad, the
younger generation, with a moving enthusiasm, gave in to the poet of
sentimentality and love, to the smart sound-bite and the tendentious
aphorism, to philosophy and humanitarianism." (Theodor Mommsen).
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Theophrastus’ Characters was written 2,300 years
ago, ages before the Freudian and Jungian claptrap, as an aid for the
aspiring playwright, and it is still as true as it was then.
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Maecenas
was a man of effeminate appearance. He liked to dress in transparent
fabrics and flaunted in public his decadent tastes and gay love
affairs. But it was he, of all people, who asked Virgil to write
something “uplifting and conservative.”
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A
namesake of mine, in New Mexico, is now convicted for statutory rape.
He is the latest example of a cult leader following an all too familiar
and often repeated paradigm. Such are the people asking us to suffer
our children comming to them.
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Most
of the book has reached us in the form of private excerpts. Since it is
a frank and unashamedly lewd book, our copyists must have been a bunch
of schoolboys who copied out only the juicy bits for later uses in the
dormitory.
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Tacitus
might have been many things but he certainly was not naive. He knew
that the person demanding security will accept the power to be, and the
one who is providing or promising to provide security will be the one
exerting this power.
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Plutarch
was a compassionate man with a rare capacity for touching our hearts in
unforgettable little vignettes. Plutarch's Lives has had a tremendous
influence on our civilization, but unlike the Bible a wholesome and
humanizing influence.
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I
find the silence following my plea rather telling. The Mandaeans are
victims of Bush’s invasion of Iraq, neither Christians nor Muslim take
kindly to their beliefs and the Mandaeans, as far as I know, don't own
oil-wells.
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What
a modern visitor to the Roman Empire would immediately notice is the
absence of billboards at the roadside and the lack of name tags on the
doors to residential buildings. One had to ask one's way through the
murk and smell of unlit corridors to find the right flat in a Roman
five- and eight-storey apartment block.
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Emperor
Augustus conceded to the spiritual chiefs of the Jews to raise their
own taxes and hold civil jurisdiction over the Jews in the Diaspora. A
bad move, as he was to find out.
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So
this is the question: is there such a thing as an underpinning unity in
the larger scheme of things? Are we citizens of a Cosmos, or does the
momentary equilibrium between the forces of chaos create the mere
illusion of sustained structure and order?
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Ready
to slip into a new dress the matron looked into the mirror at her naked
body: “I rather pull crumbs from the
hairy chest of a passing sailor, screaming and banging the headboard,”
she said. She tilted her head, inspecting the hair. She decided to
color it. “Red,” she said. “It should be red."
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The
new system of Christian ayatollahs began rolling out the shroud over
culture and education. It took almost a millennium before the dissent
of courageous functionaries would bring about changes from within.
Without the legacy of Symmachus and his compatriots, a kind of cultural
time capsule, the darkness could have lasted even longer.
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Like
most clerics of the period, Spyridon was married and a family man. His
daughter’s name was Irene and for all we know, she died as a virgin. In
her father’s absence she had accepted to take custody over a deposit by
a neighbor – a piece of jewelry – or so this neighbor said to Spyridon.
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Everybody
seemed to walk through a dreamy world of genies and magic, a kind of
Arabian Nights with the new Jerusalem at the center, the treacherous
city on the Bosporus, filling the sky with gold. It was the era of the
Germanic epic, of the formidable Hagen.
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What
has done more harm to the human race, the Bible, the Koran or the
Kamasutra? After sixteen hundred years of a Christian sex “education,”
women in the west barely suspected that they, too, could have an orgasm.
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"The word of God, and of the apostle, was
diligently recorded by his disciples on palm-leaves and the
shoulder-bones of mutton; and the pages, without order or connection,
were cast into a domestic chest, in the custody of one of his wives"
(Edward Gibbon).
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In
a tyranny the imperial councilors dispense advice in veiled terms, in
the form of backhanded flattery, or better even, holding up to the
throne the mirror of a supposedly virtuous ruler of the past as a model
to follow. Emperor Marcus Aurelius’ Handbook
was fitting this bill to a “T.”
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The
concept of an artificially prolonged period of supervised adolescence,
which is designed to exceed even the biological boundary, is really a
rather recent development.
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In
the final days of this planet, making a last stand against an
increasingly hostile environment, we may find ourselves digging in
behind the walls of a civilization very similar to that of the Incas.
They truly were the magnificent people of the Americas.
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"Since I cannot comprehend by any means how
that same God can be merciful and just, who carries the appearance of
so much wrath and iniquity, there is room for exercising faith, while
God kills and the faith of life is exercised in death” (Martin Luther).
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On
a rickety table, in front of a second hand bookshop, I found a pocket
sized booklet, A Frenchman’s Itinerary, the Travel Diary of Monsieur Montaigne.
The great man had traveled all the places I know so well from my own
childhood.
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Descartes
wrote in an age of thumbscrews and auto-da-fés for everybody who
had the temerity of thinking for himself. This could sometimes make him
giving the appearance of affirming what he didn't really believe.
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It
is a little known fact that Cervantes published his novel under the
shadow and even patronage of the Inquisition. Even less is known that
the Low Countries exist because of Prince William of Orange championing
against this very Inquisition the liberties we now take for granted.
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My
great-great Grandmother’s letter is a genuine document. She was in her
teens when she lost everything and became a refugee because of the
religious turmoil of her time. I think it was an even greater loss for
the country she left behind.
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A
hot chestnut dropping onto the unbuttoned fly can become the object of
a novel. Laurence Sterne's book of course is not an exercise in stream
of consciousness and other modern and postmodern claptrap.
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A
philosopher who never left town in his entire life has revolutionized
our ideas about the human mind. Time and space, he maintained, is all
in the mind, the world of duration and extension out there is something
beyond our mental categories.
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Languages
evolve from the complicated and cumbersome towards the easier to use,
as everybody can tell who has conjugated the Latin verb 'ire:' ('eo,' 'is,' 'it,' 'imus,' 'itis,' 'eunt') in search for the imperative
plural ‘ite,’ and then moves
on to figure out the locative for ‘domus’
(‘domum’).
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With
some justification Goethe can be seen as a forerunner of Charles Darwin
(1809 – 1882). Unfortunately Goethe thought he had to challenge
Newton's (1643 – 1727) authority and despite some valuable insight into
the physiology of color-vision, it didn't do much for Goethe's
reputation in the scientific community ever since. This is a shame.
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ETA
Hoffmann is the grandfather of all fantasy writers; Stephen King is
still trudging in the same track, I bet without even knowing the
predecessor.
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Was
it a twitch of the upper lip or some indecisive fiddling with the
sleeve cuff, that became the cause for the French Revolution?
Considering the way we manufacture Ideas as we speak, this is very
possible.
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“When the pot-roast was particularly bad,
we turned to debating the existence of God. The good Lord always was
with the majority. Only three at the table held atheistic views; yet
they too listened to reason if we had at least a good cheese for dessert”
(Heinrich Heine).
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Heinrich
Heine was a freethinker for all his life and only the hypocrite will
censor him for asking the Old Potter to let him climb back on his knee.
Heine was in pain and beyond human help.
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"There is more love for mankind in
electricity and steam, than in chastity and abnegation from meat. War
is an evil, and the court system is an evil, but it doesn’t follow that
I should wear straw sandals for it" (Antonin Chekhov).
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James
Joyce was saddled with debts, his wife was pregnant, his eyesight
failed him, nobody showed any interest in his first novel. In a
desperate moment he threw 2,000 pages of manuscript into the fireside.
His sister Eileen rescued parts of it from the flames. With the help of
Ezra Pound it was published under the title of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.
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‘Joseph K.’ is starting an affair
with his attorney's maid on the very first consultation, right under
her employer's nose. Judges have women carried into their chambers, in
the painter’s studio the king-sized bed barely leaves space for
anything else. Everywhere we find this brew of sordid sex and the
protagonist’s shabby mores.
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Gottried
Benn wore many masks. During the early 1930s he corresponded with three
sweethearts at the same time. All three, in fact all the women in
Benn's life, were tall, attractive, well educated and well connected.
Benn was a man of a stocky and portly build, but, like Henry Kissinger,
he liked to be seen with a tall blonde.
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My
wife believes she can recognize an American composer by certain
characteristics in his baseline and harmonics. The same could be said
about the American way with words. And it is a good way. William Strunk’s Elements of Style is more than a
manual of good expression, it is an education in democracy.
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My
grandmother was a very down to earth person. I owe my existence to her
conceited ways. Yet all this common sense and survival skill didn’t
prepare her for this confrontation with the weird and wonderful.
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Her husband was
shipped in a
sealed boxcar to Auschwitz. The guards rushed him to undress and he was
told to deposit his belongings in a neat pile, so that “later he could find it again.”
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Things
are not always what we think they seem, as the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas
was about to find out when he arrived in Elysium and had to look for a
job.
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People
have expressed their interest to actually lay money on the table if I
would publish my biography. Very flattering, but I am not sure I will
expand very much beyond this little sketch.
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Limited
shelf space can be a blessing. Most of my books are stored away in the
loft. So, from time to time I make a review of my references on shelf
and look what I really, really want. Then I climb upstairs.
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What
does actually constitute the fabric of our mores? Why do we observe
taboos? How is it that even the pathological liar is speaking the truth
more often than not?
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I
use to obsess over the births and deaths of the people I am interested
in. Over the years a pattern has emerged. While traveling from the
cradle to the bier, it seems we cross the invisible line of a magic
number.
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Personally
I think the Universe is teeming with life, perhaps even in the voids
between the galaxies. But if E.T. is out there, why doesn’t he visit
us? Is there an insurmountable barrier?
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From
early childhood I have taken an interest in astronomy. I think our
cosmologists neglect the possibilities of an infinite Universe. It may
not look any different from the one out there, but the physics are
simpler.
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If
somebody wishes to enthuse about the “fine tuning” of a Universe that
made our existence possible, he better explains why he thinks it is not
us who are fine tuned to given conditions.
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I
had a conversation with a very down to earth Yorkshire woman, a retired
nurse. For her every thought of an afterlife held the horrors of
prolonged infirmity, “and why should
anybody want this,” she said. Why indeed. But then she came up
with a surprise.
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The
record says, it had rained all day. Suddenly the clouds opened and
Valkyries and hordes of badly mauled warriors raced across the sky, the
blood still dripping from their wounds. There was the whinnying of
horses in the air and the witnesses flinched from the eerie swipe of
fluttering hair.
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