Persephone’s Prayer
In Greek mythology, Demeter, the goddess of the harvest, rescues her daughter, Persephone, from eternal winter in Hades and restores her to the land of the living…
On Seeking a Cultural Model in the Past
Man is a historical and a cultural being. He is not merely a performer of functions, nor does he exist by chance in a fleeting and detached…
Address to Psychoanalysis
For Zoe Unorthodox healing art, akin more to Joseph the Egyptian’s craft of insight than to the Greek lexicon of medical wisdom, a match to archeologists’ hand-digging,…
Dante in the Digital Inferno
T.S. Eliot famously said that “Dante and Shakespeare divide the world between them. There is no third.” If people know Dante, it’s probably related to his poem…
True Painting and the Problem of Imitation
There is a categorical rift between classical and modern (progressive or avant-garde) painting, for modern painting as such ceases to be “imitation of nature” in the classical…
The Wisdom of the Ancients
“The west does not die when nations do.” In his classic 1991 tome Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Marxist philosopher Frederic Jameson presents…
Cinematic Bliss: The Korngold Violin Concerto
I was driving when I heard Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s Violin Concerto the first time. It was a library CD I’d just borrowed, back in the days when…
The Musical Universe and Mozart’s “Magic Flute”
Feelings are ‘vectors’; for they feel what is there and transform it into a here. — Alfred North Whitehead Let me begin by saying to our alumni: Welcome home!…
César Franck’s Soaring Symphony in D Minor
Many of us have been in a church or concert hall where an organ is being played, all those chords and majestic sonorities cleverly manipulated to create…
007: The Timeless Story of a Blunt Instrument
“James Bond, with two double bourbons inside him, sat in the final departure lounge of Miami Airport and thought about life and death.” This sentence from Goldfinger…
Living in an Age of Boredom
We in the United States have lived in an age of material comfort and relative geopolitical peace for almost eighty years. While there have been wars and…
How to Appreciate Twentieth-Century Music
Twentieth-century classical music is intimidating for many people. I believe this is mainly due to what has been written about it rather than to the music itself.…
Community and Rituals: A Review of Byung-Chul Han’s “The Disappearance of Rituals”
Byung-Chul Han. The Disappearance of Rituals: A Topology of the Present. Translated by Daniel Steuer. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2020. Toward the end of the twentieth…
Christopher Dawson’s Cultural Mind
Joseph T. Stuart. Christopher Dawson: A Cultural Mind in the Age of the Great War. Washington DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2022. The English historian…
Roger and Me
Walking into the Reform Club in London’s ritzy Pall Mall, the aspirations of a 26-year-old American student had come true. Recently graduated from Yale but deciding against…