My Favorite Words: For or Against?

Freud followed Nietzsche in noting that the value we place in life after death was a development of post-Homeric times.

Alberto Manguel


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Freud treated Nietzsche's writings as texts to be resisted far more than to be studied.

Peter Gay
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My Favorite Words: War & Death

Si vis pacem, para bellum
(If you want peace, prepare for war)

Andromache & Hector

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Si vis vitam, para morten
(If you want life, prepare for death)

Sigmund Freud
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The Classics

Nietzsche... understood that one of the qualities of a classic is that it elicits from the reader a double sense of witnessed truth: that of poetic artifice and that of experienced reality, or, in Nietzschean terms, that of Apollonian illusion and that of Dionysian struggle.

Alberto Manguel (commenting on Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy)
*Note on Nietzsche:
Nietzsche studied in both Bonn and Leipzig and was elected to the Chair of Classical Philosophy at the University of Basel at age twenty-five. He wrote The Birth of Tragedy at age twenty-eight.

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That Thing of the Poets: On Beauty

(A sort of prologue)

What songs the Syrens sang, or what name Achilles
Assumed when he hid among the women, though
Puzzling questions are not beyond conjecture.

Sir Thomas Browne

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There was a world, or was it all a dream?

Hellen of Troy (according to Homer)

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Zeus planted a killing doom whithin us both,
So even for generations still unborn
We will live in song.

Hellen (to Paris, according to Homer)

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Ah, no wonder the men of Troy and Argives under arms have suffered
Years of agony all for her, for such a woman.
Beauty, terrible beauty!

Homer

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Was this the face that launch'd a thousand ships,
And burnt the topless towers of Illium?
Sweet Hellen, make me immortal with a Kiss.

Christopher Marlowe

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Hellen, thy beauty is to me
Like those Nicaean barks of yore
That gently, o'er a perfumed sea,
The weary, wayworn wanderer bore
To his own native shore.

Edgar Allan Poe

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Hot through Troy's ruin Menelaus broke
To Priam's palace, sword in hand, to sate
On that adulterous whore a ten years' hate
And a King's honour though red death, and smoke,
And cries, and then by quieter ways he strode,
Till the still innermost chamber fronted him.
He swung his sword, and crashed into the dim
Luxurious bower, flaming like a God.

High sat white Hellen, lonely and serene.
He had not remembered that she was so fair,
And that her neck curved down in such a way;
And he felt tired. He flung the sword away,
And kissed her feet, and knelt before her there,
The perfect Knight for the perfect Queen.

Rupert Brooke

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Is it a memory? Has a delusion seized my mind?
Was I all that? And am I?
And shall I still be?
The nightmare image, Helena the cities bane?

Hellen of Troy (according to Goethe)
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