Tag Archives: Savonarola

joan : weigh the small advance, there is still a chance

The Monarchist movement, the romantic movement, the spiritualist movement, the liberation movement, the communist movement; Joan of Arc has passed through all of them wit the ease and aplomb that one would expect of a light stepping, free-floating saint. From … Continue reading

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moving sale

Its always the same story:in the grip of forces they do not really understand; something out of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Behind all these protestors and “freedom fighters” is a risk of unchaining a process that cannot be contained … Continue reading

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BONFIRE OF THE DIVINITIES

640 A.D. : According to legend, the caliph Omar burned all 200,000 volumes in the library at Alexandria in Egypt. In doing so, he said: “If these writings of the Greeks agree with the Book of God they are useless … Continue reading

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DOCTRINE OF DUPLICITY

” For that small matter of lies”, wrote Machiavelli,”I am a doctor and hold my degrees. Life has taught me to confound false and true, till no man knows either”. In ”The Prince” his personal confession becomes a general rule; … Continue reading

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WHEN GOODNESS COMES TO A STICKY END

Machiavelli: the name leaves no one indifferent. Perhaps one of the most hated men in history among a gallery of rogues. He has been charged, down through the centuries with being the sole poisonous source of political monkey business, of … Continue reading

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SOULS WITH MALEDICTIONS

”‘Moloch’ certainly, despite the horror it holds for Ginsberg, is after all only the comfortably unreal reality of bourgeois America. It is as much ‘invisible suburbs’ as it is ‘monstrous bombs’, and even the poet admits that it ‘entered my … Continue reading

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PRIMAVERA AND THE HERMETIC OCTAVE

Interpreting the mythology of a work of art may fall under the domain of the  art sleuth, and an intrepid one at that.Take for example Sandro Botticelli’s masterpiece, ”Primavera”. Those who are willing to settle for a poetical tableau and … Continue reading

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CALAMITY OF CONTENTMENT

”The civilisation which surrounded Savonarola on every side was a civilisation which had already taken the wrong turn, the turn that leads to endless inventions and no discoveries, in which new things grow old with confounding rapidity, but in which … Continue reading

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BE SURE TO WEAR SOME FLOWERS IN YOUR HAIR

” If  you’re going to San Francisco be sure to wear some flowers in your hair”. The same could be said for Florence,which, in the fifteenth century was a permissive, liberal society. The pendulum of the permissive revolution swung the … Continue reading

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