Conundrum
Something about Kurt Weill. About Aristotle’s Rhetoric, and Fellini’s La Strada, about Der Blaue Engel or Byzantium.
Also something about wishing that Richard Burton played the part of Humbert Humbert in Kubrick’s Lolita, that more people resembled Peter Sellers, that someone, soon, would write a really good experimental novel that was, at the same time, a really good novel.
About Matteo Ricci. And Cicero. Simonides. That Plato was against books because they ruined the memory; later, in Florence, books were praised as an aid to memory, for holding all the things which would be otherwise forgotten—even Plato’s works (the sole intact corpus from antiquity) exists because of papyri rolls and vellum codices.
‘An eloquent man, child, and one who loved his country,’ puer ait, long after he was called Augustus (Logios anêr, ô pai, logios kai philopatris, Plut.Cic.49.3). He called him pater then had him proscribed — pater patriae, patria potestas.
That last doesn’t quite follow, does it? Well, it is one non sequitur among the many.