Book 2 of De rerum natura begins with “It is sweet on the great sea to watch from the shore other people drowning.”
The words were found on a wall on a house in Pompeii. Perhaps someone sweetly watched from a perch opposite Vesuvius as the lava flow swallowed up the town, and that house. Such are the ironies of Epicurean indifference.
YOU MIGHT ALSO LIKE
The Classroom Heals the Wounds of Generations
“Hope,” wrote the German-American polymath Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, “is the deity of youth.” Wholly dependent on adults, children…
Still Life, Still Sacred
Renaissance painters would use life-sized wooden dolls called manichini to study how drapery folds on the human…
Letters
I am writing not to address any particular article, but rather to register my concern about the…
