Though You Adorn Your Entire Atrium With Ancient Portraits In Every Corner, The One And Only Nobility

Though you adorn your entire atrium with ancient portraits in every corner, the one and only nobility is personal excellence. Rate that ahead of your ancestors statues, let that go ahead of the rods of office when you are consul. Your first debt to me is quality of the soul. Do you deserve a reputation as an upright champion of justice in word and action? Then I acknowledge you a true noble.

Juvenal, Satire VIII

Sol Duc Valley, Washington State

Photo credit: Jim Hagen https://www.facebook.com/jim.hagen.756/

The profound reverence for age and for tradition–all law rests on this double reverence,– the belief and prejudice in favour of ancestors and unfavourable to newcomers, is typical in the morality of the powerful; and if, reversely, men of “modern ideas” believe almost instinctively in “progress” and the “future,” and are more and more lacking in respect for old age, the ignoble origin of these “ideas” has complacently betrayed itself thereby.

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil,§260

“οἶον τὸ γλυκύμαλον ἐρεύθεται ἄκρῳ ἐπ’ ὔσδῳ, ἄκρον ἐπ’ ἀκροτάτῳ, λελάθοντο δὲ μαλοδρόπηες, οὐ μὰν ἐκλελάθοντ’, ἀλλ’ οὐκ ἐδύναντ’ ἐπίκεσθαι - Like the sweetapple reddens upon a high branch, high on the highest, and the apple-pickers missed it– no, actually, they didn’t miss it; they couldn’t reach it…”

— Sappho (Lobel-Page 105a)

“Eros is an issue of boundaries. He exists because certain boundaries do. In the interval between reach and grasp, between glance and counterglance, between ‘I love you’ and ‘I love you too,’ the absent presence of desire comes alive. But the boundaries of time and glance and I love you are only aftershocks of the main, inevitable boundary that creates Eros: the boundary of flesh and self between you and me. And it is only, suddenly, at the moment when I would dissolve that boundary, I realize I never can.”

— Anne Carson, from Eros the Bittersweet: “Finding the Edge” (via intopermanence)