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“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)

The Basilica Cistern, a 1,500-year-old treasure underground in Istanbul. This great work was built in order to collect rainwater and compensate for the city's need during Byzantine times. It is called a Basilica because it was built on the site of an old basilica.

So what are we going to say, brothers, about God? For if you have fully grasped what you want to say, it isn’t God. If you have been able to comprehend it, you have comprehended something else instead of God. If you think you have been able to comprehend, your thoughts have deceived you. So he isn’t this, if this is what you have understood; but if he is this, then you haven’t understood. So what is it that you want to say, seeing that you haven’t been able to understand it?

Augustine, Sermo 52

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

Cuneiform tablet: Sumerian dedicatory inscription from Ekur,  the temple of the god Enlil, ca. 16th–15th century B.C.

The systematic and conceptual world of international jurisprudence has, to this point, as already said, never recognized Reichs, but rather only states. In political and historical reality there have, of course, always been leading great powers; there was a “concert of the European powers” and, in the Versailles system, the “head Allied powers.” The legal conceptual formation held firmly both to a general concept, “state,” as well as to the legal equality of all independent and sovereign states. A genuine order built on a ranking of the subjects of international law was fundamentally ignored by international jurisprudence. The objective and qualitative difference between states has found, in spite of several related discussions, no open and consistent conclusion in the jurisprudence of the League of Nations. This has continued even as the fiction of the equality of international law constantly and continually slaps all truth and reality in the face in light of the open and obvious hegemony of England and France in the Geneva League of Nations.

Carl Schmitt, Writings on War

The sea is free in the sense of being free of states – free, in other words, from the singular conception of the spatial order of legal thinking, which is oriented towards the state. On land, however, the tendency of positivistic thinking about laws to refer exclusively to the state has juridically smoothed over a wonderful gap of lively spatial arrangements into a true tabula rasa. That which called itself a “spatial theory” in the course of the past century is the complete opposite of that which we today understand under the same term. The concept of the Großraum serves us well to overcome the monopolistic position of an empty concept of state territory and to raise the Reich to the decisive concept of our legal thinking in both the spheres of constitutional and international law. This development is bound up with a renewal of legal thinking, one which may again interpret the old and ancient connection of order and positioning for institutions; a renewal of legal thinking that can restore to the word “peace” its content, to the word “homeland” the character of a species-determining fundamental distinguishing characteristic.

Carl Schmitt, Writings on War

It is scarcely possible to-day to find in purity the physical traits of the ancient race in the Greek- speaking lands and islands and it is chiefly among the pure Nordics of Anglo-Norman type that there occur those smooth and regular classic features, especially the brow and nose lines, that were the delight of the sculptors of Hellas.

Madison Grant, Passing of the Great Race

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

The Greeks, as the charioteers of our culture and every other one, hold the reins, but almost always the wagon and horses are inferior material and do not match the glory of their drivers, who then consider it amusing to whip such a team into the abyss, over which they themselves jump with the leap of Achilles.

Friedrich Nietzsche - The Birth of Tragedy

οὔτε γὰρ ἀνθρώπινόν τι ἄνευ τῆς ἐπὶ τὰ θεῖα συναναφορᾶς εὖ πράξεις οὔτ̓ ἔμπαλιν. No action in the human context will succeed without reference to the divine, or vice versa.

Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

Sol Duc Valley, Washington State

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