lionofchaeronea - Tumblr blog

[lionofchaeronea]

love all the art you share, started adding some on my pinterest boards of decades. Hope that's okay?

https:// pin.it/ 2bdnK4EA7

Fine by me!

[lionofchaeronea]

Spring Rain (left screen), Kanzan Shimomura, 1916

[lionofchaeronea]

"Magical rapture / Pierces my heart; / Fixed is my gaze / Burning with terror; / I reel, my heart faints and fails!", illustration by Arthur Rackham from p. 86 of Siegfried and the Twilight of the Gods, published by William Heinemann in 1911.

[lionofchaeronea]

Twilight, Dwight William Tryon, 1918-19

[lionofchaeronea]

Today is Poem in Your Pocket Day, so here's a little poem I hope you'll like. (Please forgive my presumption in sharing one of my own--I couldn't resist.)

Text:

BOTANICAL AUBADE

Waking just like a seed today:

drowsy heavy coat splits--

toes extend into the bedclothes, warm, dark, rooted--

arms above head rise, tug at shoulders--

on each hand pink jointed leaves shiver in thanks

for the taste of sunlight

[lionofchaeronea]

Current fiction reading is Samskara: A Rite for a Dead Man by U.A. Ananthamurthy, translated from Kannada by A.K. Ramanujan. A brief but exceptionally powerful novel, it's the story of a brahminic community disrupted by the death of a rebel member, and of Praneshacharya, the wise man of the community, who finds himself in an impossible bind as he tries to figure out whether the rebel brahmin deserves funeral rites and who should perform them. Ananthamurthy is extraordinarily good at creating memorable characters with just a few verbal strokes, and he chooses just the right sensory details to evoke the tight-knit, almost claustrophobic nature of the community. Not only is this a fine read, but it's made me keenly aware of how little I really know, and how much I need to learn, about Hinduism.

[lionofchaeronea]

Will It Rain?, James Charles, 1887

[lionofchaeronea]

Windy Day, Place de la Concorde, Jean Béraud, 1890

[lionofchaeronea]

Roman silver coin minted in 55 BCE, during Julius Caesar's campaigns in Gaul, by Publius Fonteius Capito, one of the tresviri monetales (mint officials) for that year. On the obverse, the helmeted head of the war god Mars, with a small representation of a tropaeum (trophy) behind him. On the reverse, a Roman horseman rides down two enemy soldiers, identified by their helmets and shields as Gauls.

[lionofchaeronea]

Watanabe no Tsuna on a Horse in the Rain (from the series One Hundred Ghost Tales from China and Japan), Tsukioka Yoshitoshi, 1865

[lionofchaeronea]

Doing a deep dive into the history of Zoroastrianism and Manichaeism. I may be a classicist by training, but I've come to realize that you can't fully understand the Roman Empire--especially religious movements in the Roman Empire, which is my chief scholarly interest right now--without understanding Rome's Persian neighbors, the Parthians and later the Sassanids, and how they saw the world. Of course, this means I've fallen yet farther down the intellectual rabbit hole, but who wants to climb out anyway?

[lionofchaeronea]

"I had done a hellish thing" (illustration for The Rime of the Ancient Mariner), Gustave Doré, 1876

[lionofchaeronea]

Morning News, Francis Luis Mora, 1912

[lionofchaeronea]

Rain in Yotsuya-Mitsuke (from the series 100 Views of New Tokyo), Hemmi Takashi, 1930

[lionofchaeronea]

In the Rain, Paris, Nils Kreuger, 1886

[lionofchaeronea]

A Rainy Sunday, Edward Robert Hughes, 1872

[lionofchaeronea]

Hi, all--In the next few days I may be posting a number of rain scenes here. Apologies if this becomes monotonous. Being a pluviophile of the first order, I just find it soothing.