metanoias-substack

[metanoias-substack]

The Iliad offers a fresh — and liberating — lens through which we can view privilege and accomplishment.

Homer’s characters, though tragically and irresistibly flawed in many ways, to their credit never seem to resent noble lineage, excellence or greatness.

You are devastatingly handsome, impossibly athletic or dangerously cunning through no fault of your own?

You descend from a long line of great heroes and famed beauties?

Ah, then you must be one of the gods’ favourites, and will be revered, admired and feared as such.

Here are some lessons on privilege that we, the terminally online post-moderns, can learn from the ancient Greeks.

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The gods perceive what lies in the future,

and mortals, what occurs in the present,

but wise men

apprehend what is imminent.

— Philostratus, Life of Apollonius of Tyana, VIII, 7

© Image by Sueda Gln

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Wedding in Toropets (detail) by anonymous Russian painter, late 1700s

Ahinora (1925) by Ivan Milev, the founder of the Bulgarian Secession movement

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Craving spring.

Image: Mia Tarney, Duchess Peony (2007)

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Dream lifestyle vs my actual attention span.

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Jan Brueghel the Elder, The Senses of Hearing, Touch and Taste (1618)

Now that’s what I call a feast.

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I’m not a doctor and I don’t play one on TV, but apparently the circle on the right forearm of Michelangelo’s Moses highlights the extiensor digiti minimi, a small muscle that only contracts when you lift your little finger. Mind-boggling level of anatomical accuracy if true.

[metanoias-substack]

Jan Griffier, a Dutch Golden Age artist, bought a houseboat so his family could accompany him as he travelled painting landscapes. The 1600s version of van life.

Image: Jan Griffier, A Winter Landscape with Figures Ice Skating, a Village and Castle Beyond

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Andreas Schelfhout, Skaters on a Dutch Waterway at Sunset (1845)

Dang it this beauty was sold not too long ago apparently. But if you have an extra EUR 30-100k lying around, some of his other works are still up for sale. I mean, why not? People pay more for BMWs, and unlike cars, art appreciates in value.

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January was a two-faced month, jangling like jester’s bells, crackling like snow crust, pure as any beginning, grim as an old man, mysteriously familiar yet unknown, like a word one can almost but not quite define.

— Patricia Highsmith, The Price of Salt

Image: Winter (January, Cycle of the Months), ca. 1404-07, by Master Wenceslas

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Happy New Year!

Image: Oswald Achenbach, Fireworks in Naples (1875)

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He bent and laid his lips on her hands, which were cold and lifeless. She drew them away, and he turned to the door, found his coat and hat under the faint gas-light of the hall, and plunged out into the winter night bursting with the belated eloquence of the inarticulate.

— Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence

Image: Ivan Aivazovsky, Winter Landscape (1880)

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The skin consists of an inner layer called the dermis and an outer epidermis. The outermost surface of the epidermis, called the stratum corneum, is made up entirely of dead cells. It is an arresting thought that all that makes you lovely is deceased. Where body meets air, we are all cadavers. These outer skin cells are replaced every month. We shed skin copiously, almost carelessly: some twenty-five thousand flakes a minute, over a million pieces every hour. Run a finger along a dusty shelf, and you are in large part clearing a path through fragments of your former self. Silently and remorselessly we turn to dust.

— Bill Bryson, The Body: A Guide for Occupants

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Good philosophy must exist, if for no other reason, because bad philosophy needs to be answered. — C.S. Lewis

Image: Dmitry Kochanovich, Philosophy (2019)

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When Virginia Woolf wrote about having a room of one’s own, this is what she meant.

Simon Luttichuys, Vanitas Still Life with Skull, Books, Prints and Paintings by Rembrandt and Jan Lievens, with a Reflection of the Painter at Work (ca. 1635-40)

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Depending on who tells her story, she was either the quintessential femme fatale, a lover, bane and murderess of powerful men;

or a tragic feminist heroine, a bright and courageous woman ahead of her time, oppressed and unjustly ruined by a misogynistic system;

or an inept and shallow spendthrift who squandered her family estates through vanity projects and luxurious living;

or something of a madwoman, a whirlwind of volatile mental health, fraught relationships and irrational lifelong grudges with disastrous consequences for all;

or a cunning political actor at the highest level and co-conspirator accused of high treason.

At any rate, one thing is certain.

She was the most notorious Spanish woman of her century.

Meet Doña Ana de Mendoza de la Cerda y de Silva Cifuentes, Princess of Éboli, Duchess of Pastrana, II Princess of Mélito, II Duchess of Francavilla and III Countess of Aliano — better known as Ana de Mendoza or Ana, Princess of Éboli.

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Venice? Nope: Copenhagen.

Christian Mølsted, The Canal by Holmen’s Bridge, Copenhagen (1911)