Magni Formica Laboris

When he was in his twenties, [Miguel Mihura] wrote his best known comedy, Tres sombreros de copa , but its humour was not appreciated by the conservative pre-war Spanish society. Tres sombreros de copa was not staged until 1952, achieving a great success. cf. Stravinsky's Rite of Spring , others, and Ray's instructive query into the criteria of truth with respect to one's artistic decisions, and his response that the audience has a major role. also think of poems of canonical poets not yet canonical. It's a precarious situation...

1. Thomas Carlyle's Foresight It is admitted on all sides, that the Metaphysical and Moral Sciences are falling into decay, while the Physical are engrossing, every day, more respect and attention ... This condition of the two great departments of knowledge; the outer, cultivated exclusively on mechanical principles---the inward finally abandoned, because, cultivated on such principles, it is found to yield no result---sufficiently indicates the intellectual bias of our time, its all-pervading disposition towards that line of enquiry. In fact, an inward perusasion has long been diffusing itself, and now and then even comes to utterance, that except the external, there are no true sciences; that, to the inward world (if there be any) our only conceivable road is through the outward; that, in short, what cannot be investigated and understood mechanically, cannot be investigated and understood at all. - Edinburgh Review , 1829, Vol. 49, pp. 444-447 2. Ruskin growls a warning: It ha

Look how in one part of his work [Plotinus] attacks the power of the necessity of fate--quite foolishly and carelessly it seems to me--and he forcefully rebukes people who fear the decrees of Fortune. He grants no power to the stars, and he offers no necessity to fate, but says that everything is within our power... And look how, when he was secure in his impudent rashness, the power of fate compelled everything: first his limbs became stiff from a chilling and torpor in his blood, and the sharpness of his eyes slowly lost their clarity as the light in them failed. After this, his whole skin erupted in a pestilence fed by malignant humors, so that his putrid body melted away into death with soured blood, failing limbs. Every day and every hour small parts of his viscera were dissolved by the creeping disease, and what was seen as intact one moment was deformed the next by the ulceration destroying his body. Thus corrupted and dissolved in appearance, the whole shape of his body