Suchergebnisse

All art is dialogue. So is all interest in the past. And one of the parties lives and comprehends in a contemporary way, by his very existence. It seems also to be inherent in human existence to turn and return to the past (much as powerful voices may urge us to give it up). The more precisely we listen and the more we become aware of its pastness, even of its near inaccessibility, the more meaningful the dialogue becomes. In the end, it can only be a dialogue in the present, about the present.—M.I. Finley, Aspects of Antiquity (1968)

In the spring of 1936, Gordon A. Craig, twenty-two years old and about to graduate from Princeton, made two of his earliest public appearances. The first was a poem, modeled on a Latin Ode, published in the Nassau Lit with the title "Marxicos Odi," and dedicated "To My Proletarian Sweetheart." The poem evokes the brevity of life, the swift passing of undergraduate pleasures, and their irresistible distraction from more serious things: