The only way out of it seems to be for somebody to love Pimlico: to love it with a transcendental tie and without any earthly reason. If there arose a man who loved Pimlico, then Pimlico would rise into ivory towers and golden pinnacles; Pimlico would attire herself as a woman does when she is loved. For decoration is not given to hide horrible things: but to decorate things already adorable. A mother does not give her child a blue bow because he is so ugly without it. A lover does not give a girl a necklace to hide her neck. If men loved Pimlico as mothers love children, arbitrarily, because it is THEIRS, Pimlico in a year or two might be fairer than Florence.
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Vithericus
November 1, 2023
The film is specifically about timelesness, or the contrast between linear profane time and the cyclical, sacred time of the gods. The protagonists are two brothers, Justin and Aaron, orphaned in childhood when their parents died in a car crash, rescued and raised by the members of the desert cult, Camp Arcadia. Having grown up, they had decided to leave the cult behind, smear it in front of the press and return to wider society. After ten years, realising they still failed to adapt to contemporary society, despite periodic therapy sessions and failed attempts at socialising, Aaron receives a video cassette from Anna, an attractive female member of the cult
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Insight into illness generally is dependent on the right hemisphere, and those who have damage to the right hemisphere tend to deny their illness – the well-recognised, and extraordinary phenomenon of anosognosia, in which patients deny or radically minimise the fact that they have, for example, a blatant loss of use of what may be one entire half of the body.A patient with a completely paralysed (left) limb may pointedly refuse to accept that there is anything wrong with it, and will come up with the most preposterous explanations for
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Vithericus
April 17, 2021
In his book, ‘The Master and his Emissary’, Iain McGilchrist makes the case that the worldview of the left hemisphere of the brain (the emissary) has been in ascendancy for many centuries, to the detriment of the more subtle right brain (the master). At page 14 of his book, Iain tells a parable (wrongly attributed to Nietzsche) that gives us the key to his central thesis – a tale of historical usurpation:
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Vithericus
March 26, 2021
According to Scheler, values are not themselves feelings, though they reach us through the realm of feeling, much as colours reach us through the realm of sight. Scheler, like other phenomenological philosophers, emphasised the interpersonal nature of experience, particularly the nature of emotion, which he thought transcended the individual, and belonged to a realm in which such boundaries no longer applied.
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Vithericus
March 14, 2021
‘Our attention is responsive to the world. There are certain modes of attention which are naturally called forth by certain kinds of object. We pay a different sort of attention to a dying man from the sort of attention we’d pay to a sunset, or a carburettor. However, the process is reciprocal. It is not just that what we find determines the nature of the attention we accord to it, but that the attention we pay to anything also determines what it is we find. In special circumstances, the dying man may become for a pathologist a textbook of disease, or for a photojournalist a ‘shot’
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Vithericus
March 13, 2021
The following quote is from Oswald Spengler’s seminal work, ‘The Decline of the West’. While reading this it is great to notice the parallels between his ideas and those of Iain McGilchrist. ‘Imitation’ belongs to the realm of the Master, while ‘Ornament’ – to that of the Emissary. Spengler seems to be one of the few historians who
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Vithericus
January 12, 2021
Those who have spent time on an anti-theist or rationalist forum have no doubt noticed a strange form of catharsis, characteristic of former believers – the desire to curse, blaspheme and profane symbols held as sacred by others. The emotional impulse that urges them to curse God is not an unconscious aspect of their behaviour; they engage in it deliberately, claiming it’s a sign of high intelligence or that it exalts the only virtue held sacred in
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Vithericus
January 11, 2021
The following lines are an accurate re-telling of a dream I had in January 2021. Nothing’s made up or embellished, all except for the character names which have been replaced with ones that, I believe, are more evocative.
SCENE 1 – HYDE PARK
Dr. Phaedrus was all over Youtube. His lectures on his peculiar Neo-Platonic thought were spreading exponentially, and still he had the common sense to promote real life meetings over impersonal online interactions. Large crowds were gathering in Hyde Park to listen to his free talks on various issues, and I was always there to hear him speak. I was generally favourable towards his ideas, although still not an adept. Certain aspects of his philosophy were over the top; he and his wife had 13 or 14 children of various ages and some of his actions were too eccentric for my tastes.
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Vithericus
January 10, 2021
