I know no more about this play than anyone who manages to read it attentively. . . . I do not know who Godot is. I do not even know if he exists. And I do not know if they believe he does, these two who are waiting for him.

Fifteen or twenty years of silence and solitude . . . I feel this evening that that would suit me, and suit me the least badly possible. I have bought a wheelbarrow, my first wheelbarrow! It goes very well, with its one wheel. I keep an eye on the love-life of the Colorado beetle and work against it, successfully but humanely, that is to say by throwing the parents into my neighbor’s garden and burning the eggs. If only someone had done that for me!

— The Letters of Samuel Beckett: Volume 2, 1941-1956

— Sleepz and Thinkz

But then I sigh and, with a piece of scripture,
Tell them that God bids us do good for evil;
And thus I clothe my naked villainy
With odd old ends stol’n forth of Holy Writ,
And seem a saint when most I play the devil.

— William Shakespeare, Richard III

Boethius On the Consolation of Philosophy (with commentary by Nicholas Trivet)
Italy: 1385
MS Hunter 374 (V.1.11)

The Consolation of Philosophy was the most important and influential philosophical treatise of the Middle Ages. A great scholar, Boethius (c.480-524) was an important government official for the Ostrogoth king Theodoric in Rome. He was accused of treason in 522 for defending the rights of the Senate too strenuously, imprisoned, and executed in 524. He wrote the De Consolatione Philosophiae while in custody. In it, the allegorical figure Philosophia converses with Boethius, leading him from self pity to an enlightened, rational view of the human condition. Chaucer translated the work in his Boece, and it also pervades both The Knight’s Tale and Troilus and Criseyde, enriching them with a philosophical gravity.

In this manuscript, each of the five books of the Consolation is introduced by a beautifully floreated and gilt initial. The initial ‘C’ of Book I, shown to the left, incorporates a scene of Boethius instructing his students; below is a depiction of the author in his prison at Pavia. The volume was written for one Gregorius of Genoa. The scribe, Brother Amadeus, signs the work in two places; while modestly claiming to be the least of all scribes (‘ego enim sum minimus omnium scriptorum frater Amadeus’), he has produced a book of surpassing beauty.

— Chaucer’s influences

That Lucretius and many others did more than simply associate themselves with Epicurus — that they celebrated him as godlike in his wisdom and courage — depended not on his social credentials but upon what they took to be the saving power of his vision. The core of his vision may be traced back to a single incandescent idea: that everything that has ever existed and everything that will ever exist is put together out of indestructible building blocks, irreducibly small in size, unimaginably vast in number. The Greeks had a word for these invisible building blocks, things that, as they conceived them, could not be divided any further: atoms.

The notion of atoms, which originated in the fifth century BCE with Leucippus of Abdera his prize student Democritus, was only a dazzling speculation; there was no way to get any empirical proof and wouldn’t be for more than two thousand years. Other philosophers had competing theories: the core matter of the universe, they argued, was fire or water or air or earth, or some combination of these. Others suggested that if you could perceive the smallest particle of a man, you would find an infinitesimally tiny man; and similarly for a horse, a droplet of water, or a blade of grass. Others again proposed that the intricate order in the universe was evidence of an invisible mind or spirit that carefully put the pieces together according to a preconceived plan. Democritus’ conception of an infinite number of atoms that have no qualities except size, figure, and weight — particles then that are not miniature versions of what we see but rather form what we see by combining with each other in an inexhaustible variety of shapes — was a fantastically daring solution to a problem that engaged the great intellects of his world.

It took many generations to think through the implications of this solution. (We have by no means yet thought through them all.) Epicurus began his efforts to do so at the age of twelve, when to his disgust his teachers could not explain to him the meaning of chaos. Democritus’ old idea of atoms seemed to him the most promising clue, and he set to work to follow it wherever it would take him. By the age of thirty-two he was ready to found a school. There, in a garden in Athens, Epicurus constructed a whole account of the universe and a philosophy of human life.

In constant motion, atoms collide with each other, Epicurus reasoned, and in certain circumstances, they form larger and larger bodies. The largest observable bodies — the sun and the moon — are made of atoms, just as are human beings and waterflies and grains of sand. There are no supercategories of matter; no hierarchy of elements. Heavenly bodies are not divine beings who shape our destiny for good or ill, nor do they move through the void under the guidance of gods: they are simply part of the natural order, enormous structures of atoms subject to the same principles of creation and destruction that govern everything that exists. And if the natural order is unimaginably vast and complex, it is nonetheless possible to understand something of its basic constitutive elements and its universal laws. Indeed, such understanding is one of human life’s deepest pleasures.

This pleasure is perhaps the key to comprehending the powerful impact of Epicurus’ philosophy; it was as if he unlocked for his followers an inexhaustible source of gratification hidden within Democritus’ atoms. For us, the impact is rather difficult to grasp. For one thing, the pleasure seems too intellectual to reach more than a tiny number of specialist; for another, we have come to associate atoms far more with fear than with gratification. But though ancient philosophy was hardly a mass movement, Epicurus was offering something more than caviar to a handful of particle physicists. Indeed, eschewing the self-enclosed, specialized language of an inner circle of adepts, he insisted on using ordinary language, on addressing the widest circle of listeners, even on proselytizing. And the enlightenment he offered did not require sustained scientific inquiry. You did not need a detailed grasp of the actual laws of the physical universe; you needed only to comprehend that there is a hidden natural explanation for everything that alarms or eludes you. That explanation will inevitably lead you back to atoms. if you can hold on to and repeat to yourself the simplest fact of existence — atoms and void and nothing else, atoms and void and nothing else, atoms and void and nothing else — your life will change. You will no longer fear Jove’s wrath, whenever you hear a peal of thunder, or suspect that someone has offended Apollo, whenever there is an outbreak of influenza. And you will be freed from a terrible affliction — what Hamlet, many centuries later, described as “the dread of something after death,/The undiscovered country from whose bourn/No traveller returns.”

Against other things it is possible to obtain security, but when it comes to death we human beings all live in an unwalled city.

— Stephen Greenblatt, The Swerve: How the World Become Modern

In any human endeavor, some fraction of its practitioners will be motivated to pursue that activity with such concentrated focus and unalloyed passion that it will consume them utterly. One has to look no further than individuals who feel compelled to devote their lives to becoming concert pianists, say, or climbing Mount Everest. For some, the province of the extreme holds an allure that’s irresistible. And a certain percentage of such fanatics will inevitably fixate on matters of the spirit.

The zealot may be outwardly motivated by the anticipation of a great reward at the other end — wealth, fame, eternal salvation — but the real recompense is probably the obsession itself. This is no less true for the religious fanatic than for the fanatical pianist or fanatical mountain climber. As a result of his (or her) infatuation, existence overflows with purpose. Ambiguity vanishes from the fanatic’s worldview; a narcissistic sense of self-assurance displaces all doubt. A delicious rage quickens his pulse, fueled by the sins and shortcomings of lesser mortals, who are soiling the world wherever he looks. His perspective narrows until the last remnants of proportion are shed from his life. Through immoderation, he experiences something akin to rapture.

Although the far territory of the extreme can exert an intoxicating pull on susceptible individuals of all bents, extremism seems to be especially prevalent among those inclined by temperament or upbringing toward religious pursuits. Faith is the very antithesis of reason, injudiciousness a crucial component of spiritual devotion. And when religious fanaticism supplants ratiocination, all bets are suddenly off. Anything can happen. Absolutely anything. Common sense is no match for the voice of God . . .

— Jon Krakauer, Under the Banner of Heaven

Gold, silver, jewels, purple garments, houses built of marble, groomed estates, pious paintings, caparisoned steeds, and other things of this kind offer a mutable and superficial pleasure; books give delight to the very marrow of one’s bones. They speak to us, consult with us, and join with us in a living and intense intimacy.

— Petrarch

Bart Simpson:   [Looking inside an abandoned mine]   The legends are true!
Milhouse Van Houten:   Did you find gold?
Bart Simpson:   Better! The prospectors left naughty French postcards. Ooh-la-la!
Nelson Muntz:   That’s fool’s porn. I’ll take them off your hands for ya.
[Takes cards and goes behind a cactus]
Nelson Muntz:   C’est si bon! Si bon! Si bon! And… remorse.

— “The Simpsons: The Scorpion’s Tale (#22.15)” (2011)

No Western nation is as religion-soaked as ours, where nine out of ten of us love God and are loved by him in return. That mutual passion centers our society and demands some understanding, if our doom-eager society is to be understood at all.

— Harold Bloom, The American Religion

Extreme and bizarre religious ideas are so commonplace in American history that it is difficult to speak of them as fringe at all. To speak of a fringe implies a mainstream, but in terms of numbers, perhaps the largest component of the religious spectrum in contemporary America remains what it has been since colonial times: a fundamentalist evangelicalism with powerful millenarian strands. The doomsday theme has never been far from the center of religious thought. The nation has always had believers who responded to this threat by a determination to flee from the wrath to come, to separate themselves from the City of Destruction, even if that meant putting themselves at odds with the law and with their communities or families. . . . We can throughout American history find select and separatist groups who looked to a prophetic individual claiming divine revelation, in a setting that repudiated conventional assumptions about property, family life, and sexuality. They were marginal groups, peculiar people, people set apart from the world: The Shakers and the Ephrata community, the communes of Oneida and Amana, the followers of Joseph Smith and Brigham Young.

— Philip Jenkins, Mystics and Messiahs

There is a dark side to religious devotion that is too often ignored or denied. As a means of motivating people to be cruel or inhumane — as a means of inciting evil, to borrow the vocabulary of the devout — there may be no more potent force than religion.

— Jon Krakauer, Under the Banner of Heaven

And it shall come to pass that I, the Lord God, will send one mighty and strong, holding the scepter of power in his hand, clothed with light for a covering, whose mouth shall utter words, eternal words; while his bowels shall be a fountain of truth, to set in order the house of God.

— The Doctrine and Covenants, Section 85
Revealed to Joseph Smith on November 27, 1832

Just when the gods had ceased to be, and the Christ had not yet come, there was a unique moment in history, between Cicero and Marcus Aurelius, when man stood alone.

— Gustave Flaubert

By Patrick Dillon
MoreIntelligentLife

Making his own choice of the best time to have been alive, Edward Gibbon, author of “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” (1776-89), didn’t have much doubt. “If a man were called to fix the period in the history of the world during which the condition of the human race was most happy and prosperous, he would, without hesitation, name that which elapsed from the death of Domitian to the accession of Commodus.” This was the second century AD, when Rome’s “five good emperors”, Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, Antoninus Pius and Marcus Aurelius, brought a peace and stability that western Europe would—in Gibbon’s view—never see again. But maybe it was an easier question then. Gibbon was white, smart and male. He could walk from the right end of one hierarchical society into another without a tremor. Nor was he sacrificing much technology to do so. Barring gunpowder and the printing press, his world and Hadrian’s were close enough to let Gibbon swap breeches for a toga and barely notice the difference.

For us, the question needs a little more thought. Anyone who dislikes pain, prefers their operations under anaesthetic, and has no wish to die of smallpox, might well choose to live now. We can balance that by awarding ourselves perpetual good health, but it’s harder to level the playing field when it comes to gender. Not many modern women, however frustrated with their lot, would choose to go back to long skirts, tight corsets and a general assumption that they are stupid. The same may apply to any European who isn’t white, and to anyone in the less affluent three-quarters of society. My children once went on a school trip to Apsley House, the Duke of Wellington’s home. I thought they were going to learn about lords; instead they were taught what it was like being a servant. Transport most of us to ancient Rome and we’ll find ourselves in a poorhouse or slave barracks. To give our question a chance, we have to assume that we can do our time travel, if not first-class, then in premium economy, switching genders if we feel like it, to land somewhere moderately comfortable.

This isn’t a question about technology, where the present will always trump the past. It’s about lifestyle and ideas, people and manners, things that ebb and flow. Armed with a passport to the good life in a time and place of our choice, not many will pass on the journey. Culture-vultures will book their seats in Shakespeare’s Globe in 1599 or the Cotton Club, Harlem, in the 1920s. Hero-worshippers will queue up to watch Michelangelo chisel stone in 1501 or Genghis Khan ride into battle in 1206. Epicures, the most prudent time-travellers, will follow Gibbon to Rome, or time their birth to dodge a call-up for the world wars and surf the Pax Americana.

Peace and stability are all very well, but several of mankind’s giant leaps have come in times of war. Democracy got going, and conversation buzzed, in Athens in the fifth century BC, with the Peloponnesian war raging outside. I’d brave the 16th-century Wars of Religion to catch the Reformation, or the Thirty Years War (1618-48) to watch the Enlightenment dawn. What I’m after is a sense of possibility. There’s a striking moment at the start of Thucydides’ “Peloponnesian War” when he surveys Greek history up to then. The striking part is, it only lasts a couple of pages. History is still on Series One. And maybe that sense of freshness is why the present doesn’t hold all the cards. Our own excitement in the rich, free West seems to have leaked away. A third of us can’t be bothered to use the votes Libyans are dying for. We have freed slaves, empowered women, shaken off tyrants. We should be living happily ever after, yet we’re not. Reason enough to tack against time and find a place where the future hasn’t gone stale.

It’s tempting to go by what you might witness—Socrates arguing with Plato in Athens, their contemporary Confucius riding through China, or Julius Caesar tangling with Cicero in 50BC Rome. But that would just be time tourism.

The Byzantine empire at its height would be hard to beat for other-worldly glitter, but the power of church and emperor rules it out. Knights on horseback put the Middle Ages out of bounds as far as I’m concerned. Of all the Renaissance states, Vicenza in the 16th century stands out, with Palladio to build you a villa and a chance to studio-crawl round some of the Venetian artists who fill our museums today. Amsterdam in the golden age of the 17th century also comes close, but that’s putting a lot of weight on culture, and we need something broader. The French ancien régime is almost appealing enough to mute my objection to absolute monarchs. Talleyrand, the sly politician who grew up under it and survived the twists and turns of its demise, maintained that “anyone who hasn’t lived in the 18th century before the revolution does not know the sweetness of living.”

Part of the challenge is that we’re not just looking for a single charismatic moment. Places exist in time. What have the old people seen? What’s in store for the children? We’re looking for a turning point, a place living through changes whose effects are with us still. Which brings us to London in the 1690s, just after the Glorious Revolution that drove James II from his throne in a coup led by Prince William of Orange.

This London has a back story as rich as its potential. Its old people might have shaken the hand of Shakespeare, as well as surviving two civil wars; their grandchildren will die in the capital of a global empire. Around them, a whole new world is taking shape. At Jonathan’s coffee house, you can watch the stockmarket being born; insurance is being invented at Lloyd’s, and the new Bank of England is laying the foundations of national finance. Walking down Cheapside, you can buy an uncensored newspaper or stop to pray in a chapel of your choice. Your father couldn’t do either. Parliament has just begun a continuous tradition of government that will last for centuries. In the bookshops around Westminster Hall, you can buy Isaac Newton’s “Principia” warm off the press, as well as economic texts that talk for the first time about supply and demand, the way money isn’t fixed in value, and why credit matters more than gold. And you may well understand what they are saying, because enlightenment disciplines are still young and connected enough for a generalist to grasp.

Leisure is thriving in 1690s London. Pleasure gardens are opening and French food is all the rage, swept in by Huguenot immigration. You can go to the first night of Vanbrugh’s “The Relapse”, or Purcell’s “The Fairy Queen”. Coffee houses are packed and the craic is good: the age of wits such as Steele and Addison is dawning. Fashion has arrived, and the Strand is full of luxury shops whose display windows are a novelty, as are most of the things they sell. Best of all, the walk across town takes far longer than it took your father because this is becoming the first monster metropolis. “When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life,” Samuel Johnson said 80 years later. You can watch his sparkling city take shape.

No one is celebrating yet. People are saying there’ll be another coup and the newfangled stockmarket will crash again. That’s all part of the charge. Things are happening in London—tolerance, freedom of the press and parliament, consumerism, scientific breakthroughs, economic transformation—that millions of people will still be benefiting from 320 years later. In the coffee house, they talk of the new mathematics for calculating probability. That’s what the insurance market is about, as well as the gambling craze that’s ruining aristocrats all over town: a whole new engagement with possibility, an understanding that the future isn’t going to be like the past. And that’s what draws me to London in the 1690s, despite the wigs, the quack doctors and the stink of coal smoke. The modern world is starting, and I want to be there.

a lurch of drunkards
a frenzy of psychopaths
a snide of gossips
a drab of accountants
a flatter of hairdressers
a slither of yes-men
a tremble of freshmen
a scrimp of landlords
a shallow of debutantes
an annoyance of mimes
a carp of critics
a gripe of actors
a bombast of politicians
a dribble of Republicans
a stubble of uncles
a bleak of pessimists
a slack of procrastinators
a drone of teachers
a groan of comedians
an ooze of network executives
a squelch of chaperones
a swaddle of  baby-sitters
a grumpy of principals
a deft of magicians
a chill of assassins
a scam of televangelists
a creep of thieves
a muddle of experts
a bawl of infants
a pester of perfectionists
a squint of astronomers
a cram of students
a shout of ventriloquists
a quagmire of bureaucrats
a drub of bullies
a primp of fashion models
a crimp of chiropractors
a cruller of dietitians
a briny of sailors
a chirp of cheerleaders
a gloat of millionaires
a prey of lawyers

— Matt Groening, Bart Simpson’s Guide to Life: a wee handbook for the perplexed

Other people, so I have read, treasure memorable moments in their lives: the time one climbed the Parthenon at sunrise, the summer night one met a lonely girl in Central Park and achieved with her a sweet and natural relationship, as they say in books. I too once met a girl in Central Park, but it is not much to remember. What I remember is the time John Wayne killed three men with a carbine as he was falling to the dusty street in Stagecoach, and the time the kitten found Orson Welles in the doorway in The Third Man.

— Walker Percy, The Moviegoer

I am just a poor boy
Though my story’s seldom told
I have squandered my resistance
For a pocket full of mumbles such are promises
All lies and jests
Still a man hears what he wants to hear
And disregards the rest

When I left my home and my family
I was no more than a boy
In the company of strangers
In the quiet of the railway station running scared
Laying low, seeking out the poorer quarters
Where the ragged people go
Looking for the places only they would know

Lie la lie …

Asking only workman’s wages
I come looking for a job
But I get no offers,
Just a come-on from the whores on Seventh Avenue
I do declare, there were times when I was so lonesome
I took some comfort there

Lie la lie …

Then I’m laying out my winter clothes
And wishing I was gone
Going home
Where the New York City winters aren’t bleeding me
Bleeding me, going home

In the clearing stands a boxer
And a fighter by his trade
And he carries the reminders
Of ev’ry glove that layed him down
Or cut him till he cried out
In his anger and his shame
“I am leaving, I am leaving”
But the fighter still remains

Lie la lie …

Hang around, Willie Boy
Don’t you raise the sails anymore
It’s for sure, I’ve spent my whole life at sea
And I’m pushin’ age seventy three
Now there’s only one place that was meant for me

Oh, to be home again
Down in old Virginny
With my very best friend
They call him Ragtime Willie
We’re gonna soothe away the rest of our years
We’re gonna put away all of our tears
That big rockin’ chair won’t go nowhere

Slow down, Willie Boy
Your heart’s gonna give right out on you
It’s true, and I believe I know what we should do
Turn the stern and point to shore
The seven seas won’t carry us no more

Oh, to be home again
Down in old Virginny
With my very best friend
They call him Ragtime Willie
I can’t wait to sniff that air
Dip’n snuff, I won’t have no care
That big Rockin’ Chair won’t go nowhere

Hear the sound, Willie Boy
The Flyin’ Dutchman’s on the reef
It’s my belief
We’ve used up all our time
This hill’s to steep to climb
And the days that remain ain’t worth a dime

Oh, to be home again
Down in old Virginny
With my very best friend
They call him Ragtime Willie
Would-a-been nice just t’see the folks
listen once again to the stale jokes
That big Rockin’ Chair won’t go nowhere

I can hear something calling on me
And you know where I want to be
Oh Willie don’t you hear that sound
Oh to be home again down in old Virginny
I just want to get my feet back on the ground
Oh to be home again down in old Virginny
I’d love to see my very best friend
They call him Rag-time Willie
I believe old rockin chair’s got me
Oh to be home again

Dirty old river, must you keep rolling
Flowing into the night
People so busy, makes me feel dizzy
Taxi light shines so bright
But I don’t need no friends
As long as I gaze on Waterloo sunset
I am in paradise

Every day I look at the world from my window
But chilly, chilly is the evening time
Waterloo sunset’s fine

Terry meets Julie, Waterloo Station
Every Friday night
But I am so lazy, don’t want to wander
I stay at home at night
But I don’t feel afraid
As long as I gaze on Waterloo sunset
I am in paradise

Every day I look at the world from my window
But chilly, chilly is the evening time
Waterloo sunset’s fine

Millions of people swarming like flies ’round Waterloo underground
But Terry and Julie cross over the river
Where they feel safe and sound
And they don’t need no friends
As long as they gaze on Waterloo sunset
They are in paradise

Waterloo sunset’s fine

Technology, in short, made us human.

— Orion Magazine