Barbarus hic ego sum, quia non intelligor illis. – Ovid
With the economy imploding, and the wars, and crimes, and torture, and impotent political posturing — even as the pockets of the people are picked on a daily basis — there is a time, there must be a time for beauty, for a time apart the madness. We must remember what our humanity is, and why we even bother with the onus of civilization, with its exploitation and its barbarism.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in his famous essay, “Discourse on the Arts and Sciences,” provocatively asked whether it wasn’t such condolences that bound us ever tighter to the chains of oppression: