Thank you very much for this one!
At 12:54 AM 11/14/2000 +0000, you wrote:
>"If you consort with singers and harpists, you may trust your ears, but when
>you go to philosophers, whose proper style is 'Silenorum nostri Alcibiadis',
>you must withdraw from the senses, you must return into yourself, you must
>penetrate into the depths of your soul and the recesses of your mind, you
>must acquire the ears of the Tyanean with which, because he was no longer in
>his body, he heard not the terrestrial Marsyas but the heavenly Apollo, who
>on his divine lyre, with ineffable modes, tuned the melodies of the
>spheres."
>
>Giovanni Pico della Mirandola: letter to Ermolao Barbaro, Opera p.354.
>
>.......
>
>Does one choose the instruments of Marsyas or the instruments of Apollo?
>Steven J. Willett seems to have settled for one, while Shirley Sharon-Zisser
>seeks another.
>
>In the woodcut from "October", in SC, the instrument of Marsyas is offered
>to the poet. Should he accept? Did he, indeed, accept? As in Theocritus,
>the instrument is unplayed. And perhaps it is meant to remain unplayed (it
>has, after all, nine stops, so how would one play that?). Carefully
>constructed as it is, it is, nevertheless, nothing but a prize, a reward.
>But shouldn't one refuse it, and look elsewhere?
>
>Andy
David Lee Miller
Department of English
University of Kentucky
Lexington, KY 40506-0027
859-257-6965 (office)
859-252-3680 (home)
859-323-1072 (fax)
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