This from Michael Burleigh's endlessly rewarding (and rewardingly endless) Earthly Powers:
In 1896 he [Charles Maurras] attended the Olympic Games in his capacity of freelance journalist. An antique bust, which an Athenian museum claimed resembled Christ, forced Maurras to seek the afternoon sun. As darkness fell, he identified the suffering God with the onset of the long night of the modern age. Contemplating the chaos of Greek politics, and the success of athletes from the two monarchies Britain and Germany, his thoughts clouded over as they drifted to the turbulence abroad in France...
Sunday, May 04, 2008
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A blog about, among other things, imaginary ideas - What ifs? and Imagine thats. What if photographs looked nothing like what we see with our eyes? Imagine that the Berlin Wall had never come down. What if we were the punchline of an interminable joke? All contributions welcome.
Ah thank you Nige. Yes I enjoyed writing that book. Maybe because it was all relatively unfamiliar. Still, Sacred Causes has its moments too- especially the barefoot prophets of Weimar and a remarkable German-Argentinian journalist who died too young, but at least wrote 'Hidden Religions' which prefigured some of the sicknesses of our time.
ReplyDeleteI intend to move on to Sacred Causes after a decent interval and a little fiction
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