Cayalá should encourage both our traditionalist and voluntarist instincts. Its prosperity is a testament to traditional design principles, while the speed with which it was built shows us what is possible.

Percival’s sister’s bleeding out is instructive. It stands for the scattering of energies released from their proper, ordered course within the organism, in order that another may feed on them.

Uncertainty faces us more regularly than certainty. What are we to make of this? 

As in most of the great classics, the essential nature of gratitude in difficult circumstances is constantly emphasized.

The fact that demonstrating pride in one’s country is considered ‘fascist’ speaks to the utter insanity of the current ethos.

When America sneezes, the world catches a cold. Ireland is now paralyzed by an involuntary expulsion of ‘woke’ air that managed to travel 4,000 miles across the Atlantic Ocean.

This is what it means to have a leader who believes that the faith that was inseparable from the founding of the nation is vital to its survival.

If we each operate as insulated, atomic individuals, with our own private concepts of human flourishing, then the great work of civilisation-building is impossible.

Steffani’s Stabat mater is the resounding counterpart to Bernini’s overwhelming “L’Estasi di Santa Teresa d’Avila,” even though that sculpture was created almost 80 years earlier.

The disappearance of the fear of hell, Arendt tells us, leads directly to the institutionalization of immorality, and the transformation of the deviant will of a Hitler or a Stalin into state policy.

If the ‘M’ word is uttered, the malefactor’s hearers often reply: “So, you want to be a lord or something? If we had a monarchy again, you’d be nothing!” My favourite response: “What makes you think I’m something now? Do you think the chancellor cares if you or I live or die?”

What is so miraculous about this 182 bars long lullaby, the 11th of a total of 16 songs and cantatas that Tarquinio Merula compiled in his Opus 13?