Start with everything lost
It is by understanding the shape of impression and the process of etching that one begins to fathom the missing pieces of the puzzle, binding each moment so tightly with perfect chaos in a perpetual balance between right and wrong, suffering and joy.
In order to redeem your body, you will endure iron and fire, etc.
In order to be well in spirit, will you deny anything?— Ovid, Remedia Amoris
Divine blind testimony
After serving as foreign secretary and advisor to Cromwell to depose a king in revolution, Milton blindly recites divine testimony to his daughters, who begrudgingly serve their exacting, extraordinary father.
Matter constitutes what is common, the form what is proper.
— John Milton, Artis Logicae
Remnants to ruminate upon
It is in how Cicero speaks that we discover the inverse past in flourishing glory.
You are so far from the perfection of the greatest works, that you have not yet laid the foundations you are considering.
— Cicero, Pro Marcello
Orate with destiny
Information shapes the information that shapes us.
But when he was faced with this condition, that he should either accuse justly and dutifully or die bitterly and disgracefully, he chose to accuse in any way possible rather than die in that way.
— Cicero, Pro Cluentio
He now ordered the silver tables to be removed from all shrines, on which, following the old Greek custom, was inscribed ‘of the good gods’, so he claimed he wanted to make use of their goodness: the gods are good: their goodness should therefore be used.
— Cicero, De Natura Deorum
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Fates’ reasons
The irrationality of governing patterns martyrs for the benefit of many in ways impossible to justify from an internal perspective.
Sometimes they call the providence of God, which pertains to humans, fortune, because it effects many unforeseen and unexpected things for us due to the obscurity and ignorance of the causes.
— Cicero, Academica
The cause is what brings about that of which it is the cause.
— Cicero, De Fato
Pan et circus
Control is necessary for progress with diabolical madness tempting both the tempted and temptor.
They were not carried away by the desire for glory because where there is no public honor, there can be no desire for glory.
— Cicero, Agrarian Law II
Legacy ensues
Etched in the memory of history and not swept away by fate, the glory of genius becomes the fabric of the story that crystallizes into the culmination of art in a reflective stasis.
And indeed that leader of genius and learning, Plato, only then thought that the republics would be happy, if either educated and wise men began to govern them, or those who governed, placed all their study in learning and wisdom.
— Cicero, Ad Quintum Fratrem
Foreboding future
Twisting fate into an epic spanning eons squeezes testimony into fractured truths and hard lines of cohesive experience, colored by the stains of greatness and tragedy.
Perhaps someone (for there are such people) will call these things small;
But what singly do not profit, in multitudes they help.— Ovid, Remedia Amoris
Either my bold attempt will be successful and safe,
or death will be the end of my anxious love.— Ovid, Heroides
