This week’s Ecosophian offering is the monthly open post to field questions and encourage discussion among my readers. All the standard rules apply (no profanity, no sales pitches, no trolling, no rudeness, no paid propagandizing, no long screeds proclaiming the infallible truth of fill in the blank, no endless rehashes of questions I’ve already answered)…
Month: April 2025
Lords of the Fall
It’s been nine months now since I set aside the other preoccupations of this blog and launched a project I’d had in mind for many years—a discussion of the political and economic subtext underlying Richard Wagner’s vast operatic cycle The Nibelung’s Ring. All things considered, nine months ago was a propitious time for such a…
A Vision: Preliminaries
In the autumn of 1917 William Butler Yeats was at a turning point in his life and his two careers, the public one and the other, secret one. In his public career as an author, he had clawed his way up from among the crowd of writers whose work kept the British publishing industry of…
Parsifal: The Solution Assessed
As we saw two weeks ago, Richard Wagner’s last opera Parsifal makes use of most of the same symbols as The Ring of the Nibelung, and thus provides a mordant commentary to the theme of that vast and sprawling work. The magic treasure, the magic spear, the antagonist who wins power by a terrible renunciation…