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Trinkets of Virtue

So here is a musing on a interview with Ken Kesey for Paris Review. I read it long time ago so no much is left in my memory of it and when I found my little piece in the archives, it sounded ok so I decided to publish it again. I don’t think that many people would have read it before anyway. I wasn’t a part of the Beat generation, neither of its later sprout, the Hippy flower child. On The Road was not yet translated in socialist Bulgaria when I was at school in the late 70s. Fly over the Cuckoo Nest was translated but ‘of course, everybody knew it was written against the Capitalist society’. LSD, mescaline, the Doors, the Byrds and anything of this sort did not even exist in our world – ‘the dust bowl of reality’. My father was arrested for dancing rock&roll on a table and girls with short skirts had stamps put on their hips so they cannot ware them again.Even religion wasn’t there to give some kind of hope to the searching minds.  But both the Beat generation and we, behind t...
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In the Spur of the Moment


Did Seneca write this for us, the dharma people, visiting Buddhist teachings, by any chance? Why does this sound so familiar?


'Some come not to learn but just to hear him, in the same way as we are drawn to a theatre, for the sake of entertainment. You’ll find that a large proportion of the philosopher’s audience is made up of this element, which regards his lecture-hall as a place of lodging for periods of leisure. They’re not concerned to rid themselves of any faults there, but simply to enjoy the full pleasure the ear has to offer. ... Some of them are stirred by the noble sentiments they hear; their faces and spirits light up and they enter into the emotion of the speaker, going into a transport just like the eunuch priests who work themselves into a frenzy, to order, at the sound of a Phrygian flute. They are captivated and aroused not by a din of empty words, but by the splendour of the actual content of the speaker’s words – any expression of bold or spirited defiance of death or fortune making you keen to translate what you’ve heard into action straight away. They are deeply affected by the words and become the persons they are told to be – or would if the impression on their minds were to last, if this magnificent enthusiasm were not immediately intercepted by that discourager of noble conduct, the crowd: very few succeed in getting home in the same frame of mind.'

Seneca, Letters to Lucullus, Letter CVIII.

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