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episode caricatures the *#tlzqm3 interminable quarrel of Rabelais's own lawyer father with neighbors over the fishing rights in a stream. Here Rabelais introduces one of his most attractive inventions, the good-natured monk Frere Jean whose deeds of valor defend the local shepherds against the aggressive King Picrochole of the Cake Peddlers. Gargantua finally rewards Frere Jean by building him a new kind of monastery (or anti-monastery), the proverbial Abbey of Theleme, ruled by the motto "Do what you will." Inhabited only by handsome men and women richly "dressed according to their own fancy," it becomes an epicure's utopia. Members mens nike air max ltd of the order speak a half-dozen languages, play musical instruments, and write verses to one another-the girls by the age of ten, the boys by twelve. Pantagruel's adventures in Book Two, written sometime before Book One, are disjointed and delightfully random. Pantagruel's youth, like that of his father, is filled by noble deeds. In Paris for his education he meets his lifelong companion Panurge. Gargantua pleads for Renaissance 1earning mens nike air air max store 95 max heels in a letter to his son. And Pantagruel shrewdly settles a legal quibble between Lord Kissarse and Monsieur Suckpoop by theological hairsplitting debated in sign-language. Then Pantagruel and Panurge are off to the war in Utopia, which was being laid waste by the Dipsodes. When their friend Epistemon is decapitated, Panurge holds the head against his codpiece, "to keep it warm, as well as to keep it out of the draught." Then with fifteen or sixteen stitches he reattaches Epistemon's head. "Epistemon was healed, and very cleverly, too, except that he was hoarse for more than three weeks afterward, and had a hacking cough, which he could only get rid of by drinking a lot." Meanwhile, Epistemon has been dead long enough to have some wonderful adventures in hell and the Elysian Fields. There Alexander the Great earns a miserable living patching old shoes, and Xerxes hawks mustard. "All the Knights of mens nike air max shoes grey the Round Table were poor day-laborers,plying an oar on the rivers Cocytus, Phlegethon, Styx, Acheron, and Lethe.But for each fare, all they get is a punch in the nose, and at night, alittle piece of moldy bread." Needless to say, Pantagruel and Panurge win

At his death some four *#tlzqm4 hundred of these books were inherited by his heir, Stephan von Bruening, who gave them to Anton Schindler, Beethoven's devoted servant, secretary, pupil, and companion for the last ten years of his life. Schindler used them for his copious adulatory biography, finally published in 1860. Having drawn on them for his own purposes, in 1846 Schindler sold them to the Royal Prussian Library in Berlin, recalling that Beethoven had wished them to be available to everybody. What he delivered to the library was not 400 conversation books but only 126. When the librarian asked for the missing 264, Schindler explained that he had de- stroyed some because they contained nothing significant, and others be- cause they were politically embarrassing with "licentious assaults against persons in highest places." It is more likely that Schindler destroyed them to conceal damaging facts about his idol's private life or uncomplimentary remarks about himself. For obvious reasons, this strangely intimate record covering mostly the last nine years of Beethoven's life is emphatically one-sided. Beethoven remained air max sandals 95 a vivacious talker and loved to have his say. In these conversation books we read mainly the cheap nike air max 95 shoes words of his interlocutors or their answers to his questions. When he air max store 95 wrote in the books it was to put down a reminder, or when he feared being overheard or addressed another deaf person, or to record his frequent sense of outrage. But through them we can follow everyday conversations, the fees offered for composing, his concert arrangements, complaints of the price or quality of food or lodging, his reading tastes, the state of his opinions or his digestion, comments from his wayward nephew, menus from his housekeeper, and endless other trivia. Visitors were appalled by Beethoven's personal disarray and slovenly household. He had hardly moved into one apartment before he vacated for another. His biographer, Thayer, could identify more than sixty residential addresses for him after 1800. When Carl Maria von Weber visited him in 1822 he noted music, money, and articles of clothing lying on the fioor, wash piled on a dirty unmade bed, thick dust on the grand piano, and a chipped coffee set on the table. Rossini, whose Barber of Seville Beethoven much admired, was invited air max shoes 95 cheap nike for a visit in 1822, as he reported to Wagner. "Oh! The visit was short. That is easily understood because one side of the conversa- tion had to be carried on in writing. I expressed to him all my admiration for his genius, all my gratitude for having given me the opportunity to express it. He answered with a deep sigh and the single word: 60h! un

The rise of prose as a literary *#tlzqm4 art was destined to have a deep influence on Western literature and education. The mens nike air max shoes grey ancient prophet of humanism Iso- crates (436-338 B.C.), in the shadow of Plato, his eloquent opponent, has received less than his due. His style "survives" in his speeches for Helen and Palamedes. But Plato's dazzling portrayal of Ideas and Absolutes has left us impatient with the prosaic arts of persuasion, the techniques of commu- nity that Isocrates practiced, taught, and defended. Yet the arts of rhetoric, the improvement of the arts of persuasion, would become the basis of humanistic education in the West for the next millennia.While Plato and his Academy aimed to produce philosophers, Isocrates and his schools looked for the statesmen needed in his turbulent age. Theninety-seven years of Isocrates' life stretched from the decline of the Peri- clean empire to the rise of the empire of Philip of Macedon. In 430 B.C. when, for the cheap nike air max 95 shoes first time in many years, Pericles was not reelected to the board of ten generals, he lost the power base from which he had led Athens. His death in 429 B.C. and the collapse of the old empire left Athens in politicallimbo. Isocrates then grew up in the trying years of the Peloponne- sian War (431-404 B.c.), a time of plague in which two of Pericles' sons died and the population was decimated, a time ofbroken peace treaties and bitter naval defeats. Athens's domestic disorders ended in the seizure of power by the Thirty Tyrants, and their removal by a fragile democracy. After ten years as a speech writer, about 393 B.C. Isocrates opened his own school of rhetoric. He would have preferred to call it a school for statesmen. Some biographers see his new career as a kind of conversion, based on Isocrates' belief that rhetoric, the cheap nike air max 95 shoes art of oratory, was the best preparation for statesmen. In 353 he summed up his philosophy of rhetoric: While Isocrates' school, unlike Plato's Academy, was not an elite sect, it was open only to those who could pay in advance the fee of a thousand drachmas for the three- nike air max shoes 2012 or four-year course. Finally his school had taught almost a hundred pupils, but not more than nine at a time. From these fees and from the gifts of wealthy and successful pupils, Isocrates became one of the twelve hundred richest men in Athens. He was called on to perform a "liturgy," a public service of the wealthiest citizens, who were to provide a chorus for one of the dramatic contests, to recruit and train one of the ten teams for the torch race, to underwrite one of the embassies to one of the Panhellenic festivals, or to host a banquet at one of the festivals. An extraordinary liturgy in wartime required the citizen to equip a warship.

THE Hindus have left *#tlzqm3 an eloquent history of their efforts to answer tl riddle of Creation. The Vedas, sacred hymns in archaic women nike air max 95 Sanskrit from abo1500 to goo B.C., do not depict a benevolent Creator, but record a man's a before the Creation as singers of the Vedas chant the radiance of this worl Their objects of worship were devas (cognate with Latin deus, god) deriv from the old Sanskrit div, meaning brightness. Gods were the shining om The luminosity of their world impressed the Hindus from the beginnin Not the fitting-together-ness, not the hierarchy of beings or the order nature, but the blinding splendor, the Light of the World. How the wor once came into being or how it might end seemed irrelevant before t brightness of the visible world. The Vedic hymns leave us a geology of names and myths and legem untroubled by the mysteries of origin and destiny. Over all shines a radia fire illuminating the Hindu vision. The fire-god was everywhere~hc many was he? Sacrificial fire was a messenger carrying the consumed obI tion upward to the gods. Benares, the pilgrim's destination, was the Ci of Light. The god Agni (meaning fire, related to Latin ignis) was said be "the priest of the gods and the god of the priests." In the heavens he u the sun, in the atmosphere he was lightning, and on earth fire. O Agni, illuminator of darkness, day by day we approach you with holy thought bringing homage to you. Presiding at ritual functions, the brightly shining custodian nike air max 2011 shoes of the cosmic order. . . . The god who makes fire and light makes all seeing possible. What sanc fies the worshiper is no act of conversion, no change of spirit, but the simj act of seeing, the Hindi word darsan. A Hindu goes to a temple not"worship," but rather "for darsan, " to see the image nike air max shoes 2012 of the deity. Each the cities sacred to each of the thousands of gods offers its own spec darsan: Benares (Varanasi) for the darsan of Lord Visvanath, the hi Himalayas for the darsan of Vishnu, or a nearby hilltop for the darsan a local air max shoes 95 cheap nike god. In the life of the sacred city of Benares the quest for seei embodies much that is distinctive to the religions of Hindus. The Hindi dazzled by a vision of the holy, not merely holy people but places like . Himalayan peaks where the gods live, or the Ganges which flows fri Heaven to Earth, or countless inconspicuous sites where gods or goddes

The fame and the credit *#tlzqm3 for building the Parthenon came not to its"architects" but mainly to Pericles, with incidental notice to Phidias as Pericles' supervisor for all the reconstruction on the Acropolis. A century later Demosthenes (385?-322 B.C.) air max shoes 94 looked back with nostalgia on that admi- rably anonymous public spirit. The edifices which their administrations have given us, their decorations of our temples and the offerings deposited by them, are so numerous and so magnificent, that all the eflForts of posterity cannot exceed them. Then, in private life, so exemplary was their moderation, their adherence to the ancient manners so scrupulously exact, that, if any of you ever discovered the house of Aristides or Miltiades, or any of the illustrious men of those times, he must know that it was not distinguished by the least extraordinary splendour. He might have added that no statue was erected to Miltiades after the Battle of Marathon, nor to Themistocles after the Battle of Salamis. In those days even the tyrants did not dare build monuments to themselves. Since the canons of classic Greek architecture allowed variety only in the scale of the building or in decorative detail, the supervising architects were also sometimes known as sculptors. But sculptors and stonemasons were hardly distinguished from one another, for they worked in the same me- dium and used the same tools. Both proceeded by similar stages, first roughing out the sculptural block or masonry column and then gradually THE most un-Greek thing we can do, philosophers tell us, is to imitate the Greeks. Yet the great works of Greek art that invited imitation did not inspire creation. The legacy of Greek architecture was "classic" forms and their arrangement in "orders." This was appropriate too, for, as we have seen, their architecture followed a few well-known traditional models. The last will and testament of nike air max shoes 2012 Greek architecture was written not by mens black nike air max a Greek but by a Roman, four centuries after the building of the air max shoes 95 cheap nike Parthenon. The author was Vitruvius, a Roman military engineer and architect of the Age of Augustus in the first century B.C. We know so little about him that even his name is in doubt. Vitruvius was only his first name.

match the mysteries of *#tlzqm3 classical beauty. Was his statue shaped to conforn to the principles of his treatise or was his treatise written about the women nike air max 95 statue' We cannot know. But belief in his rules for making a beautiful statu* persisted. Pliny the Elder (A.D. 23-79), the versatile Roman encyclopedist four centuries after Polyclitus still credited him with "perfecting" the sci ence of sculpture in metal, just as Phidias "had opened up its possibilities.'"Polyclitus . . . made a statue which artists call the 'Canon' and from whicl they derive the basic forms of their art, as if from some kind of law.' Polyclitus's often repeated axiom was that "perfection arises through man) numbers." Even if a sculptor deviated only slightly in each of his measures. he warned, in the end these could add up to a large error. The canon, too, could protect the sculptor from the fickle public taste. A cautionary tale, still repeated seven centuries after Polyclitus's death, explained:Polyclitus made two statues at the same time, one which would be pleasing to the crowd and the other according to the principles of his art. In accordance with the opinion of each person who came into his workshop, he altered something and changed its form, submitting to the advice of each. Then he put both statues on display. The one was marvelled at by everyone, and the other was laughed at. Thereupon Polyclitus said, "But the one which you find fault with, you made yourselves; while the one which you marvel at, I made."The unmistakable Greek classic style may be a product of its mathemati- cally prescribed proportions.The ancient Greeks had long associated measure with beauty. "Measure and commensurability," wrote Plato in the Philebus, "are everywhere iden tifiable with beauty and nike air max 2011 shoes excellence." This notion, the heart of Polyclitus's canon, Aristotle himself traced back to Pythagoras's discovery that "the qualities of numbers exist in a musical scale [harmonia ], in the heavens, and in many other things." If the sounds of an octave could be expressed in harmonious proportions, why not also the harmony of the whole universe? The surviving fragments of nike air max shoes 2012 Polyclitus's treatise, finding sculptural beauty in numbers, add his bit to the Pythagorean nike air max shoes 2012 tradition. When Vitruvius, centuries later, expounded his own famous system of proportions, we have seen that his symmetria for the architectural orders plainly drew on a sculptural canon. That Polyclitus probably worked by his own canon we know from re- peated complaints that his statues were too much alike, "almost all com- posed after the same pattern." Lysippus (flourished 328 B.C.), the greatest sculptor of the Age of Alexander the Great, became famous for his slender- ized variations from Polyclitus's canon. A native of Sikyon, near Poly-