Horace at your back iv: when you simply can't be starstruck

We know it saddens friends, to think that our imperviousness to stars (much as we might admire their work) is a kind of rebuke. It's as if we didn't envy their china, and thought that Mrs Guest were simply normal. Horace was received as a star, which seems almost reasonable, but he was reminded of a baby girl playing under her nurse's watchful eye, what she eagerly desired to have, she soon abandoned when bored with it. He is saying this to his patron, the most omnipotent figure the earth had ever known - possibly, has ever known. He is mocking as degenerate, the favour of authority: If the Greeks had found novelty as offensive as we do, what would nowadays be old?  

In the next line, Horace all but jugularly asks Augustus, What likes and dislikes are there that you wouldn't suppose could be easily changed? It's notable that this spontaneous question appears in his most urgent case for poetry and its criticism, the first letter in his second, final book in this form. Horace ran a merry flirtation with misery in his missives to indulgent tyranny, and one doesn't care to think where Voltaire would be without him. But what stardom is reserved for those who work that illumination from the other end of light, and give embrace to freedom?

In his later years my father, then widowed and childless but one, sharpened an already Socratic mode with me in my visits to exploit his La Jolla weather. Referring to this man, whom he'd seen in plays in Pasadena when I was an infant, he once asked me, How do you suppose Tennessee Williams was able to write with such understanding of women? I have no regard for my educated, elegant answer - he'd paid for it, he was entitled to it. But I do have regard for a humane gift for interrogation which, finding the right register and range, deftly crafts a dialogue to embrace the actual subject of his scrutiny beyond any category of liking. 








Horace
Satires and Epistles
  Epistle to Augustus
John Davie, translation
op. cit.


ii  ad for a former client of Laurent


iii Brando corresponding