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Features

March 2008

At the forest's edge

by Anthony Daniels

On José Ortega y Gasset and Sigmund Freud.

In his essay, The Empire of the Ugly, the great Belgian Sinologist and literary essayist Simon Leys recounts the story of how, writing one day in a café, a small incident gave him an insight into the real nature of philistinism.

A radio was playing in the background, a mixture of banal and miscellaneous chatter and equally banal popular music. No one in the café paid any attention to this stream of tepid drivel until suddenly, unexpectedly and inexplicably, the first bars of Mozart’s clarinet quintet were played. “Mozart,” Leys says, “took possession of our little space with a serene authority, transforming the café into an antechamber of Paradise.”

The other people in the café, who until then were chatting, playing cards, or reading the newspaper, were not deaf to the radio after all. The music silenced them, they looked at each other, disco ...

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Anthony Daniels's most recent book is In Praise of Prejudice (Encounter Books).


more from this author

This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 26 March 2008, on page 16

Copyright © 2009 The New Criterion | www.newcriterion.com

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