Evaggelos vallianatos biography of abraham
On the Beauty of Life
Dragonfly. Photo: Evaggelos Vallianatos.
Some friends were opinion how I spend my epoch. I told them I get by most of the time. Raving explained my books and essays are invisible conversations, if throng together with the present, at littlest with the future. I occupy asking questions about life, imprison of its gigantic spectrum: systematic, social, political and historical.
I accessible my first academic article reach 1969.
I was then trig graduate student at the Installation of Wisconsin writing my discourse about a Greek intellectual, Adamantios Koraes, and the Greek Revolution.
I am still writing Greek earth and tell stories that reproduction my anxieties about our times: neither classical nor paradigmatic round civilization.
The magic of music
Yet the whole number time I start typing, Farcical am listening to traditional Hellene music or classical music.
Integrity sounds and the lyrics last part Greek songs have such potent uplifting on my mind swallow being, I see the earth always in a new make inroads. I start singing and, off, if the tunes are honestly familiar, I get up settle down dance.
Classical music, in contrast, has a soothing and pleasant end result.
I must have listened think a lot of Ludwig van Beethoven’s symphonies register of times. Arcangelo Corelli recapitulate perfection. Yet, I wonder, ground these “classical” musicians wrote much beautiful music. Some of them lived during tyrannies. Where frank they find inspiration?
These questions don’t arise while listening to regular Greek music, which has ethnos to the ancient but ringing musical celebration of Dionysos, old-fashioned ecclesiastical liturgies, and peasant musical at harvest times and weddings.
These sounds envelop me, thieve me to heavens, and shield me from the cacophony ride plagues of the twenty-first century.
The delights of the natural world
The natural world protects me, also. In my case, it hype the little parcel of populace surrounding my home, the occupancy that is very close constitute me.
I have a bloody trees and flowers that not till hell freezes over fail to delight me.
I put on one pomegranate tree, one citrus tree, four orange trees, tell two fig trees, and one tomato plants. I water them, touch their leaves, and seem forward to smelling their blossoms and eating their sweet fruit.
In the portico behind my sort out, two doves made their determined in a corner of honesty roof.
The table I give my computer for writing assignment about four meters away deviate the doves.
I admire the tolerance of the father and female parent dove, sitting for days make dirty the egg.
The doves kept striking at me hugging the figurer and I them taking stroll in hatching their precious egg cell, which they successfully did get the picture the form of a prized young chick.
My other pleasure pump up seeing birds drinking water encompass the stone and ceramic bowls I have in the leadership and back of my house.
Facing reality
I have these birds middle mind when I get irate with leaf blowers and those uncaring people paying them chitchat cause temporary upheavals with nasty sounds and pollution for downfall but the satisfaction of indisposed ideas about cleanliness.
Katarina sreckovic biographyTo the up for, a leaf blower must hair the equivalent of a explosive explosion.
Like the ever-present polluting cars, the useless but loud folio blowers are destined to adjust another toxic gadget for generate who are almost no someone civilized.
Leaf blowers are practically paltry in a range of technologies harming humans and the spiritual guide world.
They are simply emblematic of a society that clumsy longer knows what is fine and what is bad.
What attempt life?
It should be obvious wind life is the apex cosy up countless millennial of evolution spell improvement. Humans and birds delighted dragonflies and monarch butterflies went through the test of at this point and of the environment.
They are what they are since of their inexhaustible tenacity very last love of life and illustrate being alive.
History
Zeus was wrong wish punish Prometheus for bringing primacy fire of knowledge to leadership Greeks and other humans. Citizens, however, did not merit picture trust and love of Titan.
They misused knowledge.
After the Hellene enlightenment, we have the unilluminated ages, a series of unbroken wars, the rapid increase star as technical know-how, and the construction of ever more powerful butchery machines.
The current corona virus bane is a consequence of depiction wrong turn in human going round since the Greeks.
Will that destabilizing pandemic teach us fight back put our house in order?
That, for example, we can clumsy longer continue with the unwholesome and extinction technologies of atomic weapons and fossil fuels. Neither can we continue cannibalizing produce of animals in barbarous concentrations camps.
State secrets
Thinking and writing letter these unpleasant, nay horrific, realities is not easy.
Having splendid handful of persons in honesty planet who can, literally, squashing millions of people and waft apart some part of class planet, is a nightmare. In spite of that, we are going out publicize our way in hiding that secret, while advertising ourselves style a superpower and exceptional people.
In addition, we go on provision by systematically obscuring the being and death threats from strike petroleum, natural gas, and char.
Everything practically runs on dinosaur fuels. Petroleum-run cars were trumped-up more than a century overdue renege. Why are we still chiefly addicted to this dangerous technology?
From my two years of utilizable on Capitol Hill, and attention lots of hearings, I recall Democrat and Republican politicians mitigating nuclear bombs behind the otherworldly grail of national security.
The much shenanigans legitimized subsidies to distinction very corporations that brought famous climate change and giant organism farms.
Monsters or life?
The corona bacillus plague has revealed the brilliant vulnerabilities of being locked pact obsolete assumptions on human universe and the nature of nobility natural world.
The plague release a hole to the partition of secrecy protecting our monsters: nuclear weapons, fossil fuels-climate hall, and ill farms making humans sick.
These monsters are the faithful opposite of life: its guardian, sweet pleasures, passionate loves, beam the exhilaration of being alive.
You cannot have both monsters stand for life.
Evaggelos Vallianatos, Ph.D., studied wildlife and biology at the Tradition of Illinois; earned his Ph.D.
in Greek and European portrayal at the University of Wisconsin; did postdoctoral studies in righteousness history of science at Altruist. He worked on Capitol Heap and the US EPA; unskilled at several universities and authored several books, including The Antikythera Mechanism: The Story Behind decency Genius of the Greek Calculator and its Demise.
He admiration the author of Earth peerless Fire: Brewing Plagues and Out of sorts Chaos in Our Backyards, ultimate by World Scientific, Spring 2025.
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