Pray
This brief heading echoes the title of the latest novel by Michael Crichton, perhaps the best-known member of the Harvard College class of 1964. In honor of that class and of Q (see the preceding entry), here is a condensed excerpt from a passage of Plato quoted by Q:
Socrates. ‘Should we not, before going, offer up a prayer to these local deities?’
‘By all means,’ Phaedrus agrees.
Socrates (praying): ‘Beloved Pan, and all ye other gods who haunt this place, grant me beauty in the inward soul, and that the outward and inward may be at one!….
That prayer, I think, is enough for me.’
Phaedrus. ‘Ask the same for me, Socrates. Friends, methinks, should have all things in common.’
Socrates. ‘So be it…. Let us go.’
In accordance with this prayer, and with the coming of summer to Australia, that land beloved of Pan, this site’s music now returns to the theme introduced in my note of September 10, 2002, “The Sound of Hanging Rock.”