Fellow Shadow Watchers,
While trawling through my collection of
sundial-related quotations I came across the following which I think
worth sharing. The intermediate source is long forgotten but as a dial
maker this sums up the pleasure I derive in words far better than any of
mine.
Tony Moss.
P.S. It's not impossible that it came via a contributor to Our Mailing
List long ago.
"My meaning is certainly not obvious, and I will endeavour to be plainer.
I do not mean by beauty of form such beauty as that of animals or
pictures, which the many would suppose to be my meaning; but, says the
argument, understand me to mean straight lines and circles, and the plain
or solid figures which are formed out of them by turning-lathes and
rulers and measurers of angles; for these I affirm to be not only
relatively beautiful, like other things, but they are eternally and
absolutely beautiful, and they have peculiar pleasures, quite unlike the
pleasures of scratching."
Plato: Philebus, 51.
The dialogues of Plato
B. Jowett, 3rd Edition
