I would like to thank Epicurus for his philosophy of gratitude, since being grateful for the has-been inoculates one against despair over the future. A love of Epicurus is one of the bonds I share with my friend and colleague Andrea Nightingale, to whom this book is dedicated and who, over the years, has read more drafts of its chapters than she or I can tally. I am grateful to my friend Antonia for her generosity (the other supreme Epicurean virtue) and for reading almost as many chapter drafts as Andrea. My thanks also go out to the following friends who read previous drafts of some of these chapters or offered special inspiration for them: Weixing Su, Samia Kassab, Florence Naugrette, Inga Pierson, Hans Gumbrecht, Laura Wittman, Heather Webb, Susan Stewart, Dan Edelstein, Pierre Saint-Amand, Rachel Falconer, Rachel Jacoff, Florian Klinger, Christy Wampole, Elizabeth Coggeshall, Niklas Damiris, Helga Wilde, Gabriele Pedullà, Dylan Montanari, and Kelly in Rome. Special thanks also to Yves Bonnefoy for inviting me to deliver a series of lectures at the Collège de France in May 2010. Those four lectures on “Le phénomène de l’age” allowed me to bring this book into much clearer focus. Finally, I am grateful to my editors Alan Thomas (University of Chicago Press), Sophie Bancquart (Le Pommier), and Michael Kruger (Hanser Verlag) for their encouragement and enthusiasm for this book.
One of my extracurricular activities is hosting a radio show on Stanford University’s radio station, KZSU 90.1. That show is called Entitled Opinions (about Life and Literature), and for the better part of a decade, it has hosted hundreds of guests, in conversation about various intellectual topics. Since the topics and authors I deal with in this book have been the subjects of some of my radio shows, I would like to cite a few of the latter here as an audio supplement to my discussion in the pages that follow. All are available on the website http://www.stanford.edu/dept/fren-ital/opinions/ and as iTunes podcasts, downloadable for free: Karen Feldman, “On Hannah Arendt” (May 15, 2007); Thomas Harrison, “On the Emancipation of Dissonance” (March 7, 2006); Martin Lewis, “On the Discipline of Geography” (November 9, 2011); Andrew Mitchell, “On Martin Heidegger” (October 18, 2005) and “On Friedrich Nietzsche” (May 26, 2009); Andrea Nightingale, “On Plato” (November 25, 2009); Marjorie Perloff, “On the Poetry and Politics of Ezra Pound” (November 15, 2005) and “On W. B. Yeats” (March 18, 2008); Rush Rehm, “On Greek Tragedy” (March 15, 2011); Richard Saller, “On the Social Institutions of Ancient Rome” (October 26, 2011); Thomas Sheehan, “On the Historical Jesus” (January 21, 2006); Kathleen Sullivan, “On the Founding Scriptures of America” (May 2, 2006); and Caroline Winterer, “On Classicism in America” (January 18, 2011). Many other shows could be added to this list, yet these are the among the most pertinent ones for this book in the Entitled Opinions archive.
On Citations
This book does not contain numbered footnotes or endnotes. Notes and references have been consigned to the sections entitled “Notes” and “Works Cited” in the back matter.