What happens when in the midst of the routines of our workaday world we suddenly find ourselves in the presence of someone who regards us with intensity and demands our response? Rilke's poem explores that precise and pregnant moment when an object of scientific investigation, aesthetic contemplation or historical analysis suddenly breaks free from the constraints imposed upon it by a workaday perspective and transforms itself into a subject who beckons us to enter another world. Rilke's "Archaic Torso of Apollo" (...) leads us beyond our mundane and naturalistic concerns, beyond a thinking and doing that seeks to appropriate and masters a natural world.To faithfully follow its meandering thought means to be led to the very source from which springs narration and metaphor. It is from this same source that springs a human world. (shrink)

The consumption of food and drink becomes a fully human activity only when it takes place within a realm of hospitality. When thus situated a meal gathers together not only families, friends and neighbors, but it is also brings together divine and mortal being and unites in common courtesy the living and the dead. Natural scientific insights into human food consumption make their greatest contribution to our understanding when we situate these within the larger context of intersubjective relations. Anorexia, bulimia, (...) alcoholism and other forms of compulsive and unhappy consumption of natural substances all can be understood as doomed attempts to eat and drink outside the humanizing sphere of reciprocity and hospitality. (shrink)