#denis feeney

[ponderings-of-a-wildflower]

…Echo could only repeat the words she heard at the end of a sentence and never reply for herself. So when she saw Narcissus wandering over the country fields, she burned with desire and stealthily followed along his tracks. The closer she followed, the flames of her passion grew nearer and nearer, as sulphur smeared on the tip of a pine-torch quickly catches fire when another flame is brought into close proximity. Oh, how often she longed, poor creature, to say sweet nothings and beg him softly to stay! But her nature imposed a block and would not allow her to make a start. She was merely permitted and ready to wait for the sounds which her voice could return to the speaker. Narcissus once took a different path from his trusty companions. ‘Is anyone there?’ he said ‘... one there?’ came Echo’s answer. Startled, he searched with his eyes all round the glade and loudly shouted, ‘Come here!’ ‘Come here!’ the voice threw back to the caller. He looks behind him and, calls once again, when no one emerges, Why are you running away?’ he cries. His words come ringing back. His body freezes. Deceived by his voice’s reflection, the youth calls out yet again, ‘This way! We must come together.’ Echo with rapturous joy responds, ‘We must come together!’ To prove her words, she burst in excitement out of the forest, arms outstretched to fling them around the shoulders she yearned for. Shrinking in horror, he yelled, ‘Hands off! May I die before you enjoy my body.’ Her only reply was ‘… enjoy my body.’ Scorned and rejected, with burning cheeks, she fled to the forest to hide her shame and live thenceforward in lonely caves. But her love persisted and steadily grew with the pain of rejection. Wretched and sleepless with anguish, she started to waste away. Her skin grew dry and shriveled, the lovely bloom of her flesh lost all its moisture; nothing remained but voice and bones; then only voice, for her bones (so they say) were transformed to stone. Buried away in the forest, seen no more on the mountains, heard all over the world, she survives in the sound of the echo…

[princetonarchives]

George Musgrave Giger, Princeton Class of 1841, may have been the most artistic keeper of the institution’s faculty minutes! Giger’s doodles would stand up to any bullet journal in this century. Though the tradition of decorative faculty minutes hasn’t continued, Giger lives on in our memory; the professorate he endowed upon his death is now held by Denis Feeney (Giger Professor of Latin).

To see more of Giger’s artistic minute-keeping, see the Office of the Dean of the Faculty Records (AC118), Vol. 5 (which has been digitized).

[nickkahler]

What the modern poet should write is not epic but a deductum carmen, a poem that has been drawn out the way a thread has been drawn out in spinning, so that it becomes a fine strand out of the original glob of raw wool.

Denis Feeney, “Introduction” to Ovid’s Metamorphoses, 8 / 2004 CE

[nickkahler]

I believe that one day a reappraiser will come and declare that, far from having been a frivolous firebird, I was a rigid moralist: kicking sin, cuffing stupidity, ridiculing the vulgar and cruel—and assigning sovereign power to tenderness, talent and pride.

Vladimir Nabokov in Denis Feeney, “Introduction” to Ovid’s Metamorphoses, 8 / 2004 CE

[nickkahler]

The inertia of tradition keeps desensitizing us to the issues.

Denis Feeney, “Introduction” to Ovid’s Metamorphoses, 8 / 2004 CE

[newfavething]

Denis Feeney was wonderful. He toured a rapt audience through the programmatic first similes of all the major classical epics from Homer to Milton. (If Milton isn't the last of the classical epic poets I don't know what he is.) Brilliant, highly insightful, lightly amusing - and interrelation between epic similes is kind of my métier (lol am so employable).

Also his voice is exquisite. He pronounced all the consonants in the word 'blindness' in such a way that I have vowed always to enunciate like him in future.