In my office, I have a very beautiful marble bust of Seneca. I always have my eye on him when I'm taking phone calls. He's one of the many philosophers I've always read and admired.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
Seneca brings vividly before us a picture of the various scholars assembled in a school of the philosophers.
The usual picture of Socrates is of an ugly little plebeian who inspired a handsome young nobleman to write long dialogues on large topics.
In Henry Adams, I discovered not only the prototype of the modern thinker but also someone who is more interesting: a viper-toothed, puling, supercilious crank, thwarted in ambition, aging gracelessly, mad at the cosmos, and ashamed of his own jejune ideals. He is nevertheless very dear to me.
I've been very fortunate and met the guys that have become, basically, philosophers and have a kind of sensibility about life that's very precious.
The philosophy I love is very selective. It is really just the bit that is involved in a search for wisdom, and this means a short roll call of names; Socrates, Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, Epicurus, Montaigne, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche.
Portraits of other great ones look down on you in your college halls; but while you are young and sit at the brief feast, what avails their serene gaze if it do not lift up your hearts and movingly persuade you to match your manhood to its inheritance?
It's always tricky, meeting an author you've admired.
I love Rauschenberg. I love that he created a turning point in visual history, that he redefined the idea of beauty, that he combined painting, sculpture, photography, and everyday life with such gall, and that he was interested in, as he put it, 'the ability to conceive failure as progress.'
Who is happy with his appearance? I find many drawbacks of myself. But, each time when I visit Lourdes, I receive a lesson of reconciliation. When you see ill people or invalids around, you realize that it is a sin to complain!
I have a portrait of Saint Thomas More in my office.