«We can rise above other men, but I recommend you to fly carefully, without getting too high» Joining with infinite patience feathers from the wings of birds and gluing them with wax, Daedalus built for himself and his son two pairs of enormous wings that could be tied to the back and maneuvered by waving the arms. Undaunted, he built an artifact even more amazing than the labyrinth itself: the first flying machine. But once again, ingenuity came to his rescue.
The flight of icarus how to#
Daedalus, deprived of the drawings and plans that were the key to the intricate place, did not know how to find his way out of that prison. But, for it to be possible to follow this ceremony, the greatest secrecy regarding the placement and arrangement of the various parts of the labyrinth had to be kept, and therefore, in order not to divulge the secret, once the construction was finished, Minos ordered that Daedalus delve into his own work together with his young son Icarus. The victims were introduced into that twist of rooms and corridors from which no one could find the exit: their miserable fate was to run tirelessly in that sinister place, until they found the monster, which devoured them. The Minotaur, who was confined in the darkest place of the labyrinth, was considered a manifestation of divinity and required to be fed with human flesh. The construction of such a complicated work took an incredible number of years, but the end result was a wonder that made the city of Minos famous throughout the world. The architect, whom Minos commissioned to design and build the labyrinth, was a man of great ingenuity, a famous craftsman and mechanic named Daedalus, already famous for being the inventor of the square, the plumb line and the axe. Such legends, as that of The Flight of Icarus, certainly have ancient origins, and even some, at least in their central nucleus, precede the arrival of the Greeks in the Peloponnese.Īccording to one of these myths, it was a powerful king of Crete named Minos who had this deceitful building built to enclose the fearsome Minotaur, a monster with the head of a bull and a gigantic human body, son of Pasiphae, wife of Minos, and a divine bull. It seems, therefore, more than justified all the legends that arose around a similar building, which, at any time, must have impressed the imagination of all who saw it. In this immense construction that covered a large area of land and that originally should have been simpler, the modern visitor ran the risk of getting lost.
Talking about his first novel, Le Chiendent (usually translated as The Bark Tree), he pointed out that it had 91 sections, because 91 was the sum of the first 13 numbers, and also the product of two numbers he was particularly fond of: 7 and 13.When, at the end of the 19th century, some English archaeologists, under the direction of Arthur Evans, began excavations among the ruins of the site where Knossos, on the island of Crete, were surprised to find an immense labyrinth of rooms and rooms, open courtyards and corridors, stairways and terraces. He even once remarked that he simply could not leave to hazard the task of determining the number of chapters of a book. The Surrealists tried to achieve a sort of pure expression from the unconscious, without mediation of the author's self-aware "persona." Queneau's texts, on the contrary, are quite deliberate products of the author's conscious mind, of his memory, and his intentionality.Īlthough Queneau's novels give an impression of enormous spontaneity, they were in fact painstakingly conceived in every small detail. Now, seeing Queneau's work in retrospect, it seems inevitable. For some time he joined André Breton's Surrealist group, but after only a brief stint he dissociated himself. Novelist, poet, and critic Raymond Queneau, was born in Le Havre in 1903, and went to Paris when he was 17.
0 kommentar(er)
