A recent conversation reminded me of Horace. It's been years since I've read those poems; the translations don't even come close. Sure he can get a little preachy, but at his best, he gave me goosebumps. It wasn't just the rhythmic effects or the use of language. There was something about the specificity and sensuality of the best of the poems. He painted such beautiful full sensory moments, each one a pearl pulled out of time: the grain of the table and the cool of the ceramic jug; the feel of the air in the evening garden and the laugh of the girl giving her hiding place away to her suitor. Horace's world could be felt, and tasted, and smelled.
Time travel.
Moments full of life stored as carefully as his beloved aged Falernian to be sipped two thousand years on, on another continent not even dreamed of by the man who lived them.
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