The Letters of Marsilio Ficino

“Will they provide inspo for your work?” she asked.

“Almost certainly”, I said.

“Then get them”, she said, before immediately piling them up into her arms.

And that was that, how these books ended up on my desk.

it wasn’t so simple, because I’d had my eyes on them for several weeks. They were in the G. David bookstore in Cambridge, but priced at £70 I was rightly cautious about the investment.  Not just that, I have, after all, dozens of other books I could, or should, be reading. Though when it comes to books, ‘could and should’ rarely steer the plot, and especially not when it comes to matters of the soul, and Ficino’s life and letters are surely all about the soul.

But I needed the decisive instincts of my daughter, the acknowledgment of “inspo”, to get me over the line, in order to set off on an adventurous course, an adventurous deep dive into Ficino. 

As Michael Meade once said, there is no mission without permission.

What mission do you need permission for?

~

Memo: I’ve decided to return again to writing directly on my website. I have said I would do this before and returned, tail between my legs, to posting directly to (mostly) LinkedIn. But there’s a freedom, intimacy and frankly, a relinquishing of expectation, that I find here. It’s refreshing, and more aligned to the present of my soul right, and I would be foolish to ignore that.

So, please come and say hi. I’m here, you’re here, we’re here.

You can read more about the letters of Marsilio Ficino, translated by Arthur Farndell, here, it’s an extraordinary project: Arthur Farndell | Author – Shepheard-Walwyn Publishers