TR 1.3 - "NIght Fishing at Antibes"
David Payne
dpayne1912 at hotmail.com
Sun May 1 01:39:14 CDT 2011
"And he saith unto them, Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men." - Matthew 4:19
http://www.wordspy.com/words/Stendhalssyndrome.asp
In 1817, a young Frenchman named Marie-Henri Beyle — better known to us
as the French novelist Stendhal — visited Florence and soon found
himself overwhelmed by the city's intensely rich legacy of art and
history. When he visited Santa Croce (the cathedral where the likes of
Machiavelli, Michelangelo, and Galileo are buried) and saw Giotto's
famous ceiling frescoes for the first time, he was overcome with
emotion:
"I was in a sort of ecstasy, from the idea of being in Florence, close
to the great men whose tombs I had seen. Absorbed in the contemplation
of sublime beauty ... I reached the point where one encounters celestial
sensations ... Everything spoke so vividly to my soul. Ah, if I could
only forget. I had palpitations of the heart, what in Berlin they call
'nerves.' Life was drained from me. I walked with the fear of falling.''
160 years later, in the late 1970s, Dr. Graziella Magherini, at the time
the chief of psychiatry at Florence's Santa Maria Nuova Hospital,
noticed that many of the tourists who visited Florence were overcome
with anything from temporary panic attacks to bouts of outright madness
that lasted several days. She remembered that Stendhal had had similar
symptoms, so she named the condition Stendhal's syndrome. (When she first applied this name isn't clear, but it may have been as early as 1979.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stendhal_syndrome
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y7fxkiolT-k&feature=related
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