Pasquale Toscano
speaker
115 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Aug 2026
last heard 3 Aug
Pasquale Toscano’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Really importantly, they're doing that by supporting one another and helping each other along.
It's a cognitive activity that happens in the mind, but it's also an activity that happens out in the world that really relies on community.
So you do get that ethos of, you know...
that you get in Homer, right, where Achilles' actions affect everyone in the Iliad, for instance, but you also get this really beautiful sense of how two people can support each other towards trying to figure out what the truth is.
Yeah.
Yeah, I mean, I think Emily's really inviting us to think about how Milton is constantly in dialogue with these epic predecessors.
And, you know, another moment I think he's definitely evoking there, right, is two important points in the Aeneid, which, if you haven't read Emily's fantastic introduction to the new edition of the Aeneid, definitely should.
These two really important moments in the Aeneid, where at the beginning of the poem, Aeneas' knees slacken, they kind of buckle, and then at the end, his chief rival, Ternus' knees buckle, and something big happens right afterwards, and I don't want to spoil anything else.
We've done enough of that tonight, Pasquale.
I want to spoil the night, yeah.
But you get the sense where Milton, the moment of peak sort of emotion and poignance is also the moment of peak intellectualism and sort of peak fascism, but in such a way that's so totally metabolized within the poem that you don't even realize the sheer virtuosity of the allusions.
And
You know, if I may just say one other thing about lagging and sort of, I mean, I think a lot about bodies not working in epic because we talk so much about the bodies that do work and the bodies that perform.
But lagging is really important.
And you have these moments, even in epics, that seem to celebrate this sort of forward momentum, right?
The teleology of someone like Aeneas making it to Italy and having to leave invalids behind to make it to Italy.
Even in early modern epics that celebrate that forward push propulsion, like Spencer's Fairy Queen, this medievalizing sort of Arthurian romance epic from the late 16th century.
Even there, you have characters who lag, like the dwarf at the very beginning of the poem, who falls behind.
I mean, I've fallen behind my friends so often, just in terms of walking, that I really relate to this character.
But it turns out later in the poem, that it's the lagging that manages to save not only the dwarf, but also his knight, Red Cross, because they're stuck in a castle, and the castle is run by a really bad...
Showing 41–60 of 115 · page 3 of 6
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