Julius LeBlanc Stewart At Home painting

Julius LeBlanc Stewart At Home paintingTitian Sacred and Profane Love paintingTitian The Three Ages of Man painting
flesh . . . a brawl is taking place. Knives hissing in the silence, at times the clash of metal against metal. Hamza recognizes the men under attack: Khalid, Salman, Bilal. A lion himself now, Hamza draws his sword, roars the silence into shreds, runs forward as fast as sixty--year--old legs will go. His friends' assailants are unrecognizable behind their masks. Following on from previous posts on philosophers Epicurus and Schopenhauer, as well as the modern obsession with self-help books, I look at what Ancient Chinese philosophies have to teach us about how to be happy.
It has been a night of masks. Walking the debauched Jahilian streets, his heart full of bile, Hamza has seen men and women in the guise of eagles, jackals, horses, gryphons, salamanders, wart-- hogs, rocs; welling up from the murk of the alleys have come two-headed amphisbaenae and the winged bulls known as Assyrian sphinxes. Djinns, houris, demons populate the city on this night of phantasmagoria and lust. But only now, in this dark place, does he see the red masks he's been looking for. The manlion masks: he rushes towards his fate.