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“I looked on astounded as from his ordinary life he made his art. We were both ordinary men, he and I. Yet from the ordinary he created Legends--and I from Legends created only the ordinary!”
― Peter Shaffer, Amadeus

“Mental health professionals of the 1960s make their 1990s counterparts look like Mozarts trampling upon Salieri’s lesser work.”
― Claire North, The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August

“The Enemy Within by Stewart Stafford

There is more to a smile than the baring of teeth,
His grin had all the warmth of daggers unsheathed,
The lips did part but the eyes remained staring,
The skin was pocked and trust was badly faring.

The lips quivered at every imagined slight,
The eyes glittered like a serpent's at twilight,
Arms crossed in constant defence,
The foot tapping, waiting to take offence.

Who knows or cares of his jealousy's genesis,
He strove beyond measure to become my nemesis,
Seeking to frustrate me at every turn,
And put me prematurely in a cremation urn.

The hero can fend off any attack,
Except for the knife that's plunged in the back,
They may not even know the weapon's in far,
Until the assailant's coup de grâce.

© Stewart Stafford, 2021. All rights reserved.”
― Stewart Stafford

“Entirely in agreement with Salieri when he rails against God for having given humanity the gift of Mozart's divine music, for the sole purpose of making us look ridiculous and plunging us into despair. Salieri sets himself up as Man's champion against divine injustice. It is the same problem as that of the Grand Inquisitor in the Brothers Karamazov. When Christ returns to earth he says to him: 'We manage humanity for its greatest happiness. It has paid for this with its mediocrity. Don't come disturbing this fragile balance with insane promises. ' And he condemns Christ to death once again.
Salieri is not mean-spirited: it took pride, not to become jealous of Mozart, but to challenge God and ask: 'Tell it to me plainly, why am I not Mozart?' For God mocked us by throwing Mozart among us in the guise of a vulgar being, who did not even bear the exceptional marks of grace. God is toying with us, and that is unbearable. Mozart must be destroyed. All that challenges God is noble in spirit and superior to gaping, unconditional admiration of His works.
We will not have the same problem with Changeux's Neuronal Man, emerging on the horizon like Nietzsche's Last Man, with his cortical and synaptic flatness. Farewell Mozart, farewell Salieri, no more grace, but no more challenges either, such is the solution offered by modern science to the insoluble despair of the difference between men.

Signs, signs? Is that all you have to say? People act and people dream, they speak or they don't - none of that is unreal. Shut up and watch. See the philosophical beauty of these closing years of the century, the stars in the sky falling lower as the fateful date approaches, and the interactive horizon of couples in love - all this is beyond doubt, and it moves me to tears . . . The age, the coming age is like a metropolis deserted by its population, cut off from its sources of energy. Are you going to say that, are you going to go on with these twilight rantings? Every century throws the reality principle into question as it closes, but it's over today, finished, done. Everybody works these days.

Narrative and moral passions, the philosophical animal spirits, are literally blocking the electronic animal spirits, a thousand times more lively and insignificant. Videos and advertisements, credits, news reports and sports flashes, Dallas, that's television, all that transfers easily, with the minimum of energy, on ephemeral film. But pure television, like pure painting or pure speed, is hard to bear.”
― Jean Baudrillard, Cool Memories