Which reminds me, by the way, of a dream I had a couple of weeks ago.

The dead appear to us in dreams, said Julian, because that's the only way they can make us see them what we see is only a projection, beamed from a great distance, light shining at us from a dead star… There is a very moving passage where Achilles overjoyed at the sight of the apparition – tries to throw his arms around the ghost of his old friend, and it vanishes.

I remember it from a lecture of his on the Iliad, when Patroklos appears to Achilles in a dream. That, by the way, is a phrase of Julian's. “What are the dead, anyway, but waves and energy? Light shining from a dead star? If we are strong enough in our souls we can rip away the veil and look that naked, terrible beauty right in the face let God consume us, devour us, unstring our bones. Springs of honey bubbling from the ground. But how glorious to release them in a single burst! To sing, to scream, to dance barefoot in the woods in the dead of night, with no more awareness of mortality than an animal! These are powerful mysteries. And what could be more terrifying and beautiful, to souls like the Greeks or our own, than to lose control completely? To throw off the chains of being for an instant, to shatter the accident of our mortal selves? Euripides speaks of the Maenads: head thrown I back, throat to the stars, 'more like deer than human being.' To be absolutely free! One is quite capable, of course, of working out these destructive passions in more vulgar and less efficient ways. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it. “It's a very Greek idea, and a very profound one.

The secret history 1992