Welcome to Letters from Quotidia 2025 Weekend Supplement 3. Quotidia exists as a safe place for ordinary people who sometimes get to encounter the extraordinary. As the original Letters roll out over the coming months, there will be occasions when the urge to create re-asserts itself. These occasional letters will take the form of weekend podcasts supplementing the regular Monday-Friday flow of the posts, which by this stage are advancing apace. Many of us know April as the cruellest month from the opening lines of T.S. Eliot’s great modernist poem, The Waste Land. Its epigraph by Petronius translates as, I saw with my own eyes the Sibyl at Cumae hanging in a cage, and when the boys said to her: “Sibyl, what do you want?” she answered: “I want to die.” The scene Eliot quotes occurs during a feast at the villa of a wealthy buffoon and glutton named Trimalchio. According to wasteland.windingway.org, the Sibyl of Cumae was a prophetess in service to Apollo and a great beauty. Apollo wished to take her as his lover and offered her anything she desired. She asked to live for as many years as there were grains in a handful of dust. Apollo granted her wish, but still she refused to become his lover. In time, the Sibyl came to regret her boon as she grew old but did not die. She lived for hundreds of years, each year becoming smaller and frailer, Apollo having given her long life but not eternal youth. When Trimalchio speaks of her in The Satyricon, she is little more than a tourist attraction, tiny, ancient, confined, and longing to die. The Satyricon tells of the misadventures of Encolpius, the narrator and principal character who is moderately well educated as he experiences  the excesses and debauchery of the high life as well as the cruelty and depravity of the low life of the Roman Empire in the first century A.D.  Fairly lengthy fragments of the story still exist. But those fragments are more than ample kindling to spark the fire of this letter. If you are like me, you seek to find correspondences with our own lives and times in such material. Questions such as, who is the wealthy buffoon in our own times corresponding to Trimalchio and does the villa he lives in have a real-world counterpart? Who or what does the wizened prophetess represent today? In my view, the Sibyl corresponds to the once great and influential mass media dealing with matters of import which is shrivelling before our eyes in the blowtorch of reality TV and disinformation rotting our brains as we speak. And, of course, the person corresponding to Encolpius, the narrator and principal character roaming the highways and byways of Nero’s Roman Empire is me, Quentin Bega, as I traverse the cyberplains of the dying American Age from the comfort of Quotidia. I’m not, however tempted I may have been, comparing myself to the author of The Satyricon. You see, Petronius became Nero’s director of elegance- his arbiter elegantiae from which title he is known to history as Petronius Arbiter. Now, perhaps Nero became aware that his imperial self was the model for the gluttonous Trimalchio of The Satyricon.  Whatever the case may be, Petronius was arrested on a trumped-up charge of being complicit in a plot to assassinate the emperor. According to the historian Tacitus, he did not wait for the inevitable sentence to be carried out but spent his final hours chatting with friends on a variety of topics while listening to music and poetry. Of course, the context to this was a feast- like many he had indulged in before. The only difference being that before his last supper he had sliced open his veins and then bound them up so he might survive long enough for a final farewell repast with convivial companions. In Quotidia many things become possible, so, listeners to this Weekend Supplement, welcome to a fantasy feast where Petronius reclines with TS Eliot and other erudite companions as they are entertained by musicians and poets as the lifeblood of the host slowly drains away. We hear a song referencing TS Eliot’s The Waste Land, first. [insert song] Then a Goliardic minstrel recites the great kick against fate O Fortuna, on which Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana is based. O Fortune, like the moon you are changeable, ever waxing ever waning; hateful life first oppresses and then soothes playing with mental clarity; poverty and power it melts them like ice// Fate- monstrous and empty, your whirling wheel, you are malevolent, devoid of security and ever fading to nothing, shadowed and veiled you plague me too; now through the game I bring my bare back to your villainy.// Fate, in health and virtue is against me, driven on and weighted down, always enslaved. So, at this hour without delay pluck the vibrating strings; since Fate strikes down the strong, everyone weep with me. The final sleep about to envelop the host, he signals for something more upbeat to add counterbalance to an entertainment that had become too gloomy for his taste notwithstanding or, perhaps, because of, his impending exit. And the musicians oblige: [insert song] That concludes the third Weekend Supplement. Now, who knows? Fortuna may allow one- or more- of these communications before the wheels  of the Juggernaut crush the hapless author of these missives who, it may chance, has failed to get out of its way having paused to strike a pose and quote Andrew Marvell’s great line about Time’s winged chariot hurrying near. So, don’t you tarry if you hear that sound and feel the rumbling underfoot!

Fragments Piled Against My Ruin (words and music Quentin Bega)

Look! how the light descends in the west

Dark clouds spreading all around

A symphony sounds in a chamber of my heart

An echoing tune I once knew well

(I once knew well, oh, can anyone tell?)

A gypsy rover came over the hill

Casting spells across the dale

A fairy maiden danced in the light

The moon spilled white, a ghastly pale

(A ghastly pale, the moon spilled white, a ghastly pale)

Listen! Can you hear the thunder speaking?

Tell me the meaning of that sound

Once more let me gather round me

Precious fragments piled against my ruin

Poets gather under a tree

Reciting lines against the rain

Pipers stand on a twilit strand

Their tunes pitched against the stormy main

(The stormy main, their tunes pitched against the stormy main)

Meanwhile in the smoky tavern

Drinkers toast our heroes of renown

Stumbling through a darkened cavern

Someone prays that maybe he’ll be found

(That he’ll be found, he prays that maybe he’ll be found)

(Chorus)

(Against my ruin, fragments piled against my ruin)

The Gods Did Gambol (words and music Quentin Bega)

I came into this world complaining at the cheek

Of fickle fortune’s notion of a merry jape

The gods did gambol as the wheel went spinning round

They laughed whether I was lofted high or on the ground

My father beat me Mama didn’t really care

As soon as I could run I simply left them there

Travelled to the compass points of this vast land

Savouring my freedom- it was really grand

I’ve tasted riches and I’ve languished in the mire

I’ve frozen solid and I’ve suffered in the fire

Had my share of pain and pleasure on the way

Whether to perdition or heaven I just can’t say

Everyone must have a gamble- yeah yeah take the punt

Whether you end up in the rear or out in front

                                                            (four bar interlude)

It doesn’t matter if you have a cheerful streak

Or if you’re just a gloomy doleful cheerless geek

The juggernaut rolls along its mindless way

If you cannot dodge it you will surely pay

My advice is useless because it’s given free

Whether you decide to be or not to be

You can’t escape what fate has lined up just for you

Regardless of whether what I’ve said is false or true

I came into this world complaining at the cheek

Of fickle fortune’s notion of a merry jape

The gods did gambol as the wheel went spinning round

They laughed whether I was lofted high or on the ground

Everyone must have a gamble- yeah yeah take the punt

Whether you end up in the rear or out in front

In the rear or out in front

Credits: All written text, song lyrics andmusic (including background music) written and composed by Quentin Bega unless otherwise specified in the credits section after individual posts. Illustrative excerpts from other texts identified clearly within each podcast. I donate to and use Wikipedia frequently as one of the saner sources of information on the web.

Technical Stuff: Microphone-songs Shure SM58; (for the podcast spoken content) Audio Technica AT 2020 front-facing with pop filter); Apogee 76K also used for songs and spoken text. For recording and mixing down: 64-bit N-Track Studio 10 Extended used; Rubix 22 also used for mixing of microphone(s) and instruments. I use the Band in a Box/RealBand 2023 combo for music composition.