image: proof sheet from the Kelmscott Press edition of Chaucer’s Parliament of Fowls (1896); William Harcourt Hooper, engraver.
Now welcome, springtime, with your gentle sun
That wintry weather milder soon will make,
And tiresome nights’ long shroud of blackness shake.
Saint Valentine, great triumph you have won,
And little birds are singing for your sake:
Now welcome, springtime, with your gentle sun
That wintry weather milder soon will make.
They have good cause to chirp in unison
Since each today his mate again can take,
And both sing blissfully when they awake:
Now welcome, springtime, with your gentle sun
That wintry weather milder soon will make,
And tiresome nights’ long shroud of blackness shake.
—Geoffrey Chaucer, “Rondel for Saint Valentine’s Day,” from Parliament of Fowls, modernized in the original lyric form by Margaret Coats.
Featured Titles
On the Wings of Words
Conversations and Human Relations: Inner Aspects of the Fundamental Social Law and The Threefold Social Organism
Rudolf Steiner
Selected and Annotated by Gary Lamb
Rudolf Steiner’s profound and practical insights and indications concerning what happens when human beings meet and interact with one another are scarcely known and studied seriously by few. These indications and insights could easily provide the basis for a widescale reawakening of our own capacities to listen, speak, and understand one another at a higher level, as beings of soul and spirit. This volume provides a succinct yet thorough overview of Steiner’s many remarks and insights into the mysteries of social encounter, as well as offering helpful commentary and contextualization.
Also edited by Gary Lamb
The Fundamental Social Law
Rudolf Steiner on the Work of the Individual and the Spirit of Community
Peter Selg
Rudolf Steiner understood that human social, ethical, and moral development lagged far behind what had been achieved in knowledge, science, and technology; and that what human beings had achieved in these fields rested on what caused social and moral life to be untenable for so many, namely, the universal rule of egoism and self-interest. In 1905 Steiner formulated what he called the basic "social axiom” or “the cosmic law of work." Underlying this "fundamental social law" is the seminal realization that human social reality pivots on the question of work and compensation. Does one work for oneself, for one’s salary? Or does one work for others, the community or larger society?
A must-read for anyone interested in a just, equitable, healthy, and spirit-based social future.
From the Collected Works of Rudolf Steiner
The Tension between East and West
Rudolf Steiner
10 lectures at the Second International Congress of the
Anthroposophical Movement, Vienna, June 1–12, 1922 (CW 83)
Anyone with an insight (and I may say that I am using the word “insight” in its literal sense) into the way the individual soul struggles free of the body, in order to enter a spiritual realm, will have a different way of looking at our social life too. Armed with this new attitude, he can see how friendships, relationships of love, and other associations are formed; how soul finds its way to soul, moving outside the family and other social groups; how physical proximity may be a means to the community of souls, the sympathy and togetherness of souls. He now knows that, just as the body falls away from the individual soul, so the physical element and all earthly events fall away from the friendships and from the relationships of love; and he sees how the soul-relationship that has come into being between people continues into a spiritual world, where it can also be spiritually experienced.
On a foundation of knowledge, not of faith, we can now say: as they stride through the gate of death, human beings find themselves once more together. And just as the body, which impedes our sight of the spirit, disappears in the spiritual world, so too in that world every impediment to friendship and love now disappears. Human beings are closer together there than in the flesh . . . .
—Rudolf Steiner, from the lecture “Anthroposophy and Psychology,” in The Tension between East and West (CW 83)
