Fountain of Youth

Oh how I love four-year-olds:

Miss T: C, why do you have marker all over your nose??

C: Because I wanted freckles.

Miss T: laughs Why'd you want freckles? Did you see someone who had freckles?

C: Yeah, F and Miss M. And I always wanted freckles.

I will miss the little whippersnappers this summer.

Different interpretations are put forth about the anomalous imagery of the artist in his paintings, especially the Garden of Earthly Delights. Usually the basic message is this: humanity is naive and wreckless and taking the shortcut to hellish destruction. Boom, there it is. One historian even saw the famous triptych (Garden) as a manifesto of the heretical Adamite group. The proto-hippies...in a nut-shell, people who practiced "amoral" sexual bonding without guilt (and by abolishing marriage) in order to experience life as Adam and Eve knew it. They were also advocates of "holy nudism"...sign me up. I'm calling a revival, taking the medieval Dutch name "Brethren and Sisters of the Free Spirit."

I recently watched a program about the Black Death on the History Channel, and similar groups toured Europe like rock stars; everyone thought the world was coming to an end and brothers and sisters and mothers and fathers fell victim to the horrible disease while priests and legit representatives of Rome ran and hid or failed to provide the spiritual answer...before neo-Platonism and Descartes and modern Western medicine...I'd definitely kick up my heels and run wild.

This engraving was used in Bosch's biography to show a similarity between his paintings and the late medieval traditions of the love garden and fountain of youth. The book elaborates on that view, citing that the bathing couples, flowers and birds in the Garden all belong to the realm of Venus--a prominent figure in astrological and humoral traditions, of which Bosch was part.