Agency (2025)

We, or maybe more accurately, I, often think of our conceptualization of “agency” as a relatively new phenomenon.  It certainly has the whiff of a buzzword. But this question of agency has been bothering us forever, along with the limits on it imposed by pre-existing systems and other constraints outside our control such as time, the ageing process and even, as Blaise Pascal states, “the infinite immensity of spaces”. Aristotle obsessed over what we might have agency over in our lives in his Nichomachean Ethics. I use words from some of his musings on this topic along with others by Yeats, Pascal and Emily Brontë.

Movements
I. One Fine Day (from Aristotle: Nicomachean Ethics, Book I, based on F.H. Peters translation)
II. That which is by nature (from Aristotle: Nicomachean Ethics, Book I, based on F.H. Peters translation)
III. The Wheel (W.B. Yeats: The Wheel; Youth and Age)
IV. Instrumental Interstice
V. Absorbée dans l’éternité (Blaise Pascal: Pensées)
VI. I will not, cannot go (Emily Brönte: The Night is Darkening Round Me; Aristotle: Nicomachean Ethics, Book I, based on F.H. Peters translation)
VII. The Lamentation of the Old Pensioner (W.B. Yeats: The Lamentation of the Old Pensioner)
VIII. How can we know the Dancer from the Dance? (from W.B. Yeats: Among Schoolchildren)