Jun
30
Waiting
Filed Under personal | Leave a Comment
We praise those who do, who seem in control. And we should praise them - that’s what praise is for.
However: even I tend to forget just what a privilege it is to be able to do more. There has to be a way to reconcile patience with activity, a way to know one is justified in merely being hopeful.
Jun
28
The prime example of one of the books I should have and don’t is the collection of Benardete essays entitled The Argument of the Action. The essay on the Symposium alone - on how Diotima is really a very dark figure, on the political implications of eros - is one of those “wow, my IQ has just jumped 50 points knowing this essay merely exists” type things. I’ve been reading free excerpts from the essay on the Phaedo in that same book and finding them invaluable as I work through that dialogue.
It’s a book I use regularly without even owning it. Why I don’t buy it asap is really dumb on my part.
So right now, I’m going through a “if I feel like having it, dump it in the wishlist” phase, and I’m going to prioritize the books every so often. The idea is to pay real attention to what I want as opposed to what I need, because if I get something that I want which I will read and be of use immediately, I might be able to keep “needs” away.
The only thing that’s bugging me while doing this: since the list is a “wishlist,” there are more books on it right now than I might ever read in my life, and I’m tempted to add CD’s and junk.
Btw - I own two very cheap poetry anthologies that contain poems all of us read back when we were 10 or something. They’re so useless I’m tempted to say I own only one book with poems, but I barely even use that because I wrote on nearly every poem in it before I found it lying around in the basement (it wasn’t my book, not quite sure how we got it). Nearly every poem I write about is something I saw in a book that I didn’t want to pay for, and so I copied it down, or I found it online.You’ll probably also notice looking at this list that I lack some pretty surprising essentials - I don’t have a translation of Rousseau I trust, nor any Shakespeare save the Sonnets and Macbeth. No Plutarch, either: I think I read Life of Themistocles entirely online once.
Here’s the wishlist so far. DO NOT BUY ME ANYTHING FROM IT. I cannot emphasize this enough, the most help you can give for me now is to make sure this blog gets readers. The wishlist exists so you can see what I probably will be working from/reading soon, and trust me, most of these books will be easily had in a good University library. A few of them are very essential - I actually just finished Plato’s Euthydemus and am considering ordering Strauss’ Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy since I only got half the essay on it from Google Booksearch.
As always - suggestions are welcome, and I’m actually interested to see what some of you might have on your wishlists.
Jun
27
On Political Change
Filed Under politics | 12 Comments
Part of me wants to scream at everyone that they know nothing about politics.
Not because, mind you, that I know anything about politics. I know very little. The important thing is that I know I know very little, and am constantly asking questions and wondering how things work. I’m willing to concede to experts unless their values are the diametric opposite of mine. In that case, I’m willing to listen and scrutinize the parts I disagree with until I can reconcile my values with their logic.
The starting point for pride as a citizen, as one who is politically active, is modesty/humility. While Aristotle does say that modesty isn’t a virtue, but rather exists for those who are young to learn, he also says that age alone does not determine whether one is young or not. Maturity is the only real criterion.
Suggestions for how we can get a more modest citizenry that can achieve a genuine pride are welcome. It is a practical matter, a matter for statesmen, and your answers do distinguish you even if you have no power. Quite frankly, power nowadays is a function of having the job dictated to you. What would occur in a serious comment thread would be the discovery of what the proper task in the first place is.
Jun
25
476 AD
Filed Under blogging | 4 Comments
The landscape of blogging: torched houses and cities, peasants wearing cheap trinkets and carrying heads in bags while claiming to be Caesar. Occasionally one comes across an encampment among the the gray, the brown, the disrepair and the blood. At the encampment the soldiers might as well be children: they can’t spell as well as most third graders. They’d be gentler if they threw tantrums over toys instead of thinking they are ridding themselves of a despot. Their leader emerges, and he will have one eye, as is to be expected. That’s how one keeps one’s prose and ideas accessible; the only way to write the same entry over and over again is to be nearly blind and somewhat brainless.
You can see these phenomena most clearly on “political blogs” run by people who wonder why Al Franken or Michael Savage haven’t gotten their doctorates yet, but it extends to all blogs. Nearly every comment thread anywhere on the Internet is testament to this, where years upon years of education look like the most failed experiment in human history.
In the landscape, there are a few gems, but there is no open war upon the barbarians. Gems stay gems partly because they are completely hidden from sight. A link from one serious blog to another might as well be an underground passage. I wonder if the Romans experienced this too - the invaders never bothered with what was actually valuable, whether it be jewels, art, horses, food, weapons. They would wreck anything, and might have been pacified by a few well-placed decoys and counterstrikes.
Technorati Tags: blogging, barbarians, blogs
Jun
23
On Reading Slowly
Filed Under education | Leave a Comment
I wonder if all the intellectual virtues can be had merely through reading carefully.
Usually we encourage students to get books done so we can start discussing the whole. But that quite obviously serves the end of rereading, of getting more out of the book the second time.
Rereading is one way to simply read well. There, one has to know the whole book in order to be able to truly appreciate its parts.
Patience, diligence, a sense of justice (only a well-constructed text can be given this sort of treatment), fraternity (in a sense, the author’s words are closer to one than some people), contemplation, appreciation all seem to attend reading one line at a time and trying to make the most out of it. To get one book done well is quite an accomplishment, and that’s what reading should be, no?
It would seem, however, that anyone who merely worships the book using this type of reading would be exceptionally crazy. If those virtues are indeed involved, they would be twisting those virtues towards an unnatural end.
Technorati Tags: books, education, reading, literature