The furniture in the tomb of that over-publicised teenager Tutankhamen...included literally heaps of beds. (p.4)
"And–oh, think of it! We could make endless copies of the same standard forms and send them throughout the Empire. And it might not even be too much labor to have other forms, on which we could keep track of whether the first ones had been properly dispatched." (p.144)
I live on a Cornish cliff and hate cities. I write and walk and swim and drink.
a revolution, which has no other principle than to attack the existing constitution, must necessarily proceed to the last extremities of imagination and of criminal guilt. (p.79)
...that's where a daily diary differs from autobiography or memoir. It is an antidote to hindsight. (p.xxi)We could lose the repetitious "daily" (diary < Lat. diarium < dies), but an excellent point nonetheless.
"It is obvious," said Miss Brodie, "that these girls are not of cultured homes and heritage. The Philistines are upon us, Mr. Lloyd." (p.51)And
Miss Brodie had already prompted them as follows: "I am not saying anything against the Modern side. Modern and Classical, they are equal, and each provides for a function in life. You must make your free choice. Not everyone is capable of a Classical education. You must make your choice quite freely." So that the girls were left in no doubt to Miss Brodie's contempt for the Modern side.Later she has the girls report back to her about their Greek studies in an attempt to learn the language later in life.
When I ordered Books and the Founding Fathers, I was hoping for a far more comprehensive tome on the books and the Founding Fathers. Still, it proved a good little essay that I would many would read about the importance of literacy on the Founders. There are multiple appendices with useful recommendations for future reading and fragments of the Founders on books.Would John Adams have been who he was and done all that he did during our revolution if he had not paced the floors of his room at night declaiming Cicero? Would Thomas Jefferson have been able to pen the soaring language of our Declaration of Independence had he not spent evenings alone with the plays of Shakespeare and the orations of Demosthenes? (p.6)
The new events deprive the people of the older culture of any possibility of being. (p.79)
...we must transform what is coming to be. But we can do this only if we honestly say yes to it and yet with incorruptible hearts remain aware of all that is destructive and nonhuman in it. (pp.80-1)
The fact that the machine brings a measure of freedom hitherto unknown is in the first instance a gain. The value of freedom, however, is not fixed solely by the question "Freedom from what?" but decisively by the further question "Freedom for what?" Every social pedagogue knows what problems arise regarding use of the time that is made free by machines. If we do not succeed in making meaningful use of the free days then the result of such "freedom" is negative. (p.110)
Archaeoogists, anthropologists, and armchair compilers of catalogs of religion like The Golden Bough...(p.10)Just to be clear whom the reference intended:
James Frazer, the greatest of all armchair anthropologists (p.123)
In other ways, too, the human sciences have returned to late nineteenth-century form. In the last couple of decades the assumption that human history should be understood as little more than an extension of natural history has come roaring back. Retrospective prophecy has once again entered a grandiloquent phase, opening up great swathes of the human condition to the narratives of historical reconstruction. "Evolutionary pressures on our hunter-gatherer ancestors" provides the explanatory framework for all aspects of our putatively natural selves. The double helix of DNA is celebrated as a bioarchaeological record of each individual organism's evolution. The search is on for reductive neurological explanations for our complex social behaviors. It seems that the sciences from which Nietzsche derived his dark philosophy have returned with all the force of the long repressed. (pp.232-3)
I decided I'd do some reading. I rented a room in Greenwich Village (Merchant Marine money–my father would pay for schooling, but not for reading), I got a lot of good books, a lot of Hemingway, Dos Passos, Conrad, Chekhov. For four months or so I was absorbed in them. Although I was in no hurry to find out what I wanted to do in life, sitting in a room and reading for four months started to feel odd. It was hard to explain to people and I felt if I enrolled in a school it would look to both the world and myself that I was headed somewhere.
One can imagine some Roman of the first century praising the new imperial power, but through a muddleheaded tradition against "kings" swearing that he would never tolerate a "monarchy." Such a fellow would have been a very futile critic of public affairs under Trajan, but no more futile than a man who swears that nothing shall make him a "slave," though well prepared to accept laws that compel him to labor without his consent, under the force of public law, and upon terms dictated by others. (p.53)
There was no question in those ancient societies from which we spring of making subject races into slaves by the might of conquering races. All that is the guesswork of the universities. Not only is there no proof of it, rather all the existing proof is the other way. The Greek had a Greek slave, the Latin a Latin slave, the German a German slave, the Celt a Celtic slave. The theory that "superior races" invading a land either drove out the original inhabitants or reduced them to slavery, is one which has no argument either from our present knowledge of man's mind or from recorded evidence. Indeed, the most striking feature of that servile basis upon which paganism reposed was the human equality recognized between master and slave. [one thinks of Odysseus and Eumaios] This spiritual value was not, as a further pernicious piece of guesswork would dream, a "growth" or a "progress." The doctrine of human equality was inherent in the very stuff of antiquity, as it is still inherent in societies which have not lost tradition. (p.64-5)As a bonus, here is Belloc's assessment of the "practical man":
It is not difficult to discern that the practical man in social reform is exactly the same animal as the practical man in every other department of human energy, and may be discovered suffering from the same twin disabilities which stamp the practical man wherever found: these twin disabilities are an inability to define his own first principles and an inability to follow the consequences proceeding from his own action. Both these disabilities proceed from one simple and deplorable form of impotence, the inability to think. (p.148)
Unlike other athletes, Frisbee people won't let it go. My theory is that this is because there's a huge overlap between people who are good at Frisbee and people who do Teach for America. The same instinct to make at-risk kids learn, which I admire so much, becomes deadly when turned on friends trying to relax on a Sunday afternoon in the park. (p.24)p.s. I do not remember if I noted earlier that I also finished Bossypants by Tina Fey. Both gave me laughs as the newborn's sleepless nights have sapped my soul's strength.
caerulas superne laurus et virecta myrtea
leniter motabat aura blandiente sibilo.
The breeze gently stirs with pleasing hush
The dark laurels and green myrtles above.
We can find like passages in other authors, but the entire little poem (20 verses total) consists of the description of a stream and its surroundings.
(Holmes to Dr. Watson) "In the everyday affairs of life it is more useful to reason forward, and so the other comes to be neglected. There are fifty who can reason synthetically for one who can reason analytically...Most people, if you describe a train of events to them, will tell you what the result would be. They can put those events together in their minds, and argue from them that something will come to pass. There are few people, however, who, if you told them a result, would be able to evolve from their own inner consciousness what the steps were which led them up to that result. This power is what I mean when I talk of reasoning backward, or analytically." (p.100)
He praised the boys' soccer and the girls' field hockey teams as the heart of Moravian Academy athletics...I caught the administrator's eye. He stuttered out, "And cross country." But he didn't mean it. His desire was to praise the more measurable sports–those with plays, ties, over-time, and numbers on the lit-up scoreboard–the sports more easily watched. (p.222)I must confess my own prejudice in favor of cross country, having run it both in high school and college. Few other sports come close to the ancient athletic ideal where statistics do not matter as much as who wins and who loses in that particular moment (καιρός) of grace (χάρις) and glory (κλέος).
Equality has a built-in revolutionary force lacking in such ideas as justice or liberty. For once the ideal of equality becomes uppermost it can become insatiable in its demands. It is possible to conceive of human beings conceding that they have enough freedom or justice in a social order; it is not possible to imagine them ever declaring they have enough equality–once, that is, equality becomes a cornerstone of national policy. (p.184)
[Discussing corporate corruption of medical faculty...] If the price is right, they are happy to give it up. (One could imagine that humanities professors might feel the same, if only someone were willing to pay so much for a study of Chaucer.)
Ego nolo Caesar esse, ambulare per Britannos ... Scythicas pati pruinas I wouldn't be Caesar, ambling among the Britons... exposed to Scythian frosts
Hadrian answered thus:
Ego nolo Florus esse, ambulare per tabernas, latitare per popinas culices pati rotundos. I wouldn't be Florus, ambling among the pubs, holed up in his dives, exposed to fat mosquitoes.
There is a companion website that visualizes this for various passages. I will certainly be using this in future courses I teach as a very useful tool.Critical to our understanding of the Iliad’s action is the realization that its orientation of right and left remains constant throughout and is always seen from the perspective of a narrator situated in the center of the Greek camp facing the Trojan plain. (p.45)
...It seems a pity that the good old phrase 'living in sin' is likely to be dropped by the C of E. So many friends, happily living in sin, will feel very ordinary and humdrum when they become merely partners; or, as the Americans say, 'an item'. Living in sin has always sounded daring and exotic...p.s. He includes on March 28th, 1995 this citation of Canon Liddon that "The applause of all but very good men is no more than the precise measure of their possible hostility." I find this a much more pleasant way to express what Pericles did in the opening of his funeral oration.
quamlibet immenso dives vigil incubet auro, aestuat augendae dira cupido rei.
But perhaps that is because I am reading The Hobbit aloud to my wife. Here is a choice insult for students who do poorly on their Latin:No matter how vast the hoard sleepless Dives lies upon, He seethes with relentless desire of increasing his wealth.
Romani sermonis egent, ridendaque verba frangit ad horrificos turbida lingua sonos.
His description of the ugliness of the miser somehow aptly describes current beauty trends:They lack Latin, and their swollen tongue breaks laughable vocabulary upon terrifying sounds.
perplexi crines, frons improba, tempora pressa, exstantes malae deficiente gena
Mussed up locks, impudent brow, indented temples, mouth always open with hardly any cheek.
Lies in politics are an old story, but do not blame them on rhetoric. Blame them on human credulity, on our tendency to believe authority. But counter them whenever possible by campaigning for open discussion. Lies act on the market of ideas as subsidies do on commodities–they undermine our ability to choose on a rational basis. (p. 189)
Sperne mores transmarinos, mille habent offucia.
cive Romano per orbem nemo vivit rectius:
quippe malim unum Catonem quam trecentos Socratas.
Shun the morals brought across seas; they've a thousand trickeries.
None in all the world lives straighter than a citizen of Rome.
Why, I prize one Cato more than fifteen score like Socrates. (trans. Duff & Duff)
A sense of the past is far more basic to the maintenance of freedom than hope for the future. (p.184)A succinct justification of my profession.
...are typical of the Ph.D. theses, regularly turned out, with perhaps more industry than wit, from the American universities. (p.21)
The producer becomes a fearful wild fowl when he takes the theatre as an independent art. The rise of this new and very belligerent art means that its rights are asserted with the noisiness of a Suffragete. (p.120)
(In reference to a paragraph length sentence on tax exempt items) That sentence...was obviously written by a lawyer in one of his flights of rhetorical secrecy. There isn't any thought or idea that can't be expressed in a fairly simple declarative sentence, or in a series of fairly simple declarative sentences. The contents of Section G of Form 1040, I am perfectly sure, could be stated so that the average person could grasp it without suffering dizzy spells. I could state it plainly myself if I could get some lawyer to disentangle it for me first. I'll make my government a proposition: for a five-dollar bill (and costs) I will state it plainly. (p.107)
Before leaving for our eight-day holiday with our friend Marriott White in Baden-Baden...I got very fussy about what to take to read. A little pile was made of Herodotus, Elmore Leonard's thriller Out of Sight, Shakespeare's Henry VIII and Piers Paul Read's new novel, Knights of the Cross. (p.40)
In the past few weeks there have been suggested all sorts of new schemes for quickly getting rid of unwanted babies in the womb. In my head I hear a snatch of office chatter. 'Free for lunch today?' 'Awfully sorry, no. I thought I'd just slip out and have an abortion.' If the human race survives to the third millenium will our age be given a thought? Will we be hailed as the pioneers of cloning or dismissed as a trashy slip-up after the centuries of recognizable values? Most likely the future will be ignorant of the fact that we even existed. (p.49)
A few days ago, rummaging in a drawer of batteries, film spools, etc., I spotted a sixty-minute cassette tape I must have recorded ten years or more ago of various poems or speeches I had wished to learn...The tape included 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock', Ulysses' great cynical speech from Troilus, beginning ''Time hath, my lord, a wallet at his back', the nineteenth psalm, poems by Robert Graves, R.S. Thomas, Vaughan and Herbert, and the Duke of Burgundy's marvellous evocation of the French countryside in his championship of the peace towards the end of Henry V. (p.84)
Somewhere along the line of the day I managed to buy Ted Hughes's Tales from Ovid (and read 'Echo and Narcissus' immediately with intense pleasure while having a haircut; I refrained from looking in the mirror). (p.112)
The terms used to describe them [negative symptoms of schizophrenia] are derived from the Greek: affective flattening, alogia, and avolition. (p.328, from A Beautiful Mind by Sylvia Nasar)Well, not really. I will give her "alogia."
Love is the most beautiful sentiment the Lord has put into the soul of men and women. (St. Gianna in a letter to her future husband, quoted in Blessed John Paul II's May 16, 2004 homily at the Mass of Canonization, p.145)
As to the past, let us entrust it to God's Mercy, the future to Divine Providence. Our task is to live holy the present moment. (p.149)
There flashed upon his mind the idea of the difficulty that attended the kind of life he had begun, and he felt as if he heard some one whispering to him, "How can you keep up for seventy years of your life these practices which you have begun?" Knowing that this thought was a temptation of the evil one, he expelled it by this answer: "Can you, wretched one, promise me one hour of life?" In this manner he overcame the temptation, and his soul was restored to peace.Again, I apologize that the Kindle does not allow for page references.
What a girl! He had never in his life before met a woman who could write a letter without a postscript, and this was but the smallest of her unusual gifts.
"I have never heard of Brooklyn." "You've heard of New York?" "Certainly." "New York's one of the outlying suburbs."
The gift of hiding private emotion and keeping up appearances before strangers is not, as many suppose, entirely a product of our modern civilization. Centuries before we were born or thought of there was a widely press-agented boy in Sparta who even went so far as to let a fox gnaw his tender young stomach without permitting the discomfort inseparable from such a proceeding to interfere with either his facial expression or his flow of small talk. Historians have hadned it down that, even in the later stages of the meal, the polite lad continued to be the life and soul of the party...Of all the qualities which belong exclusively to Man and are not shared by the lower animals, this surely is the one which marks him off most sharply from the beasts of the field.
(Of Lord Marshmoreton about to impose himself against his overbearing sister) It was the look which Ajax had in his eyes when he defied the lightning...The Spartan boy is related by Plutarch (Moralia, Apothegmata Laconica 35). The Ajax is the lesser one of Aeneid 1 fame. These just show the thorough grounding of Wodehouse in the Classics.
