The Founders' Books

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.

The following is from the introduction:

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)

Johnson's Humorists

I did not find Paul Johnson's Humorists nearly as good as his other biographical series (Intellectuals, Creators, Heroes). Again, a book passes without a quote. I think I shall read some Wodehouse...

Sub 4:00

A quick note to say I finished Sub 4:00: Alan Webb and the Quest for the Fastest Mile. Nothing worth quoting.

A Call to Arms

From Letters from Lake Como (Explorations in Technology and the Human Race):

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) 

Ouch...

I came across this rather cavalier reference to Sir James George Frazer in Cathy Gere's Knossos and the Prophets of Modernism:

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)

But besides the passing swipe at  literary giants (who often can use the cutting-down-to-size), the book was rather good as seen in this bit from the conclusion:

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)

Pompey in the Parlor

I was rather disappointed by John Masefield's The Tragedy of Pompey the Great. C.S. Lewis liked it (in 1922) and D.L. Page (in 1928) won the Gaisford Prize at Oxford for a translation of Act 2 Scene 1. It lacks a sense of grandeur and it is dated by its British chumminess in vocabulary (e.g. "Look. Man."). The first two acts read as though set in a sitting room with many pregnant pauses rather than words of merit.

You Reap What You Sow (in Greek)

I reread in a scholion to Pythian Four a copy of a supposed oracle to Battus the First (a/k/a the Stammerer), the founder of Cyrene. I was rushed before and had not paused to note that it contained at its end an exhortation that gives the Greek equivalent of "you reap what you sow":

οἷά τ’ ἀνὴρ ἕρξει, τοῖον τέλος αὐτὸν ἱκάνει.

The slight irony in this is that the Greek colonists at Cyrene reaped what they did not sow, i.e. silphium (pictured on the coin above). They harvested the nature plant to extinction.

Just One More Thing

From Just One More Thing:

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.

Equality and Antiquity

From The Servile State:

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) 

Also (in 1913) Belloc confronts the race problem with justice to the ancients,

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)

Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me?

From Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me?:

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.

More Free Books

Returning from a trip East to find a new domicile for the coming year, I found a large box awaiting me full of free books from the Liberty Fund. With one exception, all are beautiful hardback with ribbons. But I would never complain about a free paperback either. I am starting with Belloc's The Servile State and Acton's Lectures on the French Revolution. They were also handing out Matthew Kelly's Rediscover Catholicism after Mass yesterday.

The Sign of Four

Continuing with the Sherlock Holmes stories, I finished The Sign of Four yesterday. I have not noticed any superabundance of Sherlock Holmes reprints in the book stores; but I must confess that I at least have returned to Holmes and Watson after watching the new BBC series.