Posts by Joshua

Yeah, fellow recovering Catholic altar boy here. 17 years in Catholic schools, baptized, confessed, and, against my better judgment, confirmed.

Learned young to lie early and often. When I got my first job at 16 I would skip Sunday mass for "work"; "work" in my private vernacular being to leave the house in my work uniform and go browse the books at Barnes and Noble. Imagine my surprise reading the Alexandrian novelist André Aciman years later: "People who read are hiders. They hide who they are. People who hide don’t always like who they are."

One of my prouder moments in secondary school was the paper we were asked to write on Natural Family Planning--or in very public vernacular, Vatican Roulette. I tore that whole business up one side and down the other. I didn't know at the time that I was really embarking on a long campaign which Christopher Hitchens was already defining in the aftermath of 9/11:

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Here we are then, I was thinking, in a war to the finish between everything I love and everything I hate. Fine. We will win and they will lose. A pity that we let them pick the time and place of the challenge, but we can and we will make up for that.

It could just as truthfully be argued that the conflict in question was not so different to the one articulated by Lucian of Samosata all those centuries ago. It was then and still is "war to the knife" between those on the one side who look for their reward in another life, and who more than merely scorn at the pleasure and beauty and wonder of this world, and those of us on the other who would do all in our power to make this one life truly worth living.

So reflecting on my early Catholicism is, for the second time today, like finding an old friend in Thoreau: "The greater part of what my neighbors call good I believe in my soul to be bad, and if I repent of anything, it is very likely to be my good behavior. What demon possessed me that I behaved so well?"

That is a very good passage, thank you! I completely agree when it comes to memorization. I recall walking 18 blocks in the cold one morning with a socket set to change my sister's tire, and made the journey pleasant by silently reciting Lucretius.

Thoreau records that on the desk in his cabin he kept open a copy of the Iliad, and turned it over in his mind while hoeing beans.

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^{A long war, not with cranes, but with weeds, those Trojans who had sun and rain and dews on their side. Daily the beans saw me come to their rescue armed with a hoe, and thin the ranks of their enemies, filling up the trenches with weedy dead. Many a lusty crest—waving Hector, that towered a whole foot above his crowding comrades, fell before my weapon and rolled in the dust.}

Latin-dictionary.net gives this for animans: animate/living being/organism (not man), creature

Wiktionary: A living thing or creature, an animal (as opposed to plants; as opposed to a man)

I'm satisfied as to the Latin. I will tentatively leave in the reference to Menoeceus, but I'm unsure that Greek treats ζωή like Latin treats animans. If I cannot come down to something more certain I will change the note so that it refers to the problem without making a definite conclusion.

Thank you very much Don !

Here is an attachment (I hope) of a draft which shows the general style of the project. When I finish the Hymn to Venus I will upload a more polished version with proper attribution to the sources I'm relying on.

I should also add that I am using OverLeaf as a Latex editor because it's much more tolerant of syntactical mistakes in the code. I am also using the package "glossy" instead of ExPex, because it was designed to be simple and easy instead of feature-rich.

This project has been dormant for two years, but I have recently picked it up from scratch and am making (glacial) progress. I'm grappling with the Latin word animans, which most dictionaries are careful to point out is used for lower order animals but not for humans. I am on the point of insisting that in Lucretius there is no great difference. I am supporting this claim by citing the Letter to Menoeceus, but would appreciate any thoughts as I plow ahead...particularly from Don .

My essential point is that Epicurus in that letter uses the Greek word ζῷον where βίος would be considered more "appropriate". Cyril Bailey translates; "And when this is once secured for us, all the tempest of the soul is dispersed, since the living creature has not to wander as though in search of something that is missing, and to look for some other thing by which he can fulfill the good of the soul and the good of the body. For it is then that we have need of pleasure, when we feel pain owing to the absence of pleasure; (but when we do not feel pain), we no longer need pleasure."

It's clear that Epicurus makes no distinction between lower animals and humans in this paragraph--both are equally motivated to pursue pleasure and avoid pain. In fact, the reference to fear in the preceding sentence really seems to drive home the point; it is humans and gods even more than animals that are under discussion.

I almost forgot to mention, @EricR , that we occasionally have chats with Dr. Kevin Guilfoy who co-edited "The Cambridge Companion to Peter Abelard", so if medieval logic interests you that would be a good book to lay your hands on. Kevin is a great guy and could probably be convinced to answer any questions you might have on that subject.

The Cambridge Companion to Abelard (Cambridge Companions to Philosophy)

Although best known for his views about universals and his dramatic love affair with Heloise, Peter Abelard (1079-1142) also made important contributions in…

www.amazon.com

It would be fair to say that I have an ascetic streak--for part of my twenties I was a car-free vegetarian who commuted by bicycle and drank more tea than anything else, after much reading in Thoreau, Edward Abbey, Frank Herbert and Buddhism. Some of this I found to be impractical in a small Midwestern city. The vegetarianism I found to be a strain on interpersonal relationships. It made dining with others very troublesome.

The thing is I couldn't let philosophy in general go even if I wanted to. I think for some people the questions arise unbidden. When Salman Rushdie went into protection after the fatwa, Susan Sontag told him "Salman! It’s like being in love! I think of you night and day: all the time!" It's like that with philosophy.

Death, life beyond the grave, ethics, morality, the nature of human life; even without Epicurus I should spend much time turning these things over in my mind.

Welcome!

I've been listening to an audiobook by Matthew Stewart called "Nature's God; The Heretical Origins of the American Republic."

I am still in the early chapters, but his project is to trace the Deism of Ethan Allen, Thomas Paine, Benjamin Franklin, etc--and the list is quote long--back through Charles Blount, John Locke, Baruch Spinoza, and finally through Lucretius and back to Epicurus. I cannot really review it at this time (although I might recommend a paper copy as easier to read carefully), but I am finding it very interesting.

Too kind as usual, Pacatus !

Thank you.

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All my moral and intellectual being is penetrated by an invincible conviction that whatever falls under the dominion of our senses must be in nature and, however exceptional, cannot differ in its essence from all the other effects of the visible and tangible world of which we are a self-conscious part. The world of the living contains enough marvels and mysteries as it is; marvels and mysteries acting upon our emotions and intelligence in ways so inexplicable that it would almost justify the conception of life as an enchanted state. No, I am too firm in my consciousness of the marvellous to be ever fascinated by the mere supernatural, which (take it any way you like) is but a manufactured article, the fabrication of minds insensitive to the intimate delicacies of our relation to the dead and to the living, in their countless multitudes; a desecration of our tenderest memories; an outrage on our dignity.

This is an excerpt.

That clears that up! Thank you, I was trying to work out how he could have managed that.

Speaking of manuscripts, I watched this video on the digitization of the Venetus A manuscript of the Iliad and found it really fascinating. It's amazing how many different specialists it takes to undergo this kind of project.

That being said, please do report back with your impressions!

I might be thinking of a video where Greenblatt cites Ada Palmer and not his book, but either way he holds her work in high regard.

I have that book. It's a history and document analysis of the surviving manuscripts, and goes into detail studying scholia and marginalia with a view to understanding how Renaissance readers like Montaigne were receiving the poem as they read it.

It's a great book, for the information it contains, and Greenblatt cited Ada Palmer's work pre-publication. Many readers will find it rather dry compared to the The Swerve, which continues to be a favorite of mine.

I mentioned it to Cassius Sunday evening as part of the question we unfortunately didn't get to for lack of time.

"Ixion was expelled from Olympus and blasted with a thunderbolt. Zeus ordered Hermes to bind Ixion to a winged fiery wheel that was always spinning. Therefore, Ixion was bound to a burning solar wheel for all eternity, at first spinning across the heavens,[18] but in later myth transferred to Tartarus.[19][20] Only when Orpheus played his lyre during his trip to the Underworld to rescue Eurydice did it stop for a while."

Regarding the difficult quote from Theophrastus that "The happy man cannot mount the scaffold to the wheel," I found this confession of a 19th century Parisian: "I demand to expiate it; — I accept the responsibility; — I wish to mount the scaffold." This indicates at least to me that 'mounting the scaffold' to be hanged connotes volition on the part of the condemned. Theophrastus might well be saying that it is impossible to willingly undergo torture, and Epicurus responds by saying that one might well undergo torture willingly to save a friend.

Also relevant are these lines from Shakespeare's Richard II:

“O, who can hold a fire in his hand

By thinking on the frosty Caucasus?

Or cloy the hungry edge of appetite

By bare imagination of a feast?

Or wallow naked in December snow

By thinking on fantastic summer's heat?

O, no! the apprehension of the good

Gives but the greater feeling to the worse:

Fell sorrow's tooth doth never rankle more

Than when he bites, but lanceth not the sore.”

And also the poem I wrote in response to that passage from Horace:

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Firewood

While walking in the woods, I am at pains

To pause at each cold circle of burnt stone.

A totemic blending of the profane

And sacred: a human altar where none

So human live—where memory and time

Are sacrificed in their concentric rings,

The ageless for the transitory. Each

Ring is a dolmen, or a stele of lime,

And tells of the past in a varied speech.

It gives me pause, this strange chaleur vitale¹.

I think on sacred groves—such that deterred

Thoreau², and Horace, with that old Ital-

ic saw: Do you think Virtue naught but words,

A forest only firewood? For though

The greater mass goes up in flame, pile

Upon pile of charcoal lying near

Sighs at this loss; of what, I do not know—

But that it pleases me to wander here.

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¹French, Vital Heat

²Walden; "I would that our farmers when they cut down a forest felt some of that awe which the old Romans did when they came to thin, or let in the light to, a consecrated grove (lucum conlucare), that is, would believe that it is sacred to some god."