Posts by Joshua

I was reading through r/AskReddit the other day and there was a thread titled something like "What was the closest you've ever come to suicide, and what was it that brought you back?" I clicked on it for the human interest angle, and read a post that said that 'studying stoicism really helped.'

Hey, if you're at that terrible point in your life, and stoicism is the one thing that pulls you through, that's great. I'm not going to argue or judge.

But is that the advice I would give to a friend? Sadly, no. Surely we can do better than to tell a suffering fellow human that the way to move beyond suicide ideation is to realize that life and its experiences are 'indifferent.'

I hope everyone in that thread is doing ok.

My experience with the Humphries translation is very similar to Cassius'. The audible version is great! I also have and love the paperback. He somehow manages to strike the right chord every time.

I think you'll especially love his rendition of the hymn to Venus! As I type this, I can hear it in my head.

Welcome, Patrick! DeWitt is an excellent start. If you want a few more good laughs, try Lucian's Alexander the Oracle-Monger.

Lucian of Samosata : Alexander the False Prophet

Thank you all! I really enjoyed, I will be interested in doing it again!

This is a wide subject! Allow me to narrow it through the lens of a few poems I like.

Romance:

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Drink to me only with thine eyes,

And I will pledge with mine;

Or leave a kiss but in the cup,

And I’ll not look for wine.

The thirst that from the soul doth rise

Doth ask a drink divine;

But might I of Jove’s nectar sup,

I would not change for thine.

I sent thee late a rosy wreath,

Not so much honouring thee

As giving it a hope, that there

It could not withered be.

But thou thereon didst only breathe,

And sent’st it back to me;

Since when it grows, and smells, I swear,

Not of itself, but thee.

-Ben Jonson

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simple hospitalities:

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Arrived there, the little house they fill, Ne looke for entertainement, where none was: Rest is their feast, and all things at their will; The noblest mind the best contentment has.

-Edmund Spencer

The countryside: (from a much longer poem)

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[...] Now, Penshurst, they that will proportion thee

With other edifices, when they see

Those proud, ambitious heaps, and nothing else,

May say their lords have built, but thy lord dwells.

-Ben Jonson

Wine: (from a much longer poem)

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O, for a draught of vintage! that hath been Cool'd a long age in the deep-delved earth. Tasting of Flora and the country green, Dance, and Provencal song, and sunburnt mirth!

-John Keats

Traversing the landscape:

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Whose woods these are I think I know.

His house is in the village though;

He will not see me stopping here

To watch his woods fill up with snow.

-Robert Frost

Walking alone by night:

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The Curfew tolls the knell of parting day,

The lowing herd wind slowly o'er the lea,

The ploughman homeward plods his weary way,

And leaves the world to darkness and to me.

-Thomas Gray

Thinking about nature and the cosmos:

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There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,

There is a rapture on the lonely shore,

There is society, where none intrudes,

By the deep Sea, and music in its roar:

I love not Man the less, but Nature more,

From these our interviews, in which I steal

From all I may be, or have been before,

To mingle with the Universe, and feel

What I can ne’er express, yet cannot all conceal.

-Lord Byron

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Finding a good translation of a classic text:

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Much have I travell'd in the realms of gold,

And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;

Round many western islands have I been

Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.

Oft of one wide expanse had I been told

That deep-brow'd Homer ruled as his demesne;

Yet did I never breathe its pure serene

Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:

Then felt I like some watcher of the skies

When a new planet swims into his ken;

Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes

He star'd at the Pacific—and all his men

Look'd at each other with a wild surmise—

Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

-John Keats

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And now one or two of my own:

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No more! Aye, fly! Fly to thine pleasure

Great noble bird, sun-midst sailing,

Prow a-gleaming, southward seeking;

Seek thee still a sweeter shore

And I, a sweet philosophy.

Yet I will linger here a time

Tasting of the morning's fruits—

'Ere long the yawning sea shall call:

The tide shall fail, and then the light,

And we shall mingle, you and I

Void with void, and mote with mote.

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And in lieu of a lucrative synecure for writing poetry: the pleasure of my day job, land-surveying!

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Thoreau and the Geometry of Misattribution: Field Notes

Mid-morning, June the twenty-fifth. Clear, calm;

The water's edge of Choctawhatchee Bay—

All glass and brass and darting precision—

Where little fins answer the noiseless psalm

Of some invisible magnetism.

Our survey maps the shore's meandering way

Easterly; thence perambulates this marsh

And cypress swamp. "Never look back unless

You are planning to go that way"? A harsh

And hollow saw; return is not regress—

A surveyor's first sight is his backsight.

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That last one I sent off to the Walden Woods Project (Thoreau was a surveyor by trade), and they (allegedly) filed it away in their archives.

If I seem too earnest, it might be because I recently had the pleasure of socializing with two piglets

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nor during its life can it afford any other service, as the other animals do, which either afford a vehicle for riding, or aid in the cultivation of the fields, or draw waggons by their neck, or carry burthens on their back, or furnish a covering with their skins, or abound with a supply of milk, or keep watch for guarding our houses.

This is patently false. Pigs provide excellent services. They clear tenacious, thorny and invasive weeds by digging up the roots; they turn and till the soil; they produce manure for fertilization; they are used to establish new ponds, for by their wallowing they compact and seal the ground to hold water; in Florida they are kept to drive off snakes, which protects people and animals (especially children and young); they are used to hunt for truffles; In medieval Europe, and in New York City as late as the nineteenth century, pigs were used to clean city streets of thrown out food.

And they are curiously intelligent and companionable. I know of at least one instance where a pig saved a woman's life. She had a debilitating heart attack, and when her pig found her he managed to get out to the nearby road where he flagged down a car! The driver got out and followed the pig back to where the woman had collapsed, and she was rushed to a hospital.

If Lactantius was incapable of imagining a use for this noble beast, he ought to have let the pig do his thinking for him!

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What's the reference to firefighters and pigs?

Rather grim I'm afraid. When you've smelled a burn victim.....

We talked a lot about pigs. This video by the late Christopher Hitchens is an excellent reading from a chapter of one of his books on specifically this subject.

In reading the Rolfe Humphries translation of this passage I found something interesting. At Loeb line 921, he translates with an emendation;

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In the first place, from everything we see

There is bound to be an everlasting flow.

Ah, look about you! Watch a glimmering pool

In the first shine of starlight, see the stars

Respond, that very instant, radiant

In water's universe. Does this not prove

How marvelous the swift descent from heaven?

Our other senses know of emanance

In fragrances [...]

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I was startled by the seemingly unwarranted poetic license, and the Loeb edition did not point to a lacuna in these lines. However, when I did a search for Lucretius' use of that imagery it took me all the way back to a heavily corrupted passage in Book 4. Here is a part of the Loeb note on page 292.

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[...] The new passage should begin before 217, but after 216, the opening of it being lost. 217-229 are repeated, with a few minor variations, in 6.923-935, and the reviser of this work thinks it most probable that 217 was preceded by two lines identical or almost identical to 6.921-922, and that those two lines were preceded by lines by lines in which the new subject was introduced. [...]

It seems the translators are doing their best to use these two passages (both corrupted in the manuscripts) to form a coherent whole.

Upcoming publication: a companion edition to The Pocket Stoic, published last year.

The Pocket Epicurean by John Sellars

Will Publish December 2021

Cloth-Bound $12.50

University of Chicago Press

Author:

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John Sellars is a Reader in Philosophy at Royal Holloway, University of London, a Visiting Research Fellow at King’s College London (where he is an Associate Editor for the Ancient Commentators on Aristotle project), and a member of Wolfson College, Oxford (where he was once a Junior Research Fellow).

Description:

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A short, smart guide to living the good life through the teachings of Epicurus.

As long as there has been human life, we’ve searched for what it means to be happy. More than two thousand years ago, the Greek philosopher Epicurus came to his own conclusion: all we really want in life is pleasure. Though today we tend to associate the word “Epicurean” with indulgence in the form of food and wine, the philosophy of Epicurus was about a life well lived even in the hardest of times. As John Sellars shows in this concise, approachable guide, the ideal life envisioned by Epicurus and his followers was a life much more concerned with mental pleasures and the avoidance of pain. Their goal, in short, was a life of tranquility or contentment.

In The Pocket Epicurean Sellars walks us through the history of Epicureanism, starting with the private garden on the edge of ancient Athens where Epicurus and his students lived in the fourth century BC, and where women were as welcome as men. Sellars then moves on to ancient Rome, where Epicurean influence flourished thanks to the poet Lucretius and his cohort. Throughout the book, Sellars draws on the ideas of Epicurus to offer a constructive way of thinking about the pleasures of friendship and our place in the world.

Table of Contents

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Prologue

1. Philosophy as Therapy

2. The Path to Tranquillity

3. What Do You Need?

4. The Pleasures of Friendship

5. Why Study Nature?

6. Don’t Fear Death

7. Explaining Everything

Epilogue

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This will be a good opportunity for a timely and topical discussion of a short, manageable and inexpensive book at the time of its publication. His prior work is heavily Stoical. Shall we expect to be Tranquil-ized? Let's find out!

Mark your calendars!

We briefly discussed George Santayana's essay on Lucretius maybe a year or so ago. His essay was in fact taken from a book called Three Philosophical Poets—Lucretius for the materialist or "natural" view, Dante for the supernatural, and Goethe for the Romantic. I have not read these other two essays. It might be worth looking over them as they relate to this conversion.

I have read nearly everything of significance that came out of American Transcendentalism—the major figures as well as the lesser lights, including their diaries and journals, and the letters they exchanged. This was my major obsession in college, and I can still read these authors and find them occasionally refreshing. I'm more likely now to find them unhelpfully obscurantist.

I mentioned on the podcast the Principle of Explosion. It's not exactly as I described it, but that's the wikipedia page.

It's similar to the Hermarchus problem under discussion, if not an exact fit.

There's a biographical data point that bears on this question, yes? In his early career he made the city of Mytilene too hot to hold him, and was driven to Lampsacus and the mercy of a king? I don't know if I have the details right exactly.

Suppose I decide that I am absolutely completely convinced by all my faculties and life-long experiences that Jesus Christ is the Living God, which I identify in my mind as a concept I entitle Christianity.

I am persuaded of the truth of Christianity beyond any need for seconds further data or reflection.

Has Christianity now entered into what I should understand from Epicurus that my canon of truth should be?

________________

Indeed not, good sir! But I'll have to get into the 'why' after I get to work.

And as for women, two notable Americans were Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Margaret Fuller, living at the time of Frances Wright or not long after. Both were prodigious, but Margaret Fuller in particular was extraordinary for her time. She had a reading fluency in Latin and German, and also studied Greek and several other European languages. I recall writing a paper on the pair in college.

Regarding her age, it's not at all historically unusual for British education to produce prodigies.

John Milton:

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Milton's first datable compositions are two psalms done at age 15 at Long Bennington. One contemporary source is the Brief Lives of John Aubrey, an uneven compilation including first-hand reports. In the work, Aubrey quotes Christopher, Milton's younger brother: "When he was young, he studied very hard and sat up very late, commonly till twelve or one o'clock at night". Aubrey adds, "His complexion exceeding faire—he was so faire that they called him the Lady of Christ's College

Alexander Pope:

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Pope's formal education ended at this time, [age 12] and from then on, he mostly educated himself by reading the works of classical writers such as the satirists Horace and Juvenal, the epic poets Homer and Virgil, as well as English authors such as Geoffrey Chaucer, William Shakespeare and John Dryden. He studied many languages, reading works by French, Italian, Latin, and Greek poets. After five years of study, [age 17] Pope came into contact with figures from London literary society such as William Congreve, Samuel Garth and William Trumbull.

Thomas De Quincey:

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In 1800, De Quincey, aged 15, was ready for the University of Oxford; his scholarship was far in advance of his years. "That boy could harangue an Athenian mob better than you or I could address an English one", his master at Bath had said.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson:

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Tennyson and two of his elder brothers were writing poetry in their teens and a collection of poems by all three was published locally when Alfred was only 17.

John Keats:

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However, at 13 he began focusing his energy on reading and study, winning his first academic prize in midsummer 1809.

William Wordsworth:

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However, [his father] did encourage William in his reading, and in particular set him to commit large portions of verse to memory, including works by Milton, Shakespeare and Spenser. [...]

Wordsworth made his debut as a writer in 1787 [age 17] when he published a sonnet in The European Magazine.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge:

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In one of a series of autobiographical letters written to Thomas Poole, Coleridge wrote: "At six years old I remember to have read Belisarius, Robinson Crusoe, and Philip Quarll – and then I found the Arabian Nights' Entertainments – one tale of which (the tale of a man who was compelled to seek for a pure virgin) made so deep an impression on me (I had read it in the evening while my mother was mending stockings) that I was haunted by spectres whenever I was in the dark – and I distinctly remember the anxious and fearful eagerness with which I used to watch the window in which the books lay – and whenever the sun lay upon them, I would seize it, carry it by the wall, and bask, and read.

J.R.R. Tolkien:

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Tolkien could read by the age of four and could write fluently soon afterwards. [...] While in his early teens, Tolkien had his first encounter with a constructed language, Animalic, an invention of his cousins, Mary and Marjorie Incledon. At that time, he was studying Latin and Anglo-Saxon. Their interest in Animalic soon died away, but Mary and others, including Tolkien himself, invented a new and more complex language called Nevbosh. The next constructed language he came to work with, Naffarin, would be his own creation. Tolkien learned Esperanto some time before 1909. [Age 17] Around 10 June 1909 he composed "The Book of the Foxrook", a sixteen-page notebook, where the "earliest example of one of his invented alphabets" appears. Short texts in this notebook are written in Esperanto.

Percy Bysshe Shelley:

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At age six, he was sent to a day school run by the vicar of Warnham church, where he displayed an impressive memory and gift for languages. [...] In 1802 [age 10] he entered the Syon House Academy of Brentford, Middlesex. [...] Shelley developed an interest in science which supplemented his voracious reading of tales of mystery, romance and the supernatural. During his holidays at Field Place, his sisters were often terrified at being subjected to his experiments with gunpowder, acids and electricity. Back at school he blew up a paling fence with gunpowder.

Oscar Wilde:

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Later in life he claimed that his fellow students had regarded him as a "prodigy" for his ability to speed read, claiming that he could read two facing pages simultaneously and consume a three-volume book in half an hour, retaining enough information to give a basic account of the plot. He excelled academically, particularly in the subject of Classics, in which he ranked fourth in the school in 1869. His aptitude for giving oral translations of Greek and Latin texts won him multiple prizes, including the Carpenter Prize for Greek Testament.

John Stuart Mill:

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He was given an extremely rigorous upbringing, and was deliberately shielded from association with children his own age other than his siblings. His father, a follower of Bentham and an adherent of associationism, had as his explicit aim to create a genius intellect that would carry on the cause of utilitarianism and its implementation after he and Bentham had died.

Mill was a notably precocious child. He describes his education in his autobiography. At the age of three he was taught Greek. By the age of eight, he had read Aesop's Fables, Xenophon's Anabasis, and the whole of Herodotus, and was acquainted with Lucian, Diogenes Laërtius, Isocrates and six dialogues of Plato. He had also read a great deal of history in English and had been taught arithmetic, physics and astronomy.

At the age of eight, Mill began studying Latin, the works of Euclid, and algebra, and was appointed schoolmaster to the younger children of the family. His main reading was still history, but he went through all the commonly taught Latin and Greek authors and by the age of ten could read Plato and Demosthenes with ease. His father also thought that it was important for Mill to study and compose poetry. One of his earliest poetic compositions was a continuation of the Iliad. In his spare time he also enjoyed reading about natural sciences and popular novels, such as Don Quixote and Robinson Crusoe.

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Welcome to the gardens of pleasure;

may you find it the abode of peace, of wisdom, and of virtue. [...] See to that luminary! Lovely and glorious in the dawn, he gathers strength and beauty to his meridian, and passes in peace and grandeur to his rest. So do thou, my son. Open your ears and your eyes ; know, and choose what is good ; enter the path of virtue, and thou shalt follow it, for you shall find it sweet. Thorns are not in it, nor is it difficult or steep: like the garden you have now entered, all there is pleasure and repose.

Yes–by a modern (and U.S. centered) analogy, he set up shop in Central Park, not in Montana.

But I suspect that like Aristotle he would have found his way to Athens in any case. A century or two earlier, Miletus: a century or two later, perhaps Alexandria.