Personal reorg of a lot of things done, still more to do...reading is beginning to pick back up a bit.
Permanent reading list:
The Complete Essays by Michel de Montaigne- I.25- On schoolmasters learning- This essay has little to do with what a “schoolmaster” and more to do with how that learning is applied.
A learned person should take a part in the public affairs of the state...IIRC, philosopher Martha Nussbaum said that this remains an English tradition but not much an American tradition.still an English tradition but not much of an American one now. M. uses the examples of Socrates and (my favorite) Archimedes as examples of those who served the state and, at the same time, remained aloof (in stunning contrast to the way, over 100 years after M.’s death, Sir Issac Newton was to be.) The intersection of patriotism, nationalism, and learning are reasons enough to read this essay.
M. has a serious disdain for knowledge for knowledge’s sake’; knowledge is to be utilized for the betterment of self, others, and society (at the very least, virtue is to be preferred to knowledge for it’s own sake). The M. questions whether he, in fact, has failed to live up to this standard; it remains an open question.
Thinking of the notion of “the schoolmaster” as a “pundit” in more of the classical sense of the word as opposed to the overwhelming amount of “pundits” in the modern senses of the word (who seem to converse more with other pundits than anything else...)
I am now reading:
Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson- Returned to SC and it’s getting better than ever. Never much of a sci-fi reader but I at least know that the opposition between actual and virtual reality is now an old theme but I am still pretty new to it. And, yes, subir is right, SC was a pretty prophetic book for it’s time. LOVE the scene between the swashbuckler Hiroski Protagonist and the Nipponese businessman. (Hiroski Protagonist probably has an ancestor in The Baroque Cycle).
Driven Toward Madness: The Fugitive Slave Margaret Garner and Tragedy on the Ohio by Nikki M. Taylor- Will be writing a full review of this recent find at the public library very, very soon.
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany by William Shirer