I have finished reading:
Journey of the Mind: A Life in History by Peter Brown- The best biography of anyone that I've read in a long time.
I note that with the exception of the beginning and the end of the book, Brown deals mostly with the work but that made the more personal passages (i.e., the death of his mother, which closes the book) more poignant. I also greatly enjoyed the fact that as a scholar, Brown worked at the crossroads of disciplines (classical antiquity and the Middle Ages and Christianity and Islam, primarily).
Historians are often bad prophets. Their business is diagnosis.They can sometimes pick up with considerable alertness hints of strain and of unappeased anger. But they seldom commit themselves to a prognosis.They do not know the future course of the malfunctions and ancient grievances that they may have spotted. In Iran, in 1976, it was easy enough (even for a foreign traveler) to pick up strong undertones of discontent.
[Pierre] Hadot made clear that these written texts were meant to transform these readers. They were not treatises of abstract reasoning. They were the living voice of their authors, pleading, insisting, and above all, arguing, that their readers should change their loves. For Hadot, ancient philosophy “did not consist in teaching an abstract theory...but rather the art of living...It demanded] a concrete attitude and a determinate life-style, which engaged the whole of existence.”
Black Ceasars and Foxy Cleopatras: A History of Blaxploitation Cinema by Odie Henderson- Reviewed this past Tuesday in Black Kos.
I am reading:
2666 by Roberto Bolano- Four scholars of a mysterious German author meet at literature conferences and become friends and lovers while they go on a search for the author himself. Loving Bolano’s nearly page long sentences.
...the search for Archimboldi could never fill their lives. They could read him, they could study him, they could pick him apart, but they couldn’t laugh or be sad with him, partly because Archimboldi was always far away, partly because the deeper they went into his work, the more it devoured its explorers.
Entering the Silence: Becoming a Monk and a Writer (The Journals of Thomas Merton Book 2) by Thomas Merton- I accidentally pulled this up on the Kindle and decided to start reading it again.
We do not believe things ordinarily without witnesses. If we are weak and foolish, we are not sure of even the greatest gifts unless we see that they are approved of or admired by others.
Need to pick up an ordinary fiction book. Detective or a spy novel.