Book XIX of the Iliad is all talk. This annoys Achilles, but is important for Agamemnon and Odysseus, and they should know better—Odysseus even says so.
Achilles gets ready to fight while Patroclus lies dead
(or, one of two well-fed street-dogs goes through the motions of defense)
Şalcıkır Parkı, Tarabya
Sarıyer, Istanbul
Sunday morning, March 26, 2023
On the day recounted in Book VIII of the Iliad,
I wrote a fuller summary in 2017. Because I was reading it, I also talked about Huysmans, Against Nature, and the belief of the main character that the prose poem could
contain within its small compass, like beef essence, the power of a novel, while eliminating its tedious analyses and superfluous descriptions.
Now I shall find reason to bring up Herodotus, Plato, Aristotle, Thoreau, and Freud, and especially William James and Collingwood on the subject of emotion.
Waters of the Bosphorus, Sarıyer, Istanbul
Wednesday morning, January 11, 2023
Book VII of the Iliad shows us the paradox of men at war who can still work together.
Cock and cat on a village street
near a stream channelled between concrete walls
Tarabya, Sarıyer, Istanbul
Wednesday, January 11, 2023
Yeniköy (Νιχώρι) on the Bosphorus
Sarıyer, Istanbul, December 11, 2022
The Paphlagonians must have passed by here
on their way to join the Trojans
as they did according to Iliad II.851–5
as mentioned in the Wikipedia article “Cytorus”
created by me in 2010
In Book III of the Iliad, we learn about Menelaus, Paris, Hector, Helen, and Priam. Having learned about Agamemnon, Achilles, and Patroclus in the first two books, now we know all of the players in the following summary of the epic.
This is inspired by Charlotte Brontë’s Villette. After reading this 1853 novel a second time in the summer of 2018, I put some passages I liked into a LaTeX file. I added some commentary and came up with a document more than 90 A5 pages long. I recently reread it and was reminded how much I had enjoyed the novel. I thought some of my commentary could be adapted to stand alone as a blog post—this one.
“The Sower,” 1850
Jean-François Millet (French, 1814–1875)
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
In the Platonic dialogues, Socrates frequently mentions τέχνη (technê), which is art in the archaic sense: skill or craft. The concern of this post is how one develops a skill, and what it means to have one in the first place.
This post uses work of Hannah Arendt, Augustine, R. G. Collingwood, Tom Holland, Somerset Maugham, and Ved Mehta.
Ortaköy, December 27, 2021
In the first post of this series, I gave some reasons to read the Republic, and one of them was the problem of how our political leaders were not always the best. Plato had not solved that problem, since we still had it; but that meant nobody else had solved it either. Plato had at least taught us that people with great worldly power could nonetheless be more miserable than their subjects. In the Republic, Plato has Socrates teach that lesson
In adolescence, when I started visiting art museums in Washington for my own pleasure, I would visit also the museum shops, hoping to be able to take home a souvenir. Eventually, my own memories were enough to take home.
That is what I remember observing about myself, perhaps around the time when my body stopped growing taller. That time may be used to demarcate adulthood, although in kindergarten, it had made no sense to me that our bodies could ever stop growing.
Cycads outside Selenium Twins
in the valley above Ihlamur Kasırları
on the way to Beşiktaş
December 27, 2021
I have not been to a museum since the advent of Covid-19, but I often want a souvenir when I am reading now. The souvenir may be in the form of pencil marks in a book, or pen marks in a magazine, or various interventions in an electronic file. To be able to make such interventions, I save webpages, usually with a browser’s print function or with Print Friendly.
I may also respond to what I read by writing blog posts. This is why I now have eighteen of those on Plato’s Republic: one for each of the fourteen parts in which the dialogue was divided for an online discussion, and four more for when I had an abundance of ideas.
Where has all of that left me?
We are still in the latter part of Book VI of Plato’s Republic, where Socrates undertakes to explain the education of the philosopher kings (502c–d). They are not literally so called, as we noted last time. They are going to need to “be able to bear the greatest studies” (503e), and “the idea of the good is the greatest study” (505a). People are confused about what the good is: many say it is pleasure; a few, knowledge (505b). It rather makes it possible to have knowledge (508d), and perhaps even pleasure (509a), as the sun makes seeing possible (508b–d). We looked at that much last time.
Dünya Barış Parkı 2021.10.30
Polytropy 