This is mostly about Goethe’s Faust, but it was not going to be. Faust says he never wants to sit still. It doesn’t seem like a great idea.
Athens, Monday, July 10, 2017
If, as Wikipedia now mentions, and John Warner discusses in the fittingly titled “That’s Not What Lolita Is About” (November 16, 2025) – if Elisa New recommended that Jeffrey Epstein read Lolita (which I have read) and My Antonia (which I haven’t), why not Faust?
At the end of Book XVI of the Iliad, Hector
Postacı Halil Sokağı (Street of Halil the Postman)
Tarabya (Θεραπειά), Sarıyer, Istanbul
Thursday morning, March 2, 2023
In a 2012 post in this blog, I criticized a 2009 essay called “50 Years of Stupid Grammar Advice.” The putative advice was that of Strunk and White. However, what these two had written was not the elements of grammar, but The Elements of Style. They gave style advice by precept and example. The advice is good, if well understood. The critic should recognize that, as I wrote, “Rules of style are supposed to induce thinking, not obedience.”
All photos taken in Delphi, July 12–14, 2017
This is a foray into the mystery of how things happen, based the 164th of the 361 chapters of War and Peace. This chapter contains, in a one-sentence paragraph, a summary of Tolstoy’s theory of history:
Each man lives for himself, using his freedom to attain his personal aims, and feels with his whole being that he can now do or abstain from doing this or that action; but as soon as he has done it, that action performed at a certain moment in time becomes irrevocable and belongs to history, in which it has not a free but a predestined significance.
This is about Thales of Miletus and what it means to study him. I am moved to ask what history is in the first place. It is a study of the freedom in which we face our conditions. Thales had his way of understanding the world, and we may benefit from trying to learn it.
“The Thaleses of the future are meeting in Didim,
September 24, 2016”
Polytropy 