Aesop’s Fables
Aesop, trans. by V.S. Vernon Jones
As I grow older, I wonder if conservative thinkers aren’t on to something when they talk about how people are more alike than not. Although I’m the first to advise ignoring anecdote in favor of seeking more robust evidence, I don’t think I’m alone, as a parent, in Continue reading
Beowulf
Unknown, trans. by David Wright
As a good example of a Myers-Briggs NTP, I’m forever conceiving grand projects, the greatest number of which fail to come to fruition.
Close readers will note my attempt to sidestep the responsibilities of agency through use of the passive voice. I suppose that makes me a sometimes scoundrel. This Continue reading
The Symposium
Plato (trans. by Walter Hamilton)
We’ve been here before. Well, not here exactly. But we’ve heard another’s account of this dinner party. So why not spend some time with the better-known version of the tale?
Tale strikes me as an inappropriate word for a serious work of philosophy. Make no mistake about it, this is as serious Continue reading
The Awakening
Kate Chopin
My ongoing dialog with the Tao te Ching has convinced me of one thing: the universe sends us messages and we’d be foolish not to listen.
Consequently, when a hardcover edition of Kate Chopin‘s most celebrated work fell into my hands soon after I’d terminally misplaced my just-set-aside-for-a moment Continue reading
Faust Pt. 1
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, trans. by Randall Jarrell
Back to the heavy stuff.
As I’ve said before, there are books you’re supposed to read if you fancy yourself a product of the Enlightenment. That doesn’t mean mindless adherence to the canon but it does suggest you have to be more than merely dismissive of it.
Still, I am a busy, perhaps more accurately a lazy, man , and I Continue reading
The Screwtape Letters
C.S. Lewis
Sin. What a quaint term. No one cares about sin anymore, do they?
Maybe they do. It’s hard to imagine that a trilogy about a lion and a piece of furniture is solely responsible for most of the works of a long-dead author still being available in Continue reading
Tao Te Ching
Lao Tzu
Trans. by Stephen Addis & Stanley Lombardo
There are three books I reread in more or less constant rotation. While you’ll never see them written about here they mean the world to me and keep me sane.
This is not one of those books.
It is however the basis for one of those books. More importantly, it is one of those books lying at the core of human civilization that we really ought to read. Think of the Continue reading
Memoirs of Socrates & The Symposium
Xenophon (trans. by Hugh Tredennick)
I feel sorry for philosophy majors.
Because somehow, somewhere along the line, philosophers came to be the whipping boys and girls of higher education. Who’d have thought it would ever come to that?
Quite some time ago, as a freshman, I had to take a year- Continue reading
An Honest Con 