classics digests, reflections and reviews
Glory, as Christianity teaches me to hope for it, turns out to satisfy my original desire and indeed to reveal an element in that desire which I had not noticed …just as the moment of vision dies away, as the music ends or as the landscape loses the celestial light… For a few minutes we have had the illusion of belonging to that world. Now we wake to find that […]
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I’ve always known Don Quixote by name, and thought he was a clown. I never understood why a novel about a clown was so popular, even considered one of the greatest ever written, until I read it recently for the first time, and realized who Don Quixote really is: he is everyman. He dreams of travelling around the world in search of adventures (Having being cooped up at home by […]
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Who Wants to Live Forever [The struldbrugs, or immortals] commonly acted like mortals till about thirty years old; after which, by degrees, they grew melancholy and dejected, .. When they came to fourscore years, which is reckoned the extremity of living in this country, they had not only all the follies and infirmities of other old men, but many more which arose from the dreadful prospect of never dying. They […]
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Reign of the Thirty Tyrants Now at Athens the Thirty had been chosen [by the people] for the purpose of framing a constitution under which to conduct the government, however, they continually delayed framing and publishing this constitution, but they appointed a Senate and the other magistrates as they saw fit. Then, as a first step, they arrested and brought to trial for their lives those persons who, by common […]
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The Song of Troilus If there’s no love, 0 God! What am I feeling? If there is love, who then, and what, is he? If love be good whence comes this sorrow stealing? If evil, what a wonder it is to me When every torment and adversity That comes of him is savoury, to my thinking! The more I thirst, the more I would be drinking. And if so be […]
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I’ve been extremely busy in the past months, and had no time to write a proper blogpost. But a recent event has obliged me to speak up, for “silence gives consent”, and I do not think it right to give consent to a comment made by a pubic health officer concerning my colleagues. “If people are in our healthcare system and not recognizing the importance of vaccination, then this is […]
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How Eteonicus Quashed the Conspiracy of the Reed The troops that were at Chios under Eteonicus subsisted, so long as the summer lasted, upon the produce of the season and by working for hire up and down the island; when winter came on, however, and they were without food and poorly clad and unshod, they got together and agreed to make an attack upon Chios; and it was decided that […]
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