One may take hope -- perhaps -- that there is an academic treatment of any subject imaginable. Having long wondered how Plato et al. survived to the present day, this volume sealed it. The authors are learned, quite, but can't write a compelling enough narrative to keep any but the most dogged pursuers of this story going. I chewed on the bone long enough, and gathered much marrow, hence the three stars, but this is not "exciting" reading of sensational appeal. Following the recent reprint of Albert J. Nock's warning against mass literacy (!), this can be seen to be not all that pejorative.
What this did leave me with, was a deeper appreciation for chance -- Theophrastus' library of Aristotle's bequeathed original works recovered just in time from mold -- and perseverance -- Cardinal Bessarion's long mission to establish Greek works in medieval Rome. In the authors' view, the reading, and passion for, classical literature is what founded the Renaissance. How's that for hope?
As I usually do, I've forgotten the fullness of the detail, but it was great to read of whomever pursued Tacitus and gave us that one copy of his Annals which managed to survive, and to read of why the pagan playwright Terence was so popular even into the Christian era.
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Demolishing of all that is egotistic, 'present', ignorant. Despite the author's here and there contradictions which slightly undermine the rigor, this is one of the best reflective works I've read. Pulling no punches for a scholar-gentleman, in a masterfully coherent style.
Of course, my own fragmentary style he would condemn. Rightly so.
Sample chapter titles:
Egotism In Work And Art.
The Great Stereopticon.
Fragmentation And Obsession.
Weaver's treatment of the corruption of language, of "the spoiled-child psychology", of many other things, is the most satisfying reading experience I've had in a long while, even as his agrarian Southern sensibility can be strangely semi-reactionary, semi-lib in regards to women, to woman to keep the note -- "priestess" whose equalitarian zeal makes her no better than a man serfing away in a factory. Not an insulting point, if one takes it in mind and mulls it.
His call for a re-valuation of hierarchy rings all too true as I live in a condo, owner at that, and have no power over the tediously loud renters above me. In the mass of units, after all, I'm only 1/16 of a complaint behind two interceding management companies and an unlisted landlord. Mass, faceless, and corporate at its most personal defined.
Weaver, you're right. Heh.
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by Laozi
Thanks for the review; you might also like Red Pine's version of the Heart Sutra - quite good, if for the commentary alone (or introduction, at least, as I remember it) ]]>
Eco cites Borges as a major influence, and it's clear fun to read his linking of Borges, the possible world of the possible library, incontrovertible facts in fiction, hypertext, Dante, Wilde, and on. A fine mind, if far more 'academic' than Borges. Good criticism here; if you are averse to semiotics, you may not like it so much, but Eco draws creative threads and reminds us that a society without literature is a poor one indeed. ]]>
Charmingly casual -- there's no ideology here, no hard-angled pomo poststructuralism and the like. Certain of ambiguity, and richly read, Borges has something in common with Hayek, I posit -- or rather the reverse, though I don't know if any influence is there -- and that's the thing, somehow, what's linked by literature pervades, what was it, the oversoul a la Emerson? ]]>
Good anthology from NYU Press of "conservative" writing since 1930. I don't quote the word to disparage it, but to highlight the surprising (and welcome) heterodoxy which has characterized the American Right; it's not agreed by self-styled conservatives as to just what conservatism is, or encompasses. This in itself reminds me of what Borges discussed (and which I am reading now) in This Craft Of Verse, that the less we define, the more we know -- and that arguments convince nobody. That's another discussion, but it is germane to some of the writings in this collection, that a) the argumentative ones can fall flat, and b) the tentative ones are hospitable, to draw again from Borges.
Part II, Classical Liberalism, includes an excerpt from Hayek's masterful The Road To Serfdom, on which society is heading down today. (Yet another digression to be left out). It's hard to envision any modern "liberal" anthology (and here I quote indeed to disparage the Rooseveltian corruption of the term) including classical liberals, since they by and large advocated a far greater degree of economic freedom than is admitted today by left- or right-wing statists, for that matter.
Highlights include "Why I Am Not A Conservative" by F. A. Hayek, "What Is Libertarianism?" by Murray Rothbard, and an excerpt from Richard Weaver's complacency-demolishing 1948 book Ideas Have Consequences. Also of note is the introduction to the still-controversial I'll Take My Stand by the Southern Agrarian writers such as John Crowe Ransom.
Would you know that it is the neoconservatives who are the supporters of minority civil rights on the Right, or so they say? (Not to be confused with affirmative action). This book does much to dispel the cheap labels and expensive ignorance that has grown up around this faction, the more so as one may disagree with their war policies especially, as I do.
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Not Miller's best, but a simple tale, his "most singular" as he himself described it. This story can pass an afternoon, say on a hilltop overlooking a river somewhere west of the Mississippi. ]]>
Well-done introductory survey by a scholar whose renowned, multi-volume History Of Greek Philosophy I would love to get to...someday. ]]>
"Finished the Soviet section; while this is an important text, it is sometimes tedious in its litany of statistics. Hence, "longoing" --"
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