Kendra’s Comments (group member since Aug 26, 2016)

Kendra’s comments from the Reading Classics, Chronologically Through the Ages group.

I got a little behind, so I'm only just now working my way through this book. But as I read it, I'm struck by a few different thoughts.

One is the extent of self-deprecation that she experiences. I know this is common in religious spheres, but I've also realized how harmful it has been to myself during my own religious upbringing and prior involvement. While I try not to judge anyone for their religious beliefs and experiences, I have trouble seeing this trend as anything but harmful. How does hating ourselves benefit god?

Additionally, it's interesting to consider this book in the context of the other books surrounding it on the list. There's Montaigne, who by comparison is such a worldly man. And then Shakespeare, who can be so low-brow in some of his plays. It's interesting to consider the breadth of experiences each of these individuals had and just how much their thoughts and beliefs might have differed.

Hi Irene,

Thank you for chiming in with you interesting insights! I specifically enjoyed those two lines you quoted. I've been thinking about death recently, and how the knowledge that we will die influences so much of human behavior, even when it is not a conscious thought. There's a lot of fear that comes with it, so it's no wonder so many civilizations have some sort of concept of an afterlife - there's comfort in the idea that death isn't the end. On the other hand, there can be a sense of freedom when one believes that death is the end. In the end, none of this matters, so why not take the risk/follow your passion/be generous?

Bauer recommends three plays by Shakespeare -- Richard III, A Midsummer Night's Dream, and Hamlet -- and this thread will be a place to discuss all three.

"Shakespeare occupies a position unique in world literature. Other poets, such as Homer and Dante, and novelists, such as Leo Tolstoy and Charles Dickens, have transcended national barriers, but no writer’s living reputation can compare to that of Shakespeare, whose plays, written in the late 16th and early 17th centuries for a small repertory theatre, are now performed and read more often and in more countries than ever before. The prophecy of his great contemporary, the poet and dramatist Ben Jonson, that Shakespeare 'was not of an age, but for all time,' has been fulfilled.

It may be audacious even to attempt a definition of his greatness, but it is not so difficult to describe the gifts that enabled him to create imaginative visions of pathos and mirth that, whether read or witnessed in the theatre, fill the mind and linger there. He is a writer of great intellectual rapidity, perceptiveness, and poetic power. Other writers have had these qualities, but with Shakespeare the keenness of mind was applied not to abstruse or remote subjects but to human beings and their complete range of emotions and conflicts. Other writers have applied their keenness of mind in this way, but Shakespeare is astonishingly clever with words and images, so that his mental energy, when applied to intelligible human situations, finds full and memorable expression, convincing and imaginatively stimulating. As if this were not enough, the art form into which his creative energies went was not remote and bookish but involved the vivid stage impersonation of human beings, commanding sympathy and inviting vicarious participation. Thus, Shakespeare’s merits can survive translation into other languages and into cultures remote from that of Elizabethan England." Source

I finally finished the Selected Essays in this version I read. I agree with both of you - he was an interesting narrator and I appreciated his thoughts. I didn't agree with everything he said, but some of it was extremely relatable. I didn't appreciate the casual misogyny, but he was clearly a product of his environment. And I think that is partially what made him intriguing: he was just a semi-average person who didn't claim he was anything special. He was just writing down some thoughts for his friends, not trying to create a masterpiece.

"Doctor Faustus is a play about desire: for the best in life, for knowledge, power, material comfort, and influence. Faustus sells his soul to the devil hoping to learn the secrets of the universe, but is fobbed off with explanations which he knows to be inadequate. He is obsessed with fame, but his achievement as a devil-assisted celebrity magician is less substantial than it was previously as a scholar.

Marlowe's most famous play is a tragedy, but also extremely funny. It involves hideous representations of the Seven Deadly Sins, and of Helen of Troy, the world's most beautiful woman. With its fireworks and special effects, it was one of the most spectacular and popular on the Elizabethan stage. Yet, ever since Marlowe's death, it has been regularly rewritten. Its mix of fantastical story, slapstick, and raw human emotion still arouses conflicting interpretations, and presents us with endlessly fascinating problems." Source

"Teresa of Ávila was a Spanish noblewoman who felt called to monastic life in the Catholic Church. A Carmelite nun, prominent Spanish mystic, religious reformer, author, theologian of the contemplative life and mental prayer, she earned the rare distinction of being declared a Doctor of the Church over four centuries after her death. Active during the Catholic Reformation, she reformed the Carmelite Orders of both women and men.

Teresa, who had been a social celebrity in her home province, was dogged by early family losses and ill health. In her mature years, she became the central figure of a movement of spiritual and monastic renewal borne out of an inner conviction and honed by ascetic practice. She was also at the center of deep ecclesiastical controversy as she took on the pervasive laxity in her order against the background of the Protestant reformation sweeping over Europe and the Spanish Inquisition asserting church discipline in her home country. The consequences were to last well beyond her life.

Forty years after her death in 1622, Teresa was canonized by Pope Gregory XV. At the time she was considered a candidate for national patron saint of Spain, but lost out to St. James the Apostle. She has since become one of the patron saints of Spain.

Her written contributions, which include her autobiography, are today an integral part of Spanish Renaissance literature." Source

Hi Martin,

I think that is a great idea! If I'm not mistaken, I think you should be able to create a thread yourself, and you are more than welcome to do so. Let me know if you're having any trouble doing that.

Hi Cleo,

Thanks for the reminder that Bauer gives a list of recommended essays. I'll go back and edit the original post with the list of those.

I'm glad the hear you enjoyed them. I'm looking forward to getting started on them soon. What I've read about them has definitely left me intrigued.

"When Michel de Montaigne retired to his family estate in 1572, aged 38, he tells us that he wanted to write his famous Essays as a distraction for his idle mind. He neither wanted nor expected people beyond his circle of friends to be too interested.

His Essays’ preface almost warns us off:

'Reader, you have here an honest book; … in writing it, I have proposed to myself no other than a domestic and private end. I have had no consideration at all either to your service or to my glory … Thus, reader, I myself am the matter of my book: there’s no reason that you should employ your leisure upon so frivolous and vain a subject. Therefore farewell.'

The ensuing, free-ranging essays, although steeped in classical poetry, history and philosophy, are unquestionably something new in the history of Western thought. They were almost scandalous for their day.

No one before Montaigne in the Western canon had thought to devote pages to subjects as diverse and seemingly insignificant as “Of Smells”, “Of the Custom of Wearing Clothes”, “Of Posting” (letters, that is), “Of Thumbs” or “Of Sleep” — let alone reflections on the unruliness of the male appendage, a subject which repeatedly concerned him.

French philosopher Jacques Rancière has recently argued that modernism began with the opening up of the mundane, private and ordinary to artistic treatment. Modern art no longer restricts its subject matters to classical myths, biblical tales, the battles and dealings of Princes and prelates.

If Rancière is right, it could be said that Montaigne’s 107 Essays, each between several hundred words and (in one case) several hundred pages, came close to inventing modernism in the late 16th century." Source

Bauer recommends the following Essays:
"To the Reader"
Book I: Ch 2 - 4, 9, 19-21, 26, 28-29, 51
Book II: Ch 1, 5-8, 10, 17-21, 29, 31
Book III: Ch 1-2, 13

Welcome, Jenni! We're glad to have you, and good luck with your reading goals. Even though we're technically reading on a schedule, please feel welcome to post your thoughts on "old" posts, or let me know if you'd like a post created for a book we haven't reached yet. I can't wait to hear your insights!

2019 Recap

And just like that another year is done. My reading this year reflected a continued commitment to this group and The Well Educated Mind list, as well as an expanding interest in science and natural history.

This was a year of change for me personally and, in some ways, my reading habits aligned with those changes. But, on the other hand, over half of my books were from TWEM and I wonder how much of that content impacted the changes I experienced.

My favorite book of the year was definitively Behave by Robert Sapolsky. While very much a science book, Sapolsky wrote it in such a way that it inspired philosophy and reflection. I definitely intend to read it again soon and spend more time with its numerous ideas.

Books Completed:

TWEM:
1. The City of God by Augustine
2. The Ecclesiastical History of the English People by Bede
3. Beowulf
4. Inferno by Dante Alighieri
5. Sir Gawin and the Green Knight
6. The Centerbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
7. The Book of Margery Kempe
8. Everyman
9. The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli
10. Utopia by Sir Thomas More
11. Commentariolus by Nicolaus Copernicus
12. Sonnets by William Shakespeare

Miscellaneous:
13. The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating by Elisabeth Tova Bailey
14. High School by Sara Quin and Teagan Quin
15. Mind of the Raven by Bernd Heinrich
16. Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett
17. Sissy by Jacob Tobia
18. Behave by Robert Sapolsky
19. A Field Guido to Your Own Backyard by John Hanson Mitchell
20. How to Read Nature by Tristan Gooley
21. The Defining Decade by Meg Jay

Planned But Didn’t Complete:

- Cesar and Christ by Will Durant – While I made some progress on this one, I didn’t get nearly as far as I wished.
- The Sagas of Icelanders by Örnólfur Thorsson – This one has been sitting around since 2017… Maybe 2020 will be the year I complete it?

"John Donne was born in 1572 in London, England. He is known as the founder of the Metaphysical Poets, a term created by Samuel Johnson, an eighteenth-century English essayist, poet, and philosopher.The Metaphysical Poets are known for their ability to startle the reader and coax new perspective through paradoxical images, subtle argument, inventive syntax, and imagery from art, philosophy, and religion using an extended metaphor known as a conceit. Donne reached beyond the rational and hierarchical structures of the seventeenth century with his exacting and ingenious conceits, advancing the exploratory spirit of his time." Source

"John Donne's reputation as a dissolute, poetry-spouting rake who miraculously mutated into a devout priest and dean of St. Paul's Cathedral isn't entirely deserved. True, Donne did spend the first part of his life as a courtier and man about town, and he did carry on an affair with his employer's sixteen-year-old niece, Anne More, when he was himself nearly thirty. But he married Anne (after her father had him jailed) and lived with her faithfully afterward. And although Donne's poetry is traditionally divided into two parts--the earthly love poetry written in the first part of his life, and the poetry of devotion to God produced during his later years--he actually began writing religious poetry years before he became a priest, and was still producing amorous verses two years after his ordination." (Bauer)

“Sonnets are fourteen-line lyric poems, traditionally written in iambic pentameter - that is, in lines ten syllables long, with accents falling on every second syllable.

"There are no documented records of when the sonnets were written and there is even some doubt as to their true authorship. It is, however, certain that William Shakespeare had written some sonnets as in 1598 Francis Meres, in a 'survey' of poetry and literature, made reference to the Bard and 'his sugared sonnets among his private friends.' The sonnets were intended as a form private communication, some perhaps to flatter potential patrons.

"William Shakespeare's sonnets are stories about a handsome boy, or rival poet, and the mysterious and aloof 'dark' lady they both love. The sonnets fall into three clear groupings: Sonnets 1 to 126 are addressed to, or concern, a young man; Sonnets 127-152 are addressed to, or concern, a dark lady (dark in the sense of her hair, her facial features, and her character), and Sonnets 153-154 are fairly free adaptations of two classical Greek poems.” Source

Here is a good overview of the Sonnets:Crash Course Shakespeare’s Sonnets

If you don’t want to read every single one, Susan Wise Bauer points out the following as ones to take note of: 3, 16, 18, 19, 21, 30, 36, 40, 60, 98, 116, 129, 130, 152

Happy Reading!

“Sir Thomas More (1477 - 1535) was the first person to write of a 'utopia', a word used to describe a perfect imaginary world. More's book imagines a complex, self-contained community set on an island, in which people share a common culture and way of life. He coined the word 'utopia' from the Greek ou-topos meaning 'no place' or 'nowhere'. It was a pun - the almost identical Greek word eu-toposmeans 'a good place'. So at the very heart of the word is a vital question: can a perfect world ever be realised?” Source

Here is a good source to read more about the author:Biography of Sir Thomas More

The most interesting thing I found about this essay was the reason Copernicus is famous: he was the first to place the sun, rather than the earth, at the center of the universe. The leads to the logical conclusion that the earth is in motion.

Moments show a bit of Copernicus's pride. I can hear the eye roll when he says, "For the principle arguments by which the natural philosophers attempt to establish the immobility of the earth rest for the most part on the appearances. It is particularly such arguments that collapse here." Or the bit of self-congratulations behind his claim. "Yet Mercury too will be understood, if a person of unusual talent attack the problem."

He ends with the phrase "ballet of the planets" which I find beautiful and poetic, even if, in the first part of the sentence, he claims to have explained the entire structure of the universe. There was so much he did not know, and there is so much we don't know, too.

“Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543) was a mathematician and astronomer who proposed that the sun was stationary in the center of the universe and the earth revolved around it. Disturbed by the failure of Ptolemy's geocentric model of the universe to follow Aristotle's requirement for the uniform circular motion of all celestial bodies and determined to eliminate Ptolemy's equant, an imaginary point around which the bodies seemed to follow that requirement, Copernicus decided that he could achieve his goal only through a heliocentric model. He thereby created a concept of a universe in which the distances of the planets from the sun bore a direct relationship to the size of their orbits. At the time Copernicus's heliocentric idea was very controversial; nevertheless, it was the start of a change in the way the world was viewed, and Copernicus came to be seen as the initiator of the Scientific Revolution.” Source

Commentariolus was a small manuscript, written as an introduction to Copernicus’s ideas. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, the source of the quote above, is a great overview of the life of Copernicus, and his ideas and writing.

Given that this is not his most famous work, it might be a little difficult to find. If you’re having trouble obtaining a copy, please send me a message.

Periodically, as I was reading this book, I would stop and say, “Wow, Machiavelli is a complete pessimist.” It is well summed up when he says, “Yet the way men live is so far removed from the way they ought to live that anyone who abandons what is for what should be pursues his downfall rather than his preservation; for a man who strives after goodness in all his acts is sure to come to ruin, since there are so many men who are not good.”

And he’s not afraid to be direct with his clear distrust of human goodness. For example:

“Men will always prove bad unless necessity compels them to be good.”

“A wise prince cannot and should not keep his pledge when it is against his interest to do so and when his reasons for making the pledge are no longer operative. If all men were good, this would be a bad precept, but since they are evil and would not keep a pledge to you, then you need not keep yours to them.”

“Men will never do good except by necessity. Whenever they have the freedom to choose and the chance to act with abandon, they introduce confusion and chaos everywhere.”

Machiavelli believes that people are inherently bad and that is at the core of all his philosophies about government and politics. He thinks it is better for a ruler to be feared than to be loved because people will more easily betray bonds based on love than fear. So why bother even trying to play by the rules of fairness, honesty, trust, and goodness?

Machiavelli also sees outcomes as a balance of fate and ability. A prince who has the ability to be great and powerful can only become so when the right opportunity arises. “Since our free will must not be denied, I estimate that even if fortune is the arbiter of half our actions, she still allows us to control the other half, of thereabouts.”

This is a scary combination. On one hand, there’s a mindset that humans are naturally bad and will screw you over at every opportunity so don’t even bother to treat them decently and feel no remorse when you do mistreat them. Additionally, you only have partial free will. So are you to blame for anything you do?

Nevertheless, he still believes strongly in the honor and sanctity of life and liberty. The final note in The Discourses, which were partially included in my version of the book, reads, “Where the well-being of one’s country is at all in question, no consideration of justice or injustice, of mercy or cruelty, of honor or shame must be allowed to enter in at all. Indeed, every other consideration having been put aside, that course of action alone which will save the life and liberty of the country ought to be wholeheartedly pursued.”

Within this horrifying statement is a large amount of pride and identity in one’s country. An interesting, and almost out of place sentiment in his musings on the dog eat dog nature of men. His conclusions would lead me to apathy more so than anything else.

All in all, I loved this book and found look through its point of view very fascinating. It truly lives up to its reputation.

"A short treatise on how to acquire power, create a state, and keep it, The Prince represents Machiavelli’s effort to provide a guide for political action based on the lessons of history and his own experience as a foreign secretary in Florence. His belief that politics has its own rules so shocked his readers that the adjectival form of his surname, Machiavellian, came to be used as a synonym for political maneuvers marked by cunning, duplicity, or bad faith.

Machiavelli referred to his treatise as De Principatibus ('Of Principalities') while writing it, and it circulated in manuscript form during the 1510s. When it was first published in 1532, five years after Machiavelli had died, it carried the title Il Principe ('The Prince')." Source

Here is a link to a great introductory video of Machiavelli's principles and the context of his writing.

Happy Reading!

To be honest, when I first read this I did not find it especially interesting and I quickly tossed it aside. But while reading Caesar and Christ by Will Durant today, he quotes a passage that, when pulled out, became more meaningful to me:

"If men could feel, as they seem to feel, that there is an
oppression on their minds, which wearies them with its
weight, and could also perceive from what causes it arises,
and whence so great a mass, as it were, of evil exists in their
breasts, they would not live in the manner in which we
generally see them living; for we observe them uncertain what
they would have, and always inquiring for something new; and
changing their place, as if by the change they could lay aside
a load.

He, who has grown weary of remaining at home, often
goes forth from his vast mansion, and suddenly returns, inasmuch as he perceives that he is nothing bettered by being
abroad. He runs precipitately, hurrying on his horses, to his
villa, as if he were eager to carry succour to an edifice on
fire; but, as soon as he has touched the threshold of the
building, he yawns, or falls heavily to sleep, and seeks forgetfulness of himself, or even with equal haste goes back and
revisits the city.

In this way each man flees from himself; but himself, as it
always happens, whom he cannot escape, and whom he still
hates, adheres to him in spite of his efforts; and for this reason, that the sick man does not know the cause of his disease,
which if every one could understand, he would, in the first
place, having laid aside all other pursuits, study to learn the
NATURE OF THINGS" (Lucretius, Book III, 1066-1084)

Durant reads this "weight" as an effect of the turbulent times in Rome which Lucretius and others were living through. He says, "But not one of them found peace. War and revolution touched them with pervasive infection; and even Lucretius must have known the restlessness which he describes...His poem is a longing for physical and mental peace."

I think this is a fascinating perspective to view his work from and it's just another reason why I'm reading Durant alongside these other books... even if I am quite a bit behind at the moment.

Question for all of you: Do you think our reading order should be based on date written or date published?

Specifically, I'm looking at the upcoming months books and I noticed that Commentariolus by Nicolaus Copernicus was written in 1514 but published in 1543. Which date we decided to go with will determine if it comes before or after Utopia by Sir Thomas More.

Personally, I'm leaning towards written date, since it easier to place in the context of its time, especially if there's many years in between those two dates. Nevertheless, I figured I'd put it to a vote.

Thoughts?