Fred Jenkins > Recent Status Updates

Not a book to read fast.

In Scetis a brother went to Moses to ask for advice. He said to him, 'Go and sit in your cell, and your cell will teach you everything.'

And thence to Pascal!

The first part (roughly 100 pages) is a chronological account of Livia's life; the second (to p. 225) covers specific aspects in more detail. Then we come to the many and lengthy appendices. Currently in the first, on sources.

Finally seriously reading this, after a false start a week ago. Barrett begins by warning us not to confuse the historical Livia with the Livia of Robert Graves' I, Claudius (or Siân Phillips' portrayal in the BBC production of it). I am not a fan of Graves' writing; I did like the BBC version. But how many people under fifty remember either?

"Yes, Professor, knowledge and understanding are quite different. Only understanding can lead to being, whereas knowledge is but a passing presence in it. New knowledge displaces the old and the result is, as it were, a pouring from the empty into the void."

Or as Heraclitus says, πολυμαθίη νόον ἔχειν οὐ διδάσκει. A good reminder for anyone who spent his life in academe.

"Socratic ignorance represents in fact the power of the empty, silent mind, the mind free of preoccupation with ideas and thoughts, the mind purified. And in and from this purified mind there arises a new quality of mind: call it pure attention."

Really don't like this much; not sure why I am continuing. Why is it that so many famous, highly recommended books disappoint? To put it mildly, Clark's style sucks.

Clark really doesn't like Hadrian; granted the Villa is somewhat like Nero's Domus Aurea, but otherwise H. was a pretty good emperor and not very much like N.

Clark writes in a steam of consciousness, juxtaposing bits of the ancient, medieval, Renaissance, and modern in no particular order. Reading it is sometimes like climbing a wall of ice; slippery surfaces and hard to get beneath them. But there are many interesting bits.

Manguel's seventh digression deals with dreams and truth: "the lies told by writers are not untruths, they are merely not real." But see Aristotle's Poetics 1451b : "The real difference is this, that one tells what happened and the other what might happen. For this reason poetry is something more scientific and serious than history, because poetry tends to give general truths while history gives particular facts."