ARTICLES ARCHIVE

 

You can find a complete listing of all the articles on this site here. They are listed in reverse chronological order, and are all clickable links. Twenty-five articles are displayed per page, with the publication date included. To find older articles, click on the page numbers at the bottom.

To search the site by subject, topic, or name, you can use the “Search” function on the right sidebar.

_______________________________

 

  • Coming In Spring 2016: “On Duties”

    For well over a year now, I’ve been working steadily on the most ambitious literary project of my life.  It has been an incredible and exhausting adventure, and has opened up vistas in my perception of the world that I never would have expected.

  • The World Will Provide

    Our spirits are driven by two things:  appetite and Reason. Appetite is the hunger for pleasures, and Reason is the rational impulse.  When Reason does not control the appetite, then the appetite usurps the leadership position of the spirit. And this is a sure road to ruin. Appetite leads us around aimlessly by the nose,…

  • What Is It Like To Get Older?

      One of the questions that I’ve been asked a lot these days is how one’s perceptions change about things as one gets older. A lot of younger guys in their twenties or thirties want to get a glimpse of what lies around the corners of life that they will be approaching soon. [To read…

  • One Illusion Is Only Worth Another Illusion: The Judgment Of Bocchoris

    Here is a sly and amusing story that I came across in Plutarch this weekend.  We find it in his Life of Demetrius (Ch. 27).  It is short, but effective. There was an Egyptian pharaoh named Bakenranef, who was known to the Greeks as Bocchoris (names of foreign rulers and notables were often Hellenized by…

  • Success Can Be Fatal

    I was eating today at one of those a kilo places in Rio:  one of those places where the food is purchased by the total weight.  The greater the quantity of food, the greater the price.  It turned out to be an opportunity for reflection on the price not of food, but of achievement. Where…

  • Genius Springs Up In Unlikely Places

    On an airline flight yesterday I was watching a 2014 Mark Wahlberg film called The Gambler.  I had not heard of it before.  Apparently it didn’t do too well at the box office last year, due to its depressing and nihilistic tone. Regardless, there was a great speech near the beginning of the movie by…

  • Civil And Military Organization Of The Later Roman Empire

      Introduction Current news headlines of populations on the move into Europe have drawn attention to a previous era in European history, one in which mass migrations of foreign peoples played a major role.  The Roman Empire of the fourth and fifth centuries was faced with these very challenges from the movements of Germanic tribes,…

  • Never Get Out Of The Boat, Unless You’re Going All The Way

    There is a scene in the 1979 film classic Apocalypse Now where Willard and the Chef stop their river patrol boat to collect some mangoes in the jungle.  They come face to face with a tiger, and this causes the tightly-wound Chef to become unglued. “Never get out of the boat…never get out of the…

  • The Films Of Gaspar Noé

    Sometimes we need to take a break from virtue.  All things in moderation, I say, including virtue. Sometimes, we need to look deeply into the abyss.  Someone once said that the abyss looks back at you, but it’s more accurate to say something else: it blows out its breath at you, like the open maw…

  • You Will Never Reach The End-Zone

    Some want to reach a point of victorious finality.  They want to enter the end-zone of the football field, slam the ball down, and celebrate.  Finally, they say, I have arrived! I have made it, they bray.  I can now coast a little, they assure us.  Listen to these asses bray, bray, bray. I can…

  • I Won’t Go Back To Nature

    There is this entire literature of sentimentalizing the soil, and Nature in general.  Sentimentalizing the brute labor required to fructify the soil.  Think of Hector St. John de Crevecoeur, Rousseau, Emerson, Thoreau.  You know, the whole nineteenth century Romanticism of it all.  I never really liked this impulse, as it always smacked to me of…

  • The Wisdom Of Moderation, And The Danger Of Extremism

    Plutarch’s lives of Phocion and Cato the Younger can be read as case studies on the contrasting features of moderation and extremism. The successful, rational leader will know when to compromise and seek settlements; the extremist will not, and thereby brings himself and others to ruin.

  • Beware The Waters Of Salmacis

    Men take their masculinity too lightly.  That is, they do not value that which makes them men.  They are too eager to minimize its power, to dull its sheen, and to snuff out its distinct phosphorescence. What one does not value, is not safeguarded from outside attack.

  • A Professional Translator Shares His Thoughts

    [A reader of Stoic Paradoxes contacted me recently and shared some of his experiences and adventures gained from many years of translating.  I told him that his ideas would make for a great guest post here. His language is expertise is Japanese, a language that I am not proficient in.  But it is interesting that…

  • My Own Ten Commandments

    I was having a chat with some friends recently about some aspects of life.  It gave me the opportunity to express my thoughts on one or two subjects.  Let me tell you more about it.

  • A Passage From Plutarch’s “Life of Timoleon”

    Here is a morsel to chew on. I was reading a bit of Plutarch this morning and came across a passage that is worth sharing.  It is from the Life of Timoleon (6):

  • Aldus Manutius: The First Great Publisher In History

    We take so much for granted today about printed books.  The wisdom of the ages can be captured and preserved for costs that are so low as to almost negligible.  Save for the surfeit of information that currently exists, the modern man has no excuse not to be reasonably acquainted with his heritage. It was…

  • Stoic Paradoxes Is Now Available

    My third book, Stoic Paradoxes, is now available on Amazon.   It is offered in both Kindle edition and in paperback.  Click on the cover image above. I wanted to use this post to explain what the book is about, and why it is an important addition to the literature on Stoicism.

  • The Luckiest Man On The Face Of The Earth

    I have a close friend who knows a great deal about the game of baseball.  I always defer to his knowledge in discussions of the sport.  We were recently talking about the relative merits of modern ball players when compared to the great figures of earlier generations.  It is a debate that has no end,…

  • Jack London Sails Across The Pacific

    Readers no doubt are familiar with Jack London.  One of the great 20th century American novelists and short-story writers, he is justly famous for his harrowing tales of survival and courage, often set in exotic locales like the Klondike, the South Seas, and the abysses of urban squalor. He lived a life that was as adventurous…

  • Simon Murray: Legionnaire

    I have recently finished reading Simon Murray’s memoir of his life in the French Foreign Legion, which is titled simply Legionnaire: Five Years in the French Foreign Legion.  First published in 1978, it was recently reissued in 2006 as a mass market paperback.

  • Justinian’s Codification Of The Law

    Great men make laws, and greater men interpret them. If a leader wishes to achieve immortality, let him organize, arrange, and codify a body of law for his people.  Many of the greatest leaders (Numa Pompilia, Lycurgus, Solon, etc.) have been lawgivers.  The monuments of stone have crumbled, but the laws remain. To codify is to bestow…

  • The Importance Of Linguistic Nationalism

    I read this weekend an article in the BBC that I interpreted as a good thing.  The article was discussing a recent decision of Pakistan’s Supreme Court to replace English with Urdu as the official language. I should say at the outset here that I have never been to Pakistan and know nothing about its…

  • How A Rogue Can Take Over A Village

    I was talking to a friend earlier today, and the conversation happened to be diverted into the topic of hucksters, pitch-men, and carnival-barkers. After thinking about the conversation, my mind wandered off to some of the late-night “pitch-man” advertising I had seen years ago.

  • A Tale Of Grapes And Greed

    The Sufi order called Qadiri was founded by Abdul Qadir Gilani Al Amoli (1077–1166).  He was born at Nif, which lies to the south of the Caspian Sea.  The Qadiriyya Order is a large one and has many adherents in the Islamic world. There is a teaching story that I came across recently that reminded…

20160812_162948

Original copy of Cicero’s De Officiis (On Duties) published in Holland in 1642.  From the collection of Fortress of the Mind.