Thought

My First Podcast: Part One Of A Lecture Series On Stoicism

Quintus Curtius Thought , ,

I have decided to add podcasts to the content offered on my site.  There is a refreshing value in mixing the presentation of material by audio, along with material already offered in a written format.

Because of the many questions I receive on Stoicism, and the enduring interest in this subject, I have decided to give a series of 10 lectures on Cicero’s Stoic Paradoxes.

I published a translation of Stoic Paradoxes in September, and this lecture series will explain and explore the themes of this work.  Those who have not read the work will find these lectures to be a good introduction to it, while those who have already read it will benefit from the additional review.

Since this is the first podcast I’ve made, I appreciate the feedback of listeners.  I expect things to become additionally refined as we move forward.

The World Will Provide

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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, this way and that, like some kind of insensate farm animal.

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What Is It Like To Get Older?

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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 the rest of the article, click here.]

 

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

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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 historians).  According to the chronicler Manetho, he ruled Lower Egypt as a king of the Twenty-Fourth Dynasty from 725 to 720 B.C.  According to tradition, he was famous for his wisdom and prudence.

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Success Can Be Fatal

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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 food is concerned, nourishment is measured in quantities, by weight.  But so is life, or mortality, in a way.

For the doctors of medicine assure us that one can die just as readily from overeating, as from under-eating.  Excess is just as much a danger as dearth.  And in the developed world, it is more of a danger.  For few of us will be faced with the prospect of starvation in our lives.  More likely, our challenges will come from the over-abundance of choices, from the temptations of bounty.

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Genius Springs Up In Unlikely Places

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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 Wahlberg, who plays an existentially-troubled English teacher.  In the speech to his class, he offers a few words on the whole “Shakespeare controversy”:  that is, were Shakespeare’s plays written by him, or by someone else?

You may know that there is an industry built up around the denial that Shakespeare wrote his places.  These deniers claim it must have been some aristocrat or some professor who wrote the plays attributed to him.

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

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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 boat…I got to remember:  never get out of the boat,” he repeats over and over.

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You Will Never Reach The End-Zone

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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 hardly stand it.  And then they tell us:  I can subsist on this victorious inertia for a while, and see where that takes me.

Oh, if only it were that simple.  The end-zone, sorry to say, does not exist.  Fortune hates inertia, and will snuff it out quickly.

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I Won’t Go Back To Nature

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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 idealistic falsity, of insincerity.  Those who hate the world find solace in the Stone-Age.

And modernly we have Pearl Buck, with her odes to the Chinese peasant.  Never mind, of course, that that same saintly peasant would have stank to high heaven.  There may be a Good Earth, but there is also a Bad Earth, too, and Peal Buck never wrote that novel.

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Beware The Waters Of Salmacis

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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.

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