Stoicism has proven itself to be an enduring and influential philosophy.
It may not have attracted the greatest number of adherents when compared to other schools of philosophy, but the men that it did attract tended to be the best men.
Cicero, whose name is synonymous with eloquence, wrote a great deal on Stoicism.
I will be releasing a new book this coming fall.
I have decided to issue a fresh, new translation of one of Cicero’s lesser known works, a treatise called Stoic Paradoxes.
One of the greatest accounts of suffering and survival that I’ve read is the book Prisoners of the Japanese by writer Gavan Daws. It’s a compendium of anecdotes, stories, and harrowing accounts of Allied prisoners taken by the Japanese Army in the Pacific.
More than this, it is a painstakingly-assembed oral record of the men–almost all of them dead now–who lived and survived in now-forgotten hellholes like Changi Prison, Cabanatuan, the Burma-Siam railroad, Davao, and a dozen other places.
Thousands of men from the armed forces of the United States, Great Britain, Australia and New Zealand, and the Netherlands were done to death in these camps, either by disease, forced labor, starvation, or related causes.
I’ve recently learned something about the theories and works of a little-known philosopher and educationalist named John Comenius (1592-1670). He was a Czech cleric perhaps best remembered for his progressive theories on universal education. Some exposure to his ideas made me realize just how out of focus the educational system is here in the United States.
In Comenius’s time, illiteracy was the rule in perhaps a majority of Europeans. He spent decades traveling around Europe to promote educational reform, and to attempt to bring the art of instruction in line with modern realities.
We live in times where our “leaders” at the top lecture us on duty and responsibility, yet aggregate to themselves a larger and larger portion of the pie. They grow fat on your labor, and on your backs; and yet you have very little to call your own.
And in their spare time, they sweep away our cultural inheritance to make way for corrupting entertainments, distracting amusements, and intoxicating spectacles that offer nothing in the way of meaningful value. We see this as the lesson of the great film Harakiri (1962). It is one of the great samurai films, and a powerful indictment of institutional hypocrisy.
I like to listen to audiobooks when driving around. News doesn’t interest me as much as in years past, and I can get what I want from websites.
I recently rented Stephen Mitchell’s new translation of The Iliad
I’m not a big Sherlock Holmes fan. Some of the stories are amusing, but I never really warmed to the character. (I do like Arthur Conan Doyle’s science fiction and suspense stories, but that’s a separate conversation).
Anyway, about Sherlock Holmes. He used to have a saying that “Passion was the enemy of precision.” And it can be, certainly.
But other things are enemies of precision, too. One of them is more insidious than passion. It is delusion.
What is delusion?
Delusion is the failure or inability to see the reality that is before our eyes. Delusion is the blocking out of information that does not conform to our pre-existing beliefs.
Delusion is all to common. It can be a killer.
Essayist and Japan observer Alex Kerr wrote a very perceptive collection of essays on Japanese culture and his experiences with it. The book was released in the 1990s and was called Lost Japan
One of the many engaging stories he told in the book was how he (basically accidentally) got into art collecting. He noticed that many Japanese antiquities were undervalued and underpriced. So he bought a few of them.
And then he bought more of them.
Everyone knows that physical fitness is crucial. It is the bedrock that supports the other activities of the body and the mind. But it’s often necessary to change things up a little. It’s too easy to slip into a rut, to fall into a trap of feeling that we’re well-rounded, when we may not be.
And that’s something I see a lot of.
I see a lot of guys focusing too much on one thing, to the detriment of the big picture. I’m seeing too much focus on weightlifting, and not enough focus on all-around fitness.
Remember that it’s all-around fitness that matters.
Don’t get me wrong. I love weightlifting and firmly believe that it should be one of your foundations. But other things matter, too. And it’s easy to slip into the self-delusion that you’re in shape just because your biceps or pecs look good with a tight t-shirt on. Some of these guys are laughable.
Language acquisition and learning are subjects that I’m interested in.
Over the years, I’ve worked very hard to acquire knowledge a detailed knowledge several foreign languages. I’ve lived in several countries, and have never had a problem conversing in the local language. And I’m not just talking about rattling off a few survival phrases, either.
Those who have read Thirty-Seven
I go right to the original sources. With no filter or buffer.
Not many people know how to do this. But I want to share what I’ve learned over the years, because I know that someone out there is struggling with the same things that I used to struggle with.
[My article this week at Return of Kings is about my impressions from reading Jerry Heller’s 2006 book Ruthless: A Memoir
I still remember the time I first listened to N.W.A.’s Straight Outta Compton. I was in college, and a friend of mine had dubbed a tape for me and said, “Man, you need to check this out.” So I brought it back to my dorm room and let it rip. I couldn’t believe they were saying the things they were saying; no one had ever cursed like that on a record before, or spun such violent fantasies.
The attraction of the music for white kids like me with no experiences in the inner city was this: it was angry, rebellious, and somehow bizarrely life-affirming in its exuberance. In 2015, this type of music is no big deal any more. But in 1988, it was incendiary.
When I heard last month that a movie was being made about the formation of N.W.A., I decided to read Jerry Heller’s 2006 book Ruthless: A Memoir
[To read the rest of the article, click here].
Quintus Curtius 
You must be logged in to post a comment.