Misdeeds

The boys and I didn’t stay long at the library this morning.

Daniel kept trying to sneak out of the building. He would open the front doors by pushing the buttons meant for disabled people.

There was nothing for it but to drag him home, and Samuel too – just when he was occupied with the library’s Lego collection.

The protestations!

Samuel can be so quiet, one forgets that he has no sense of decorum. It’s usually all right to take him places, but, occasionally, one regrets it.

They really like it here, I told the librarians who watched me pull my shrieking children past the circulation desk.

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I viewed soccer this afternoon and came away from the TV to find Samuel “cooking” grits. It was his idea to add the taco seasoning.

Here is a more flattering depiction of the brothers. They supped at Karin’s dad’s house last night and managed to pose for him, more-or-less obediently.

Karin & I were busy celebrating our anniversary. We got haircuts and ate salad. We like the salad bar at Macri’s. It’s simple, but the ingredients are good: I especially like the beets.

We usually can’t finish the entrées we order with the salad, so we eat them the next day. They taste better after cooling and reheating.

Having eaten our salad, we went to a hardware store and looked at some macabre weeding tools.

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Today I have a cold. I feel as though my nose will fall off.

I’ve begun reading a book I swore I’d never touch: Baroness Orczy’s Scarlet Pimpernel. As I age, I have less and less appetite for camp, but after the 8,392nd TV reference, the urge got the better of me.

I’ve also been reading Forster’s Where Angels Fear to Tread; various previously mentioned books (Tolkien’s dwarves keep reminding me of the twelve tribes of Israel); and some Platonic dialogs I hadn’t gotten to (more on them later).

As I type, Samuel threads a USB cable through a grate in the floor of our house.

Socrates vs. Hamlet

I’ve read these passages I don’t know how many times, but before today it never occurred to me to pair them against each other.

First, Socrates:

To fear death, gentlemen, is no other than to think oneself wise when one is not, to think one knows what one does not know. No one knows whether death may not be the greatest of all blessings for a man, yet men fear it as if they knew that it is the greatest of evils.

Apology 29a (trans. G.M.A. Grube).

Second, Hamlet:

To be, or not to be: that is the question:

Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer

The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,

Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,

And by opposing end them. To die, to sleep –

No more – and by a sleep to say we end

The heartache, and the thousand natural shocks

That flesh is heir to! ’Tis a consummation

Devoutly to be wished. To die, to sleep –

To sleep – perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub [impediment],

For in that sleep of death what dreams may come,

When we have shuffled off this mortal coil [turmoil],

Must give us pause. There’s the respect [consideration]

That makes calamity of so long life [(1) makes calamity so long-lived; (2) makes living so long a calamity]:

For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,

Th’ oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely [harsh language or treatment arising from haughtiness and contempt],

The pangs of despised love, the law’s delay,

The insolence of office, and the spurns

That patient merit of th’ unworthy takes,

When he himself might his quietus [full discharge (a legal term)] make

With a bare bodkin [dagger]? Who would fardels [burdens] bear,

To grunt and sweat under a weary life,

But that the dread of something after death,

The undiscovered country, from whose bourn [region]

No traveler returns, puzzles the will

And makes us rather bear those ills we have,

Than fly to others that we know not of?

Thus conscience [self-consciousness, introspection] does make cowards of us all,

And thus the native hue of resolution

Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast [color] of thought,

And enterprises of great pitch [height (a term from falconry)] and moment

With this regard [consideration] their currents turn awry,

And lose the name of action.

Hamlet III.i 56–88. Text and notes from The Complete Signet Classic Shakespeare – excepting the note for “contumely” (Merriam-Webster).

Cephalus, the old man in Republic, bk. I, fears death enough to rejoice that his wealth has guarded him from having to resort to injustice (as the poor often must do).

Training up my little “future guardians”

With Samuel I’m watching Schoolhouse Rock!, which I didn’t grow up with. He loves it. It sure is clever and catchy. Alas, the history it teaches is on a par with the myth of little George Washington and his cherry tree.

Having recently re-read those parts of the Republic that talk about primary schooling, I can’t but suspect that Socrates would have heartily approved of Schoolhouse Rock!

I do like the “I’m Just a Bill” song.

The science in the show isn’t much better than the history. Don’t burn too much fuel, or it’ll run out and we’ll all be cold, is one lesson from an episode broadcast in 1979. (Oil was expensive that year.) Samuel and I haven’t gotten to the later episodes, but I assume that the message has been quietly revised for the climate science videos of the late 2000s.

The body is a machine, says the episode about human anatomy.

A computer doesn’t have emotions or morality, a later episode says. It’s just a machine.

Combine these two lessons, and the implications are … disturbing.

An ambitious plan

Robert Paul Wolff made a list of twenty-five philosophical books for grad students to read. Since I’m something of an eternal first-year grad student, I intend to get through all of these books – including those I’ve already read – and twenty-five more because, as Wolff acknowledges, the list includes too little from the Middle Ages and the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; besides, I want to tackle a few “non-essentials” like Butler’s Analogy of Religion (recently reissued).

Having begun with Plato’s shorter dialogs, I’m now breezing through Robin Waterfield’s Oxford World’s Classics translation of the Republic. Why isn’t this version assigned more often? It’s cheap, it’s helpfully annotated, and it’s got the smoothest and most propulsive prose of any English Republic I’ve looked at. Yet I don’t remember my grad school teachers or classmates reading it. (I do see that one teacher has endorsed Waterfield’s new translation of Marcus Aurelius.)

Two quirks of this Republic. (1) As a reviewer points out, Waterfield writes “morality” instead of “justice” for dikaiosyne, as well as “type” instead of “form” or “idea” for idea/eidos. I am not put off. I can juggle a few conspicuous word changes. These don’t feel as strange as when my beloved Good News Translation of the Bible says “Covenant Box” instead of “Ark” or “Sudanese” instead of “Ethiopian.” (2) Traditionally, the Republic is divided rather arbitrarily into ten “books”; Waterfield divides it thematically into fourteen “chapters.” For an amateur reader, this change is welcome. For a long time now, my aim has been to read at least one philosophical article or chapter each day. It’s harder than you’d think. So, the shorter the chapters are, the better.

I wonder if the general neglect of Waterfield is due to ignoble prejudices. He is self-employed. He has written shameless potboilers – for children. At this stage of my life, these things only endear an author to me.

Trump syllabus

The U.S.’s presidential election is just around the corner. Trumpie has been lavishing us with the spectacle of himself. But I believe that he’ll lose, and that Clinton will maintain a “business as usual” regime for at least four more years.

The academic folks at The Chronicle of Higher Education also believe that Trump will lose. Though the election is yet to be held, they’re treating Trumpie as a seminar topic – as a puzzle to be leisurely studied – rather than as a plague to be dealt with. They’ve recruited some of their all-stars to write a “syllabus” in order to “explore the phenomenon that is Donald Trump’s presidential campaign.” The items on the syllabus include utopian and dystopian writings (Plato’s Republic; Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here; Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America); very, very old historical writing (Thucydides); thinly-disguised, fictional portraits of real-life demagogues (Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men); and exposés of how Trump rose to prominence. A lot of these items are for lulling one into a comfortable sleep in front of the fire, not for lifting one’s ass up by lighting a fire (under it). Well, that’s to be expected, I guess. Professors would have everyone just sit and read.

Last night there was a debate between Clinton and Trump, but I didn’t watch it – it began at 9:00pm or some such hour when schoolworkers ought to be in bed. The truth is, though, I love to watch Trumpie in the debates. I read that last night he had a good line about a “400-lb. guy lying in his bed.” Brilliant. If only Clinton would talk like that. … No, it wasn’t because I listened to any of the debates that I decided that Trump was incompetent. My mind was made up by a short documentary from 2009 – an entry in ESPN’s 30 for 30 series, on Netflix – Small Potatoes: Who Killed the USFL?

Not that the CHE would’ve asked me, but that movie is what I would have put on my Trump syllabus.

Basically, Trump is the guy who shows up at the playground and insists on everyone playing according to his schedule and rules, at his house, and with his toys; and who gets enough suckers to join him so that he is able to ruin the game for everyone. Trust me, sports lovers: you don’t want this guy calling the shots. Watch Small Potatoes – which was broadcast years before Trumpie decided to run for the presidency – and you’ll want to stop whatever you’re doing and go stand in line for the next month, so that you can be sure to have a place at the polling station to vote against Donald Trump.

Back to the salt mines

Ana & David have gone back to Houston, and Edoarda & Stephen have returned from Nicaragua, bearing gifts and lbs.

Today was my first day back at work. I researched the prices of various editions of Plato — one of our teachers hopes to assign Republic to his highschoolers (God bless the International Baccalaureate). Not that I’m envious. Due to the budget, they’ll probably end up reading Jowett. … After I finished working, my church friend Karin drove me home, which spared me some agony since the temperature was close to zero. … On Wednesday it may be too cold to work at all. M&M are praying for the city to be Snowed In.

I ask E&S if the first sentence is too harsh. They reassure me that it isn’t. “It’s the truth.”

Edoarda: “You can just say that we came back hermosos.”

I ask them for permission to quote these things because lately I’ve been worrying that my teasing is too cruel.