Eclipses

Karin has had a cold all week; the boys have been sick even longer. I caught it two days ago. My dad has been watching the Final Four with us; he has a cold, too.

I’ve been ill during many NCAA tournaments. I’m used to watching with blankets and medicine and tea. It must have something to do with the time of year.

My neighbors have been mowing their lawns. It’s warm enough, and our grass certainly is long enough, but I’m just not up to doing it.

And now, the business on everyone’s mind: Monday’s eclipse.

Karin had talked of traveling to Indianapolis, into the path of totality. Bad idea, she decided. The highway will be crammed.

As for me, the memory of the 2017 event is fresh. It was a time of joy and solidarity on the IUSB campus. All too brief. The recollection literally pains me; it makes me squint.

Eclipses are better to study, or to read about, or to imagine, than to view. I recently came across one in King Solomon’s Mines; it was the usual rot about science-minded explorers displaying their “magic” in front of savages. It should be noted, however, that the idea of carrying eclipse-mania through “exotic” lands has a basis in the actual history of science.

I read this, yesterday, in Herodotus (Robin Waterfield, trans.):

The war lasted for five years and although plenty of battles went the Medes’ way, just as many went the Lydians’ way too. They even once fought a kind of night battle. In the sixth year, when neither side had a clear advantage over the other in the war, an engagement took place and it so happened that in the battle day suddenly became night. Thales of Miletus had predicted this loss of daylight to the Ionians by establishing in advance that it would happen within the limits of the year in which it did in fact happen. When the Lydians and the Medes saw that night had replaced day, they did not just stop fighting; both sides also more actively wanted an end to the war. Peace between them was brokered by Syennesis of Cilicia and Labynetus of Babylon, who were anxious that the two sides should enter into a formal peace treaty and arranged for there to be mutual ties of marriage between them. That is, they decided that Allyates should give his daughter Aryenis in marriage to Cyaxeres’ son Astyages, on the grounds that strong treaties tend not to last in the absence of strong ties. These people formalize their treaties in the same way the Greeks do, with the extra feature that when they cut into the skin of their arms, each party licks the other’s blood.

Here is the famous picture of my family observing an eclipse in Esmeraldas (perhaps in 1991). David is shooting it with a machine gun.

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.