Sr. Instructional Designer, Classicist, Amateur everything else. Rugged Individualist who loves ancient languages. A Golden Age is dawning in America! 🇺🇸🌅
Washington State
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Deep in her bones, France knows what to do with exploitive, extractive, worthless governments. It’s coming.
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Pure wickedness—“1500 books in a skip…”
Would he burn them in his backyard?
What’s the difference?
John Milton has been in my mind’s ear almost all my life thanks to a book that the above-mentioned savage might have gleefully tossed away.
“…as good almost kill a Man as kill a good Book; who kills a Man kills a reasonable creature, Gods Image; but hee who destroyes a good Booke, kills reason it selfe, kills the Image of God, as it were in the eye. Many a man lives a burden to the Earth; but a good Booke is the pretious life-blood of a master spirit, imbalm’d and treasur’d up on purpose to a life beyond life. ’Tis true, no age can restore a life, whereof perhaps there is no great losse; and revolutions of ages do not oft recover the losse of a rejected truth, for the want of which whole Nations fare the worse. We should be wary therefore what persecution we raise against the living labours of publick men, how we spill that season’d life of man preserv’d and stor’d up in Books; since we see a kinde of homicide may be thus committed, sometimes a martyrdome, and if it extend to the whole impression, a kinde of massacre, whereof the execution ends not in the slaying of an elementall life, but strikes at that ethereall and fift essence, the breath of reason it selfe, slaies an immortality rather then a life.”
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Tell that to Walter Leaf.
He published a benchmark edition of Homer's Iliad, a commentary that is still used today, and was a director of Westminster Bank, eventually becoming its chairman. He was a co-founder and later president of the International Chamber of Commerce and served as president of the Institute of Bankers, the Hellenic Society, and the Classical Association.
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It’s good to have an account like this, but won’t be much of a group effort like it might be on Facebook. I have a number of bookplates I could contribute—not many, but still…
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Shades of Groucho: “Last night, I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got into my pajamas, I’ll never know!”
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In 1647, during a witchcraft trial at Natternberg near the Benedictine Abbey of Metten in Bavaria, the accused said they had no power over the monastery because of the crosses painted on its walls.
The monks looked and found those same lettered crosses, but no one at the abbey any longer knew what the letters meant.
In the abbey library, they then found a 1415 manuscript that showed St. Benedict holding a cross-staff and a scroll with the full Latin phrases written out.
The initials on the walls (and later on the medals) matched the first letters of those phrases.
Vade Retro Satana, Nunquam Suade Mihi Vana.
“Get thee behind [me], Satan; never tempt me with your vanities.”
Sunt Mala Quae Libas, Ipse Venena Bibas
“What you offer is evil; drink the poison yourself.”
Crux Sacra Sit Mihi Lux / Nunquam Draco Sit Mihi Dux
“May the Holy Cross be my light; may the dragon never be my guide.”
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I was racked on this little number as a teenager. I did not enjoy myself….😒
“Easy” was false advertising.
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Twelve years after finishing the Tractatus, he overcame whatever scruples he had and drew a salary by teaching philosophy at Cambridge from 1930 to 1947, a subject he believed was clapped out.
I wouldn’t have done that.
“The House of Wittgenstein: A Family at War” by Alexander Waugh gives an excellent context to the man.
His family, prone, it would seem, to interesting methods of suicide, was populated by far more interesting characters than old “Luki” himself, and his philosophical conclusions were not what turned him into an asshole.
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Indeed!
Sadly, I read it later in life. Had I read it in my teens, it might have saved me a great number of wasted years spent of left-wing stupidity. I’m out of it now, thankfully. Trying to make amends.
Have you read these, by the way?
I recommend both very highly.
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I have a wee copy of the Gita that I’ve managed to lose several times in the pockets of various coats and jackets…🫠
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Buy a few hundred pounds of pig parts. Get a wood chipper. Find somebody with fairly good aim and a flatbed truck.
Are you getting the picture?
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