If you want to see what’s really going on in America, go to a major Veterans Administration hospital. Since Covid, you can’t go inside unless you have business there. But walk around outside and go by the entrance.
Celeste Dell’Anna, interior designer of genius and my friend of thirty years, is coming to visit us today from Milan, where he lives. I haven’t seen him for a long time and obviously I want to make a good impression, despite the fact that such will be made anyway by the airs and graces that young Vasily puts on when meeting strangers. But a taxi needs to be dispatched to the airport to fetch him when he lands and, in Shakespeare’s immortal words, thereby hangs a tale.
This time around my impression of the town where I had spent four waterlogged years was altogether baleful. Now I was here as a stranger, and this made immersion in the tourist miasma, which locals are trained and equipped to evade, unavoidable and humiliating.
This replaces an earlier version that was prematurely posted. Book II is today virtually everyone’s least favorite part of the Iliad. Much of the book is taken up by a somewhat tedious list of the ships and contingents sent by various Greek cities and peoples. Some students and teachers even manage go avoid reading it. This is a grave mistake, not only because it is not only a pivotal book, which determines the organization of the entire work, but it is among the parts most quoted in antiquity.
I am a little tired of hearing white Republicans complaining about reparations. Most of them supported discriminatory wealth transfer programs and did little or nothing to oppose affirmative action.
My father was a scholar and knew Greek.
When I was five years old, I asked him once
“What do you read about?”
“The siege of Troy.”
“What is a siege, and what is Troy?”
Only the eyes make us feel more vulnerable, more exposed to harm and subject to deterioration, than our teeth. But the eyes at least have eyelids, whereas our teeth stand naked and afraid before every grain of sand, every cherry pit, and every year that passes. Were they of flesh and blood, they would tremble in fear whenever we opened our mouths.
The Lincolnian Regime governed the United States, roughly speaking, from 1860 to 1932, when it was transformed by left-wing Fascists into the New Deal Regime, which endured down to about 1960, when FDR’s national-socialist apparatus was rechanneled into a system whose primary beneficiaries were specially designated minorities.
Gold keeps hitting record highs. Here’s the graph, as I write, for the past five years:
In fact, we do have a lot to learn about ourselves from studying Homeric man. Homer’s heroes are extraordinary men, but they are not the etherial saints of ethical philosophers since Kant. ”To know the will as an ethical factor” is a gift reserved for few mortal men in any era, but ordinary people, even when they do not possess these abstract concepts, are capable of sitting on juries and pronouncing on questions of guilt and innocence.
The Wrongs of Rights
