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.
With the expiration of Title 42, the flood of illegals across our southern border is approaching the proverbial “biblical proportions”, though there is no sight of Noah or any ark under construction.
Some decades ago the psychologist Mortimer Adler produced one of his many cultural “how-to” books with the preposterous title, How to Read a Book. If only Adler had first considered the question of how to write a book, he might never have indulged his vanity to the point of telling people they were only permitted to read the way that Mortimer Adler reads.
Sitting, like the late Otis Redding , and watching the tide roll away out of Navarino Bay, I find it hard to think much about TV land—a country inhabited by the minds of most of my fellow-Americans and the great bulk of the world’s population.
The “somewhere” is Nafpaktos (which the Venetians, when they acquired the town, renamed Lepanto) on the Corinthian Gulf.
The Marshal’s Own Case is the seventh of Magdalen’s mystery novels featuring Marshall Salvatore Guarnaccia. Jack Trotter, who introduced me to Nabb some years ago, has been invited to write some things on several of the other novels, but let us leap ahead to consider this, the strangest and least liked of her books.
While we are waiting for people to acquire and peruse The Marshall’s Own Case, we can talk briefly about the series. The first novel is as good a way to begin as anything .
Many of our readers I know personally and some are good friends, and I think to a great extent we are all at least virtual friends
A few days ago, in the discussion of the Nashville school shootings, I suggested that if people wan’t to gain a more serious understanding of the transgender world, they might not do better than to read the seventh of Magdalen Nabb’s detective mysteries set in Florence (not South Carolina).
I wrote this fifty years ago after taking part in a hog-killing. We did eat every scrap of the pork.
