Poetry: Robert Browning
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?”
The Fleming Foundation Cultural Commentary
Wednesday’s Child: The Jaws of Defeat
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.
America–A Captive Nation. A Regime of Privilege
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 Shows Real Inflation Rate Is High
Gold keeps hitting record highs. Here’s the graph, as I write, for the past five years:
Rereading the Iliad, I A, B, C (updated 05/19)
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.
Chronicle of Wasted Time
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.
Rereading a Classic
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.
Wednesday’s Child: Godfather to the Nation
Italians always say the same thing when events like this unfold on their television screens. “The English,” they effuse, “it’s only the English who know how to do it.” The event in question was, in this case, the Coronation of King Charles III, but I’d heard the phrase and observed the facial expression that accompanies it on many a past occasion – funerals, weddings, and whatnot.
Tucker Purged: Send the Murdochs to Ukraine
Want some more of my observations on the Tucker Purge? I shall oblige.
