Results of Ruminations

In terms of pedagogy, I follow Socrates in weird ways. If you've heard of the chap, you know Socrates is known for asking questions. We always think of Socrates and his method as being question-based. While that isn't necessarily wrong, it's important to note how Socrates uses questions. Think of the beginning of  Book IV of Plato's The Republic . There, we see Socrates being asked a question by Adeimantus, but most of the first major section of text is Socrates' answer (after having asked a clarifying question of his interlocutor). He doesn't necessarily spend a lot of time asking questions and listening to others.* In fact, he often posits his own ideas at great length, occasionally asking for input from the others. It's important to note that he sets up his arguments with large, important questions. Book I of The Republic  starts off with this question: "Is life harder toward the end, or what report do you give of it?" (11). That launches th...

I finished reading In Defense of a Liberal Education  by Fareed Zakaria. Having read two books now by different authors (coming from very  different backgrounds) about "the classics", I have to say that I much preferred this second one. It's not an apples-to-apples comparison by any stretch--one book was a quasi-manual for teaching in a prescribed way, the other was an argument for why liberal arts and the humanities ought to be invested--and, in a sense--believed in. The fifth and final chapter of Zakaria's book really made me happy. Perhaps it was an echo-chamber effect--I'm not above confirmation bias--but I felt optimistic about the students I teach and my role in the world. The other book left me disgruntled, abused, and pessimistic; this one made me hopeful. And the last part of the book is where it made the most sense to me. In it, Zakaria goes to great lengths to describe the accusations against the "millennial generation", of which I am bare...

Why do we tell stories? Yeah, yeah, I know: To make sense of the world, to preserve our culture and heritage, to explain what we could be. There are lots of reasons, and a lot of them also make sense (which is nice), but I've been thinking a lot about stories lately. Maybe it's because it's late but I'm worried the insomnia that's been plaguing me the last three nights is lurking behind me; maybe it's because my own sense of self-worth and legacy resides in twenty-six fragile letters, pushed back and forth on my keyboard millions of times and my stories remain almost entirely unread; maybe it's because the late July night outside of my now-open window is cooler than July usually is, and that feels like a detail that ought to be remembered somehow, if even in a nebulous, digital way. Maybe there are more reasons for telling stories than there are stories to be told, or maybe because there are really only a handful of each, but the veneer is different enou...

Harold Bloom made a whole book out of the idea of the "anxiety of influence" , which is that those who come after greatness always look back at that which inspired them and it causes an anxiety, a worry about how the forerunners are forming the present work. I haven't read the book, but I've read enough of Bloom to know that there's probably a lot more to unpack in such a complex idea. It's similar to what my friend, Dustin Simmons , studies in his conceits of the "reception" of ancient literature. While Simmons' ideas are often more of "What are the modern expressions and allusions to the classical past?" than "How did the classical past cause anxiety for the creator of new work?", the two branches of reflecting on the past are interesting avenues to wander down, and I encourage you to give it a go whenever you've the time. What I wanted to talk about is an inversion of Bloom's anxiety, using the term "enthusia...