reading robert aickman
the best and perhaps only way to describe his stories is with the word Aickmanesque.
theme
classics
21 posts
black blood that kept drippin'
I am no stranger to you. I was born in Troy, and the blood you see is oozing from no tree...
virgil is the prince of the poets
in The Aeneid, we find a seamless fluidity that is indifferent to the translator
Thucydides, Book 4
a petition to preserve Spartan dignity in misfortune takes us back to Solon's warning
history's first (and grandest) funeral oration
an answer, perhaps the answer, to "what we fight for?", "what we die for?" and, most importantly "what we live for?"
dying a good death and reading antifragile
against my (acquired) skepticism of anything published in the last 50 years (exceptions: Kazuo Ishiguro's novels, The Selfish Gene), I picked up Nassim N. Taleb's Antifragile.
the day I finished The Rambler
in every man's life, however splendid or modest, there are episodes that mark one's journey as a reader or as a person. Reading Samuel Johnson's essays is both a personal and a reader milestone.
the victim card on Christmas Eve
for what would so soon destroy all the order of society, and deform life with violence and ravage, as a permission to every one to judge his own cause...
the misery of sovereign power
a sword is perpetually suspended over our head. We dread our very guards, we distrust our companions.
book list for the new year (2024)
the guiding principle has been, and will continue to be, to seek knowledge and beauty in books that have been tested by time. Exceptions are granted in areas of technical knowledge (e.g., physics, computer science)
behave philosophically
when they debate some topic, they do not attempt to follow the reasoning of that which they are debating, but simply try to have the audience concur with what they are presenting.
cheerfulness under ill-health or other misfortunes
"Maximus was my model for self-control, fixity of purpose, and cheerfulness under ill-health or other misfortunes. "
prayer (kavafis)
the sea engulfed a sailor in its depths. Unaware, his mother goes and lights a tall candle before the ikon of our Lady
the journey to ithaka
give it first to Homer and then, 2600 years later, to Kavafis and you get something that rises above all of us.
the selfish gene | richard dawkins
this is the first book that I have finished from the re-reading list I compiled a while ago. And this is the book, the one I would take with me to a prolonged quarantine, and the one I’d give to all my friends if I knew they were going to…
the remains of the day | ishiguro
ok. Ishiguro won the Nobel Prize in 2017 and I’m happy to report that I was a bit ahead of the curve. I had already read Never Let Me Go and gifted four copies of the book to people dear to me. Never Let Me Go is definitely high on the…
meditations | marcus aurelius
marcus aurelius, the last of the Five Good Emperors, wrote one of the final classical books of stoicism. The Greek title, Ta Eis Heauton, simply means “To Himself”. Someone, somewhere, sometime used “Meditations” as the title, and it…
byzantium: the decline and fall
and then, gradually and inexorably, the fire begins to fade, and worse: the flames are not extinguished by themselves or by the Islamic powers of Asia but by their Christian brethren of Europe
byzantium: the apogee
this is volume II of III of the history of the Byzantine Empire. This volume, unlike the first one, covers a relatively short period of time: from the year 800 with the coronation of Charlemagne as Emperor of the Western Empire to Easter…
byzantium: the early centuries
"our civilization has never adequately acknowledged the debt it owes to the Empire of the East," writes John Julius Norwich in the introduction of this magnificent book. In very rare occasions, historians rise to the level of the history…
the odyssey
It was a long overdue debt with “literature.” A checkmark on a list of titles that the scholarly-bent reader thinks is required to enter the dignified club of literarte.