Lughnasa Waning Honey Extraction Moon
Been feelin’ tired, a bit lowdown. Got a good nap this afternoon and better.
Latin today was a bit more encouraging than I had anticipated. My translation was not so far off, I hadn’t pursued sentence and clause construction quite as diligently as would have been good, but I had the right idea, for the most part. I now see another level to this translation process and that is the one where I set off on my own, with no expectation that a tutor will read it. Instead, I will rely on my own knowledge and skill. That day is off a ways, but no where near so far as it was a year ago March when I began this journey.
Greg and I had a conversation today about the classics, about language and books and translation and interpretation. Exegesis and hermeneutics. This is turf I know well from my days in Sem. I persist in believing that there is a history and an author to which texts refer and are bound. Surprisingly, this belief is not widely shared among academics in literary fields. They’ve ridden off on the horse of post-modernism, headed, with speed, down what Francis Bacon would have called the wrong path, a path not unlike the Scholastics, where all knowledge happens within a field of words and all conclusions come from deductive reasoning.
Bacon said traveling down the wrong path will not lead your toward your destination and traveling faster down that path only leads you further and further away.
