• Tag Archives Caesar

  • Next Week

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Winter                                                                      Waning Moon of the Cold Month

    With the Latin tutoring session behind me and Chapter 26 coming up, I downloaded a commentary on Caesar’s Gallic Wars with Latin text.  I’m gonna have a shot at it for a while.

    Started my Titian research last week by reading the Grove entry on Titian and checking out other websites and the Met’s timelines.  Printed out some stuff.  Next I’m going to read the catalog to get an overview of the show and to get images of each object in a file so I can reference them as I work.

    Also trying to decide what to do for the Woolly retreat.  One thought is to share my work on Ovid.  Still, it’s pretty inelegant, representing as those first 60 or so verses do the earliest of my work both in learning the language and then attempting translation.  Another is to talk about Big History but that seems pedantic.  I’ve thought about reading the first pages of Missing, just to see what folks think, but it’s low brow compared to the stuff most Woollies read.  Gotta decide sometime soon since the retreat starts on February 3rd.  I head out right after the Titian lecture.

    Another possibility is to share the research process on Titian, let them see what it takes to learn enough to tour a special exhibit.

    I just had another idea as I wrote this:  do an exegetical piece on Jacob at the Jabbok Ford.  About dreams, struggling with the angel of our better selves.  Hmmm.


    📂This entry was posted in Art and Culture Faith and Spirituality Humanities Woolly Mammoths 📎and tagged

  • Externally, We Swim In the Same Ocean, but…

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Winter                                              Waning Moon of the Cold Month

    “Man must cease attributing his problems to his environment and learn again to exercise his will — his personal responsibility.” – Albert Schweitzer

    Schweitzer was a favorite of both my mother and my father, his “reverence for life” must have rung loudly in the ear of the WWII generation.  I find his Christianity, though unorthodox, still too orthodox for me these days.  This quote seems to lean against the interrelatedness voiced by MLK and quoted here recently and put that inflection point back on the individual.  In most ways I agree with it from  a personal perspective, a focus on the existential predicament decided by emphasizing personal choice rather than the web of influences from genes and nurture.

    As I’ve reflected on the notion of interrelatedness over the last month or so, and commented on it by using the idea of inflection, that is a mental tick by the perspective most important at the moment, this dialectical, tension of opposites approach, seems more and more sound to me.  What I mean is that, yes, we are in this together and that, yes, the fate of even the most vulnerable and neglected bears on our own, while at the same, yes, we live alone and will die alone, never really bridging the gap between our interior and that of the Other.  Externally we swim in the same waters as one larger organism, a sort of super-0rganism, while internally, we paddle alone in our single kayak traversing the vast expanse of the inner world.

    On a less abstruse note, well, a bit less abstruse anyhow, I did very well on my Latin session today.  I’ve decided it takes me 4-6 hours to get through a Wheelock chapter and the particular grammatical points presented there, along with exercises.  Greg said that was about right.  So, I might as well lean into it and learn it right the first time.  Then, he says I have to read, read, read.  I’m thinking about picking up some Caesar and maybe some Tacitus since they write in prose and that’s easier than the convoluted word order of poets like Ovid and Virgil.  I’m sticking with Ovid as my Northstar in all this, but reading some stuff where I’m not stumbling over words and phrases lines apart that belong together might be fun.


    📂This entry was posted in Commentary on Religion Faith and Spirituality Humanities Letters Memories 📎and tagged

  • A Changed Political Terrain

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Samhain                                      Waning Harvest Moon

    So.  Election day is over; the rascals have been thrown out and the new rascals will soon take their places in the halls of Congress and the Minnesota Legislature.  This is an opportunity to develop the bipartisan nature of environmental issues, since preservation and conservation are not, intrinsically, related to party.  Theodore Roosevelt, the ur-conservationist from a political perspective, was a Republican.  Economic justice issues will become more sharply defined and the outlines of a new liberal majority still remains a mystery.  Politics has one guarantee, change.

    ( bloodletting in politics is not new.)

    I choose not  to  feel dejected, rejected or powerless in light of these results, instead those issues in which I believe need us more than ever.

    On a brighter note, today I’m back to translating Ovid.  I’m 30 verses in to what I believe is about 15,000.  Almost there.


    📂This entry was posted in Politics 📎and tagged