Chaucer and Spenser

 

Studying for my upcoming conference talk and came across this gem:

"Spenser, almost alone among Elizabethans, drank deeply from Chaucer's poetry and shared his vision."
J.A.W. Bennett, The Parlement of Foules: An Interpretation

You know Spenser's Faerie Queene is going to come up in my talk, right? :-D 

This conference is going to be fantastic. Jason Baxter, author of The Medieval Mind of C.S. Lewis, will be speaking in addition to Angelina Stanford, Thomas Banks, and Jenn Rogers. Read more about it here.

Grammar speaks

 "I have four parts: letters, literature, the man of letters, and literary style. Letters are what I teach, literature is I who teach, the man of letters is the person whom I have taught, and literary style is the skill of a person whom I form. I claim to speak also about the nature and practice of poetry. Nature is that from which speech is formed. Practice occurs when we put that material into use. To these we add the matter, so as to know what we must talk about. Speech itself is taught in three steps; that is, from letters [i.e. phonemes, the basic units of sound in a particular language], syllables, and words."
~Grammar, explaining her profession and field of study in The Marriage of Philology and Mercury, by Martianus Capella (fl. A.D. 410-420)

"... angry passion yields to wisdom and Ares stands in awe of the Muses"

 "Not only during peacetime but also in war, the Gauls obey with great care these Druids and singing poets, both friend and enemy alike. Often when the two armies have come together with swords drawn these men have stepped between the battle-lines and stopped the conflict, as if they held wild animals spell-bound. Thus even among the most brutal barbarians angry passion yields to wisdom and Ares stands in awe of the Muses."

~ Diodorus Siculus (fl. c. 60-c. 30 BC)
Bibliotheca Historica, Book V.31

How to read The Faerie Queene; or, You are already qualified to read Spenser's masterpiece

Many of you know that last school year I taught a year-long class on Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene. To help prepare myself for the classes, I spent hours and hours reading commentaries and scholarly essays on the poem, because I wanted to give my students (mostly adults, but a few high schoolers as well) value for their money. If you’re going to pay for a class, you should get more out of it than you can get just by reading something on your own.

Before deciding to teach the class, I had read The Faerie Queene aloud with my children three times over the previous several years. I loved the poem and wanted to share it with other homeschool families, so that, in my opinion, was my main qualification for teaching it—I was familiar with it and I loved it.

But what qualified me to read it to my kids in the first place? I don’t have a college degree, let alone a degree in English. I didn’t have any specialized knowledge of Edmund Spenser or Elizabethan England or of the kind of poetry Spenser was writing.

The only qualification I had was that I wanted to read it. And I wanted to read it because I loved C.S. Lewis, and he loved The Faerie Queene.

The only specialized knowledge I had was that I knew the Bible pretty well, I was fairly familiar with Greek and Roman mythology, and with fairy tales and the legends of King Arthur. Really you can’t even call that specialized knowledge. All of that is what every child ought to have been listening to from birth, “building blocks of story,” as Angelina Stanford says, summarizing Northrop Frye and his brilliant commentaries on literature.

So, how do you, dear Homeschool Mama, begin reading this glorious masterpiece to your own children?

Here’s what I did with my four children who were still at home with me—my fifteen year old daughter, thirteen year old son, and eleven year old daughter, plus my nineteen year old special-needs son.

Charlotte Mason suggests having younger children read from Charles and Mary Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare before reading the bard himself so that they will be familiar with the stories. I felt it was even more important to do this with Spenser’s Faerie Queene, since the language in his poem is more difficult than in Shakespeare’s plays.

Most of us are familiar with C.S. Lewis’s mention of first reading The Faerie Queene from a large illustrated volume on a rainy day. Here is the quote in full:

Beyond all doubt it is best to have made one’s first acquaintance with Spenser in a very large—and, preferably, illustrated—edition of The Faerie Queene, on a wet day, between the ages of twelve and sixteen; and if, even at that age, certain of the names aroused unidentified memories of some still earlier, some almost prehistoric, commerce with a selection of “Stories from Spenser,” heard before we could read, so much the better.
(“On Reading ‘The Faerie Queene,’” in Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Literature, p. 146)

I had been reading Margaret Hodges and Trina Schart Hyman’s gorgeously illustrated edition of Saint George and the Dragon since before some of these children were born, and Lewis’s words here spurred me on to find another high quality children’s edition of the whole story, for he says that that’s where even the mature reader must start, if not with the children’s versions, at least with the child’s unjaded appetite for stories like “Jack the Giant Killer,” and his lack of awareness of any allegory or moral purpose. In the same essay, Lewis says,

It may not be necessary for all readers at all stages of the narrative to know exactly what the poet means, but it is emphatically necessary that they should surrender themselves to the sense of some dim significance in the background—that they should feel themselves to be moving in regions “where more is meant than meets the ear.”

 

I found two beautifully written editions that served us well. The first and shortest is Stories from the Faerie Queen by Jeanie Lang. Her book is just a few chapters long, roughly one chapter per book of Spenser’s FQ, each taking 15-20 minutes to read aloud. The second is Mary Macleod’s much longer Stories from the Faerie Queene. The chapters are all “read-aloud” length, like Lang’s, but Macleod’s book covers the poem in much more detail than Lang’s book.

Our method was to read a chapter of Lang one day (kids narrating), then in the following days I would read aloud the corresponding chapters from Macleod (again having the kids narrate). Then I read aloud from my Penguin edition of The Faerie Queene (pausing occasionally for narrations). In this way we worked through FQ, one book at a time.

If your kids are much younger than mine were, say all under twelve, you could read aloud the whole Lang book, and later read aloud the whole Macleod. Do be sure to have your kids narrate both books. This way they’ll be so familiar with the basic outline of the story that when you get to Spenser they’ll be able to follow the Elizabethan poetry without trouble in the way that Lewis describes.

In my next post, I’ll give some tips for reading the full edition of The Faerie Queene.

 

Literature as Logos

This, so far as I can see, is the specific value or good of literature considered as Logos; it admits us to experiences other than our own. . . . it may be the typical (and we say ‘How true!’) or the abnormal (and we say ‘How strange!’); it may be the beautiful, the terrible, the awe-inspiring, the exhilarating, the pathetic, the comic, or the merely piquant. Literature gives the entrée to them all. Those of us who have been true readers all our life seldom fully realise the enormous extension of our being which we owe to authors. We realise it best when we talk with an unliterary friend. He may be full of goodness and good sense but he inhabits a tiny world. In it, we should be suffocated. The man who is contented to be only himself, and therefore less a self, is in prison. My own eyes are not enough for me, I will see through those of others. Reality, even seen through the eyes of many, is not enough. I will see what others have invented. Even the eyes of all humanity are not enough. I regret that the brutes cannot write books. Very gladly would I learn what face things present to a mouse or a bee; more gladly still would I perceive the olfactory world charged with all the information and emotion it carries to a dog.

This is the next-to-last paragraph of C.S. Lewis’ Experiment in Criticism. How does he do this? How does he put into words everything I’m feeling?

When I read that, I put the book down and sat there for a moment, sobbing.

Why does it hurt so much to be human?

The next paragraph says:

“Literary experience heals the wound, without undermining the privilege, of individuality.”

Yes. That’s it. “The wound of individuality.” I didn’t know what that feeling was before, but now I do. (This is why I love you so much, dear saint! More than anyone, you help me understand what I’m feeling and thinking.)

But in reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself. Like the night sky in the Greek poem, I see with a myriad eyes, but it is still I who see. Here, as in worship, in love, in moral action, and in knowing, I transcend myself; and am never more myself than when I do.

Wednesdays with Words: For all the saints . . .

I'm currently reading Wilkie Collins' The Woman in White, which I'm really enjoying but I'm not ready to make a post of quotes -- it would take too long to get it together and I want to get back to my book.  Instead, here's a quote from a book I've never read (but which now has to go into my wish list!) that I found at Alan Jacobs' blog on Tumblr and is perfectly suited to this week in the Church year.

To those who know a little of christian history probably the most moving of all the reflections it brings is not the thought of the great events and the well-remembered saints, but of those innumerable millions of entirely obscure faithful men and women, every one with his or her own individual hopes and fears and joys and sorrows and loves — and sins and temptations and prayers — once every whit as vivid and alive as mine are now. They have left no slightest trace in this world, not even a name, but have passed to God utterly forgotten by men. Yet each one of them once believed and prayed as I believe and pray, and found it hard and grew slack and sinned and repented and fell again. Each of them worshipped at the eucharist, and found their thoughts wandering and tried again, and felt heavy and unresponsive and yet knew — just as really and pathetically as I do these things. There is a little ill-spelled ill-carved rustic epitaph of the fourth century from Asia Minor: — ‘Here sleeps the blessed Chione, who has found Jerusalem for she prayed much’. Not another word is known of Chione, some peasant woman who lived in that vanished world of christian Anatolia. But how lovely if all that should survive after sixteen centuries were that one had prayed much, so that the neighbours who saw all one’s life were sure one must have found Jerusalem! What did the Sunday eucharist in her village church every week for a life-time mean to the blessed Chione — and to the millions like her then, and every year since then? The sheer stupendous quantity of the love of God which this ever-repeated action has drawn from the obscure Christian multitudes through the centuries is in itself an overwhelming thought.

— Dom Gregory Dix, The Shape of the Liturgy (1945). One of my favorite paragraphs I’ve ever read. (via wesleyhill)

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Shelfie

Biographies, shelf 2 of 3

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Sunday, October the 26th, was the feast day of Alfred the Great.  Every year in October I read Chesterton's Ballad of the White Horse to remember him and to learn from him.  I've blogged about both the poem and the man several times over the years, so be sure to check out my Alfred the Great tag.  One of the posts includes lots of links to cool websites with history, music, and more.

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Current Reading
A History of Mathematics, Uta C. Merzbach and Carl B. Boyer
A History of Pi, Petr Beckmann
Introduction to Arithmetic, Nichomachus of Gerasa
The Code of the Warrior:  Exploring Warrior Values Past and Present, Shannon E. French
The Woman in White, Wilkie Collins
Onward and Upward in the Garden, Katharine S. White
A Book of Hours, Thomas Merton, ed. Kathleen Deignan

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Wednesdays with Words: Thirst

“I don’t have any excuses, Son,” he said to me. And it was odd to be called Son by a man I hadn’t seen in thirty years. It was odd to be anybody’s son. It felt right, but right for another time and another place and another story that never actually happened.

“I’m sorry,” he said. And he cried. A tear came down his cheek, and he put down his beer and reached his hand over the arm of his chair to the couch, and I took his hand. “I’m sorry,” he repeated, his voice breaking with emotion. “Do you forgive me?”

“I do,” I said. “I forgive you.” And I did, even though I didn’t know I needed to. I forgave him and haven’t felt anything against him since. He took a sip from his beer and thanked me. He put his hand on my knee and squeezed till I thought my leg would break. He reached over and picked up my book and smiled and shook his head. “You can write,” he said in a voice that seemed to come from before time. “I can’t believe how good your stories are.” I didn’t want his words to mean anything. I didn’t want to need his affirmation. But part of our selves is spirit, and our spirits are thirsty, and my father’s words went into my spirit like water.

[A Thousand Miles in a Million Years, by Dennis Miller]

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Shelfie

Books on education, books on books, and books on words

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Current Reading
A History of Mathematics, Uta C. Merzbach and Carl B. Boyer
A History of Pi, Petr Beckmann
Introduction to Arithmetic, Nichomachus of Gerasa
Our Magnificent Bastard Language, John McWhorter
Waldo, Robert Heinlein
Let There Be Light: A Book About Windows, James Cross Giblin
The Old Farmer's Almanac, 2015 edition
Onward and Upward in the Garden, Katharine S. White
Music of Silence: A Sacred Journey Through the Hours of the Day, David Steindl-Rast and Sharon Lebell



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Wednesdays with Words: Beauty for Truth's Sake 2

From Chapter 2: Educating the Poetic Imagination
For the Platonic and Aristotelian tradition, music was not just one of the subjects to be studied for a master’s degree. In a certain broader sense the choral art was the foundation of the educational process. As we read in Plato’s Laws, “the whole choral art is also in our view the whole of education; and of this art, rhythms and harmonies form the part which has to do with the voice.” Music in this wider sense included song, poetry, story, and dance (“gymnastic”).

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[T]he greatest scientists have never ceased to be motivated by the desire to find beauty in their equations, and their breakthroughs are often the result of an intuition, or an imaginative leap.

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Poetry and the poetic imagination depend very largely on the interplay of likeness and difference. Simile, metaphor, contrast, analogy, are all used to connect one experience with another.

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A “symbol” is something that, by virtue of its analogous properties, or some other reason, represents something else. It is not just a “sign,” which is made to correspond to something by an arbitrary convention (like a road sign), but has some natural resemblance to what it represents. Traditional cosmologies were ways of reading the cosmos itself as a fabric woven of natural symbols.

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Eventually, every created thing can be seen as a manifestation of its own interior essence, and the world is transformed into a radiant book to be read with eyes sensitive to spiritual light.

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To take the examples motioned earlier, a tree is a natural symbol of the way the visible (trunk and branches) comes from the invisible (roots and seed), linking higher and lower realities into one living pattern. As such, it can function either as a symbol of the world as a whole (Yggdrasil, in the Norse myths), or of tradition, or of the Church, or of Man. A star by its piercing and remote beauty represents the “light” of higher realities, or the angels, or the thoughts of God, and so on. In each case, these associations are not arbitrary but precise and natural, even to a large extent predictable and consistent from one culture to another (though capable of many applications and variations). The symbol and the archetype to which it refers are not separate things, for the symbol is simply the manifestation of the archetype in a particular milieu or place of existence. It is “meaning made tangible.”

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Shelfie
I’m still slowly working my way through my math books and I’m working on the next post in my “Squaring the Circle” series, but it’s super-slow, now that we’ve gone back to having regular Morning Times. In the meantime, here’s a picture of some of the math books I’ve been gathering.

I don’t know why that Atlas of Military History is there – it’s my youngest son’s book.  The coin is a German schilling #1Son found when he was in Guatemala this summer.

Wednesdays with Words: The Rector of Justin, by Louis Auchincloss

"There is no real distinction between the pulpit and the classroom. I tried to put God into every book and sport in Justin. That was my ideal, to spread a sense of his presence so that it would not be confined to prayers and sacred studies and to spread it in such a way as to make the school joyful." He shook his head ruefully. "Oh, if I could have done that, Brian, Justin would have been the model for all preparatory schools!"

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His principle reason, however, for giving so much care and devotion to the chapel service was that he regarded it as the keystone of his educational plan. God might indeed be everywhere, but he was particularly in chapel when masters and boys worshiped together.

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"And none of us is a Christian until he has accepted the parable of the laborer in the vineyard. Until he is willing to share the kingdom of God equally with those who have toiled but a fraction of his working day. Until he has recognized that it would not be the kingdom of God if there were any differences in it."

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When I left, I asked him if I could make a habit of driving down to see him every Saturday afternoon, and he consented . . . . And then in a burst of gratitude and because I had been overwrought by his news [of his impending death], I subjected him to one of my silly fits of conscience. Oh, the egotism of the neurotic!

"Unless you think I'm only coming to collect your last words!" I exclaimed. "Perhaps I am. Perhaps, God help me, I am!"

"Coming to see me is a good deed, Brian," Dr. Prescott replied gently. "It gives me great pleasure, therefore it is good. You worry too much about motives. Suppose your motive is selfish. Very well. But now suppose yourself an inquisitor of the Middle Ages who would burn my living body to save my soul. The motive might be good. But what about poor me at the stake! Do you imagine the good Lord will reward the inquisitor more than you? Of course not. Some of the intrinsic goodness of a good deed must seep into the motive, and some of the bad of a bad deed. Keep doing good deeds long enough, and you'll probably turn out a good man. In spite of yourself!"

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We like heroes in shirtsleeves, or, in other words, we don't like heroes. But things were not always that way, and today is not forever.

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But I must stop rambling. I must cease my everlasting speculations. If I am ever to write anything, even if I give it my whole lifetime, I must still make a beginning. I must still make a mark on the acres of white paper that seem to unroll before me like arctic snows.

Wednesays with Words: Beauty for Truth's Sake

[I wrote this up and scheduled it for the next Wednesday before Cindy announced that she's leaving the blogging world.  I'm keeping the title because, well . .  y'all know why.]

From Chapter 1:  The Tradition of the Four Ways

"The process of education requires us to become open, receptive, curious, and humble in the face of what we do not know."

"[P]hilosophy is a preparation for dying; or rather, for dying well."

"An integrated curriculum must teach subjects, and it must teach the right subjects, but it should do so by incorporating each subject, even mathematics and the hard sciences, within the history of ideas, which is the history of our culture."

"Beauty is the radiance of the true and the good, and it is what attracts us to both."

"[Beauty] is, we should add, difference or otherness held in a unity that does not destroy uniqueness. As Hart explains, if the Trinity were instead a Duality, God would not be love but narcissism, and beauty would lose its radiance. It is the Holy Spirit, the fact that true love is always turned away from itself, pouring itself out for others, that makes it open and radiant, and creates room in the Trinity for the creation itself, as well as for all the suffering and all the sacrifice that creation involves. The Trinity is the home of the Logos and the shape of love. These are the high secrets of our Western tradition, and together they offer the key to its renewal."


Update:

Dawn at Ladydusk is continuing Cindy's WWW link-up.  Yay, Dawn!  Check her blog for more quotes.

How NOT to teach math

The area of a circle, we know, is

A = πr²

where r is the radius of the circle. Most of us first learned this formula in school with the justification that teacher said so, take it or leave it, but you’d better take it and learn it by heart; the formula is, in fact, an example of the brutality with which mathematics is often taught to the innocent.

[A History of Pi, Petr Beckman, p. 17]

Wednesday with words: Isaac Asimov is so funny

The crucial point in man’s mathematical history came when more than patterns were required; when more was needed than to look inside the cave to assure himself that both children were present, or a glance at his rack of stone axes to convince himself that all four spares were in place.

At some point, man found it necessary to communicate numbers. He had to go to a neighbor and say, “Listen, old man, you didn’t lift one of my stone axes last time you were in my cave, did you?” Then, if the neighbor were to say, “Good heavens, what makes you think that?” it would be convenient to be able to say, “You see, friend, I had four spares before you came to visit and only three after you left.”

~ Isaac Asimov, Realm of Numbers, pp. 1-2

Wednesday with Words: The Quadrivium is all about Math

[T]he quadrivium is essential to a liberal education in the traditional sense. And since we can normally only advance from sense-perception to intellectual intuition by way of intellectual argumentation, the quadrivium necessarily involved the study of number and its relationship to physical space or time, preparatory to the study of philosophy (in the higher sense of that word) and theology: arithmetic being pure number, geometry number in space, music number in time, and astronomy number in both space and time.
(Stratford Caldecott, Beauty for Truth’s Sake, pp. 23-24)

Elaienar made a graphic for me.
Isn't it pretty?

“The octaves of human experience”

It is in the Imagination that language and the Muses are born from Memory in the house of tradition. The first lesson of our revised ‘Trivium’ is therefore the vital importance of crafts, drama and dance, poetry and storytelling, as a foundation for independent and critical thought. Through doing and making, through poesis, the house of the soul is built. The grammar of language, however, rests on a deeper foundation still. It rests on music. Music is the wordless language on which poetry—the purest and most concentrated form of speech—is built. Poetry is made of images, similes, metaphors, analogies; but what holds these elements together and makes them live is fundamentally musical in nature.

In music we glimpse the grammar of creation itself, from the harmony of the planetary and subatomic spheres to the octaves of human experience and the cycles of growth in plants and animals. Modern writers as varied as Schopenhauer and Tolkien have seen the world as a kind of ‘embodied music,’ and of course the notion is ubiquitous among the ancients. Music in turn is a play of mathematics, coherent patterns of number and shape in time and space, expressed in rhythm and timbre, tone and pitch. It is the closest most of us get to seeing and feeling the beauty of mathematics.

~ Beauty in the Word, by Stratford Caldecott, pages 57-58

That phrase, “the octaves of human experience” jumped out at me, and of course at first I thought of the musical octave—do, re, mi, and so on. But then I remember that there are dates on the Church calendar that are called Octaves, and I wonder if this is what he was referring to.

The Church year begins with the First Sunday in Advent. The first octave day on the calendar is January the 1^st, “The Circumcision of Christ and Octave Day of the Nativity of Our Lord,” which means it’s the eighth day after his birth.

Another octave, though it isn’t labeled this way on the calendar, is Holy Week, from Palm Sunday to Easter Sunday—eight days.

Our church doesn’t do anything in particular to observe most of these, so I haven’t paid them much attention, but our calendar shows that there are several more octaves. The next one begins on Ascension day (which is tomorrow, by the way—this year May the 29^th is the fortieth day after the Resurrection) and runs through the following Thursday (Ascension is always on a Thursday). Corpus Christi is June 19 and its Octave Day is June 26. There’s an octave for the Nativity of John the Baptist (beginning on June 24), Saints Peter and Paul (June 29), the Dormition of the Blessed Virgin Mary (August 15) and of her Nativity (September 8). The last octave on my church’s calendar begins with All Saints’ Day (November 1).

If we lived in a time and place where Morning Prayers were offered every day at church and all the Days of Obligation were kept I’m sure we would feel these rhythms.

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I keep re-reading this passage.  There are several other things that fascinate me, especially those last two sentences:

“Music in turn is a play of mathematics, coherent patterns of number and shape in time and space, expressed in rhythm and timbre, tone and pitch. It is the closest most of us get to seeing and feeling the beauty of mathematics.”

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Cindy has been blogging through Beauty in the Word at Ordo Amoris.  Be sure to read all her posts!

Wednesday with Words: Thrift store find

“The small boys came early to the hanging”

The Pillars of the Earth, Ken Follett

Well, with an opening line like that, how could I resist?

Wednesday with Words: A word from the Father of History

Marble bust of Herodotus
photo by Marie-Lan Nguyen
Wikimedia Commons

Herodotus of Halicarnassus here displays his inquiry, so that human achievements may not become forgotten in time, and great and marvellous deeds — some displayed by Greeks, some by barbarians — may not be without their glory; and especially to show why the two peoples fought with each other.

[Herodotus, The Histories, translated by Aubrey de Sélincourt, revised by John Marincola.]


Herodotus (c. 484–425 BC) was born at Halicarnassus, which is on the Aegean coast of modern day Turkey.  Cicero called him the Father of History because he is the first person we know of who systematically inquired into events of the past and tried to make sure that they had actually happened before creating his own narrative.

That seems obvious to us, but compare his book's opening lines with the usual way of telling of memorable deeds of the past:

Sing, O Goddess, the anger of Achilles son of Peleus, that brought countless ills upon the Achaeans. (The Illiad. tr. Butler)

and:

Speak to me, Muse, of the adventurous man who wandered long after he sacked the sacred citadel of Troy.  (The Odyssey, tr. Palmer)

Homer appeals to the goddess for inspiration, and then tells how the gods' actions led to the events following.

But Herodotus begins by saying that he's going to tell about great things people have done and then gives a lengthy account of the Persian's version of what caused the war:  Io was kidnapped by a group of Phoenecian sailors and then in retaliation Europa was kidnapped by a group of Greeks followed by the abduction of Medea which inspired Paris to kidnap Helen.  Evidently the Persians thought all this kidnapping was no big deal, but "the Greeks, merely on account of a girl from Sparta, raised a big army, invaded Asia and destroyed the empire of Priam."

All of this caused the eternal enmity between the Greeks and the Persians.  No mention at all of gods, but simply the actions of men — things that can be verified by inquiry.

Just for fun, here's the original Greek text:

Ἡροδότου Ἁλικαρνησσέος ἱστορίης ἀπόδεξις ἥδε, ὡς μήτε τὰ γενόμενα ἐξ ἀνθρώπων τῷ χρόνῳ ἐξίτηλα γένηται, μήτε ἔργα μεγάλα τε καὶ θωμαστά, τὰ μὲν Ἕλλησι τὰ δὲ βαρβάροισι ἀποδεχθέντα, ἀκλεᾶ γένηται, τά τε ἄλλα καὶ δι᾽ ἣν αἰτίην ἐπολέμησαν ἀλλήλοισι.

[Source:  Sacred Texts]

Oh, and the "word" from Herodotus?  The third word in Greek is ἱστορίης, which means inquiry.  It is pronounced something like istoria, and gives us our word history.

And there you have the history of History.

Wednesday with Words: "House and wife and an ox for the plough"

This semester I’m taking a seven week-long class from Coursera on The Ancient Greeks. Check out the syllabus – it’s brutal.

This quote is from one of my assigned readings this week, a selection from Aristotle’s Politics, on the polis.  I’ve deleted a longish section because I wanted to focus on Aristotle’s description of the oikos, the household or family.

He who thus considers things in their first growth and origin, whether a state or anything else, will obtain the clearest view of them. In the first place there must be a union of those who cannot exist without each other; namely, of male and female, that the race may continue (and this is a union which is formed, not of deliberate purpose, but because, in common with other animals and with plants, mankind have a natural desire to leave behind them an image of themselves), and of natural ruler and subject, that both may be preserved…. 

Out of these two relationships between man and woman, master and slave, the first thing to arise is the family, and Hesiod is right when he says, 

        ‘First house and wife and an ox for the plough,’ 

for the ox is the poor man’s slave. The family is the association established by nature for the supply of men’s everyday wants, and the members of it are called by Charondas ‘companions of the cupboard,’ and by Epimenides the Cretan, ‘companions of the manger.’

Source:  http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/ancient/Aristotle-politics-polis.asp

Wednesday with Words: Implacable resentment

Odysseus answered: 

“May it please your grace, my lord King Agamemnon, the man will not quench his anger; he is even more full of passion and rejects you and your gifts….” 

All heard this aghast, in dead silence; it was a heavy blow.  They were long silent, but Diomedês broke the silence, as usual: 

“May it please your Grace, my lord King Agamemnon!  It was a great pity to ask [Achillês] at all or to offer your heaps of treasure.  He is always a proud man, and now you have made him prouder than ever.

 [The Illiad, Book IX, Homer, tr. W.H.D. Rouse]

‘No’ – said Darcy, ‘I have made no such pretension.  I have faults enough, but they are not, I hope, of understanding.  My temper I dare not vouch for. – It is, I believe, too little yielding – certainly too little for the convenience of the world.  I cannot forget the follies and vices of others so soon as I ought, nor their offences against myself.  My feelings are not puffed about with every attempt to move them.  My temper would perhaps be called resentful.  My good opinion, once lost, is lost forever.’ 

‘That is a failing indeed!’ cried Elizabeth.

 [Pride and Prejudice, chapter XI, Jane Austen]

Wednesday with Words: More from Wodehouse's Love Among the Chickens

Garnet entered the compartment, and stood at the door, looking out in order, after the friendly manner of the traveling Briton, to thwart an invasion of fellow-travelers.

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There are few things more restful than to watch some one else busy under a warm sun.

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It was only when I heard him call out to Hawk to be careful, when a movement on the part of that oarsman set the boat rocking, that I began to weave romances round him in which I myself figured.

But, once started, I progressed rapidly. I imagined a sudden upset. Professor struggling in water. Myself (heroically): “Courage! I’m coming!” A few rapid strokes. Saved! Sequel: A subdued professor, dripping salt water and tears of gratitude, urging me to become his son-in-law. That sort of thing happened in fiction. It was a shame that it should not happen in real life. In my hot youth I once had seven stories in seven weekly penny papers in the same month all dealing with a situation of the kind. Only the details differed. In “Not Really a Coward,” Vincent Devereux had rescued the earl’s daughter from a fire, whereas in “Hilda’s Hero” it was the peppery old father whom Tom Slingsby saved, singularly enough, from drowning. In other words, I, a very mediocre scribbler, had effected seven times in a single month what the powers of the universe could not manage once, even on the smallest scale.

I was a little annoyed with the powers of the universe.

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The professor was in the best of tempers, and I worked strenuously to keep him so. My scheme had been so successful that its iniquity did not worry me. I have noticed that this is usually the case in matters of its kind. It is the bungled crime that brings remorse.

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I went into the garden. She was sitting under the cedar by the tennis lawn, reading. She looked up as I approached.

To walk any distance under observation is one of the most trying things I know. I advanced in bad order, hoping that my hands did not really look as big as they felt. The same remark applied to my feet. In emergencies of this kind a diffident man could very well dispense with extremities. I should have liked to be wheeled up in a bath chair.

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I felt, like the man in the fable, as if some one had played a mean trick on me, and substituted for my brain a side order of cauliflower.

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I often make Bob [the dog] the recipient of my confidences. He listens appreciatively and never interrupts. And he never has grievances of his own. If there is one person I dislike, it is the man who tries to air his grievances when I wish to air mine. 

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But, I reflected, I ought not to be surprised. His whole career, as long as I had known him, had been dotted with little eccentricities of a type which an unfeeling world generally stigmatizes as shady. They were small things, it was true; but they ought to have warned me. We are most of us wise after the event. When the wind has blown we generally discover a multitude of straws which should have shown us which way it was blowing.

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“Now this,” I said to myself, “is rather interesting. Here in this one farm we have the only three known methods of dealing with duns. Beale is evidently an exponent of the violent method. Ukridge is an apostle of evasion. I shall try conciliation. I wonder which of us will be the most successful.”

Meanwhile, not to spoil Beale’s efforts by allowing him too little scope for experiment, I refrained from making my presence known, and continued to stand by the gate, an interested spectator.

Wednesday with Words: A Commonplace Book

A commonplace book is the author's rag bag. In it he places all the insane ideas that come to him, in the groundless hope that some day he will be able to convert them with magic touch into marketable plots.
~ P.G. Wodehouse, Love Among the Chickens