The Colloquial Reader

The person who devotes himself to the life of learning should not forget, in his implacable intoxication, the life that he is supposed to live. Learning is what adds to the living.

America has three authors who produced epics in the Homeric mode: 1. Melville with MOBY-DICK 2. Faulkner with AS I LAY DYING 3. Cormac McCarthy with BLOOD MERIDIAN

@JamesF_Moody Real

@TheColloquialR Highly recommended. History is made by great men.

I think what makes this book fascinating is that Tom Holland makes Roman history about the lives of ambitious and exceptional men. They didn't come out of nowhere: the environment of greatness is embedded as a civilizational bedrock.

@Soy_Mou_ I actually read this first before Rubicon. It's one of my favs in popular history

@TheColloquialR I recommend Persian Fire, very similar in the way of tell the history. Reads like a novel

Boethius studied under Ammonius who studied under Proclus.... 🤔

You read 100 book per year, but I grasp pure essences in eidetic intuition, cognize noumena with the intellectus archetypus, and recollect the imperishable Forms of things. We are not the same.

Herodotus is the nosy American tourist who keeps bugging tour guides with random-ass questions. Thucydides is a CIA spook

@SecretCicero Oh yeah I agree! It's either Caesar waging civil war or Sibyl meeting Tarquin

@TheColloquialR The opening pages of this book had me hooked on Rome forever

Remind me not to engage with someone whose idea is so idiotic he thinks reading great books should *reliably* improve the one who reads it.

@eutaktospol If that's your argument, that's a very superficial way of seeing it. Wow...

You’re arguing against things I never said. My claim was that the great books do not reliably improve people, as they are largely powerless against type. Did I ever say that the great books are historically irrelevant? I don’t dispute that books shape civilisations. I dispute that they reliably transform individuals.

Read the great books and you'll become a conservative.

@eutaktospol Seriously? Lol. You're adhering to the belief that my take is "read this = great", as if there's a *necessary causation* with reading books? Talk about a strawman lmao

Do you believe influence and transformation are identical? Because if that’s the case then I would assume we would see every Greek become Achilles, simply because they had Homer, or everyone in Christian Europe become a saint because they read the bible. In fact, the entire twentieth century is almost a laboratory proving that the possession of texts and moral transformation are not at all the same thing. Do you believe Alexander became Alexander *because* he read Homer? Surely millions can read Homer and see something completely different.

@eutaktospol Another point: it's also wrong to say the great books are to improve people. It's more than that. If Plato didn't exist, we would not have Christianity, bcs Plato's metaphysics helps to explain Christian doctrines. The relevance of the great books is historical, not just personal

@eutaktospol I think that's a very skeptical take on the great books as a whole, and wrong. The great books are powerful, and we can see this with Alexander the Great. He had the Illiad wherever he went, and Aristotle also had tutored him. Of course he's great, bcs he internalized Achilles.

@eutaktospol Useless in what way? What's your argument about it?

@TheColloquialR No, this is wrong. They’re actually pretty useless to the common run of humanity.

@Incictus_V I see. Well, tbh I wasn't a conservative before I read Roger Scruton. But most great books have a conservative element within it (tradition, family, institution, etc). That's why I said they'll become a conservative if they read them (at least intuit there's a truth in it).

I think if you read what most people recommend as "Great Books" which is to say Graeco-Roman classics and then various Assorted works of Western canonical literature then you're both more likely of the background to be conservative (less suspicious of traditional "European canon") and also if you had no prior formation those books will tend to lean you conservative. I was a hard-core Marxist by the time I branched out into reading other stuff so it didn't really have that effect on me. Eventually I dialled down the Marxism but that wasn't really because of "great books" but because I became disillusioned with Marxian economic predictions which I no longer believed to be true.

@Incictus_V Well mostly they aren't written with nihilism in mind, compared to books written today. That for me is what makes the great books (mostly) conservative.

@TheColloquialR Idk didn't happen for me as far as I'm aware..

'Beauty is vanishing from our world because we live as though it did not matter.' Sir Roger Scruton

@the_book_land Books are the earliest form that explore the human experience. If they see books as just "knowledge", well, that's on them, or they read mediocre stuffs

Some people really think books are just objects, and that their physical existence doesn't go beyond that.

@mcgillmd921 Boethius, Lucullus, Cicero, Sulla...

If you could sit and have a cup of coffee with any single person from Roman history ... Who would it be?