I may previously have mentioned that I’m not particularly cultured. For instance, I share in my late grandmother’s opinion of opera. Grandma would hear an aria on the radio and demand, “Whose cat’s dying?” She got a universal laugh with this line until the day when she said it and the feline death wail in question turned out to be sung by her granddaughter Kim, who had presented Grandma with […]
I finished Plutarch’s life of Romulus, which reads a lot like one of Rudyard Kipling’s Just So Stories. Just as Kipling mythologizes animal history such as how the leopard got its spots or how the camel got its hump, Plutarch explains the beginnings of Roman history, including such tidbits as why fast people are said to have celerity, why lawyer-client privilege exists, and even why the bridegroom carries his new […]
The re-start of school and all the fresh promise of a new year have me hankering to get back to my intellectual improvement through reading the classics. I picked up Plutarch’s Lives this afternoon (current month’s reading in my Great Books group) and dug into the life of Theseus. He was the mythical founder of Athens and probably is best known for slaying the Minotaur, a half-man, half-bull creature, in […]
Flabby Brain 