Tuesday, August 30, 2011

What I've Been Reading

The Greek Way by Edith Hamilton. 
Following were my favorite lines from the new book The Social Animal: The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement by David Brooks:


Harold found Ms. Taylor absurd for the first few weeks and then unforgettable forever after that. The most important moment of their relationship came one afternoon as Harold was moving from gym class to lunch. Ms. Taylor had been lurking in the hallway, camouflaged in her earth tones against the locker. She spotted her prey approaching at normal speed. For few seconds, she stalked him with a professional calm and patience, and then during a second when the hallway crowds parted and Harold was vulnerable and alone, she pounced. She pressed a slim volume into Harold's hand. "This will lift you to greatness!" she emoted. And in a second she was gone. Harold looked down. It was a used copy of a book called The Greek Way by a woman named Edith Hamilton. Harold would remember that moment forever.

Now that I have read that book, I can relate why Harold remembered that moment forever. I can only wish someone gave it to me when I was his age. A simple, powerful and lucid book to ignite the intellectual fire in any young kid's heart via that Greek spark.

On the intellectual influence of the Greeks:
We are composite creatures, made up of the soul and body, mind and spirit. When men's attention is fixed upon one to the disregard of the others, human beings result who are only partially developed, their eyes blinded to half of what life offers and the great world holds. But in that antique world of Egypt and the early Asiatic civilizations, that world where the pendulum was swinging ever farther and farther away from all fact, something completely new happened. The Greek came into being and the world, as we know it, began.
All things are at odds when God lets a thinker loose on this planet. They were let loose in Greece. The Greeks were intellectualists; they had a passion for using their minds.

On straight talk sans white lies:
"Some of you are of an age at which they may hope to have other children, and they ought to bear their sorrow better. To those of you who have passed their prime, I say: Congratulate yourselves that you have been happy during the greater part of your days; remember that your life of sorrow will not last long, and take comfort in the glory of those who are gone." 
- Funeral oration delivered by Pericles over the those fallen in the war.

On compassion:
"Ten of of the ruling party in Corinth went to a house with the purpose of killing a little boy there who an oracle had declared would group up to destroy the city. The mother thinking it a friendly visit, bought he son when asked to see him, and put him in the arms of one of them. Now they had agreed on the way there that whoever first received the child should dash it to the ground. But it happened that the baby smiled at the man who took it and so he was unable to kill it and handed it over to another. Thus it passed through the hands of all the ten and no one of them would kill it. Then they gave it back to the mother and went away and began to blame each other, but especially him who had first held that child."
- Herodotus

On anti-slavery 2000 years ago:
"That thing of evil, by its nature evil, Forcing submission from a man to what No man should yield to." 
 -Euripides, he was the first to condemn slavery. 



There was never anywhere a dreamer so rash or so romantic as to imagine a life without slaves. The loftiest thinkers, idealists, and moralists never had an idea that slavery was evil. In the Old Testament it is accepted without comment exactly as in records of Egypt and Mesopotamia. Even the prophets of Israel did not utter a word against it, nor, for that matter, did St. Paul. What is strange is not that the Greeks took Slavery for granted through hundreds of years, but that finally they began to think about it and question it. 

On faith :
"Think this certain, that to a good man no evil can happen, either in life or in death." 
- Socrates

On shedding the dogma and embracing an open mind:
The Greek mind was free to think about the world as it pleased, to reject all traditional explanations, to disregard all the priests taught, to search unhampered by any outside authority for the truth. The Greeks had free scope for their scientific genius and they laid the foundation of our science today. Never, not in the brightest days of the Renaissance, has learning appeared in such a radiant light as it did to the gay young men of imperial Athens. 

On free speech: 
Aristophanes's stupendous satire is unparalleled before the modern world. 

On joy of living:
But never, not in their darkest moments, do they lose their taste for life. It is always a wonder and a delight, the world a place of beauty, and they themselves rejoicing to be alive in it. 

And finally why we need wisdom from Greeks:
When the world is storm driven and the bad that happens and the worse that threatens are so urgent as to shutout everything else from the view, then we need to know all the strong fortresses of the spirit which men have built through the ages. The eternal perspectives are being blotted out, and out judgment of immediate issues will go wrong unless we bring them back.

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