-
Do you remember the silly puzzle in the last Newsletter (What English word has all the vowels in order (a, e, i, o, u and y), each one occurring once and only once)? It provoked a lot of responses, from which I learned something that surprised me. So, before going on to thinking about the Classics, and higher ed, (and a new challenge for readers), let’s start with the puzzle and those who solved it..
And the Answer Is:
facetiously or abstemiously.
--
And the Winner Is:
Judith Hallett was first to respond with a correct answer – facetiously. We promised eternal fame as the prize, which is hereby conferred upon her. Brava!
--
The Discovery That Surprised Me:
It turns out that many respondents had used AI for an answer. I pass no judgment on such apparent depravity, because in so doing they have taught me not one but two lessons:
First, a big generalization from a tiny data base - we have passed a cultural divide. We used to sit and scratch the head until we came up with a solution to such puzzles. Now we turn to AI. It’s a brave new world!
Second lesson: Be careful which chatbot you choose! Some come up with implausible answers (anteriourly, indeed!) Other AI bots claimed there really wasn’t an answer.
Some of the problems at this stage of AI became clear in a response that deserves special mention
--
Honorable Mention: Good Try!
John Mole, a writer of always enjoyable books, took the challenge one step further, asking for a Greek word, including all the vowels in the order in which they occur in the Greek alphabet. It proved a good test of AI tools at this stage of their development: “Gemini failed completely,” he reports. “Chat CPT produced seven words, none of which included omega.” Google Gemini pontificated "While there likely aren't many common Greek words containing all six vowels, there are definitely some! Unfortunately, due to the way vowels interact in Greek, forming diphthongs (two vowel sounds combined), it's nearly impossible to have all six vowels maintaining their distinct sounds in one word.” Blame those naughty diphthongs!
--
Why Stop With Greek?
The same challenge can be posed for Latin and modern languages. Your German is flawless? Proud of your French? Swahili? Solve the same puzzle in these languages, then email your answers to [email protected]. Great fame will follow.
--
What I Learned from the Puzzle:
First, the Big Divide: Some of us scratched our head until we found a solution, but most of the respondents turned to generative Artificial Intelligence for an answer. Was this cheating or some other form of moral depravity? I pass no judgment, but this episode is instructive, convincing me that, like it or not, with only imperfect bots in hand, we have crossed the electronic Rubicon and entered AI territory. That means we have to learn how to use it, alert to facile or false conclusions, but, increasingly, benefitting from what AI does best. That’s the new puzzle we have set for ourselves.
So what does it do best?
--
What’s AI Really Good At?
At this stage AI, as we have seen, is not especially good at the very human task of thumbing through lexicons. I’m not even sure that it’s very much like human intelligence. Its great strength may be in seeing things we humans recognize only very slowly, or maybe not at all. What has really impressed me is its ability to recognize patterns in large bodies of data. It has already, for example, detected incipient breast cancer by recognizing patterns that even skilled human observers do not notice. Or consider this breakthrough:
“It took humans 134 years to discover Norn cells. Last summer, computers in California discovered them on their own in just six weeks. The discovery came about when researchers at Stanford programmed the computers to teach themselves biology. The computers ran an artificial intelligence program similar to ChatGPT, the popular bot that became fluent with language after training on billions of pieces of text from the internet. But the Stanford researchers trained their computers on raw data about millions of real cells and their chemical and genetic makeup.”
Carl Zimmer in The New York Times of March 10, 2024.
Could something of comparable significance be achieved if top quality generative AI was given access to the large amount of data we now have available in electronic form about ancient Greece, or some portion thereof, e.g. Greek drama? Could it recognize patterns we have overlooked? My layman’s hunch is that classical scholarship may be approaching a breakthrough moment, in which AI will help us see ancient Greece (and other cultures) in fresh ways.
--
On “Breakthrough Moments”:
When budgets for the humanities are being cut, self-appointed prophets are talking gloom and doom for liberal education, and despondent lemmings are jumping off the Cliffs of Academe, it’s time to think back to a breakthrough moment not so long ago. Classical studies in the United States experienced something of that sort in the 1970s and 1980s as ancient texts became machine readable and scholars found new ways of understanding the ancient world: “ ... it was the advent of modern technology and a young classicist's search for "terms of happiness" that provided the catalyst and impetus for the creation of the electronic thesaurus, namely the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae fittingly named after its Renaissance predecessor.” But the TLG did not stand alone. There was also the work of the Packard Humanities Institute and the Perseus Project. Here’s the story of the start of one of these projects.
The achievements of that era made it possible to access texts in a vastly more efficient way, but did not fundamentally change how one put that access to work - the questions asked, the conclusions searched for. This time it may be different.
--
And Now?
The potential of AI is only part of the story for Classics. A lot has been happening: The Vesuvius Challenge is starting to make accessible a whole library of hitherto unread ancient texts. And new discoveries underwater point to more good things to come. Meanwhile, back at the Institute for Advanced Study “ The Krateros Project is launching a new, exploratory effort to further unlock the texts of ancient Greek inscriptions using its collection of epigraphic squeezes. “ For more information click here. In most of these projects new technologies are making possible new approaches, and over time a deeper understanding of antiquity.
----
Forbidden Words of the Month:
Speaking plain English has become a hazardous occupation. Say a forbidden word and you can lose a friend or get in other trouble. Here’s an example:
obese (adj.), obesity (n.)
Both are now forbidden, as you can see here. The objection is etymological, for these words imply that one’s weight is tied to eating. Drug companies now assure us that any such problem can best be treated by anti-obesity drugs. (“Anti-obesity” is still an acceptable term.)
They are right about the etymology. Obese & Co. entered the English language in the 17th century, probably as a genteel Latinate substitute for blunt AngloSaxon fat. Obese and its relatives have a long pedigree, , as Etymonline explains: “1610s, from French obésité and ... from Latin obesitas "fatness, corpulence," from obesus "that has eaten itself fat," past participle of obedere "to eat all over, devour," from ... PIE root *ed- "to eat". (Compare Greek esthiein, English edible.)
So, yes, it implies that being overweight has something to do with overeating. Ban the word, say the drug companies. Use our drugs instead. But, beware, the NIH warns us: some of these treatments are risky.
--
What Can Philology Do?
It can help “Keep Dead Languages Alive,” as Linguists say in Austin. But the perspective provided by those languages can help keep our own language healthy and vigorous, even if one has only “small Latin and less Greek,” as someone said of a poet he admired.
--
Verses of the Month:
Everyone knows that Shakespeare had “small Latin and less Greek,” but do you remember the context for that judgment? Here it is:
Thou art a monument without a tomb,
And art alive still while thy book doth live
And we have wits to read and praise to give.
That I not mix thee so, my brain excuses,
I mean with great, but disproportion'd Muses,
For if I thought my judgment were of years,
I should commit thee surely with thy peers,
And tell how far thou didst our Lyly outshine,
Or sporting Kyd, or Marlowe's mighty line.
And though thou hadst small Latin and less Greek,
From thence to honour thee, I would not seek
For names; but call forth thund'ring Aeschylus,
Euripides and Sophocles to us;
From Ben Jonson “To the Memory of My Beloved the Author Mr. William Shakespeare.--
--
--
Brush Up Your Latin / Start Testing It Now:
The study of Latin, beleaguered at some levels, is flourishing in some pre-high school settings. So, how’s your Latin? See how you do on the National Latin Exam, which grammar school Latinists are using to test their progress in the language.
--
Civic Discourse, and Civil, too?
Congratulations to Jed Atkins on his appointment as Director and Dean of the new School of Civic Life and Leadership at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Political controversy has surrounded the creation of such programs at several universities, but Atkins brings to his new post a solid reputation as a scholar of Cicero and ancient political thought, and a vision of shaping this new School into living-learning communities such as Duke's Transformative Ideas program. His real test, however, will be in guiding the selection of 10 – 20 new faculty members for whom the NC legislature has promised support, hoping for appointees willing to challenge views thought currently to dominate the campus.
In the meantime, take a close look at the Duke model. It seems to me like an exemplary program, well designed to deal with the dread “sophomore slump.”
For Your Reading List:
League of the Lexicon
“This original quiz game is hilarious and erudite, wildly entertaining and learned, zany and academic. Some of the categories addressed are a usage guide to novel punctuation, a Simpsons lexicon, delicious English words for nonsense, reduplicative words, obsolete occupations, origin stories of eponyms, phrases the English use to insult the French and vice versa, the slang and jargon of drunks and drinks, obsolete occupations, grammar jokes (who knew?), medical conditions that make pretty girls’ names, original titles of famous books, and on and on.” The New York Review
--
Where Did “The Humanities” Come From?
“[I]n a law court of 63 BCE, Cicero first spoke of studia humanitatis (“the pursuits of humanity”) to highlight the learning of his adversary, the austere Stoic grandee Marcus Cato. Fundamentally, humanitas meant the human condition, but it evolved to describe both humane conduct and a liberal education — synonymous with the artes liberales. “
David Butterfield in The Critic March 2024. (Thanks to Michael Fontaine for calling this article to my attention.)
---
How Different Things Could Be:
“Must things be this way for the Humanities in the twenty-first century? No. And I saw a brief glimpse of this last summer: on a Greek island, I was surrounded by 30 students reading Ancient Greek, speaking it to each other, amid long-form conversations about what moved them most in these texts. It was so simple, so fresh, and so incredible that the students in question had never studied Greek before, and that their attendance was philanthropically covered by full scholarships. To begin their MA in the Humanities they sat alongside two of the top five ancient linguists in the world, before returning to Savannah, Georgia, to chart the Western tradition up to the present. That institution, Ralston College, models just how different things can be if the Humanities are given the space to breathe and believe.” (This too is from David Butterfield; here’s a link to Ralston’s program of an M.A. in the Humanities.
----
A Firebrand in a Hot Bed:
Stanley Fish is now teaching (Milton, et al.) at New College in Florida, a center of controversy. Here’s a glimpse into what it’s like.
--
A Decipherment:
Mark Saltveit reports that his team (including Mike Fontaine and Rachel Fickes has “deciphered nearly all of a previously illegible part of a manuscript (British Library Harley MS 2735, fol. 1r). It turns out to be a collection of 4th-6th century Roman poetry: 8 versus recurrentes, three Christian distichs, three pagan poems, two by Claudian and one attributed to Seneca, plus five palindromes and one Christian distich comparing two of the Apostle Peter's miracles. Much of this treasure trove is otherwise unknown to scholars who now await its publication. What to make of it as a whole? I think of it as a time capsule, the collection of favorite pieces brought together by someone who moved freely between pagan and Christian sides of Late Antiquity, and who delighted in language at play.
Congratulations to Mark and his team.
--
Save the Date for Fireworks on the Hill:
On April 17 the House Committee on Education and the Workforce will interrogate the president of Columbia University on antisemitism on her campus and relates issues. (Remember what happened to the presidents of Harvard and Penn after the last such interrogation?)
Columbia has a Taskforce on antisemitism, but it has not said how it defines the term. This leaves an opening which will surely be exploited at the hearing. Stay tuned!
A Contest:
What’s your favorite mixed metaphor? Here are two birds in hand to prime the pump:
“Every lemon has a silver lining,”
“A rolling stone catches the worm.”
You can do better than that! Send your entry to me at [email protected].
--
Quotable:
“Words ought to be a little wild, for they are the assault of though on the unthinking.”
John Maynard Keynes, quoted by Paul Krugman.
--
Jilted? Breaking Up?
Michael Fontaine, following the lead of Ovid’s Remedia Amoris, has some advice in How to Get Over a Breakup: An Ancient Guide to Moving On. It’s part of the Ancient Wisdom for Modern Readers series.
--
Guilt Me, Kate:
The Neologism of the Month is to guilt.
Example, “I guilted him.”’
The old noun guilt has now morphed into a verb, a transitive one at that, expressing the power of those who master the techniques of modern guiltification. To ”guilt someone,” which is first attested in 1995, overlaps with old fashioned “making someone feel guilty,” but is not quite the same, since one can be guilted not for what one said or did, but simply for who one is.
---
A Missed Opportunity:
I would have taught better if I had thought through what Adam Nicolson learned while sailing in the eastern Aegean, for example about early Greeks: “Entrepreneurial qualities governed them: inventiveness, a sprightliness of mind, a new athleticism, a certain fluidity of thought, a desire to rule themselves, to generate their own systems of law and regulate their turbulent lives and to find justice by accommodating difference.”
Nicolson’s most recent book is How to Be: Life Lessons from the Early Greeks.
--
The Magnetic Power of Grandchildren:
The tug of grandchildren is pulling us back north. Our house in idyllic Hillsborough NC has sold and we will soon move to Cataumet on the Cape. Here’s the contact info:
Post Office Box 188
(1090 County Rad)
Cataumet, Massachusetts 02534
There will be no change in email address. Use [email protected] to send items, links, or new subscribers.
Bob Connor
P.S. Please forward this Newsletter to friends, especially rebellious younger friends who might be willing to share their perspectives, ideas, and links.
STOP PRESS: The Trojan War has just turned up in Pompeii. Here’s the story.
Do you remember the silly puzzle in the last Newsletter (What English word has all the vowels in order (a, e, i, o, u and y), each one occurring once and only once)? It provoked a lot of responses, from which I learned something that surprised me. So, before going on to thinking about the Classics, and higher ed, (and a new challenge for readers), let’s start with the puzzle and those who solved it..
And the Answer Is:
facetiously or abstemiously.
--
And the Winner Is:
Judith Hallett was first to respond with a correct answer – facetiously. We promised eternal fame as the prize, which is hereby conferred upon her. Brava!
--
The Discovery That Surprised Me:
It turns out that many respondents had used AI for an answer. I pass no judgment on such apparent depravity, because in so doing they have taught me not one but two lessons:
First, a big generalization from a tiny data base - we have passed a cultural divide. We used to sit and scratch the head until we came up with a solution to such puzzles. Now we turn to AI. It’s a brave new world!
Second lesson: Be careful which chatbot you choose! Some come up with implausible answers (anteriourly, indeed!) Other AI bots claimed there really wasn’t an answer.
Some of the problems at this stage of AI became clear in a response that deserves special mention
--
Honorable Mention: Good Try!
John Mole, a writer of always enjoyable books, took the challenge one step further, asking for a Greek word, including all the vowels in the order in which they occur in the Greek alphabet. It proved a good test of AI tools at this stage of their development: “Gemini failed completely,” he reports. “Chat CPT produced seven words, none of which included omega.” Google Gemini pontificated "While there likely aren't many common Greek words containing all six vowels, there are definitely some! Unfortunately, due to the way vowels interact in Greek, forming diphthongs (two vowel sounds combined), it's nearly impossible to have all six vowels maintaining their distinct sounds in one word.” Blame those naughty diphthongs!
--
Why Stop With Greek?
The same challenge can be posed for Latin and modern languages. Your German is flawless? Proud of your French? Swahili? Solve the same puzzle in these languages, then email your answers to [email protected]. Great fame will follow.
--
What I Learned from the Puzzle:
First, the Big Divide: Some of us scratched our head until we found a solution, but most of the respondents turned to generative Artificial Intelligence for an answer. Was this cheating or some other form of moral depravity? I pass no judgment, but this episode is instructive, convincing me that, like it or not, with only imperfect bots in hand, we have crossed the electronic Rubicon and entered AI territory. That means we have to learn how to use it, alert to facile or false conclusions, but, increasingly, benefitting from what AI does best. That’s the new puzzle we have set for ourselves.
So what does it do best?
--
What’s AI Really Good At?
At this stage AI, as we have seen, is not especially good at the very human task of thumbing through lexicons. I’m not even sure that it’s very much like human intelligence. Its great strength may be in seeing things we humans recognize only very slowly, or maybe not at all. What has really impressed me is its ability to recognize patterns in large bodies of data. It has already, for example, detected incipient breast cancer by recognizing patterns that even skilled human observers do not notice. Or consider this breakthrough:
“It took humans 134 years to discover Norn cells. Last summer, computers in California discovered them on their own in just six weeks. The discovery came about when researchers at Stanford programmed the computers to teach themselves biology. The computers ran an artificial intelligence program similar to ChatGPT, the popular bot that became fluent with language after training on billions of pieces of text from the internet. But the Stanford researchers trained their computers on raw data about millions of real cells and their chemical and genetic makeup.”
Carl Zimmer in The New York Times of March 10, 2024.
Could something of comparable significance be achieved if top quality generative AI was given access to the large amount of data we now have available in electronic form about ancient Greece, or some portion thereof, e.g. Greek drama? Could it recognize patterns we have overlooked? My layman’s hunch is that classical scholarship may be approaching a breakthrough moment, in which AI will help us see ancient Greece (and other cultures) in fresh ways.
--
On “Breakthrough Moments”:
When budgets for the humanities are being cut, self-appointed prophets are talking gloom and doom for liberal education, and despondent lemmings are jumping off the Cliffs of Academe, it’s time to think back to a breakthrough moment not so long ago. Classical studies in the United States experienced something of that sort in the 1970s and 1980s as ancient texts became machine readable and scholars found new ways of understanding the ancient world: “ ... it was the advent of modern technology and a young classicist's search for "terms of happiness" that provided the catalyst and impetus for the creation of the electronic thesaurus, namely the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae fittingly named after its Renaissance predecessor.” But the TLG did not stand alone. There was also the work of the Packard Humanities Institute and the Perseus Project. Here’s the story of the start of one of these projects.
The achievements of that era made it possible to access texts in a vastly more efficient way, but did not fundamentally change how one put that access to work - the questions asked, the conclusions searched for. This time it may be different.
--
And Now?
The potential of AI is only part of the story for Classics. A lot has been happening: The Vesuvius Challenge is starting to make accessible a whole library of hitherto unread ancient texts. And new discoveries underwater point to more good things to come. Meanwhile, back at the Institute for Advanced Study “ The Krateros Project is launching a new, exploratory effort to further unlock the texts of ancient Greek inscriptions using its collection of epigraphic squeezes. “ For more information click here. In most of these projects new technologies are making possible new approaches, and over time a deeper understanding of antiquity.
----
Forbidden Words of the Month:
Speaking plain English has become a hazardous occupation. Say a forbidden word and you can lose a friend or get in other trouble. Here’s an example:
obese (adj.), obesity (n.)
Both are now forbidden, as you can see here. The objection is etymological, for these words imply that one’s weight is tied to eating. Drug companies now assure us that any such problem can best be treated by anti-obesity drugs. (“Anti-obesity” is still an acceptable term.)
They are right about the etymology. Obese & Co. entered the English language in the 17th century, probably as a genteel Latinate substitute for blunt AngloSaxon fat. Obese and its relatives have a long pedigree, , as Etymonline explains: “1610s, from French obésité and ... from Latin obesitas "fatness, corpulence," from obesus "that has eaten itself fat," past participle of obedere "to eat all over, devour," from ... PIE root *ed- "to eat". (Compare Greek esthiein, English edible.)
So, yes, it implies that being overweight has something to do with overeating. Ban the word, say the drug companies. Use our drugs instead. But, beware, the NIH warns us: some of these treatments are risky.
--
What Can Philology Do?
It can help “Keep Dead Languages Alive,” as Linguists say in Austin. But the perspective provided by those languages can help keep our own language healthy and vigorous, even if one has only “small Latin and less Greek,” as someone said of a poet he admired.
--
Verses of the Month:
Everyone knows that Shakespeare had “small Latin and less Greek,” but do you remember the context for that judgment? Here it is:
Thou art a monument without a tomb,
And art alive still while thy book doth live
And we have wits to read and praise to give.
That I not mix thee so, my brain excuses,
I mean with great, but disproportion'd Muses,
For if I thought my judgment were of years,
I should commit thee surely with thy peers,
And tell how far thou didst our Lyly outshine,
Or sporting Kyd, or Marlowe's mighty line.
And though thou hadst small Latin and less Greek,
From thence to honour thee, I would not seek
For names; but call forth thund'ring Aeschylus,
Euripides and Sophocles to us;
From Ben Jonson “To the Memory of My Beloved the Author Mr. William Shakespeare.--
--
--
Brush Up Your Latin / Start Testing It Now:
The study of Latin, beleaguered at some levels, is flourishing in some pre-high school settings. So, how’s your Latin? See how you do on the National Latin Exam, which grammar school Latinists are using to test their progress in the language.
--
Civic Discourse, and Civil, too?
Congratulations to Jed Atkins on his appointment as Director and Dean of the new School of Civic Life and Leadership at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Political controversy has surrounded the creation of such programs at several universities, but Atkins brings to his new post a solid reputation as a scholar of Cicero and ancient political thought, and a vision of shaping this new School into living-learning communities such as Duke's Transformative Ideas program. His real test, however, will be in guiding the selection of 10 – 20 new faculty members for whom the NC legislature has promised support, hoping for appointees willing to challenge views thought currently to dominate the campus.
In the meantime, take a close look at the Duke model. It seems to me like an exemplary program, well designed to deal with the dread “sophomore slump.”
For Your Reading List:
League of the Lexicon
“This original quiz game is hilarious and erudite, wildly entertaining and learned, zany and academic. Some of the categories addressed are a usage guide to novel punctuation, a Simpsons lexicon, delicious English words for nonsense, reduplicative words, obsolete occupations, origin stories of eponyms, phrases the English use to insult the French and vice versa, the slang and jargon of drunks and drinks, obsolete occupations, grammar jokes (who knew?), medical conditions that make pretty girls’ names, original titles of famous books, and on and on.” The New York Review
--
Where Did “The Humanities” Come From?
“[I]n a law court of 63 BCE, Cicero first spoke of studia humanitatis (“the pursuits of humanity”) to highlight the learning of his adversary, the austere Stoic grandee Marcus Cato. Fundamentally, humanitas meant the human condition, but it evolved to describe both humane conduct and a liberal education — synonymous with the artes liberales. “
David Butterfield in The Critic March 2024. (Thanks to Michael Fontaine for calling this article to my attention.)
---
How Different Things Could Be:
“Must things be this way for the Humanities in the twenty-first century? No. And I saw a brief glimpse of this last summer: on a Greek island, I was surrounded by 30 students reading Ancient Greek, speaking it to each other, amid long-form conversations about what moved them most in these texts. It was so simple, so fresh, and so incredible that the students in question had never studied Greek before, and that their attendance was philanthropically covered by full scholarships. To begin their MA in the Humanities they sat alongside two of the top five ancient linguists in the world, before returning to Savannah, Georgia, to chart the Western tradition up to the present. That institution, Ralston College, models just how different things can be if the Humanities are given the space to breathe and believe.” (This too is from David Butterfield; here’s a link to Ralston’s program of an M.A. in the Humanities.
----
A Firebrand in a Hot Bed:
Stanley Fish is now teaching (Milton, et al.) at New College in Florida, a center of controversy. Here’s a glimpse into what it’s like.
--
A Decipherment:
Mark Saltveit reports that his team (including Mike Fontaine and Rachel Fickes has “deciphered nearly all of a previously illegible part of a manuscript (British Library Harley MS 2735, fol. 1r). It turns out to be a collection of 4th-6th century Roman poetry: 8 versus recurrentes, three Christian distichs, three pagan poems, two by Claudian and one attributed to Seneca, plus five palindromes and one Christian distich comparing two of the Apostle Peter's miracles. Much of this treasure trove is otherwise unknown to scholars who now await its publication. What to make of it as a whole? I think of it as a time capsule, the collection of favorite pieces brought together by someone who moved freely between pagan and Christian sides of Late Antiquity, and who delighted in language at play.
Congratulations to Mark and his team.
--
Save the Date for Fireworks on the Hill:
On April 17 the House Committee on Education and the Workforce will interrogate the president of Columbia University on antisemitism on her campus and relates issues. (Remember what happened to the presidents of Harvard and Penn after the last such interrogation?)
Columbia has a Taskforce on antisemitism, but it has not said how it defines the term. This leaves an opening which will surely be exploited at the hearing. Stay tuned!
A Contest:
What’s your favorite mixed metaphor? Here are two birds in hand to prime the pump:
“Every lemon has a silver lining,”
“A rolling stone catches the worm.”
You can do better than that! Send your entry to me at [email protected].
--
Quotable:
“Words ought to be a little wild, for they are the assault of though on the unthinking.”
John Maynard Keynes, quoted by Paul Krugman.
--
Jilted? Breaking Up?
Michael Fontaine, following the lead of Ovid’s Remedia Amoris, has some advice in How to Get Over a Breakup: An Ancient Guide to Moving On. It’s part of the Ancient Wisdom for Modern Readers series.
--
Guilt Me, Kate:
The Neologism of the Month is to guilt.
Example, “I guilted him.”’
The old noun guilt has now morphed into a verb, a transitive one at that, expressing the power of those who master the techniques of modern guiltification. To ”guilt someone,” which is first attested in 1995, overlaps with old fashioned “making someone feel guilty,” but is not quite the same, since one can be guilted not for what one said or did, but simply for who one is.
---
A Missed Opportunity:
I would have taught better if I had thought through what Adam Nicolson learned while sailing in the eastern Aegean, for example about early Greeks: “Entrepreneurial qualities governed them: inventiveness, a sprightliness of mind, a new athleticism, a certain fluidity of thought, a desire to rule themselves, to generate their own systems of law and regulate their turbulent lives and to find justice by accommodating difference.”
Nicolson’s most recent book is How to Be: Life Lessons from the Early Greeks.
--
The Magnetic Power of Grandchildren:
The tug of grandchildren is pulling us back north. Our house in idyllic Hillsborough NC has sold and we will soon move to Cataumet on the Cape. Here’s the contact info:
Post Office Box 188
(1090 County Rad)
Cataumet, Massachusetts 02534
There will be no change in email address. Use [email protected] to send items, links, or new subscribers.
Bob Connor
P.S. Please forward this Newsletter to friends, especially rebellious younger friends who might be willing to share their perspectives, ideas, and links.
STOP PRESS: The Trojan War has just turned up in Pompeii. Here’s the story.