Reading Not Reading

I had been happily reading some library books mostly about the fur trade and the indigenous peoples of the Canadian West, a topic of abiding interest to me. I have described the origins of this interest here.

https://thatsjustthewildwood.blogspot.com/2018/01/the-beaver.html

However the world as too much with me, and my concentration not all it should be at present so I returned them. I will borrow then again. I am holding on to library books on the history of the Madan and the history of the Anishinaabeg peoples for better days.

So instead I reread a couple of novels by my beloved Andre Norton and have set my sights on reading Johnson's "Preface to Shakespeare". I have been watching a youtube series on reading the classics by a young man using the "name" Drunzo" and want to make the reading a few classics part of my routine, with definite goals.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC72a8QL142vdH3s6Dn3NVRA

Helen and I discovered a youtube series on the history of Godzilla, and we follow each episode by watching, in my case, often rewatching the movie.

https://www.youtube.com/c/BigActionBill

I leave you with one of my favourite quotes and a photo from this summer at the cabin.

"I hear new news every day, and those ordinary rumours
of war, plagues, fires, inundations, thefts, murders, massacres,
meteors, comets, spectrums, prodigies, apparitions, of towns
taken, cities besieged in France, Germany, Turkey, Persia,
Poland, &c., daily musters and preparations, and such like;
which these tempestuous times afford, battles fought, so many
men slain, monomachies, shipwrecks, piracies, and sea-fights;
peace, leagues, stratagems, and fresh alarums. A vast confusion
of vows, wishes, actions, edicts, petitions, lawsuits, pleas, laws,
proclamations, complaints, grievances, are daily brought to our
ears. New books every day, pamphlets, currantoes, stories, whole
catalogues of volumes of all sorts, new paradoxes, opinions,
schisms, heresies, controversies in philosophy, religion, &c. Now
come tidings of weddings, maskings, mummeries, entertainments,
jubilees, embassies, tilts and tournaments, trophies, triumphs, revels,
sports, plays ; then again, as in a new shifted scene, treasons,
cheating tricks, robberies, enormous villainies in all kinds, funerals,
burials, deaths of princes, new discoveries, expeditions, now comical,
then tragical matters. Today we hear of new lords and officers created,
to-morrow of some great men deposed, and then again of fresh honours
conferred; one is let loose, another imprisoned; one purchaseth, another
breaketh; he thrives, his neighbour turns bankrupt; now plenty, then
again dearth and famine; one runs, another rides, wrangles, laughs,
weeps, &c. Thus I daily hear, and such like, both private and public
news, amidst the gallantry and misery of the world"


from Anatomy of Melancholy
by Robert Burton

" They are also called liberal because their aim to free us. 

It's as if knowledge contains within itself the power

 to give us some form of freedom, to free us from 

various sorts of tyranny; "

from reading dante (text version of the free 

Yale Open Course on Dante' s Comedy)

by Giuseppe Mazzotta, this quote is on 

the difference between the liberal and 
mechanical arts, "an old medieval 
distinction."

I think in this trying time, when rationality and decency seem
largely absent, that I need to turn my back on the certainties 

of the past, engage less in the present (especially the news) 
and quietly reexamine what I want to do for myself, my family
and what I want to contribute to the world. I see this as part exile

and part journey of discovery, to identify some new mental or 
emotional tools that can bring me a new, stronger sense of 
equilibrium that I can use to deal with a changing world.

I may have mentioned before that I have spent many years
studying the lives and works to two very contradictory individuals

 Charles Darwin and Dante Alighieri, in my mind Darwin personifies 
scientific inquiry and Dante the results of government and faith 
questioned. Both questioned what they saw, spoke truth to power
and both left works of great beauty and power. As Dante himself 
may have melodramatically phrased it , They shall be my Virgil.

"I hear new news every day, and those ordinary rumours 

of war, plagues, fires, inundations, thefts, murders, massacres, 

meteors, comets, spectrums, prodigies, apparitions, of towns 

taken, cities besieged in France, Germany, Turkey, Persia, 

Poland, &c., daily musters and preparations, and such like; 

which these tempestuous times afford, battles fought, so many 

men slain, monomachies, shipwrecks, piracies, and sea-fights; 

peace, leagues, stratagems, and fresh alarums. A vast confusion 

of vows, wishes, actions, edicts, petitions, lawsuits, pleas, laws, 

proclamations, complaints, grievances, are daily brought to our 

ears. New books every day, pamphlets, currantoes, stories, whole 

catalogues of volumes of all sorts, new paradoxes, opinions, 

schisms, heresies, controversies in philosophy, religion, &c. Now 

come tidings of weddings, maskings, mummeries, entertainments, 

jubilees, embassies, tilts and tournaments, trophies, triumphs, revels, 

sports, plays ; then again, as in a new shifted scene, treasons, 

cheating tricks, robberies, enormous villainies in all kinds, funerals, 

burials, deaths of princes, new discoveries, expeditions, now comical, 

then tragical matters. Today we hear of new lords and officers created, 

to-morrow of some great men deposed, and then again of fresh honours 

conferred; one is let loose, another imprisoned; one purchaseth, another 

breaketh; he thrives, his neighbour turns bankrupt; now plenty, then 

again dearth and famine; one runs, another rides, wrangles, laughs, 

weeps, &c. Thus I daily hear, and such like, both private and public 

news, amidst the gallantry and misery of the world"

from Anatomy of Melancholy 

by Robert Burton 

" That this aggressive haste has influenced us detrimentally

from our earliest schooldays is sad but inescapable. Unhappily,

moreover, the increasing speed of modern life has long since

done away with what meager leisure we had then. Our ways of

enjoying ourselves are hardly less irritating and nerve-racking

than the pressure of our work."As much as possible, as fast as

possible" is the motto. And so there is more and more entertainment

and less and less joy."

                         from On Little Joys 1905

                           by Hermann Hesse