Absalom, Absalom!

Peter Paul Rubens, Two Satyrs, 1617–1619 Before I address the question of desire in Seneca’s Phaedra, I want to pause and reflect on the beauty of the language. Time silently wears you away, and the moment that passes you by is pursued by a worse one. From the Ode to Hippolytus’s Beauty in R. Scott Smith’s translation for Penguin, a dark reminder and with such beauty in itself that it strikes…

Three folios from a Persian manuscript of Kalīlah wa-Dimnah in Mughal-era style, ca. 1010 The Panchatantra is a classic of Indian antiquity. Its changing series of tales-within-tales-within-tales has seen many lives since, from medieval Persia, to renaissance Europe, to the modern university’s Great Books course. The middle of Book One (the first of the Five Tantras) sees the climax of the…

*Part of a series summarizing lectures in The Human Situation The chief concern of Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations is the care of one’s soul; one name such care goes by in antiquity will be instantly familiar to a modern audience: therapeia. The connection, of course, is not incidental, with early psychoanalytic thought deeply shaped by Stoicism and other schools of ancient philosophy. But this is…

As the years slowly meander along it seems that I have given over fifty lectures in The Human Situation, a course taken by every first-year student in The Honors College at UH. The course is taught by a team of ten or so professors and we rotate the texts every semester, and I realized recently that some of the lectures I’ve given have slipped away a bit. I have, of course, the lecture slides…

Mock clay tablets all you want, but at least when you burned ancient Mesopotamian libraries it made their collections more durable, not less. If you tried to read the carbonized scrolls from the library of Herculaneum, the above result—a pile of cinders—was all you would receive. Until now. Not a lot about AI gets me excited; ChatGPT is fun to play with, but may be a slow-moving academic…

“[Sophocles] had first to rid himself of Aeschylean bombast …. to turn to the form of speech which would be ‘the most ethical and the best’ (using the word ēthos in the sense of ‘character’).” —Karl Reinhardt, Sophocles (7)

“Eugene Dönt once also drew a comparison between the structure of Oedipus and the novel The Trial by Franz Kafka. Both could be termed metaphors for the sudden, complete and relentless breakdown of a human being, a helpless victim of powers beyond his reach, or even termed descriptions of the hopeless human situation as such.“ —Walter Burkert, Oedipus, Oracles, and Meaning (#)

At the time, a substantial drop, but created institutional structures that deactivated periodically to create a persistent effect. papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm

Blood Meridian is one of the three best novels I’ve ever read. And I am not a big rater-of-books, they are too diverse over too long a period for that to make much sense. But the ecstatic poetry of McCarthy’s restless sentences, the as ifs strung together like he was translating from some other language that saw the same things we did, only different, darker, clearer. One of those authors whom…

Wittgenstein was always disgusted with what he had said and with himself. Often he would rush off to a cinema immediately after the class ended. I mean, if even Wittgenstein might feel such a way. Then off to the movies, which he equates to dreams, incoming Freud. In the anecdote, we feel a fierce anxiety that moves him relentlessly to flee the scene, where the words he has just uttered linger in…

As a rule parents and authorities analogous to them follow the precepts of their own super-egos in educating children. Whatever understanding their ego may have come to with their super-ego, they are severe and exacting in educating children. They have forgotten the difficulties of their own childhood and they are glad to be able now to identify themselves fully with their own parents who in the…

Carving Without the Least Bit of Intimidation: Love, War, and Food in Jhumpa Lahiri

I’m just going to jump right in and get us started with two interpretive questions: 1. What, precisely, is the “temporary matter” of the first story?2. What does a pumpkin have to do with the partition of India? Obviously, the title of “A Temporary Matter” refers o the brief electrical outages that occur each evening in the story, but by the end we are so far from minor inconveniences and so…

The Gossip of Flames: Becoming Opposite Equal’s in Whitman’s “Song of Myself”

Out of the dimness opposite equals advance . . . . Always substance and increase, always sex, Always a knit of identity . . . . always distinction . . . always a breed of life. [3] In today’s lecture, I am going to address two seemingly simple questions: 1. How does Whitman’s poetry work in “Song of Myself”? 2. What does Whitman’s poetry mean in “Song of Myself”? I believe that the answer to…