Teach me to care and not to care.
The modern parent believes that the best way to teach a child responsibility is to give the child a number of costly gifts and tell the child not to ruin or break the gifts.
The classical parent believes the best way to teach responsibility is to require a child to perform tasks that are productive and not particularly pleasant.
If you don’t have a police, you must have some organized group of people who keep a police from forming, and the people who keep a police from forming are the police.
When teaching the Comedy, it is often the same student who claims that “all sin is the same in God’s eyes” that also most heartily objects to Dante’s insinuation that gluttony is worse than lust.
I will say this about Do Not Allow Virtual Learning To Steal Our Snow Days, my latest for Circe: I don’t want to be a celebrity, but I am definitely shooting for “folk hero.”
And everybody is somebody’s child.
Episode 49 of Proverbial is available now.
Gibbs: How are you?
Kroger cashier: I can’t complain.
Gibbs: You could complain, but you don’t. That’s a virtue.
Kroger cashier: Ooh, I like that.
My favorite single line of dialogue from any motion picture, a line I repeat often to myself as a sort of consolation, comes from Tom Alfredson’s 2011 film Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, and it is, “The fanatic is always concealing a secret doubt.”
While the line is original, I was reading the proverbs of William Hazlitt this morning (who is English, like John le Carré) and I came across, “Violent antipathies are always suspicious, and betray a secret affinity.”
Phoenix (2014) is about marriage, plain and simple.
This week’s episode of Proverbial is concerned with a saying of Thomas Aquinas: “I fear the man of one book.”
Offensive things are said about modern reading strategies. Enjoy.
There are still faint glimmers of civilization left in this barbaric slaughterhouse that was once known as humanity.