Teach me to care and not to care.
My latest for CiRCE is really more of a McSweeney’s piece, but I’ve collected too many rejection letters from that place to send them anything else.
Of the piece, I would add this: There is no fashionable big corporate banality which is not a temptation for private education, as well.
A tried and true way of climbing the ranks of the online intellectual world: pick a fight with someone just a little bigger than you, hope they respond, win a little web traffic in the process.
It is a good day for the music of Hiroshi Yoshimura.
Thursday night: the dangers of Patreon intellectuals, how the wellness industry has spread into private education, the feel-good flattery of bloggers whose ad revenue depends on telling everyone, “Society demands too much of people like you,” and more.
Sign up for the GibbsClassical.com mailing list for a link to “Intellectual Honesty in an Age of Flattery.”
The inexperienced man trusts human beings; the experienced man trusts human nature.
The inexperienced man finds common sense offensive and cruel; the experienced man knows the alternatives to common sense are crueler still.
My latest for CiRCE is a series of proverbs about experience.
My lecture Thursday night, “Intellectual Honesty in an Age of Flattery,” will gloss an increasingly troublesome conception of the classical Christian classroom as “a safe space where none of my son’s ideas about god, politics, and video games are ever challenged.”
To sign up for the GibbsClassical.com mailing list and receive a link to this lecture, sign up here. Tell all your friends, too.
Tom: How did you sleep last night?
Harry: Eh, not so great.
Tom: Did it take you a long time to fall asleep?
Harry: No.
Tom: Did you wake up often in the night?
Harry: No, it wasn’t that either.
Tom: Did you wake up early and have a hard time falling back to sleep?
Harry: No.
Tom: Were you plagued by bad dreams?
Harry: No.
Tom: Then what went wrong?
Harry: I mean, I slept for eight solid hours but it just wasn’t a transformative, restorative night of sleep that makes you wake up feeling whole, healthy, unified, energized, dynamic, and full of confidence.
Tom: I’ve never had a-
Harry: Honestly, the solution might be some organic cotton pajamas I saw on Instagram the other day. And a more guilt-free skin care routine.
For the record, there are two great filmmakers working today who happen to be Christians: Whit Stillman and John Patrick Shanley.
Shanley’s Wild Mountain Thyme was both weird and conventional, traditional and Shakespearean, and included a number of scenes so thematically rich, I was already looking forward to my third or fourth viewing. It has my vote for the best film of 2020.
This song is overwhelmingly beautiful. Britten does more in these one hundred seconds than many other competent composers can accomplish in forty minutes.
After a month off, Proverbial is back. Available now, “A New Twist on an Old Favorite.” Up for consideration is Edmund Burke’s aphorism, “A spirit of innovation is generally the result of a selfish tempter and confined views.”
There are still faint glimmers of civilization left in this barbaric slaughterhouse that was once known as humanity.