Of Morals and Mystery
Sayers’ work becomes what Woolf calls “a room of one’s own,” a place where she can be at liberty write without thought to the expectations of her sex to marry nor to limit herself to the conventions of her Oxford education.
Great Works & Authors
Epictetus: Slave and Sage
Self-mastery, over both emotions and thoughts, is an invaluable skill that every person should work to acquire.
The Great Conversation: Temperance
“The archer that shoots over, misses as much as he that falls short, and ’tis equally troublesome to my sight to look up at a great light, and to look down into a dark abyss.” Michel de Montaigne
The Bhagavad Gītā: Jewel of India
Though it has been available in European languages for only a couple of centuries, the Bhagavad Gita has had a tremendous influence on the world’s culture.
John Milton: The Blind Bard of Christendom
Images of mutual and contrasting courtesies between the God and angels, angels and man, Adam and Eve, are some of his most persistent; even the damned angels cannot function without a parody of heavenly order.
The Great Conversation: History
“Such is the unity of all history that anyone who endeavors to tell a piece of it must feel that his first sentence tears a seamless web.” — Sir Frederick Pollock
Cicero: A Tongue of Gold
Cicero’s formulation of ethics was a major influence on minds as diverse as St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, Martin Luther, John Locke, Voltaire, and Thomas Jefferson. Perhaps we would do wisely to return to a fountain that has watered so many so well.
Lucretius: Heir of the Void
Although his philosophy was never held by more than a small fraction of the Roman people, his work had a major impact on the poets that succeeded him and remained popular for centuries, and went on to influence many eminent scholars.
The Great Conversation: Astronomy
The paradoxes in how gravity, light, and atomic nuclear forces operate have prompted subtle theories about not only nature, but reality as such—bending science back towards its parent discipline of philosophy.
The Great Conversation: Virtue and Vice
“All the things I really like to do are either illegal, immoral, or fattening.” — Alexander Woollcott
