Great work and very insightful. I share your sentiments exactly and have made similar points in many of my essays.
As a teacher, I hear the exact same ‘three pages is toooooo muuuuuch’ complaint a good bit. It’s cringeworthy to hear from a teenager, much less a grown man, and facepalm-inducing when it comes from a parent or administrator.
I read and I write the sorts of things I would read that are not yet written. My typical post is over 3,000 words, which Google tells me amounts to six single-spaced pages, and by Substack’s estimate takes around 14 minutes to read. I’m actually pretty whitepilled by the overall engagement I’ve gotten. I don’t know how many readers I’m supposed to have, but doing what I do my newsletter has experienced steady growth and a few people have even become paid subscribers, without my ever really having done any ‘marketing,’ or even knowing how to do so. I think there really is an audience out there looking for depth and breadth beyond what the mainstream media offers, and we reactionaries have a great opportunity to meet that demand with a wide range of literature.
You are a great writer and deep thinker with much that is interesting and insightful to share. There are some writers, however, who badly need an editor and seem to refuse to do that job themselves, and their half-formed ideas, which could be clearly stated in half a page, take ten pages for them to convey, so sometimes the criticism "too long" is valid. But when it comes to writers like you and Theophilus, I do agree that the answer is not coddling subliterates by dumbing down great writing, but rather to urge people to improve the quality and quantity of their reading. Mortimer J Adler's "How to Read a Book" ought to be required reading for American high schoolers.
I agree that people should have the stamina to sit down and read City of God or War and Peace, but I worry that there's now a knee jerk reaction among "intellectuals" that long = not tiktok = good. The point of art is to strip away the detritus until we arrive at the essence of things. This blossoming new Romanticism is making us lose sight of this.
I don't think anyone is advocating length for the sake of length, rather, an attentive thoroughness that explores a subject in a way that is both edifying and aesthetically appropriate. A statue is just as bad if too much marble has been chiseled away as it is if too much has been left. One could reduce The City of God or War and Peace to bullet points; indeed, there is an entire genre of study literature that does just that. You could learn a great deal about them from Wikipedia summaries. I think that misses the point, however. Good art invites engagement. It is an experience, a coming together of the mind of the participant with that of the artist. This experience should be exactly as long as it needs to be, and the participant who can't keep up is missing out. This is also why a refined critical sense is important. Because good art takes time to appreciate, one can't waste one's time on the bad stuff. The way to tell the good from bad is to read a lot of the older stuff that has been deemed good by the great collective appraisal of Tradition. Which, in turn, is one of the reasons Tradition is important, and why we must RETVRN.
A refined critical sense based in tradition *is* important! But I would argue that most people don't know the depths of their own tradition. How many people have studied Gregorian Chant? How many people know Catullus? How many have read Euclid? In other words, do people actually know how supremely beautiful artistic concision is? I think if they did we'd see a lot less of these pseudo intellectual windbags!
Yes. My prescription is for people to read approximately 100x more than they write, and what they read should be at least 80% old stuff, at least during their formative years.
Finally an article ending with a tasking or a personal challenge, thank you.
I turned off hell-a-vision/TV back in the 80s. My friends knew then I was crazy as a bell tower bat, so be it. I have observed this slide into zombie brains has accelerated in the last twenty years. There aren’t enough superior homeschooled kids in the country to pull society out of this planned condition I fear. Even if the cancer that is killing this society is cut out once and for all.
I will forward this message to the men I know with young families.
Μηνιν is in the accusative, so I don’t think it can be the subject. Θέα is vocative, and αειδε is an imperative, so I rendered it as I did with someone telling the goddess to sing about rage. I wanted to elide the rage into the man; to sing of the rage is to sing of Achilles, and I wanted to make it a shade more relatable by translating his patronymic more literally, giving the effect of a last name. The rage is accursed and so is the man. He dooms himself and those around him. In my translation it’s ambiguous whose side he’s on at this point in the poem.
That is one argument, yes. But there are many roles for the accusative and in this case the logical one is ἄειδε being imperative. This means that this interpretation would say that the song the goddess sings is about wrath.
Well said, Theo. My only disagreement is in perspective and aim.
Perspective. I submit that no society at any point or time has had more than a minority of its citizens engaged in the way you suggest. We can quibble about percentages but the majority in any society are laboring to survive and keep their families intact-- no small accomplishment in any age. There is a popular notion that change in any society largely comes from a very small percentage of the population. An active, organized, and coherent (or vocal) minority can completely upend or transform a society for good or ill, ex. Russian Revolution, American Revolution, current Gramsci revolution. Bread and circuses for the proletariat has always been the rule. Society is essentially always and everywhere a question of control-- who will control, how, and by what means. This is always a battle of the few and their allies/ accomplices. The US post 1865 at least has been controlled by consumerism and soft despotism. Only in the last 20 years has that despotism been less soft and more overt.
Point being: it's vital for all of us who have the mind and will to become better thinkers and better humans because the majority cant or won't and it is a battle between our minority and the malign minorities who currently control this Oligarchy.
As for aim, I submit that it's too late to effect a rescue of the US by any of the electoral or Constitutional processes. Those in charge are predatory, sociopathic criminals and will never surrender control by these processes.
We are over the waterfall, so to speak, and there's no chance of paddling our way back up. We'll just have to ride it out which means a smash up sooner or later.
And this is why we need thinkers and humans because, when the Smash happens, society will be up for grabs. Who will figure out what comes next? It had better be humans or a dark age indeed will descend.
This is interesting. Growing up in the 80s I watched a lot of tv, loves movies and comic books. At the same time, I begged my mother practically every day to take me to the library so I can look up the Greek culture like “These Were The Greeks”, theology, American history, art history in addition to the Wizard of Oz books and Prince Valiant novels (not comic stripe) which have marvelous illustrations by John N. Neil and Hal Foster that I studied religiously. I also read my textbooks cover to cover the first week of a school year, which annoyed my teachers.
So, I can say I honestly do not understand why people like the Family Guy or watching a football games played by the felons. It maybe be partly genes as well as a deliberate cultural poisoning.
Well said. I think, as I write this from the tropics, your exhortation to stop indulging in the vapid TV, music, movies and feuilleton-esque programs (see what they did there, they're literally telling us what they're doing in broad daylight) applies to non-Westerners and non-Americans as well.
How many of my countrymen have read the Daodejing or Romance of the Three Kingdoms? How many subcontinentals have read the Mahabharata or the Vedas? This malaise of ignorance of the classics has gone global.
At least, in here, I know there are bastions of sanity and erudition, still toiling away in defiance of the night. God bless you, TC and everyone.
I found a copy of James Legge’s four-volume set of Chinese classics in the school library where I teach. I brought in the first volume and showed my students, several of whom are native Mandarin speakers. They found it very interesting, puzzling out the traditional characters and critiquing Legge’s English translations. As a motivational tool I made one of the whiteboards in my classroom a class ‘Da Zi Bao’ with traditional rather than commie slogans- the current one is 君子務本
I have also been struck by Hesse's insight into the future of the west. He said in 1929 that there was going to be another world war, in his book Steppenwolf. At the time, it was thought that no one would ever go back to war, after WW1...the war to end all wars. This is the second article I've read this week about Magister Ludi (or The Glass Bead Game). What marks the Feuilleton is his inability to connect the dots of history. He still attends lectures and concerts and there are still intellectual celebrities in his age, it's just that he can't see the big picture or synthesize the progress of history. This insight is a prescient and scathing assessment of where our culture was headed nearly 100 years ago.
co-opt the idiots, if the left wins through bread and circuses, provide better bread and circuses. We have the opportunity to do this now that Miami, of all places, has declared itself on the "wrong side of history". Imagine a right-wing Hollywood and counter-culture fed by the rays of the sunshine state.
Staying home and reading the Illiad is a core component of any strategy, I agree. But that's why we also need a right-wing co-option of the university system and along with it, a robust system of NEET-bucks (for lack of better terms); we should not attempt to defund universities we should fund them and thus control them, we should not spurn the NEETs and the inkwells, we should fund them and thus control them, putting their energy to a pro-social use.
I feel exactly some, just if you or someone else could you help me or others to preserve the knowledge? For me or maybe others it's very hard to distinguish what is shallow and what is worthwhile. I as well noticed this dumbing downshift, that's reason why I now watch only movies - no TV created before 2010. Since then I saw huge amount of propaganda and dumbing down in every movie. Same is with books, is there some old website or something where are listed important books to read since 1960-2010?
We need guidance, me, my friends, younger generation and we urge for that. It's not school, university, peers and older people so we need someone to put effort and start to show, what is really worthwhile for intellectual and cultural people.
This was the first post that I have read and it took about 20 seconds to subscribe. Oddly, in the last nine months I have shut off the TV, returned to Rilke, Hesse, Eliot, purchased a printed copy of the Iliad and the Odyssey, and have blown the dust off the jacket of the The Complete Works William Shakespeare Illustrated by Rockwell Kent. Oddly, believing in Democritus’ Atomic Theory of the Universe I purchased a copy of the King James Version of the Bible. Since the world seems to fighting about various tenets found in the Bible, Quran and Torah figured let’s start somewhere and ergo the Bible, and when finished, will read the other two. Thank you from helping to codify the effort; however incomplete at this point, to further one’s education and resist the constant temptation to be dulled down to the lowest common denominator; to reinvigorate the ability to look at complex materials and make sense of them. As the great Rocky Balboa opined “one step at a time, one punch at a time, one round at a time” the bell for round one has been rung.
"Sitting down and reading Beowulf or the Iliad may not be as entertaining or fun as vegetating in front of a television for six hours" Anything's more entertaining and fun than TV. Beowulf and the Iliad are GOAT.
Max Weber is not a Founder of America but of Weimar.
His maxim should only be mentioned to be denounced.
It should be noted the next stable German government, while indeed having a monopoly on the use of force, was less than ideal.
Nor has it ever been the case here nor in much of the West, nor indeed most of history.
That maxim being canon has done more to emasculate us and so destroy us than all the scribblers together.
As for a return to the Humanities- such an education leaves too many without any skill except living by their wits and arbitrage of the work of others (parasitic).
Let them have a skill, profession, trade and then read great books later when they are mature- maturity cannot and does not come in school.
In addition, there is the daily grind that our modern, convenient society has created. Rather than more time to read and reflect, we find ourselves leashed to jobs by a constant stream of communication and stress. In our free time, we consume what amounts to media and entertainment the same way. The digital leash makes the blur between my real life and the simulacrum difficult to discern.
In my previous iterations as an adult, I was a successful slacker and managed to read and travel quite a bit. I can say with certainty, having tasted these two disparate ways of life, that the slow life outside of rapid consumption of cultural junk food is far superior for mind and body. This essay was a good reminder...now off to the grind.
Great work and very insightful. I share your sentiments exactly and have made similar points in many of my essays.
As a teacher, I hear the exact same ‘three pages is toooooo muuuuuch’ complaint a good bit. It’s cringeworthy to hear from a teenager, much less a grown man, and facepalm-inducing when it comes from a parent or administrator.
I read and I write the sorts of things I would read that are not yet written. My typical post is over 3,000 words, which Google tells me amounts to six single-spaced pages, and by Substack’s estimate takes around 14 minutes to read. I’m actually pretty whitepilled by the overall engagement I’ve gotten. I don’t know how many readers I’m supposed to have, but doing what I do my newsletter has experienced steady growth and a few people have even become paid subscribers, without my ever really having done any ‘marketing,’ or even knowing how to do so. I think there really is an audience out there looking for depth and breadth beyond what the mainstream media offers, and we reactionaries have a great opportunity to meet that demand with a wide range of literature.
You are a great writer and deep thinker with much that is interesting and insightful to share. There are some writers, however, who badly need an editor and seem to refuse to do that job themselves, and their half-formed ideas, which could be clearly stated in half a page, take ten pages for them to convey, so sometimes the criticism "too long" is valid. But when it comes to writers like you and Theophilus, I do agree that the answer is not coddling subliterates by dumbing down great writing, but rather to urge people to improve the quality and quantity of their reading. Mortimer J Adler's "How to Read a Book" ought to be required reading for American high schoolers.
See my reply below.
I agree that people should have the stamina to sit down and read City of God or War and Peace, but I worry that there's now a knee jerk reaction among "intellectuals" that long = not tiktok = good. The point of art is to strip away the detritus until we arrive at the essence of things. This blossoming new Romanticism is making us lose sight of this.
I don't think anyone is advocating length for the sake of length, rather, an attentive thoroughness that explores a subject in a way that is both edifying and aesthetically appropriate. A statue is just as bad if too much marble has been chiseled away as it is if too much has been left. One could reduce The City of God or War and Peace to bullet points; indeed, there is an entire genre of study literature that does just that. You could learn a great deal about them from Wikipedia summaries. I think that misses the point, however. Good art invites engagement. It is an experience, a coming together of the mind of the participant with that of the artist. This experience should be exactly as long as it needs to be, and the participant who can't keep up is missing out. This is also why a refined critical sense is important. Because good art takes time to appreciate, one can't waste one's time on the bad stuff. The way to tell the good from bad is to read a lot of the older stuff that has been deemed good by the great collective appraisal of Tradition. Which, in turn, is one of the reasons Tradition is important, and why we must RETVRN.
A refined critical sense based in tradition *is* important! But I would argue that most people don't know the depths of their own tradition. How many people have studied Gregorian Chant? How many people know Catullus? How many have read Euclid? In other words, do people actually know how supremely beautiful artistic concision is? I think if they did we'd see a lot less of these pseudo intellectual windbags!
Yes. My prescription is for people to read approximately 100x more than they write, and what they read should be at least 80% old stuff, at least during their formative years.
💯%
Finally an article ending with a tasking or a personal challenge, thank you.
I turned off hell-a-vision/TV back in the 80s. My friends knew then I was crazy as a bell tower bat, so be it. I have observed this slide into zombie brains has accelerated in the last twenty years. There aren’t enough superior homeschooled kids in the country to pull society out of this planned condition I fear. Even if the cancer that is killing this society is cut out once and for all.
I will forward this message to the men I know with young families.
God help us all.
Saber 7
How dare you sir'am, what if that donut identifies as an eclair?!
μῆνιν ἄειδε θεὰ Πηληϊάδεω Ἀχιλῆος
οὐλομένην, ἣ μυρί᾽ Ἀχαιοῖς ἄλγε᾽ ἔθηκε,
I think learning to read is one of the core "Liberal Arts"
Sing of his rage, goddess, of Achilles Peleidēs
That accursed rage that doomed the Achaean hosts.
1. I would say that "wrath" is the subject, though there is a large debate on this.
2. point for the "rage" being duplicated. Though all translation are as imperfect mirror.
Μηνιν is in the accusative, so I don’t think it can be the subject. Θέα is vocative, and αειδε is an imperative, so I rendered it as I did with someone telling the goddess to sing about rage. I wanted to elide the rage into the man; to sing of the rage is to sing of Achilles, and I wanted to make it a shade more relatable by translating his patronymic more literally, giving the effect of a last name. The rage is accursed and so is the man. He dooms himself and those around him. In my translation it’s ambiguous whose side he’s on at this point in the poem.
That is one argument, yes. But there are many roles for the accusative and in this case the logical one is ἄειδε being imperative. This means that this interpretation would say that the song the goddess sings is about wrath.
https://dcc.dickinson.edu/grammar/goodell/accusative
Because μῆνιν is very often "divine wrath."
Well said, Theo. My only disagreement is in perspective and aim.
Perspective. I submit that no society at any point or time has had more than a minority of its citizens engaged in the way you suggest. We can quibble about percentages but the majority in any society are laboring to survive and keep their families intact-- no small accomplishment in any age. There is a popular notion that change in any society largely comes from a very small percentage of the population. An active, organized, and coherent (or vocal) minority can completely upend or transform a society for good or ill, ex. Russian Revolution, American Revolution, current Gramsci revolution. Bread and circuses for the proletariat has always been the rule. Society is essentially always and everywhere a question of control-- who will control, how, and by what means. This is always a battle of the few and their allies/ accomplices. The US post 1865 at least has been controlled by consumerism and soft despotism. Only in the last 20 years has that despotism been less soft and more overt.
Point being: it's vital for all of us who have the mind and will to become better thinkers and better humans because the majority cant or won't and it is a battle between our minority and the malign minorities who currently control this Oligarchy.
As for aim, I submit that it's too late to effect a rescue of the US by any of the electoral or Constitutional processes. Those in charge are predatory, sociopathic criminals and will never surrender control by these processes.
We are over the waterfall, so to speak, and there's no chance of paddling our way back up. We'll just have to ride it out which means a smash up sooner or later.
And this is why we need thinkers and humans because, when the Smash happens, society will be up for grabs. Who will figure out what comes next? It had better be humans or a dark age indeed will descend.
This is interesting. Growing up in the 80s I watched a lot of tv, loves movies and comic books. At the same time, I begged my mother practically every day to take me to the library so I can look up the Greek culture like “These Were The Greeks”, theology, American history, art history in addition to the Wizard of Oz books and Prince Valiant novels (not comic stripe) which have marvelous illustrations by John N. Neil and Hal Foster that I studied religiously. I also read my textbooks cover to cover the first week of a school year, which annoyed my teachers.
So, I can say I honestly do not understand why people like the Family Guy or watching a football games played by the felons. It maybe be partly genes as well as a deliberate cultural poisoning.
I did the same thing with the textbooks.
Well said. I think, as I write this from the tropics, your exhortation to stop indulging in the vapid TV, music, movies and feuilleton-esque programs (see what they did there, they're literally telling us what they're doing in broad daylight) applies to non-Westerners and non-Americans as well.
How many of my countrymen have read the Daodejing or Romance of the Three Kingdoms? How many subcontinentals have read the Mahabharata or the Vedas? This malaise of ignorance of the classics has gone global.
At least, in here, I know there are bastions of sanity and erudition, still toiling away in defiance of the night. God bless you, TC and everyone.
I found a copy of James Legge’s four-volume set of Chinese classics in the school library where I teach. I brought in the first volume and showed my students, several of whom are native Mandarin speakers. They found it very interesting, puzzling out the traditional characters and critiquing Legge’s English translations. As a motivational tool I made one of the whiteboards in my classroom a class ‘Da Zi Bao’ with traditional rather than commie slogans- the current one is 君子務本
I have also been struck by Hesse's insight into the future of the west. He said in 1929 that there was going to be another world war, in his book Steppenwolf. At the time, it was thought that no one would ever go back to war, after WW1...the war to end all wars. This is the second article I've read this week about Magister Ludi (or The Glass Bead Game). What marks the Feuilleton is his inability to connect the dots of history. He still attends lectures and concerts and there are still intellectual celebrities in his age, it's just that he can't see the big picture or synthesize the progress of history. This insight is a prescient and scathing assessment of where our culture was headed nearly 100 years ago.
co-opt the idiots, if the left wins through bread and circuses, provide better bread and circuses. We have the opportunity to do this now that Miami, of all places, has declared itself on the "wrong side of history". Imagine a right-wing Hollywood and counter-culture fed by the rays of the sunshine state.
Staying home and reading the Illiad is a core component of any strategy, I agree. But that's why we also need a right-wing co-option of the university system and along with it, a robust system of NEET-bucks (for lack of better terms); we should not attempt to defund universities we should fund them and thus control them, we should not spurn the NEETs and the inkwells, we should fund them and thus control them, putting their energy to a pro-social use.
I wrote about that very thing in my series on teaching.
I feel exactly some, just if you or someone else could you help me or others to preserve the knowledge? For me or maybe others it's very hard to distinguish what is shallow and what is worthwhile. I as well noticed this dumbing downshift, that's reason why I now watch only movies - no TV created before 2010. Since then I saw huge amount of propaganda and dumbing down in every movie. Same is with books, is there some old website or something where are listed important books to read since 1960-2010?
We need guidance, me, my friends, younger generation and we urge for that. It's not school, university, peers and older people so we need someone to put effort and start to show, what is really worthwhile for intellectual and cultural people.
America needs some serious reform of education and media. Bring the classics back into the classroom! Good article, many good points.
This was the first post that I have read and it took about 20 seconds to subscribe. Oddly, in the last nine months I have shut off the TV, returned to Rilke, Hesse, Eliot, purchased a printed copy of the Iliad and the Odyssey, and have blown the dust off the jacket of the The Complete Works William Shakespeare Illustrated by Rockwell Kent. Oddly, believing in Democritus’ Atomic Theory of the Universe I purchased a copy of the King James Version of the Bible. Since the world seems to fighting about various tenets found in the Bible, Quran and Torah figured let’s start somewhere and ergo the Bible, and when finished, will read the other two. Thank you from helping to codify the effort; however incomplete at this point, to further one’s education and resist the constant temptation to be dulled down to the lowest common denominator; to reinvigorate the ability to look at complex materials and make sense of them. As the great Rocky Balboa opined “one step at a time, one punch at a time, one round at a time” the bell for round one has been rung.
"Sitting down and reading Beowulf or the Iliad may not be as entertaining or fun as vegetating in front of a television for six hours" Anything's more entertaining and fun than TV. Beowulf and the Iliad are GOAT.
The return of the king will be preceded by the return of a proper, classical education in the so-called "liberal arts."
Max Weber is not a Founder of America but of Weimar.
His maxim should only be mentioned to be denounced.
It should be noted the next stable German government, while indeed having a monopoly on the use of force, was less than ideal.
Nor has it ever been the case here nor in much of the West, nor indeed most of history.
That maxim being canon has done more to emasculate us and so destroy us than all the scribblers together.
As for a return to the Humanities- such an education leaves too many without any skill except living by their wits and arbitrage of the work of others (parasitic).
Let them have a skill, profession, trade and then read great books later when they are mature- maturity cannot and does not come in school.
In addition, there is the daily grind that our modern, convenient society has created. Rather than more time to read and reflect, we find ourselves leashed to jobs by a constant stream of communication and stress. In our free time, we consume what amounts to media and entertainment the same way. The digital leash makes the blur between my real life and the simulacrum difficult to discern.
In my previous iterations as an adult, I was a successful slacker and managed to read and travel quite a bit. I can say with certainty, having tasted these two disparate ways of life, that the slow life outside of rapid consumption of cultural junk food is far superior for mind and body. This essay was a good reminder...now off to the grind.