Ancient Classical Authors Recommending One Another's Work

Some time after 1345, Petrarch wrote a letter to his friend Giovanni dell'Incisa which contains this praise of one aspect of Classical literature:

"[...]libris satiari nequeo. Et habeo plures forte quam oportet; sed sicut in ceteris rebus, sic et in libris accidit: querendi successus avaritie calcar est. uinimo, singulare quiddam in libris est: aurum, argentum, gemme, purpurea vestis, marmorea domus, cultus ager, picte tabule, phaleratus sonipes, ceteraque id genus, mutam habent et superficiariam voluptatem; libri medullitus delectant, colloquuntur, consulunt et viva quadam nobis atque arguta familiaritate iunguntur, neque solum se se lectoribus quisque suis insinuat, sed et aliorum nomen ingerit et alter alterius desiderium facit. Ac ne res egeat exemplo, Marcum michi Varronem carum et amabilem Ciceronis Achademicus fecit; Ennii nomen in Officiorum libris audivi; primum Terrentii amorem ex Tusculanarum questionum lectione concepi; Catonis Origines et Xenophontis Economicum ex libro De senectute cognovi, eundemque a Cicerone translatum in eisdem officialibus libris edidici. Sic et Platonis Thimeus Solonis michi commendavit ingenium, et Platonicum Phedronem mors Catonis, et Ptholomei regis interdictum cyrenaicum Hegesiam, et de Ciceronis epystolis Senece priusquam oculis meis credidi. Et Senece Contra superstitiones librum ut querere inciperem, Augustinus admonuit, et Apollonii Argonautica Servius ostendit, et Reipublice libros cum multi tum precipue Lactantius optabiles reddidit, et Romanam Plinii Tranquillus Historiam et Agellius eloquentiam Favorini itemque Annei Flori florentissima brevitas ad inquirendas Titi Livii reliquias animavit[...]"

("I will never have as many books as I want. Yes, I have more than I should, but, as in other things, so also with books, success in finding the ones I want just makes me covet more. But there is something unique about books: gold, silver, jewels, purple cloth, a palace of marble, fertile fields, paintings, a finely turned-out horse, and other things in this line, give us only a silent, superficial pleasure; books delight us deeply, ask us interesting questions, and are bound to us by a lively familiarity, and do not merely insinuate themselves upon thier readers, but also name other books, each creating the desire for another. So that examples won't be lacking: Marcus Cicero made me know and love Varro with his Academicus, and I heard the name of Ennius in his De Officiis; the Tusculanae Disputationes made me love Terence; I learned of Cato's Origines and Xenophon's Economicus from Cicero's book De Senectute, and that Cicero had translated the Economicus from the De Officiis. In just the same way, Plato's Timaeus commended Solon's genius to me, as Cato's death did Plato's Phaedo. Ptolomy brought Hegesias of Cyrene to my attention, and I trusted Seneca's judgement about Cicero's letter's before I read them for myself. It was Augustine who urged me to begin my search for Seneca's book Contra superstitiones, and Servius reveleaded to me the Argonautica of Apollonius. There are many others. Lactantius, especially, made me desire Cicero's books De Re Publica, and Suetonius brought Pliny's history alive as did Gellius the eloquence of Favorinus, and the most florid brevity of Annaeus Florus animated me to seek out whatever might remain of Livy.")

Do the best contemporary authors still recommend each other in this manner? I certainly hope that they do, although I couldn't give you many recent examples, because in the late 1980's I began to give up reading all of the latest prize-winning English-language literature in favour of reading material which was older, and then older, and then older than that, and here I am three decades later, still slowly learning to read Latin in my spare time.

Petrarch sure was daffy about Cicero, huh? Nothing remarkable about that. Indeed, I think it's about time that I finally reach the conclusion that the number of people who love Cicero's work is equal to the number who have read it, minus me. And perhaps as many as 3 or 4 others over the course of the past 2000 years.

Which, being the eminently reasonable person that I am, is gradually leading me to an agonizing re-appraisal of the whole situation, and the conclusion that I must give Cicero another try.

But I still don't want to. I still feel, based on the very little amount of his work that I have read, that Cicero is thoroughly pedestrian at best, telling us things every half-wit already knows, and perhaps thoroughly bad at worst. "Quo usque tandem abutere, Catilina, patientia nostra?" Yeah, well, what if Cicero and his pals weren't patient at all, or honest at all, and the portrait we have of Catiline -- which we have from Cicero -- is completely inaccurate? It's not as if I'm the first one who's asked that.

*sigh* I must give Cicero another try. Perhaps he was a thoroughly bad man and at the same time an utterly brilliant writer. That, too, would not be a first.

Great Green Walls

First there was the Great Green Wall of China, begun in the late 1970's.



Then several decades later, Africa began its own Green Wall.



And the idea has been repeated in other places as well: plant many trees along the edge of a desert, in order to stop the desert from spreading. In China and in Africa, there are dramatic stories of regions which had been almost uninhabitable, being restored to fertile, sometimes even lush condition. Stories of farmers moving back to regions which they had abandoned.

In addition to curbing the growth of the desert -- the Gobi Desert in the case of China, the Sahara in Africa -- the atmosphere is cleaned, by taking carbon from the air and storing it in trees. Reducing the amount of carbon which is put into the atmosphere, by burning things like oil, coal and gas, is just one half of the solution to global warming. The other half is increasing plant life.

Planting trees in areas where there had been none previously is referred to as afforestation, as opposed to reforestation, replacing forests which had been removed. The Green Walls are just the two largest examples of afforestation currently underway in the world; smaller projects have been started all over the world.

As far as just exactly how large the Green Walls in China and Africa are -- I've found it very hard to find any precise statistics. For example, I can't tell you for certain whether the number of trees planted so far in China's Great Green Wall is in the millions, or the billions. And I would love to be able to tell you in great detail just what sort of changes of temperature, precipitation and so forth have occurred in the areas covered by the Green Walls, but I haven't been able to find that data either.

Also, there is some controversy over just how helpful afforestation is for the climate overall, and about just exactly what are the best methods for restoring arid regions. So, as always: education is crucial. In this case, education about all the positive and negative effects of afforestation, and about all the other methods to combat the spread of deserts. All I can tell you for sure is that I surely hope that afforestation is at least close to as effective as its most enthusiastic advocates claim.

The Missing History of Spain

The history of Spain is largely missing from the consciousness of that which we sometimes still call Western civilization. And in many instances, what we "Westerners" do know about Spain is bad: they had the Spanish Inquisition there. The Spanish Armada and the Bartholomew's Day massacre came from there. As if only horror ever came from there, as if horror were never perpetrated elsewhere in Europe. Only rarely has a single towering Spanish genius managed to pierce the veil of our ignorance: Cervantes, Velasquez, Goya, Picasso.

In the Roman Empire, Spaniards such as the authors Seneca the Elder and the Younger, Lucan and Martial are thought of as part and parcel of Roman culture. Spanish Emperors such as Hadrian are thought of as being as thoroughly Roman as anyone else. The separation had not yet begun.

But then in the 5th century AD the sense began to spread that Spain was foreign, as the Vandals came in and ruled the whole peninsula. Germanic tribes ruled most of the rest of western Europe during the Dark Ages too, but what made the Vandals foreign to the rest was above all that they were Arian Christians, not Catholics -- not, that is, the sort of Christians who later, in historical hindsight, would become known as Catholics. In order to keep thinking of some group of people as foreign and horrible and wrong, it is best to know as little about them as possible, and so, while Western history of the Dark Ages conventionally mentions two writers above all, two Gregories, Gregory of Tours and Pope Gregory the Great, their late-6th-century-early-7th-century Spanish contemporary Isidore of Seville, even though he too was thoroughly Catholic and deeply involved in the Catholization of Spain, and even though he is a far, far more learned and interesting writer than either of the Gregories, is not nearly as well known in the West.

After the Vandals, the Muslims came to Spain and began a nearly 800-year-long epoch about which we in the West are just beginning to learn. So, for example, we are just now beginning to hear about Gerbert of Aurillac, even though he spent the last 4 years of his life, from 999 to 1003, as Pope Sylvester II, and even though he was indisputably one of the most brilliant European scholars of his age. We are just now beginning to hear about King Alfonso X of Castile, who reigned from 1252 to 1284, known all along to Spaniards as Alfonso el Sabio, Alfonso the Wise, who developed one of the centres of learning which welcome Christians, Jews and Muslims, which have been so intensely hated by some Christians and others since well before Alfonso's time right down to our own, and which always seem to be so brilliant.

Cultural tolerance leading directly to intellectual breakthroughs. Imagine such a thing.

Alfonso's court was one of those places where we got those translations of ancient Greek authors which had first been translated into Arabic -- translations we've heard a lot about, without usually asking where they came from. Another was the Sicilian court of Frederick II, Holy Roman Emperor from 1220 to 1250. For his trouble, Frederick spent much of his reign excommunicated by various popes, and when he died Innocent IV offered a hymn of praise on the occasion of "the death of Antichrist." I'm not sure, but I bet that hymn makes no reference to the parable of the Good Samaritan from the Gospel of Luke, chapter 10, verses 25-37. I'm just guessing it doesn't.

Anyway: it wasn't just translations from Greek and Arabic into Latin which were produced at Alfonso's court: also, works originally written in Greek, Arabic or Latin were all translated into Castilian. And this may be one more, and a much more ironic reason for the cultural separation of Spain from the rest of western Europe. Alfonso's translations seems to have led to a decline of the use of Latin in Spain. The Latin language didn't disappear from Spain, but compared to academics and clerics in the rest of Western Europe, Spanish academics and clerics after Alfonso's time write surprisingly seldom in Latin. Latin remained the dominant language of academia in western Europe for a long, long time to come, still very lively in pockets of academia as late as the late 19th century. And this predominance of one common international language, quite naturally, fostered and nurtured one international academic community. Alfonso the Wise may have unintentionally, and unwisely, made Spain even more isolated from the rest of Europe than it already had been, because of these translations from Latin to Castilian.

Dream Log: In Madonna's Entourage

Last night I dreamed I was walking around in the upper 50's in Manhattan, the place where midtown meets the southern edge of Central Park, near dusk. I did not see John Wick running at the end of John Wick: Chapter 2, but it was the right part of town and time of day to do so. I did, however, see Robert Redford walking on the sidewalk, looking 40 years old or even younger, with collar-length hair and enormous 1970's-style sideburns. A limousine drove past and a teenaged girl pressed both hands against the rear window as she gazed out with longing at Redford.

Then I was in a hotel suite and I had joined Madonna's entourage, somehow. There were over a dozen of us with Madonna in the suite. It was the present day, and although Madonna is 60 years old in real life, and in the dream she was still the same Madonna with the same decades-long career, in the dream she looked like she did in her early 20's:

I felt very much like the newbie in the entourage, and I was very nervous about getting off to a good start. I was in a hallway just outside of Madonna's bedroom. A jewelry box of Madonna's had been the subject of much attention. I noticed that it was not pristinely clean inside, so I decided to wipe out the lint and dust. When I was done doing this, however, I realized that I had made a big mistake, because the box had been the subject of much careful scrutiny without touching the inside of it, as if it had been a crime scene. Another member of the entourage took the jewelry box from my hands and took it into the bedroom to Madonna. I heard Madonna scream "NO!" and throw the box against a wall. I was mortified.

A little later, Madonna and I and several other members of the entourage had gone from the suite to the hotel's lobby. There was a TV hung high on one wall of the lobby. Madonna was sitting on a couch. She had the remote control in her hand and had changed the channel to a movie.

A man none of us knew, about 30 years old, wearing a black leather jacket, blue jeans and shiny black shoes, came and sat down on the couch next to Madonna, took the remote away from her and changed the channel. Several of us in the entourage gasped. Madonna looked surprised and displeased.

I said to the man, "She was watching that movie." He replied, "So what?" I asked: "Madonna, is this guy bothering you?" She regarded him for a long moment, then finally sighed and said, "Yeah."

I went over to him, took ahold of the lapels of his jacket, lifted him up off of the ground by his jacket -- he weighed about half as much as me -- carried him several steps away, set him on his feet on the floor, took the remote from his hand and tossed it to Madonna, put my arm around the man's shoulder, walked him a good distance away, said, "Why don't you go bother someone else now?" and returned to our group. Madonna was beaming at me, and several people actually clapped.

Madonna patted the sofa beside her to tell me to come sit down beside her. When I was sitting she told me, "That was very gallant." I mumbled something like, "Oh. Well." Madonna added, "Forceful, but gentle. I'm glad you didn't hurt anybody or break any hotel property." I responded, "Well, I'm not a maniac." "Clearly," Madonna replied.

We were both silent for a while, and then I said, "I'm sorry about the jewelry box." Madonna said, "Oh Jeez, let it go! I have!" I said, "After I cleaned it out I realized that that was exactly what you didn't want done to it, because you were examining it exactly as it was." Madonna said, "Uh-huh, and did anyone explain that to you?" I said, "No," and Madonna said, "No. So we know that, not only are you not a maniac, you're not a moron either." And she gave me a great big smile, and touched my shoulder.

"Oh," she said, and told me to turn so my back was toward her. She dug her fingers into my shoulders and upper back and said, "Wow, you're really tense." I told her that I had some pain from sciatica and that the pain sometimes made me tense up. She asked me whether the sciatica responded to massage and I told her that it did. She called for her masseur. "We help each other out," she told me. "That's how this works." I wasn't sure whether by "this" she meant the entourage, or life in general, or maybe something else.

When the masseur had me on the table and was working on me, I became sort of like a cyborg with a diagnostic video screen hovering in the air beside me. Every time the pain lessened, an additional red light appeared on this screen.

Then I woke up.

Are We Technologically Prepared For 100% Renewables Right Now?

For any given challenge facing a society, there seem typically to be at least two, diametrically opposed sorts of responses: 1) This challenge can't be overcome; or 2) How exactly will we overcome this challenge? Response type 1 has said: We can't cross this river, we can't cure this disease, we can't fly through the air, etc, etc, and response type 2 has enabled progress to occur.

Of course, there can be dishonest reasons for claiming that something is impossible. Perhaps some slave owners didn't really believe that it was impossible for society to exist without slavery, but claimed that it was impossible, because they were making lots of money as slave holders, and didn't want to face the economic competition which would come along with the abolition of slavery. Perhaps some steamship operators knew as well as anyone that airplanes were technologically feasible, but didn't want the economic competition of airlines.

Today, response type 1 says that we can't generate all of the electricity we need by means of renewable energy, that we will have to use natural gas and nuclear power as well, because we can't make all of the batteries we would need in order to store as much electricity as we would have to in order to make 100% renewable energy work. Do I really even need to mention that some people might intentionally exaggerate the technical challenges associated with 100% renewables because they're financially invested in petrochemicals and nuclear and don't want the competition from renewables, or was that already perfectly obvious to all of you?

Response type 2 is busy building better batteries, as well as ways to store energy made by renewable means in other forms than electricity, which can be converted into electricity when needed. Batteries and other energy-storage technologies are rapidly improving, and the potential for further improvement appears to be vast.

In the case of this challenge, there is also a response type 3, which says: we don't need any breakthroughs in energy-storage technology, the technology we have right now can enable us to rely 100% on renewable sources of power. Breakthroughs in energy-storage technology will be nice, of course, and give us still greater flexibility and a still more reliable grid, but renewables plus today's energy-storage technology can already add up to a more reliable grid than the one we have today, still powered mostly by oil, gas, coal and nukes. The lovably geeky Amory Lovins lays out a type 3 scenario in under 5 minutes in this TED talk video:



There are all sorts of people today purporting to be experts in energy technology, contradicting what other supposed experts are saying. I would encourage you to consider conflicting assertions, and think for yourself.

I'm much more inclined to believe the believers in 100% renewables than the nay-sayers, because the nay-sayers have already been proven dead wrong over and over, as renewable energy grows and grows and continues to actually function really well. I agree with those who say that the major obstacle to renewable energy is corrupt politics propping up old, highly-polluting means of generating energy which, in a truly unfettered free market, would no longer be able to compete.

Beer Videos on YouTube: Chad'z Beer Reviews

I'm talking about afficianados of fine beers, as opposed to people who drink a lot of Bud Light or Miller High Life before making their YouTube videos, or videos about drunken parties, or something like that.

Okay, let's get something out of the way: Yes, I was in Alcoholics Anonymous for a while, in the mid-90's. And a good thing I was: I had been drinking much too much, and with the help of AA I dried out for a couple of years. I also met a lot of wonderful people through AA. I have absolutely no regrets about the AA period of my life. And maybe there are some people who really can't drink moderately. Turns out, I'm not one of them. Turns out, I enjoy drinking one or two beers and then stopping for the day. This was something I had never even tried before joining AA. Before that I had always drunk much too much. "Having a beer or two" had been a euphemism, for me, for having a dozen or two.

Also, these days, besides meaning it literally when I say I'll have "a beer or two," I don't have a beer or two every day -- or even every month. I think it's been about six months since I drank any beer. I had a beer -- literally. One -- to celebrate having survived major surgery. Does my looking for interesting beer critics mean I'm going to drink more? Not sure that it does mean that.

Onward: yesterday I finally did something I'd been meaning to do for a while: looked for videos on You Tube featuring beer connoisseurs. WARNING: There's no particular reason to think that I might be good at telling a beer connoisseur apart from a non-connoisseur. Keeping that in mind, and keeping in mind that I've been looking for less than 24 hours now, my favorite YouTube beer channel so far is Chad'z Beer Reviews:



Yes, that's Chad'z with a z instead of an s for some reason. Chad has a lot of videos in which he has one glass of one brand and variety of beer and describes it in-depth. Then there are some yearly ten-best and ten-worst videos. In these Chad does not list what he considers to be the very best or very worst beers in the world, but the ten best or worst which he had for the first time during that year. And Chad, although he definitely seems to enjoy fine beers, also reviews mass-produced beers and tells you how much worse they are than the good stuff. (One thing I remember from one of the year-end videos is the warning that the word "Ice" in a beer's name is always a bad sign.)

I'm curious about the good stuff. But I will defintely not be drinking a lot of the very finest (according to Chad) beer soon, unless, of course, I suddenly become wealthy very soon: a lot of the stuff on the ten best list goes for $10 or $20 a bottle or up. That's right: $10 or $20 or more, not for a 6-pack, nor a 4-pack, but for one (typically 24-oz) bottle. In the 2018 ten-best video, Chad named Samuel Adams Utopias, 2013 vintage, number one. It sells for hundreds of dollars per 28-ounce bottle. It's also 30 percent alcohol by volume. That's 60 proof. That's almost 10 times stronger than some beers. That's stronger than most wine, as strong as some hard liquor.

Most of the top-ten stuff Chad reviews, that stuff going for $10 or $20 or more for a 24 oz bottle, has more typical alcohol content: 4.5 to 7% by volume, around in there.

Some of the beer Chad considers the best is available at prices more familiar to us Joe 6-pack types: Sam Adams New England IPA made one of his yearly ten best lists, and in February 2018 Sam Adams announced a suggested retail price of $8.99 to $9.99 for 4 16-ounce cans. According to Chad, Sam Adams is the best American mass-produced brand, head and shoulders above most of the others.

It is becoming less unusual for the finer beers to come in cans instead of bottles. That may be news to you if you're old like me and haven't been a beer-hound lately, like me.

Yesterday I saw a beer-tasting video from Epicurious which I will not link here, because it made me angry, and I don't want to make my readers angry in turn. It was series of comparisons of a less expensive vs a more expensive beer: a cheap IPA vs an expensive IPA, a cheap barrel-aged beer vs an expensive one and so forth. The labels were removed from the bottles and cans to make it a blind tasting. I have nothing against the beer critic. He seemed very knowledgeable. He preferred the more expensive beer every time. Prices ranged from under $1 per bottle or can to over $10.

What made me angry is that they never showed the labels! We were never told what beers this guy described in such depth and with such know-how! At the end the beer critic encouraged us viewers to "get out there and have some fun!" Well, I have more fun when I have more helpful information, there's no question about that. I'm TIRED of thrashing around in the dark with no clue, with beer as with life in general. Again, I'm not mad at the beer critic. One piece of information which I do not have is whether he realized that Epicurious, who presented the video, was never going to show the labels.

Dream Log: Romance and Green Energy

Last night I dreamed I was at a meeting of people concerned about global warming, discussing ways to advocate and implement green energy. People at the meeting were discussing the way that advocates for fossil fuels exaggerate the problems involved in switching to green energy; for example, claiming that solar generation of electricity requires 1000 times more land area than fossil fuels -- an extreme example of fossil-fuel propaganda, to be sure. I was there because I wanted to get some reliable figures about such things. In the dream I was -- and now, waking, I am -- under the impression that solar can generate electricity while using less land than fossil fuels. But I was not -- and still am not -- completely sure who has the most reliable figures, and who is making the most sense.

At the meeting, a lot of John Lennon recordings were been played, from the late 60's and the early 70's, recordings he made with the Beatles and solo, from "Everybody's Got Something to Hide (Cept For Me and My Monkey)" and "Glass Onion" to "#9 Dream." In the dream the music was key to the education about global warming and propaganda.

I met a woman at the meeting and we soon became friendly. After the meeting broke up, late in the evening, she and I went for a walk. We began to hug and kiss. Walking along, she said that she was tired. I picked her and carried her for a while, which made her laugh.

She was sad and I didn't know what I could do about it. I tried to be very nice.

We walked through an office building. We were in an atrium several stories above the ground floor. The ground floor was covered in tiles in the shapes and colors of pictures by Matisse. It wasn't clear to me whether Matisse himself had actually made the tiles. I exclaimed about how beautiful the tiles were, she did not reply, and immediately, I was afraid that she disliked Matisse, perhaps more for political than aesthetic reasons.

She smoked a lot. She stepped back outside of the building to have another cigarette. I haven't smoked in 20 years, and I didn't feel good about starting again, but I wanted to be with her, and I find that it's hard to be a couple when one person smokes and the other doesn't, and also I had been smelling so much of her smoke since before the meeting had broken up that I felt I was getting hooked again. So I asked for a drag on her cigarette. I was all-in, even if it meant I had to smoke to be with her.

But then, after I took a puff, she had disappeared when I was looking in another direction. I looked all over and couldn't find her. I didn't have her phone number or address.

Then I woke up.