Reading & Thinking - 9/23/2014–9/24/2014 (Part 4)

 [Continued from Reading & Thinking - 9/23/2014–9/24/2014 (Part 3).  I am back working through my prison journal. It is out of order.. Well, the order is as I have opened boxes. The date in the title is the date it was written. I hope this is not confusing. What you are reading is what you get for your tax dollars. sch 6/14/2025]

The eyes got blurry a little earlier in the day now.

I'm working my way through Michael Grant's Latin Literature: An Anthology (Penguin Classics, 1989). One would think these ideas from Seneca might give me some calm:

... It would ber waste of time to count all the ways by which doom can come. One thing I know, and it's this: all the works of mortal hand lie under the sentence of mortality: we live among things doomed.

"The Great Fire of Lyons", trans by E. Phillips Barker (1932) 

After all, this does approximate the Christian attitude towards this world. But my imagination goes out to the harm done to people and AI flinch. Yes, I know we're all better off out of this world. I can only testify to my worldly weaknesses.

With Seneca, I also found an interesting point, shining some light on my earlier made point about prison and its purpose. Truly, what Seneca writes has also to do with education and how we generally conduct our lives.

... Praise in him what can neither be removed nor bestowed, what's inseparable from his humanity.

And what, you ask is that? His spirit, and Reason as perfected in that spirit. For man's a creature of Reason. So his good is consummated if he fulfills the end he's born to. And whatdoes this Reason demand of him? A very easy thing - to live in accord with his own nature. But it's made hard by the universal insanity: we jostle each other into voices. How is a recall to health of spirit possible for those when no one seeks to check and every pushes on? 

"God in Man", trans. E. Phillips Baker (1932)

That may not seem applicable to you, but it does to me. You do not feel jostled into vice? Then you have done nothing to keep up with the Joneses or gotten a little stoned due to peer pressure, or went to bed with a neighbor's wife because everybody was doing something like that, or you downloaded Internet porn to see what everyone was talking about? I have. The last sentence of the quote above appears to me a description of federal prison policy.

Enough seriousness! I need pace myself - if I want to leave here with some claim to sanity. It is looking forward, knowing  the years, months, days, minutes, seconds I remain amongst those people with nothing useful to do which lies hardest on me. I have almost killed this pen. Let me finish with this bit from Propertius' poem "Cynthia":

So while the fates still grant us leave

Let's feast our eyes on love: 
For the darkness of night is coming -
A long night with no day following.
As we cling to each other like this
Bend us with a chain so strong
That time will not dissolve it.

trans. John Warden (1972)

I have business at home with several women; debts need paid them.

Such have been a small number of my thoughts while I have been reading these past few days. I think they represent the general trend of my thoughts.

sch