Virginia Woolf paused writing Mrs Dalloway to pen her essay "On not knowing Greek", whose cunning title cloaks her intense passion for Ancient Greek and its literature. To mark its centenary, we reprinted that essay, along with another philhellenic piece:
https://t.co/eUrRMsrbXZ
@metalgearobama Here's the article fwiw https://t.co/LfeVLb3soH
Absolutely fucking insane that "ai therapy" is a thing. A machine cannot be given that responsibility when someone's on the line. OpenAI's response is... Yesh.
My advice to young humanities students:
1. Don’t be afraid to skip around the chapters in an academic history book non-linearly. As long as it’s not narrative, it’s fine as long as you read everything
2. Don’t be afraid to use Wikipedia. Its footnotes and sources are a goldmine
There’s an Ursula K. Le Guin essay that’s actually really cracked the whole thing of the shadow and the collective self open for me in a way I’ve found really interesting/genuinely useful, I’ll link it
Borges at eighty:
“I think that one should never use words like ‘the best’ or ‘the first,’ since those words carry no conviction and only lead to arguments. Beauty is not something rare. […] For example, I know nothing whatever about Hungarian poetry, and yet I am sure that [+]
“While they were preparing the hemlock, Socrates was learning a tune on the flute. ‘What good will it do you,’ they asked, ‘to know this tune before you die?’”
— from “Why Read the Classics?,” in The Uses of Literature (trans. Patrick Creagh)