Sublime

I went back to [Hannah] Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem and reread sections of it. I was looking for a clue as to what she meant by “the banality of evil,” which she defines as a “kind of thoughtlessness.” I guess I think of evil as in some way connected with self-deception. —Morris

First, there will be an incentive to find some asset other than money to save with.

Archbishop Isidore of Seville, writing an encyclopedia called the Etymologiae that circulated widely in manuscript—as many as a thousand handwritten copies survive—had drawn the world as a circle surrounded by oceans and divided by seas into three bodies of land, Asia, Europe, and Africa, inhabited by the descendants of the three sons of Noah: Shem

We do not trust the stranger, or the next-door neighbour – we trust the coin they hold. If they run out of coins, we run out of trust. As money brings down the dams of community, religion and state, the world is in danger of becoming one big and rather heartless marketplace.

The meeting of classical Greek culture and the ancient lore of Egypt, when Alexander the Great drove into the streets of Babylonia and Alexandria, led to the great era of Alexandrian science.

There was no city, however small and obscure it might be, that did not pay the greatest attention to preserving an account of what had passed within it. This was not vanity, but religion.