David Siegel - The Plenitude of Arboreal Beauty

Passages like “when London is a grass-grown path and all those hurrying along the pavement this Wednesday morning are but bones with a few wedding rings mixed up in their dust and the gold stoppings of innumerable decayed teeth” (16) and “later [Clarissa] wasn’t so positive perhaps; she thought there were no Gods; no one [...]

I was struck by the compromises of civil and political rights for economic promise that Booker T. Washington was willing to make on behalf of a struggling race. DuBois describes Washington’s agenda as “a gospel of Work and Money to such extent as to completely overshadow the higher aims of life,” (30) and “the sudden [...]

No matter what side of the evolution debate you fall on, Charles Darwin is the exemplar of disinterested scientific inquiry. Darwin also successfully maintains an unparalleled passion for the study of nature which reveals itself in the comprehensive corpus of empirical data presented to the us, not for the sake of argument, but rather for [...]

What struck me as the greatest theme in Philosophical Letters is Voltaire’s fascination with progress. We read in the introduction about a library fund bequeathed to young Voltaire in order to stoke the fire of his precocious curiosity, and Letters is an intermediate result of years of study in disparate fields. Naturally, I began by [...]

I enjoyed Montaigne’s essays more than any of the great books we have read so far for three reasons: (1) Montaigne’s writings are the most philosophically viable; (2) his reasoning is straightforward, cogent, and demonstratively corroborated by some of the most influential thinkers of all time; (3) I feel that Montaigne is a realistic expectation [...]

Hamlet strikes me as a much different kind of hero than Jesus, Aeneas, Augustine, Mohammed, or Genji. All of these other heroes have had either (A) an affinity for a mother figure or (B) a disaffinity for or vacuous ambivalence towards a father figure. In fact, most of these heroes satisfy both of these conditions: [...]

Let’s see if I can get this straight – Genji lusts after his aunt-to-be, Fujitsubo, because of the resemblance she bears to his deceased mother. The Emperor has dibs on Fujitsubo, so Genji sets his sights on Young Murasaki, the ten year-old niece of Fujitsubo who also resembles Genji’s mother transitively. Fujitsubo is “impossibly young,” [...]

I read that the Qur’an was originally an oral tradition, with its many surah preserved primarily in the memories and recitations of ancient Muslims. It wasn’t until Surah 55 that I discovered some of the mnemonic vestiges of this tradition. Aside from the ubiquitous preface “in the name of Allah, Most Gracious, Most Merciful,” seven [...]

Confessions documents an extremely impressionable man’s tenacious search for a consistent and comforting worldview. Augustine transitions from quantitative hedonism, to Manichaeism, to Aristotelianism, to Neoplatonism, and, as far as we know, ultimately to Catholicism, with the intermittent hiatus in Astrology, Aestheticism, and more hedonism. He is motivated successively by the vicissitudes of youth, by the [...]

When Aeneas consults with the ghost of his father, Anchises, we find a passage heavily influenced by Neoplatonic thought. Anchises mentions “a celestial energy… slowed and dulled by mortal frames,” (VI 867) and warns that upon death “many corporeal taints remain, ingrained in the soul in myriad ways” (874). This is redolent of the Phaedo, [...]