Why Read Tacitus?

As I'm reading the Annals and Histories of Tacitus a few pages an evening I've decided to record why Tacitus is so important to us at the moment politically, historically, morally and personally.

1. Tacitus gives a careful and comprehensive picture of the early Roman empire. Seeing his picture enables us to better contextualize and understand current world events.

2. Tacitus is a sinuous and versatile prose master, even in translation, and thus a great teacher of how to speak, think and write.

3. Tacitus is the model historian, to be copied and defined against for all future tellers of true tales.

4. Tacitus really understands tyranny. To educate and reveal the abuses of absolute power, his vision is supreme, and a kind of negative picture of human liberty.

5. Tacitus sees with absolute clarity the differences between liberty and license, and the differences between civic virtue and private immorality. As such, he is in one book a citizen's education.

6. Tacitus is concerned with the nature of civilization as individual virtue. He constantly shows non-Romans as virtuous and noble free men, and Romans are savages, highlighting the reality of virtue as a property in men from all walks of life. He is truly cosmopolitan, concerned with civilization in its most intimate and personal reality as personal virtue. Thus Tacitus is a great moral teacher.

7. Tacitus gives one of the earliest non-Christian reports of Christianity, thus showing us a fascinating outside view of the young cult.

8. Tacitus gives an example of ruthless honesty in assessing one's birth culture, and how to maintain integrity throughout and avoiding alienating oneself from the culture.

9. Tacitus is a wisdom writer, giving the basic mentality of republican virtue in his words, ideas and personality, showing how one can be free even in the midst of a slavish society.

10. Tacitus is a great maker of sayings. For example:

"The desire for safety stands against every great and noble enterprise."

"Crime, once exposed, has no refuge but in audacity."

"To show resentment at a reproach is to acknowledge that one may have deserved it."

"It is a principle of nature to hate those whom you have injured."

"The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws."

"Viewed at a distance, everything is beautiful."

"Men are more ready to repay and injury than a benefit, because gratitude is a burden and revenge a pleasure."

10. For the first and last time in history the entire Mediterranean basin was united in one political unit during the time of Tacitus' histories, so his work is a unique and primary insight into the management of large enterprises such as are commonplace today. Tacitus himself served in this organism as consul and governor.

11. Other than Suetonius and Dio Cassius, both considered inferior historians compared to Tacitus, his is the only history of this key period of time to come down to us mostly intact, and it is said to be by far the best of the three.

12. Critics may equivocate all they like, but Tacitus is self-evidently republican, oligarchical, humanist, and reason-centered. As such, he is an elder contemporary to the Founding Fathers of the United States and valuable as a teacher to the creators of the modern world. He is still relevant for these essential values.

13. Tacitus examines mass psychology alongside and in contrast to individual psychology, delivering acerbic judgements of both; his description of psychology remain powerfully accurate and instructive.

14. Finally, I can no longer see or read the news without seeing them through the eyes of Tacitus, who is the original scholar of dissidents everywhere, and I must record that tyranny is alive and well in the public media - a view which is all thanks to the tutelage of this long-ago Roman historian.

Love Maps of Books.

Books are the most permanent, stable and reliable friends we have in life, so it befits us to make a love map of them. What is a love map? It's a basis for appreciation and affection. It's a map of what you love about a book. The idea comes from marriage scholar John Gottman, as a way of drawing couples closer together.

The kind of book suitable for a love map must be one you would want to spend all your life with. The writing of books is endless, but greatness remains rare. Choose only the greatest of books to do a love map of, and they will reward you with some of their magnitude.

Then, write the answers to the following questions:

1. What is the title? Pages? Divisions?
2. Who are the main characters?
3. What are the main relationships, briefly told?
4. Where is the action set in space? When is the action set in time?
5. What do the characters want most?
6. What do the characters hate most?
7. What happens in the beginning?
8. The middle?
9. The end?
10. What are the most important events in the novel? Why?
11. What is funny? Strange? Sublime? Beautiful? What affects me?
12. What foods are eaten in the book?
13. What opinions are expressed in the book? How are they still relevant?
14. What are the major tools, props, and physical markers of the book?
15. What color is the book overall, or specifically?
16. How do the characters handle conflict?
17. How do the characters recover from conflict?
18. What do the characters read or do for entertainment?
19. What jobs do the characters do? How do they occupy their time when not in the book?
20. What is to happen to the characters after the book ends? What happened to the characters before the book began?

Ask at least 20 questions, and write down the answers.

By now you will be better acquainted with the book than most literary critics, and have a more thorough knowledge with which to enjoy a re-reading of the book.

The books we love deserve to be treated with love and respect; making a love map of them is the best way to get closer to them.

On Reading the Gospel of Matthew.

I set myself the task of reading the gospel of Matthew as if I had never read it before.

This failed completely: I know so much about the gospel that the best I can hope for is a clear-eyed look at my own complete emmersion in Christian culture and society. The operative work here is "clear-eyed"; it yielded some fine stuff.

Let me say first up that the same uncanny mix of humor, myth, legend, epic, folk story, teaching, poem, and inspired visionary text that one finds in Genesis, one also encounters immediately in the first gospel - the book of Matthew. The form is the same, but everything is different.

Chapter One. The opening echoes the kingly lists of Chronicles, detailing distinguished lineage but this time in the utterly revolutionary context of the prophet Jesus. But already we are on strange land, because Jesus is a kingly prophet. It is as if Isaiah and Solomon were born in the one man. Nothing quite like it existed before. And then comes the divine omens.

Chapter Two. The gorgeous myth of the birth of Jesus is so mediaeval in its telling that one almost forgets it is not a stained glass window. How are we supposed to take this tall tale? The middle ages has colonized our imagining of the gospel. We cannot see beyond the images of those centuries to the true tale.

One thing we can say: this is not the normal style to be reading a miraculous birth-of-a-son-god type of tale; not at all; the tone around it is historical, factual, realistic even. The interpolation of the ooh and ahh of the miracle birth is surely not calculated to blemish the historical record; rather, the simplest explanation is that it is to stun the unquestioning pre-rational audience into acquiescence.

Augustine tacitly acknowledges this difficulty with the gospels in his autobiography when he confesses that the gospels must be read in a very simple and uncomplicated spirit. I agree. They are not addressed to a reasonable, scientifically educated, and literate middleclass. They belong to everyone.

But because of their universal quality we find ourselves in the deep time of human consciousness, looking through the pristine simplicity of Matthew's eyes at the unaccountable astonishment that was Jesus. Is it any wonder Matthew invented fancies to compel his bovine audience to some faint sense of the incredible nature of these events? It is no wonder that the out-wondering wonder of Jesus should attract the ornaments of myth?

Chapters Three and Four. The tale of John the Baptist and the temptation in the wilderness suddenly moves into fact from fancy. John's tale is so remarkable that it must be true, and yet it validates the prophetic angle of Jesus' ministry so perfectly that it simply piles up more compelling evidence of the man.

The three temptations of Christ clearly delineates, in a visual format, the actual advanced spiritual work that have been researched, described and corroborated in modern times by Doctor David R. Hawkins. This is simply how it is; one can question the visual images, but not the content which is pristine to the universal nature of advanced inner spiritual work.

So the opening 4 chapters work to present Jesus as an authority. Chapter one presents his kingly status. Two presents him as a prophet. Three presents his inner qualifications, for those in the know, as an spiritual entity of surpassing purity, having refused the temptations of power and personal gain. The masses are suitably stunned by the first two yarns, and the spiritual students ought to be suitably sobered by the third. Then come the teachings.

And what teachings they are!

Hawkins calibrates the level of consciousness of humanity at Jesus' time as 100. I would argue that Jesus, being a teacher of all humanity, addressed humanity at exactly the level we were at. In other words, imagine Jesus speaking directly and lovingly to a very very scared entity called "humanity". Imagine Jesus speaking to a frightened being, a being lost in terror and darkness of fright and horror, a being run like a robot on its own wishes to avoid further pain. That is the level of consciousness Jesus addresses in his first teaching. And what he says corroborates this presumption: he speaks of the poor, of the meek, of the grieving - all levels of consciousness below 100. On the Hawkins scale, he is speaking about the apathetic and the grief-stricken - those who have been shattered by life and cannot have any illusions about the human hell of that age. Jesus is speaking about those who have broken down denial about the frightening reality of human nature in his age. He is speaking TO the fearful, reminding them of their brothers and sisters who are lost IN grief and apathy. His words, so strange at first hearing, are simply an outpouring of compassion and well-wishing for those who have seen the terrible truth about human nature being hopelessly stuck.

Jesus reminds his listeners of those less fortunate than themselves, who also have less illusions about reality. He blesses people who are free of illusion, but also bereft of hope. Then he turns to integrity. And what does he say?

He blesses those who desire for integrity. Now desire is the level immediately above fear. Jesus is consciously contextualizing human consciousness within the levels below and above it. The entire field of potential for human consciousness receives his attention. Next he blesses those who are merciful, in other words those who give up anger, the level of consciousness above desire; next he blesses the pure in heart, the peacemakers, and those who are persecuted. What do all these have in common? They are all social expressions of integrity - making peace, being persecuted. Jesus is talking about being at the level of pride, the level of looking good rather than being good, the level of hypocrisy.

In one dazzling passage, Jesus has recontextualized human consciousness in a totally new light. The grieving and apathetic have seen the truth. Those stuck in desire are really hungry and thirtsy for truth. Those stuck in anger are really seeking mercy. Those stuck in pride and hypocrisy are really only after a pure heart, peacemaking and feeling justified in their victimhood. Notice how Jesus does not condemn these negative energy fields - he simply sees them as love, love in action, love in intention, love in expression. He sees love in human consciousness, and thus it is.

Versus 11 to 16 describe the world of level of consciousness 200, which Jesus calls heaven. It is hard to imagine that human consciousness today, here and now, is at the remarkable level of consciousness overall of 206. That means that we the living of the modern world are in a world which to the humans of Jesus time would seem like heaven. One can hardly underestimate the shocking difference between human nature in Jesus' time and human nature in our time. It is like night and day.

Versus 17 to 37 seems to me like sound traditional morality. Was it anything new in Jesus time. No; Jesus say it is the law of the prophets. Is it just me, or has Jesus just finished with the carrot and now is applying the stick? Certainly he shows sound motivational psychology with his warnings. But let's take a close look at the rhetorical intention.

The opening verses of the sermon from the start to 16 recontextualize human consciousness as love in the process of unfoldment. Then the moralistic verses from 17 to 37 warn about being very moral using fear as a motivating tool. The level of consciousness of the listeners is Fear, level 100 on the map of consciousness. So first Jesus recontextualizes all the levels of consciousness AROUND fear, and second Jesus leans quite heavily on the fear stick and makes a big impact, no doubt, on his fearful audience. He first loosens up the field around fear, then he uses fear to stimulate moral behavior. Or so it seems. But look at what he does next:

"Love your enemies". "Turn the other cheek". This is the value of unconditional love. Where on earth does this come from? Suddenly we have moved from instilling fear of ethical failure to instilling a visionary economic program, without any warning. I think a few of the links in Jesus chain of thought are missing at this point personally. Where is the link between conventional moral scrupulosity motivated by the animal fear of hell, and the humanistic ethos of universal brotherhood, other than in Matthew's torrid ethical imagination?

Chapter Six begins with Jesus teaching his frightened cattle-humans the principle of anonymity. Don't do good acts to be seen in public, he says. Small words for clear images of real things - no further evidence that Jesus is talking to men of little brain is needed than this remarkably lucid explanation of the power of personal anonymity. If no human notices me doing a good act, Jesus explains, then God sees it. A toddler could comprehend this.

The principle of anonymous prayer brings up the basic Christian teachings on prayer: don't try to program God to give you stuff, just ask for what you need today, make sure you stay straight with your fellow humans, and remember to ask God to lead you into a positive energy field because you can't find your way there on your own. Which is all simply factual if you are open to the research on prayer by Doctor Hawkins.

6:14 and 6:15 describe the right relationship between me, God and others. If I'm good with others, then God will be good with me. Real simple. But if I'm not good with others, then God won't be good with me. Karma in one easy lesson!

6:19 to 6:23 I don't understand. Are they esoteric references to light bodies? What are "treasures in heaven" precisely? I am going to assume, from the discussion preceding it directly, that Jesus is talking about karma still. Treasures in heaven means karmic merit. The light of the eye is referring to consciousness itself: literally if I do ill, my consciousness becomes dark and I cannot understand spiritual matters automatically, and if I do good my consciousness is lit up, again literally. I don't think they are esoteric references: I think Jesus is being dead literal about spiritual and karmic fundamentals.

6:24 to the end of chapter six I have often read as anti- or non-materialistic references by Jesus, and in the light of Jesus' status as a wandering mendicant faith healer, this is easy to assume. But I think by putting these references in the context of his audience a different picture becomes clear.

Jesus' audience is at the level of fear. With the addition of the energy field of Jesus himself, as well as Jesus' recontextualizations and inspiration and teachings, they will quickly ascend to the higher energy field above fear of desire. And in that precise instant the downside of desire, greed and lust for gain, will take hold. So Jesus is, as it were, heading them off at the pass. He is trying his best to block off any excuse or evasion of integrity in his audience.

His audience is to avoid showing off (thus dismantling Pride, 175); they are to forgive everyone (thus processing out Anger, 150), and they are to avoid greed (thus minimizing the downside of Desire at 125). His audience are at 100. If they take on board everything he has just said and apply it, they cannot but end up over 200, the crucial line of integrity. Another way of putting this is that if someone in fear takes to heart these few lines, he or she can move into courage by simply applying them to their situation. This is a pretty remarkable claim, an enormous leap by any standards in consciousness from fear to integrity, and Jesus accomplishes it in fewer words than most people take to share dinner with their family.

Chapter Seven consists of various legendary admonishments. Jesus warns people who fail to apply his teachings with the "house built on sand". He warns against occult gyrations with those who cast out demons but don't have integrity so are not recognized by God in Heaven - ie, as integrous. He warns against fake spiritual teachers in a beautiful phrase "wolves in sheep's clothing". Jesus is obviously really trying to make sure his hearer get what he is saying. Integrity, Jesus is saying, integrity integrity integrity. And his audience is responding "Baa-aaa!"

Chapters 8 and 9 are sundry miracles. In these chapters the ooh and ahh factor of the miraculous birth is intermingled with sage titbits from the Master. It functions kind of like an integration of the miraculous and the historical. Then in 10 the real ministry begins. Jesus gives instructions to his disciples. They are extraordinary, bizarre instructions.

Jesus might as well have suggested his disciples go forth wearing fruitbowl hats and dancing traditional Hawaiian dances as suggest what he actually says. Is this guy for real? A life of poverty, dirty clothes, faith healing and testimony is in store for the 12. No wonder the harvest was great but the laborers few: Jesus was a tough boss!

I also find it remarkable that none of the disciples puts up his hands and asks for some exemption from the rules. Either we are to suppose Matthew was portraying Jesus as far more hard-arse than he actually was, OR we must assume that Jesus selected the 12 out of a prior organisation that they were already part of. Given the political implications of John's ministry and Jesus' birth, the possibility one considers is that the 12 arose out of the political organization of which Jesus was the focus. But Jesus tells the 12 to heal and teach, not organize sit-ins and sign petitions. So what Jesus is explicitly doing with this ministry is, it would seem, taking people from a political organization around him and putting them into a spiritual order. Clearly the disciples are, well, disciplined. Were they from a paramilitary political order? I am not thinking of the Essenes here; I am willing to assume perhaps that Jesus' influences arose from the Essene tradition, but one must also concede that the disciples did not arise out of nothing. They didn't pop into existence as a miracle. Jesus recruited them from some prior organization, probably political in nature.

I resist attempts to politicize Jesus' message, personally. I think he arose from a political context into the universal ethical and spiritual contexts of his teaching and healing ministry. But the incredible fortitude of the disciples revealed in chapter ten indicates they likely had a military origin of some kind.

Chapter 11 shows Matthew's poor logical organization. It consists of Jesus giving a kind stream of consciousness impression of how things are all going. It's sort of like Jesus as us are watching the disciples go out doing their think and ruminating about how things are progressing. But it's loose and baggy and mercifully a short chapter. It has various legendary sayings in it, of course, that any civilized person would commit to memory and use in their right place.

Then suddenly in chapter 12 the disciples are back, or these are different disciples maybe. And Jesus is bickering about the Law with some conservatives. The conservatives, no doubt somewhat arch about faith healing and the taint of revolutionary politics inevitably attached to some of Jesus' more vociferous disciples, beat up the issue of the Sabbath. But this is the old left and right, conservative and liberal opposition all over again - this is not about Jesus but about the culture of the time.

Chapter 13 begins the parables. 14 is miracles with food. 15 and 16 are Jesus bickering with the conservatives again, ending with a foreshadowing of his death at their hands.

Chapter 17 is an exact match for chapter 3, which describes in concrete images some advanced spiritual work done with James, John and Peter. The interesting thing here is how the four men 'see' Moses and Elijah. I take this to mean the statement that at the highest levels of consciousness one experiences what the sages who passed through that condition also experienced, experiencing it as oneself at the same time as the individual. So I think Peter, James and John experience what Moses experienced, and become that which Moses had become also. Which would be a condition on the map of consciousness in the mid 700s. I think chapter 17 describes the enlightenment experience of James, John and Peter.

Chapter 18 addresses spiritual egotism and the problem of specialness - both common issues for spiritual students. How does one deal with ego and pride at spiritual attainment? And, how does one deal with the glamour of being special?

Chapter 19 would be more kvetching with the conservatives only, were it now for the final lines of this chapter making some remarkable statements. Jesus says, in Matthew 19:26-30, that man needs a savior to be saved, and cannot be saved on his own efforts, but he adds a statement which seems to imply in a veiled way that the conservative factions addicted to legalism will be judged by the spiritually advanced disciples. This is very interesting indeed. It is as if Jesus' twelve disciplines are set up as an alternative for the hopelessly-mired-in-negativity twelve tribes of Israel. Individuals replace tribes, Jesus seems to be suggesting here. All very interesting ideas, and very relevant for the Roman world and for our world today.

20, 21, 22, 23 represent a melange of 3 elements: parables, miracles, and Jesus putting up patiently with the conservatives' bitching. But in 23 Jesus really loses his cool and starts cussing up a storm against his enemies. They have finally and officially pissed off the son of God, and it's not pretty.

24 and 25 are fascinating chapters for us precisely because they describe the modern world. We live in a world where integrity matters. We live, then, in a world where the kingdom of heaven, integrity, is here and now; a world where one is taken up into integrity while another remains, unable to see or even know the different dimension the integrous occupy.

The traditional interpolation of doomsday occult visions from the book of Relevations is unfortunate. According to consciousness research, the end of the world scenario in that book is simply flat out false. So what Jesus must be talking about in Matthew 24 and 25 is not some imaginary apocalypse, but rather a real world emergence of integrity as a practical way of being in the world for most people. In other words, Jesus is talking about ordinary life in the West every day. Another day in paradise.

26 to 28 tell the tale, in choice few words, of Jesus' arrest and death at the hands of the conservatives. We all know the ending; what is remarkable for me is how brief the story is in Matthew.

Why did Matthew write this way? We have perhaps a quarter of a book of Jesus speaking, as it were, straight into Matthew's microphone. We get the raw feed on Jesus' instructions to his disciplines, Jesus' rant against the conservatives, and even a little chapter where Jesus is sort of rambling to himself somewhat loosely while his disciples are off discipling. The rest of the book, shorn of its mythic opening and tragic ending, is endless bickering and miracles of healing and feeding. Jesus mostly seems to have brought health and food and moral guidance in this book.

The most remarkable part of the book of Matthew is the sermon on the mount. Once it is put into the context of the listeners to whom Jesus is addressing his comments, it brilliantly illuminates Jesus' model for teaching and inspiring others. Jesus makes himself accessible as a savior through this sermon.

I suppose the other value in the book of Matthew is for convincing the credulous to follow Jesus. There are no appeals to reason to be found here, and many appeals indeed for the sheep to follow the Shepherd.

So, that's my clear-eyed take on the book of Matthew. It has taken me two hours to re-read it and keep running notes on it as I go, and I am glad I did. It is a wonderful book. I recommend it to everyone. Get a copy and underline all the cool statements in it and commit them to memory. Try out Jesus' views on prayer. Read the sermon and pursuade yourself that only integrity is worth living for, even if you already 'know' the sermon' and its purport. It's a fine piece of work, worth many readings. I certainly enjoyed the chance to share it with you.

Reading Dostoyevsky For Kicks and Giggles

Every few days I read a bit of Augustine; he is magnificent reading, but difficult, irregular, and strange.

I read Augustine in the middle of the day, in snatches.

Even in his word choice I can feel the chaos and confusion of his age. In the irregularity of subject and the novelty of the autobiographical voice, we see for the first time what I call the Christian difference. Before Augustine the chief figure of the age were nobles. Augustine was a common school teacher, and a bishop. After Christ, it is the common folk who make history.

But the palpable darkness of Augustine frightens to me. His profound seriousness is the only relief from human nature. His century is a frightening place.

In comparison to Augustine, Dostoyevsky is a blaze of light.

Before I sleep I read as much Dostoyevsky as I can. Before sleep is best - his work is liminal - that is, on the edge of unconsciousness. Reading him when you first wake up or after meditating seems altogether too cheerful to me, but in the dark hours Dostoyevsky shines.

I'm reading Demons; the new Penguin translation is flat out fine work. Translator was Robert A Maguire. I love how well Penguin has translated his work. Maybe the choppy rough Russian just moves better into modern English than the French? I don't know.

Demons is confusing and superb. First I had trouble with the names, and had to bookmark the cast of characters list at the end of the text and refer to it constantly (I still do a bit). Second I had to deal with the allusive and hysterical way characters have of delivering major plot points. My thinking goes something like this:

"So... Stephan Verkovensky is maybe betrothed to some nobody called Sonya or Dunya who is the protege of his patron Vavarya Stravogina, for manifold deeply suspicous and impure reasons other. But Vavarya's maybe looney son, is returning home soon, bringing along with him Stephan's son who is an unknown and sundry complications. And Kirilov thinks everyone should commit suicide to prove there is no God. And Liputin is a vile gossip who seems to know everything and say nothing. And there is a new governor in town whose wife doesn't like Vavarya Starvogina. And everyone speaks French when they're excited, which is all the time, which is tiresome to deciper into English but simpler than having to stop to look it up in the stupid notes at the end of the Penguin Book because you know what it means anyhow if you stop reading for a minute and dig out the French vocab but that means you have to stop reading to translate French."

Jeebus himself couldn't sort out this kind of absurd mess, but it sort of makes sense, if you ignore the many maybes in the plot. Reading a summary online would take away the surprise and leave the hysterics.

At 17 years of age, when I last read Demons, I doubt I understood it anyhow.

Do you know why I find him funny? Because I really enjoy Dostoyevsky's company. I really like Fyodor Mikhaylovich the man. I empathize with him. I feel his wild humor. I see how he sees the Russian people. Dostoyevsky cannot see the future, the Bolsheviks and the present Russian Mafia kleptocracy. Instead he sees the foolishness genius and passionately misplaced devotion of the Russian intelligentsia to French frivolity and sentimental vacuity a la Russe. He sees it clearly, and sees it fully, accepts it all in himself, and he laughs.

Do I love Dostoyevsky most of all because he laughs at himself? I don't mean him to reduce him to a character out of Gogol. He is much more than anything Gogol could invent.

Hm. Please allow me to help non-Dostoyevsky readers understand what kind of experience they are missing out on:

Reading Dostoyevsky is like being trapped in a big hessian sack with twenty-seven affectionate lapdogs: it's unpleasant at the time but when its over you secretly enjoyed it so much. All those flickering pink tongues. Mmm.

Reading the Aeneid of Virgil, Blow by Blow

I read books 3, 4, 5 and half of book 6 of the Aeneid tonight (so far). Publius Virgilius packs a lot of story in his text. I can best appreciate this work in the light of Homer, the tragedians and Plato; the summation of all story up til his time is simply remarkable. It is is as if Virgil in his epic has set out not simply to tell a story, but to give all Story, the archetype of story-ness, the All-Story. But he is not summing up like Homer; characteristically Roman, Virgil seeks to engulf the memories of stories past. Virgil's Aeneid is a colony poem in more ways than one.

And what about the person, the consciousness of Virgil? I must admit I read Virgil through the more accessibly humane Dante. So much of Dante is clearly enriched by Virgil, that if the character Dante had not kept him at his side the strength of Virgil's poem would have overcome Dante the poet. Keep your literary influences close - this seems to be Dante's approach to Virgil.

Virgil sometimes comes across as a bit of a patchwork man. The story leaps from reference to reference of other men's work - and it works, it flows, but we do not clearly get a sense of the cohent consciousness of a work. At least, not yet. Maybe I ought to read on before I judge the man!

The poetry is fine. I have fiddled with many translations, and chanced on the Fagles-like one by Kline, which is superbly lucid compared to the Dryden (best of the olde translations). Tony Kline's Aeneid is free online, and has the benefit of having the books subdivided into the more precise episodic structure. This means the reader gets to rest without losing the thread, and gets reminders of what the thread was, and the sense of the story stands more clearly out than if we just have books one to twelve. It really helps the read. Also, Kline's version renders words that past generations might have called the 'moral sentiments' into plain emotions, which is a bit more real.

Kline's translation of Aeneid is not fancy, but neither is it pedestrian - the poetry reads simply and roughly into Virgil's luminous verse. Compared with ye olde Englishe translations, with which one needs to stop and mentally retranslate into modern English every dozen lines, Tony Kline's translation is a pleasure to read.

Update: I'm now at book 8, and the patchwork is becoming clearer. It makes better sense how Virgil's exercise in epic poetry is not an end in itself but a means to justify the Roman empire. But I can also see how, by making the poem a means to a political end, Virgil undercuts his personal source of inspiration. One cannot turn such sophisticated and urbane critical and aesthetic faculties onto the legends of the founding of Rome without also uncovering something of a critique of the beautiful lies of armed force. Virgil's falterings really illuminate why the Romans were relatively scarce in creative genius: it is hard work being a good Roman!

Update: Finished. I can see why Virgil didn't finish the poem. love the first half of Aeneid, but the second is like reading Rupert Brooke's war poems for a few thousand lines. Pathos becomes bathos. Lyrical emotion become prim patriotism. By the time Turnus dies it is just dreary, and the rage of Achilles has become the duty of Aeneas. Meh.

Part two Aeneid sucks more than Scylla's whirlpool. I suggest prospective readers read up until the Trojans land in Italy and stop there. For reading pleasure, the first half is superb. Trust me on this one: the Trojans settled Italy just fine.

A New Nonlinear Way to Read Dante Alighieri.

You can get at the nonlinear and visual construction of Dante's Commedia can be got at by the mind by just reading from start to finish, if you want, passing through Inferno to Purgatorio to Paradiso.

But what tends to happen as the reader traverses Inferno is that they stop short somewhere. Perhaps they pause at the gates of Purgatory to watch Venus rise. Or perhaps they stop half way up the mountain at Vergil's second lecture of free will. The mind falls short of the passion of Dante's design. Failing to grasp the beating heart that is the whole piece, intellect grows cold at the foot of the mountain where it ought to fall silent in the transcendent presence of Beatrice at the crown of the summit.

Why?

The answer is the failure to invoke the vegetative soul in the recitation: or, in less Aristotelian terms, the failure to extract the juice and excitement that comes from getting the whole work in a single hit of image, light and song.

Here's the problem: Dante's Commedia is nonlinear. The book unfolds in an acausal structure: Inferno mirrors Purgatorio illuminates Paradiso and back again. And that is on the most gross level of the plot: at the deeper level every image calls to image, like three friends chanting at one another from three mountain peaks in perfect harmony and consonance.

So the Commedia of Dante forms a single field of inspirational power, a matrix of image and idea that must be sensed whole in order to be "read" in any realistic way. In a word, you only begin to read Dante once you have read the whole poem from start to finish and have closed the book and started reflecting.

With that in mind, here's a fresh new nonlinear way to read Dante Alighieri's Commedia:

Start with the three books of the poem in front of you.

Read through Canto One of Paradise, then Canto One of Purgatory, then pass through Canto One of Inferno.

Stop, reflect; then repeat.

Continue moving DOWN from Paradise to Purgatory to Inferno, canto by canto, until you get to Canto 15 of Inferno.

This is the pivotal point in each of the three books. In Canto 15 Inferno Dante is about to ride Geryon into the Abyss to meet those who are actively vicious and aggressive against God. In each book at this point we move into the zone of heightened aliveness after this point.

Now there's a small hitch: the same pivotal point I point to in Inferno 15 occurs in Purgatory in Canto Sixteen and in Paradise in Canto Seventeen. In Purgatory Sixteen Dante ascents on an Eagle's back to the midway gate of the actively virtuous and pure. In Paradise Seventeen Dante attains the vision of the Heaven of Mars, of the warriors for God.

So the suggested nonlinear path is as follows:

Read up to Paradise 15, Purgatory 15, Hell 15.

THEN, reverse the order of readings to put Paradise last instead of first, thusly:

Read Purgatory 16, Paradise 16, Paradise 17.
Read Hell 16, Purgatory 17, Paradise 18.

At this point you will be able to compare the three pivotal points (Hell 15-16, Purgatory 16-17, Paradise 17-18) in the plot. All the threads will come together in the martial action of the midpoint of all three books.

Reflecting on the midpoints, note that Dante deals respectively with vengeance, anger, and courage - the vices and virtues of Mars, and the uses and misuse of the vital energy of the vegetative soul. Notice your gut level reaction to the images and feelings. And notice especially how much Dante has grown as a person from the start of the book to the midpoint.

These are also the points in the poem where the personal psyche ends and the transpersonal realm of begins. From these three midpoints in the poem, Dante the man becomes less important than Dante the Everyman. The universal Dante shines forth.

These pivotal points are a great place to pause and check in, get an overview of the poem, and really stir up a bit of passionate motivation to finish the adventure by taking it all the way to the finish. The Mars archetype acts as a spur to motivation to complete the recitation of the poem.

So, to summarize: we read from Paradise DOWN to Hell through the personal realm, correlating all the expressions together of Dante's individual psyche as it expresses in all three realms, then at the midpoint of each realm we reverse the order of the books and begin the ascent into the transpersonal:

Read Hell 17, Purgatory 18, Paradise 19.

Continue until the end:

Read Hell 34, Purgatory 33, Paradise 33.

The latter half of the three books gives a sort of transcendent play of image and idea that, to my mind, best resembles the leisure of the Olympian gods.

I firmly assert that only readers who have first grasped Dante the man are equipped to make sense of Dante the visionary poet-prophet. In my opinion, we meet Dante the man himself in the first half of each of the three books and Dante the poet in the last halves of the poem.

By reading the first half of each poem to become acquainted with Dante, we motivate ourselves to read the entire poem and discover the entire "good of the human", as Dante puts it.

Augustine's Four Rules of Reading A Book

Today I learnt how Augustine read.

His style of reading reminds me of Dante's letter to his patron Can Grande - no doubt Dante learnt to read through Augustine. But what I was unprepared for was how very wide the gap between Augustine's view of reading and the modern view.

Augustine's rules for reading are (to me at least) still relevant. They are four, and I state them as principles rather than practices because of their general usefulness:

1. PURITY - reading that subserves cravings and appetites distorts the mind's ability to read the text. Maybe a text serves the lower appetites; nevertheless, the meaning of it can only be got at with a mind free of bias and a pure appetite to understand.

2. FAITH - You must suspend disbelief, but you must not suspend belief, in reading. That is to say, faith must be present in reading, and cynicism must be suspending in reading, for comprehension to occur.

I would add that faith can be conditional on historical context or limited to the space of the reading of the text, but it must be present according to Augustine in order to read well.

Faith in the text is primary in making sense of it. Why? Because reading is an inclination of the will and appetite towards clarity and freedom, therefore right from the start the will must be freed from doubt, the enemy of good faith.

These two rules for reading, purity and faith, pertain to the appetites and the will. Purity of appetites and a faithful will are the ends of their application.

3. LOVE - I read Harold Bloom's criticism from love of his mind. Why do I love Bloom's work? Because he has taught me that only by love can I win access through the text to another person's consciousness. For me, as for Bloom, Augustine and Dante, love is the only entree into the mind of greatness. A strong love will take you to the heart of any text.

Simply put, love makes reading and writing worth while. Since reading involves the love of that which reads - in other words, reading is intellectual vanity - the most literate books win the greatest love, since they most intimately put us in contact with that quality of intellectual vanity which does reading. Even more deeply, the love that creates a text and the love that reads the text are the one substance, and the love that carefully appreciates a text arises from the same kind of love as that which created the text. Love is the common human factor in reading and writing.

Criticism without love is worthless. A critic without love, even in the form of courtesy, respect, or polite restraint from abuse, is not worth a hearing. Any misreading (in the sense of Harold Bloom's map of misreadings) that adds love to the text is good or at least harmless.

4. MULTIPLICITY - Simple, clear passages of a text offer a meaning which is unarguably revealed by purity, faith and love. The consensus of informed opinions around a great text is fairly fixed, and there is little freedom in it. But Augustine offers a view of free interpretation of the text in the case of ambiguous passages.

Multiple readings, imagined, invented and supposed, are good and useful when the text is ambiguous and poetic, and when they do not violate the good faith of the text. Obscure passages provide freedom to play and explore the text more fully.

These are Augustine's four rules for reading a book, then. Let's put them in their historical and intellectual context now!

Augustine came to value the pagan tradition negatively, as an example of ignorance and error in human thinking. So much of his rules for reading concern the Christian and Jewish religious writings of his time, many of which came to be our present day bible. Augustine's reading was informed by a deep seriousness or purpose, and a moral and devotional aim.

Perhaps the primary challenge to we moderns is Augustine's stark vision of the human good to be got from reading. But Augustine differs not greatly in this from Samuel Johnson, who read voraciously and judged by very high standards of moral purity.

I suppose the biggest difference from we moderns is the more broad sense of what is proper in books - we are less offended and less corrupted, I suppose, by impure and appetite-stimulating images or words. Perhaps it is because we are so constantly overfull with stimuli, that we end up becoming accustomed or unaffected to the tides of vicious and sex-loaded content or screens and pages wash up. Certainly we seem to inhabit an alien and noisy world compared to the agrarian north African environment of Augustine.

Take these rules, then, as you will... a stimulus to your reading more spiritedly, or a window on a kind of reading past and long gone.