Tag: classical literature

The cult classics

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For a while now, I’ve been reading The Nicomachean Ethics, taking it slowly—two or three pages at a time—in the morning with a fresh mind after a full night’s sleep; and perhaps it’s my own ignorance talking, but I’ve never read such a bland and uninspiring text that I found myself glancing with a modicum of sympathy at the washing machine’s instruction manual lying on the shelf above it. It’s like with the old silent films that have become cult classics—you appreciate their importance to the development of cinematography, but you can’t resist yawning while watching them.

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Reading the Apology

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[…] not by wisdom do poets write poetry, but by a sort of genius and inspiration; they are like diviners or soothsayers who also say many fine things but do not understand the meaning of them.
Plato, Apology

Although not without its jocosities,
as well as its tragedies, life is mostly filled
with a farrago of inconveniences,
so, with a soft spot for magpies,
while mastering the implements
of idle chatter and flamboyance of gesture,
being the reserved ignoramus I am, I shrug
in front of it, just as I did
when I first met Platocrates—
not with resentment but relief.
After all, he gave me a dispensation
from intellectualism.

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The legacy

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qui dolorem ipsum, quia dolor sit
De finibus bonorum et malorum, Marcus Tullius Cicero

How can I not pity
the old beggar Cicero
for his most read text
being Lorem ipsum?

But I guess that suffices
for an indifficile reader
content with the life
of a tourist—myself.

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To those of numbered days

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Non est ad astra mollis e terris via.
Seneca, Hercules Furens

Chiefly British, often archaic, like a gobemouche
that found his snollygoster, Mr Honk wandered
the streets of the long-lost home town he no longer recognised
the buildings of—the trees were still the same, though, just mightier—
and muttered under his breath, ‘Signed, Kushim’; finding it ironic
that the first name ever recorded was that of an accountant, not a poet,
but in response he only heard the cries of the peacocks in the palace park—
a sensory room full of adjectified characters, heroes of the complex sentence
or the old man’s indifference, one calls the lost passion for the morass
of mundane concerns—knowing full well that he was nothing
but a talkative ape descendant facing the level three chaos:
per quietem ad terram.

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The unbridled

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Mr Honk always wondered what was expected of him.
Something, for sure; otherwise, what would be the point?
Especially since, despite his name, he was a rather quiet fella,
without much of an ambition of his own or a seminal act
of cowardice—nothing beyond low tea with the provost
Barbariccia or collecting the whole Everyman’s Library
and actually reading it, and all because of a hunch
that there may be maybe in the sure.

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