travel and the lure of the smartphone

Alan Turing’s notion of a “universal machine” is the founding insight of the computer revolution, and today’s smartphones are the fullest embodiment of that idea we’ve yet realized, which is what makes them irresistible to so many of us. Many of us, I suppose, have at times made a mental list of the devices we once owned that...

some things about The Thing Itself

I had a really wonderful time in Cambridge the other night talking with Adam Roberts, Francis Spufford, and Rowan Williams about Adam’s novel The Thing Itself and related matters. But it turns out that there are a great many related matters, so since we parted I can’t stop thinking about all the issues I wish we had had time to...

why blog?

The chief reason I blog is to create a kind of accountability to my own reading and thinking. Blogging is a way of thinking out loud and in public, which also means that people can respond — and often those responses are helpful in shaping further thoughts. But even if I got no responses, putting my ideas out here would still be...

the Roman world and ours, continued

To pick up where I left off last time: Imagine that you are a historian in the far future: say, a hundred thousand years from now. Isn’t it perfectly possible that from that vantage point the rise of the United States as a global power might be seen primarily as a development in the history of the Roman Empire? To you, future...

with sincere thanks

I get quite a few unsolicited emails from people who want me to do something for them, and many of those emails end with “Thank you,” “Thank you for your time,” “Thanks for your attention,” and so on. It has never occurred to me to think that such people were doing anything inappropriate; in fact, it...

the Roman world and ours

So why am I reading about — I’m gonna coin a phrase here — the decline and fall of the Roman Empire? It started as part of my work on Auden. I first learned about Charles Norris Cochrane’s Christianity and Classical Culture from reading Auden’s review of it, published in The New Republic in 1944. Auden began that review by...

synopsis of Cochrane’s Christianity and Classical Culture

Augustus, by uniting virtue and fortune in himself (viii, 174), established “the final triumph of creative politics,” solving “the problem of the classical commonwealth” (32). For a Christian with Tertullian’s view of things, the “deification of imperial virtue” that accompanied this...

Virgil and adversarial subtlety

So, back to Virgil … (Sorry about the spelling, Professor Roberts.) What do we know about Virgil’s reputation in his own time and soon thereafter? We know that Augustus Caesar brought the poet into his circle and understood the Aeneid to articulate his own vision for his regime. We know that the same educational system that...

two great things that work great together

a small crisis in my life as a reader

I mentioned in my previous post that I’ve been re-reading Charles Norris Cochrane’s Christianity and Classical Culture, but I’m doing so in some perplexity. Here’s my copy of the beautiful Liberty Fund reissue of the book, with its perfectly sewn binding and creamy thick paper (available, you should know, at a...