It's fun to see how all these themes are reflected in the scriptures and in all good art, and how ancient classic literature is referred to often to this day. I was watching the old movie The Sound and the Fury and Joanne Woodward's great line "It's positively Greek!" was suddenly funny and meaningful. We have been using as our outline/booklist Fadiman's' The New Lifetime Reading Plan but, finding that he has a decidedly politically correct bent, we are going to add to his list. A great help has been Elizabeth Kantor's The Politically Incorrect Guide to English and American Literature which I just finished reading. (It was glorious -- I felt like I had taken the college course I always wished existed. More on this later.) Also, Reading the Classics with C. S. Lewis is helping to fill in the gaps. It is turning out to be a lot of fun to read with my 28-year-old daughter, the intellectual, and my 75-year-old mother, the sage. I suppose I'm the realist.
Friday, January 12, 2007
It's positively Greek!
About our little Classics Club, one day Camille, Janice, and Julia, representing 3 generations, decided to embark on a lifetime educational journey, exploring world literature from the beginning, hoping to learn some geography and history in the process. (Anyone is welcome to join us any time -- see the link above.) After battling through Homer's Iliad, sailing through his Odyssey, and pondering through Confucius, we are now reading Greek plays (Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides) finding to our delight that human nature, goodness, and truth are timeless and universal and that knowledge is wealth. Yesterday I read from Euripides' Hippolytus, "My hands are clean. It is my soul that's fouled." (The queen is secretly in love with her stepson and she's trying to fight temptation and evil.)
It's fun to see how all these themes are reflected in the scriptures and in all good art, and how ancient classic literature is referred to often to this day. I was watching the old movie The Sound and the Fury and Joanne Woodward's great line "It's positively Greek!" was suddenly funny and meaningful. We have been using as our outline/booklist Fadiman's' The New Lifetime Reading Plan but, finding that he has a decidedly politically correct bent, we are going to add to his list. A great help has been Elizabeth Kantor's The Politically Incorrect Guide to English and American Literature which I just finished reading. (It was glorious -- I felt like I had taken the college course I always wished existed. More on this later.) Also, Reading the Classics with C. S. Lewis is helping to fill in the gaps. It is turning out to be a lot of fun to read with my 28-year-old daughter, the intellectual, and my 75-year-old mother, the sage. I suppose I'm the realist.
It's fun to see how all these themes are reflected in the scriptures and in all good art, and how ancient classic literature is referred to often to this day. I was watching the old movie The Sound and the Fury and Joanne Woodward's great line "It's positively Greek!" was suddenly funny and meaningful. We have been using as our outline/booklist Fadiman's' The New Lifetime Reading Plan but, finding that he has a decidedly politically correct bent, we are going to add to his list. A great help has been Elizabeth Kantor's The Politically Incorrect Guide to English and American Literature which I just finished reading. (It was glorious -- I felt like I had taken the college course I always wished existed. More on this later.) Also, Reading the Classics with C. S. Lewis is helping to fill in the gaps. It is turning out to be a lot of fun to read with my 28-year-old daughter, the intellectual, and my 75-year-old mother, the sage. I suppose I'm the realist.
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1 comment:
OOOOOHH! I'm the intelectual! That's very excitementy. It's fun reading with you. Good pictures!
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