Ancient guides for shopping, bathing, dining, and dealing with drunk relatives

Edited by Morris Dean

When researchers find more than one fragment of an ancient text, they know that it was popular in antiquity. We consulted “Ancient Greek manuscripts reveal life lessons from the Roman empire,” by Alison Flood, Guardian, February 10. Excerpt:

Third Monday Random

When is enough?

By motomynd

When is the time to stop learning, and instead start sharing the knowledge of a lifetime, no matter if lived well or not? At some point, cramming more information into a fading brain so you can take it to the great beyond, makes as little sense as buying countless diamonds so you can have them sprinkled in your casket and buried with you.

Laughter, too, as well as love and learning

Story behind photo

As a result of writing yesterday's post—or rather of dislodging its concluding joke ("It's probably because of all the meat they eat")—I have added "laughter" to Moristotle's masthead. Its tag used to read, "An ironic celebration of evolved life, love, and learning on Earth."
    Now the masthead says, "An ironic celebration of evolved life, love, laughter, and learning on Earth."

And how do we celebrate laughter?
    By more laughing, of course.
    Same as we properly celebrate love by loving, life by living, and learning by continuing to learn.
    Fortunately, the best learning comes from loving and living, especially when we can laugh about it.
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Footnote: The photo initially published with this post came from a quick google, which netted a group of anonymous, mixed-race, but all young people. To me, at the time, it was a photo of laughing people. Nevertheless, I decided to replace the photo with my favorite one of myself laughing. I guess it could be titled, "Laughing Oldster."

    Here's the first photo I considered using. I didn't decide against it because the individual laughing isn't human. He (she?) is higher-animal enough for me. But somehow we can't be entirely sure that that is a laugh, we are that different from chimpanzees.

Good on you, oh my reader!

Your sincere travail will not go unrewarded. Some recent critical references to “institutional education” on another blog made me realize that I very much cherish my own such education. I learned to form clear letters from dear Mrs. Zelpha Bennett, my nuturing third-grade teacher, learned to cherish ancient learning from Mr. Morris Knudsen, my cosmopolitan high-school Latin teacher, was introduced to “The Great Books” by Mr. Charles Albert King, my visionary high-school history teacher, read Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species and novels by Thomas Hardy and others for Miss Lois Thompson, my devoted high-school English teacher, acquired a love mathematics and proofs from Mr. Loren Court, my passionate math instructor, majored in philosophy at Yale University (which Mr. Court recommended I apply to), where I immersed myself in Plato, St. Thomas Aquinas, Descartes, David Hume, Immanuel Kant, Soren Kierkegaard, Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, and other philosophers, read a smattering of the world's religion texts, and discovered the work of Sigmund Freud, Leon Festinger, and a number of others. I feel richly blessed by my institutional education and its book learning. A friend shared with me today that he and his wife went through a phase with their homeschooled son in which he would do nothing but read for hours on end. His wife told the local principal, “I don't know what to do. He won't do any of his workbooks. He just reads.” “He reads?” said the principal. “Don't do anything!” I also feel richly blessed by my intuitive learning, which often “overcomes me” out in the garden—while I'm raking leaves, mowing grass, digging holes to plant, moving rocks to line paths. Life and learning are glorious, and institutional and life learning can come together in a beautiful, mutually supportive mosaic. At least, I feel that my own learning experiences have done so. Perhaps I am unusually blessed, but I can hardly credit that conceit. Good on you all, to overrunning cup!