Wednesday, February 24, 2010

Immensely long perspective...


Albert Jay Nock on classical education:

The literature of Greece and Rome comprise the longest and fullest continuous record available to us of what the human mind has been busy about in practically every department of spiritual and social activity... The record covers twenty-five hundred consecutive years o the human mind's operations in poetry, drama, law, agriculture, philosophy, architecture, natural history, philology, rhetoric, astronomy, politics, medicine, theology, geography, everything. Hence the mind that has attentively canvassed this record is not only a disciplined mind but an experienced mind; a mind that instinctively views any contemporary phenomenon from the vantage-point of an immensely long perspective attained through this profound and weighty experience of the human spirit's operations. If I may paraphrase the words of Emerson, this discipline brings us into the feeling of an immense longevity, and maintains us in it.
~T. L. Simmons, Climbing Parnassus, pp.156-157

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