45/1001 - Jason Baxter, Plato, and Tolkien

Tuesday, March 25th, 2025

The feast of the Annunciation and Gondor's New Year's Day

Essay: Chapter 3 of Jason Baxter's book Why Literature Still Matters

What I remember most is his excellent proof of how much we moderns equate speed with beauth

Short story: I am cheating on this one. I'm counting Chapter 7 of Plato's Republic as my short story, mainly because it starts with the story of the men chained to the wall of the cave. 

I know I read part of this several years ago, but this was my first time reading the whole chapter. I want to read the entire Republic now. It was fascinating how un-ancient it felt. People seem to be pretty much the same yesterday and today. We aren't immutable, but neither are we unrecognizable across millennia. He emphasizes people wanting to speed things up, too, which related to Baxter's essay. 

So much Charlotte Mason in here, too. He pretty much spells out the science of relations:

Socrates: After that time those who are selected from the class of twenty years old will be promoted to higher honor, and the sciences which they learned without any order in their early education will now be brought together, and they will be able to see the natural relationship of them to one another and to true being.

Glaucon: Yes, that is the only kind of knowledge which takes lasting root.

Poem:

In honor of it being the day the Ring was destroyed in Mt. Doom, I chose Sam's song from The Return of the King:

In western lands beneath the Sun 

  the flowers may rise in Spring, 

the trees may bud, the waters run, 

  the merry finches sing.

Or there maybe 'tis cloudless night 

  and swaying beeches bear 

the Elven-stars as jewels white 

  amid their branching hair. 

Though here at journey's end I lie 

  in darkness buried deep, 

beyond all towers strong and high, 

  beyond all mountains steep, 

above all shadows rides the Sun 

  and Stars for ever dwell:

I will not say the Day is done, 

  nor bid the Stars farewell.