Dear MCC Readers,
I want to praise the good taste of those of you who have chosen to pay for a subscription. Thank you. You deserve good things. So I will be putting together 10 minute or so pieces after each lecture just for those subscribers.
For tomorrow’s first “premium” piece, I will discuss a hilarious and strikingly relevant interview that Bradbury gave as well as a couple of reflections on the limitations of book learning that Plato points out in his Phaedrus. As much as Bradbury and Plato both admire books, they are also keenly aware of the tradeoffs that attend intensive book learning.
I am writing the lecture on Jack London’s Call of the Wild now. I’m aiming for Wednesday, December 15th to put it out. If you have never read it, I highly recommend it. I was personally very skeptical of even picking it up; humans are interesting, dogs are less so. But the book offers striking thoughts on the tradeoffs that attend being civilized and orients us towards not forgetting that we need a kind of fierceness or barbaric edge in order to maintain the good things that civilized life offers us. Besides this, there are a couple of lyrical passages on primordial vitality that sound down right Nietzschean (and Jack London’s book Sea Wolf confirms that he has indeed spent time explicitly considering Nietzsche). It is a short and pleasing read and strikes me as a great book to get middle schoolers or young high schoolers excited about reading; and not only this—they will see how soft they are but begin to realize how strong they might become.
With happy winter tidings,
Brian C. Wilson