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Letter to John Brazer 24 Aug 1819

You ask my opinion on the extent to which classical learning should be carried in our country. A sickly condition permits me to think and a rheumatic hand to write too briefly on this litigated question. The utilities we derive from the remains of the Greek and Latin languages are, first, as models of pure taste in writing. To these we are certainly indebted for the national and chaste style of modern composition which so much distinguishes the nations to whom these languages are familiar. Without these models we should probably have continued the inflated style of our northern ancestors, or the hyperbolical and vague one of the east. Second, among the values of classical learning, I estimate the luxury of reading the Greek and Roman authors in all the beauties of their originals. And why should not this innocent and elegant luxury take its preeminent stand ahead of all those addressed merely to the senses? I think myself more indebted to my father for this than for all the other luxuries his cares and affections have placed within my reach; and more now than when younger, and more susceptible of delights from other sources. When the decays of age have enfeebled the useful energies of the mind, the classic pages fill up the vacuum of ennui, and become sweet composers to that rest of the grave into which we are all sooner or later to descend. A third value is in the stores of real science deposited and transmitted us in these languages, to-wit: in history, ethics, arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and natural history.

But to whom are these things useful? Certainly not to all men. There are conditions of life to which they must be forever estranged, and there are epochs of life too, after which the endeavor to attain them would be a great misemployment of time. Their acquisition should be the occupation of our early years only, when the memory is susceptible of deep and lasting impressions, and reason and judgment not yet strong enough for abstract speculations. To the moralist they are valuable, because they furnish ethical writings highly and justly esteemed: although in my own opinion, the moderns are far advanced beyond them in this line of science, the divine finds in the Greek language a translation of his primary code, of more importance to him than the original because better understood; and, in the same language, the newer code, with the doctrines of the earliest fathers, who lived and wrote before the simple precepts of the founder of this most benign and pure of all systems of morality became frittered into subtleties and mysteries, and hidden under jargons incomprehensible to the human mind. To these original sources he must now, therefore, return, to recover the virgin purity of his religion. The lawyer finds in the Latin language the system of civil law most conformable with the principles of justice of any which has ever yet been established among men, and from which much has been incorporated into our own. The physician as good a code of his art as has been given us to this day. Theories and systems of medicine, indeed, have been in perpetual change from the days of the good Hippocrates to the days of the good Rush, but which of them is the true one? The present, to be sure, as long as it is the present, but to yield its place in turn to the next novelty, which is then to become the true system, and is to mark the vast advance of medicine since the days of Hippocrates. Our situation is certainly benefited by the discovery of some new and very valuable medicines; and substituting those for some of his with the treasure of facts, and of sound observations recorded by him (mixed to be sure with anilities of his day) and we shall have nearly the present sum of the healing art. The statesman will find in these languages history, politics, mathematics, ethics, eloquence, love of country, to which he must add the sciences of his own day, for which of them should be unknown to him? And all the sciences must recur to the classical languages for the etymon, and sound understanding of their fundamental terms. For the merchant I should not say that the languages are a necessary. Ethics, mathematics, geography, political economy, history, seem to constitute the immediate foundations of his calling. The agriculturist needs ethics, mathematics, chemistry and natural philosophy. The mechanic the same. To them the languages are but ornament and comfort. I know it is often said there have been shining examples of men of great abilities in all the businesses of life, without any other science than what they had gathered from conversations and intercourse with the world. But who can say what these men would not have been had they started in the science on the shoulders of a Demosthenes or Cicero, of a Locke or Bacon, or a Newton? To sum the whole, therefore, it may truly be said that the classical languages are a solid basis for most, and an ornament to all the sciences.

By Henry David Thoreau, “Reading” from Walden

The student may read Homer or Æschylus in the Greek without danger of dissipation or luxuriousness, for it implies that he in some measure emulate their heroes, and consecrate morning hours to their pages. The heroic books, even if printed in the character of our mother tongue, will always be in a language dead to degenerate times; and we must laboriously seek the meaning of each word and line, conjecturing a larger sense than common use permits out of what wisdom and valor and generosity we have. The modern cheap and fertile press, with all its translations, has done little to bring us nearer to the heroic writers of antiquity. They seem as solitary, and the letter in which they are printed as rare and curious, as ever. It is worth the expense of youthful days and costly hours, if you learn only some words of an ancient language, which are raised out of the trivialness of the street, to be perpetual suggestions and provocations. It is not in vain that the farmer remembers and repeats the few Latin words which he has heard. Men sometimes speak as if the study of the classics would at length make way for more modern and practical studies; but the adventurous student will always study classics, in whatever language they may be written and however ancient they may be. For what are the classics but the noblest recorded thoughts of man? They are the only oracles which are not decayed, and there are such answers to the most modern inquiry in them as Delphi and Dodona never gave. We might as well omit to study Nature because she is old. To read well, that is, to read true books in a true spirit, is a noble exercise, and one that will task the reader more than any exercise which the customs of the day esteem. It requires a training such as the athletes underwent, the steady intention almost of the whole life to this object. Books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written. It is not enough even to be able to speak the language of that nation by which they are written, for there is a memorable interval between the spoken and the written language, the language heard and the language read. The one is commonly transitory, a sound, a tongue, a dialect merely, almost brutish, and we learn it unconsciously, like the brutes, of our mothers. The other is the maturity and experience of that; if that is our mother tongue, this is our father tongue, a reserved and select expression, too significant to be heard by the ear, which we must be born again in order to speak. The crowds of men who merely spoke the Greek and Latin tongues in the Middle Ages were not entitled by the accident of birth to read the works of genius written in those languages; for these were not written in that Greek or Latin which they knew, but in the select language of literature. They had not learned the nobler dialects of Greece and Rome, but the very materials on which they were written were waste paper to them, and they prized instead a cheap contemporary literature. But when the several nations of Europe had acquired distinct though rude written languages of their own, sufficient for the purposes of their rising literatures, then first learning revived, and scholars were enabled to discern from that remoteness the treasures of antiquity. What the Roman and Grecian multitude could not hear, after the lapse of ages a few scholars read, and a few scholars only are still reading it.

However much we may admire the orator’s occasional bursts of eloquence, the noblest written words are commonly as far behind or above the fleeting spoken language as the firmament with its stars is behind the clouds. There are the stars, and they who can may read them. The astronomers forever comment on and observe them. They are not exhalations like our daily colloquies and vaporous breath. What is called eloquence in the forum is commonly found to be rhetoric in the study. The orator yields to the inspiration of a transient occasion, and speaks to the mob before him, to those who can hear him; but the writer, whose more equable life is his occasion, and who would be distracted by the event and the crowd which inspire the orator, speaks to the intellect and health of mankind, to all in any age who can understand him.

No wonder that Alexander carried the Iliad with him on his expeditions in a precious casket. A written word is the choicest of relics. It is something at once more intimate with us and more universal than any other work of art. It is the work of art nearest to life itself. It may be translated into every language, and not only be read but actually breathed from all human lips;–not be represented on canvas or in marble only, but be carved out of the breath of life itself. The symbol of an ancient man’s thought becomes a modern man’s speech. Two thousand summers have imparted to the monuments of Grecian literature, as to her marbles, only a maturer golden and autumnal tint, for they have carried their own serene and celestial atmosphere into all lands to protect them against the corrosion of time. Books are the treasured wealth of the world and the fit inheritance of generations and nations. Books, the oldest and the best, stand naturally and rightfully on the shelves of every cottage. They have no cause of their own to plead, but while they enlighten and sustain the reader his common sense will not refuse them. Their authors are a natural and irresistible aristocracy in every society, and, more than kings or emperors, exert an influence on mankind. When the illiterate and perhaps scornful trader has earned by enterprise and industry his coveted leisure and independence, and is admitted to the circles of wealth and fashion, he turns inevitably at last to those still higher but yet inaccessible circles of intellect and genius, and is sensible only of the imperfection of his culture and the vanity and insufficiency of all his riches, and further proves his good sense by the pains which be takes to secure for his children that intellectual culture whose want he so keenly feels; and thus it is that he becomes the founder of a family.

Those who have not learned to read the ancient classics in the language in which they were written must have a very imperfect knowledge of the history of the human race; for it is remarkable that no transcript of them has ever been made into any modern tongue, unless our civilization itself may be regarded as such a transcript. Homer has never yet been printed in English, nor Æschylus, nor Virgil even–works as refined, as solidly done, and as beautiful almost as the morning itself; for later writers, say what we will of their genius, have rarely, if ever, equaled the elaborate beauty and finish and the lifelong and heroic literary labors of the ancients. They only talk of forgetting them who never knew them. It will be soon enough to forget them when we have the learning and the genius which will enable us to attend to and appreciate them. That age will be rich indeed when those relics which we call Classics, and the still older and more than classic but even less known Scriptures of the nations, shall have still further accumulated, when the Vaticans shall be filled with Vedas and Zendavestas and Bibles, with Homers and Dantes and Shakespeares, and all the centuries to come shall have successively deposited their trophies in the forum of the world. By such a pile we may hope to scale heaven at last.

The works of the great poets have never yet been read by mankind, for only great poets can read them. They have only been read as the multitude read the stars, at most astrologically, not astronomically. Most men have learned to read to serve a paltry convenience, as they have learned to cipher in order to keep accounts and not be cheated in trade; but of reading as a noble intellectual exercise they know little or nothing; yet this only is reading, in a high sense, not that which lulls us as a luxury and suffers the nobler faculties to sleep the while, but what we have to stand on tip-toe to read and devote our most alert and wakeful hours to.

I think that having learned our letters we should read the best that is in literature, and not be forever repeating our a-b-abs, and words of one syllable, in the fourth or fifth classes, sitting on the lowest and foremost form all our lives. Most men are satisfied if they read or hear read, and perchance have been convicted by the wisdom of one good book, the Bible, and for the rest of their lives vegetate and dissipate their faculties in what is called easy reading. There is a work in several volumes in our Circulating Library entitled “Little Reading,” which I thought referred to a town of that name which I had not been to. There are those who, like cormorants and ostriches, can digest all sorts of this, even after the fullest dinner of meats and vegetables, for they suffer nothing to be wasted. If others are the machines to provide this provender, they are the machines to read it. They read the nine thousandth tale about Zebulon and Sophronia, and how they loved as none had ever loved before, and neither did the course of their true love run smooth–at any rate, how it did run and stumble, and get up again and go on! how some poor unfortunate got up on to a steeple, who had better never have gone up as far as the belfry; and then, having needlessly got him up there, the happy novelist rings the bell for all the world to come together and hear, O dear! how he did get down again! For my part, I think that they had better metamorphose all such aspiring heroes of universal noveldom into man weather-cocks, as they used to put heroes among the constellations, and let them swing round there till they are rusty, and not come down at all to bother honest men with their pranks. The next time the novelist rings the bell I will not stir though the meeting-house burn down. “The Skip of the Tip-Toe-Hop, a Romance of the Middle Ages, by the celebrated author of ‘Tittle-Tol-Tan,’ to appear in monthly parts; a great rush; don’t all come together.” All this they read with saucer eyes, and erect and primitive curiosity, and with unwearied gizzard, whose corrugations even yet need no sharpening, just as some little four-year-old bencher his two-cent gilt-covered edition of Cinderella–without any improvement, that I can see, in the pronunciation, or accent, or emphasis, or any more skill in extracting or inserting the moral. The result is dulness of sight, a stagnation of the vital circulations, and a general deliquium and sloughing off of all the intellectual faculties. This sort of gingerbread is baked daily and more sedulously than pure wheat or rye-and-Indian in almost every oven, and finds a surer market.

The best books are not read even by those who are called good readers. What does our Concord culture amount to? There is in this town, with a very few exceptions, no taste for the best or for very good books even in English literature, whose words all can read and spell. Even the college-bred and so-called liberally educated men here and elsewhere have really little or no acquaintance with the English classics; and as for the recorded wisdom of mankind, the ancient classics and Bibles, which are accessible to all who will know of them, there are the feeblest efforts anywhere made to become acquainted with them. I know a woodchopper, of middle age, who takes a French paper, not for news as he says, for he is above that, but to “keep himself in practice,” he being a Canadian by birth; and when I ask him what he considers the best thing he can do in this world, he says, beside this, to keep up and add to his English. This is about as much as the college-bred generally do or aspire to do, and they take an English paper for the purpose. One who has just come from reading perhaps one of the best English books will find how many with whom he can converse about it? Or suppose he comes from reading a Greek or Latin classic in the original, whose praises are familiar even to the so-called illiterate; he will find nobody at all to speak to, but must keep silence about it. Indeed, there is hardly the professor in our colleges, who, if he has mastered the difficulties of the language, has proportionally mastered the difficulties of the wit and poetry of a Greek poet, and has any sympathy to impart to the alert and heroic reader; and as for the sacred Scriptures, or Bibles of mankind, who in this town can tell me even their titles? Most men do not know that any nation but the Hebrews have had a scripture. A man, any man, will go considerably out of his way to pick up a silver dollar; but here are golden words, which the wisest men of antiquity have uttered, and whose worth the wise of every succeeding age have assured us of;–and yet we learn to read only as far as Easy Reading, the primers and class-books, and when we leave school, the “Little Reading,” and story-books, which are for boys and beginners; and our reading, our conversation and thinking, are all on a very low level, worthy only of pygmies and manikins.

I aspire to be acquainted with wiser men than this our Concord soil has produced, whose names are hardly known here. Or shall I hear the name of Plato and never read his book? As if Plato were my townsman and I never saw him–my next neighbor and I never heard him speak or attended to the wisdom of his words. But how actually is it? His Dialogues, which contain what was immortal in him, lie on the next shelf, and yet I never read them. We are underbred and low-lived and illiterate; and in this respect I confess I do not make any very broad distinction between the illiterateness of my townsman who cannot read at all and the illiterateness of him who has learned to read only what is for children and feeble intellects. We should be as good as the worthies of antiquity, but partly by first knowing how good they were. We are a race of tit-men, and soar but little higher in our intellectual flights than the columns of the daily papers of the mind, the classick pages fill up the vacuum of ennui, and become sweet composers to that rest of the grave into which we are all sooner or later to descend.”

By Elizabeth Renter, Natural Society

If you’re a reader, chances are there are a few books that stand out as having changed the way you thought about something. Far more than just a little escapism, books have the ability to change our lives, and as a new study shows—they can even change our brain chemistry.

Researchers from Emory University in Atlanta published their work in the journal Brain Connectivity, where they revealed reading a novel can have lasting effects on the brain.

For the study, 21 undergraduates were recruited to read the novel Pompeii, by Robery Harris. Written in 2003, the volume follows a protagonist as he watches the impending eruption of Mount Vesuvius from afar. It’s a thriller and has a “strong narrative line”, something the researchers thought important when choosing the book. More details

By Elizabeth Renter, Natural Society

Pollution isn’t only a concern when you’re outdoors—it’s a concern in your home as well. From the carpet on the floor to the cleaning products you might use, there are numerous contaminants that could be infiltrating your domicile. Ideally you would replace these toxic substances with less toxic counterparts, but that isn’t always practical. Fortunately, research has shown certain houseplants to have air-purifying effects that can make it easier to breathe while beautifying your surroundings. Learn more

Recent studies have shown that young people are under unprecedented stress.  They are concerned about their weight, concerned about their grades, being bullied and bombarded with pornography from every direction.  Learn more via The Independant.

We, as adults and parents, must step in and give the next generation hope and a reason to live a healthy, happy life. We must create an environment where young people are allowed to live a life of happiness and accomplishment.  At The McCarthy Project, we pledge to create programs and events that give young people the tools they need to complete this process.

Control Thru Numbers or The Art of Life, Which One?

By Stephen McCarthy, The McCarthy Project

Over the last couple months, the words “philosophy of science” have continued to pop up.  What does it mean?  For as long as I remember, the two subjects are stand-alone forms, right?  But then one of those revelation moments came and I realized that life is not about predictive, controlled programming, it is meant to be an art form with science added for additional information.

I would challenge you to start developing your thoughts individual viewpoints around the concept of philosophy of science.  It will lead you to places that few people have traveled and revelations of new ideas are available.  Here are the conversations and books I read over the last couple weeks that lead me to realize that life can bee seen differently.

Kurt Lewin, The Principles of Topological Psychology, the first part of the book is around the concepts of philosophy of science, Greek logic, and experiments that can be proven scientifically.

A conversation with Travis Zins, strength coach at St. Cloud State University and Shaun Myszka, performance coach at Explosive Edge, on the concept of periodization and the lack of time and control that even the big time coaches have with athletes.  The constraints lead back to the art of training, not science.

Lastly, Cal Dietz, strength coach at the University of Minnesota, just posted an essay on a new paradigm in coaching athletes.  Hard core, make you puke workouts, don’t make better athletes.  See the entire post here.

In the end, we must realize that how we view life and the philosophy that we act out with our life is just as important to what “research says.”

Risk and the Role it Plays in Success in Life and Sport

Dr. Mary Riddel, professor at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas, recently posted an article entitled, “Risky Recreation.”  She discussed the role that risk plays in the life of extreme sports.  On the show today, Stephen and Dr. Riddel discussed how risk plays out in everyday life, as well as, sport.

Secondly, Dr. Riddel covered the concept of “too much risk”, “not enough risk” and the balance between each one in the real world.

For the complete show, click here.

Mary Riddel, chair of the economics department and a Beam Research Fellow in the Lee Business School at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas. Mary has built a national reputation in environmental economics and risk through her contributions to the Center for Business and Economic Research at UNLV.

By Stephen McCarthy, The McCarthy Project

In today’s world of technology and organized sports, our young people have become more inactive than previous generations.   Who remembers going to building a tree fort for hours and then climbing the tree to get to it.  Playing pond hockey for hour after hour after hour.  Playing basketball in the driveway in the winter time for hours.

Peter Ling in his 19th century work called Home Gymnastics says,

“It is a fact that a person who likes and practices physical exercise has purer habits of life, and-greater power of resisting temptation, than a person who is physically weak and effeminate, and who gives himself up to unsound enjoyments and expensive but injurious habits.

Daily physical exercise suppresses the morbid craving for pleasure; a right amount of physical work produces a sense of satisfaction and a happier frame of mind, through which nervousness and the feeling of discomfort are banished. “Happiness is the best nerve tonic.

A person who is bodily and morally strong is usually good-natured ; he is not easily excited, and his temper is far more under control than that of a person who is weak and delicate. He is free from cowardice, and scorns everything false and ugly, every fraud and deception in word or action; he values honor and loyalty, honesty, and the sense of duty. He is not susceptible to small complaints, sentimentality, or fussiness. A person bodily and morally weak is mostly occupied with thoughts of his health; if he can endure this or that exertion, whether he can digest this or that food; how he must dress in order not to take cold in the house or outside. He loses all power of endurance, enjoyment of life, and confidence in himself. He causes his friends inconvenience and anxiety, while a strong and sound person is of use to his neighbors.

Parents and teachers should avoid too much cautiousness in the education of children; they ought not to keep children confined to the house for a slight cold, catarrh, or headache; physical exercise in the open air is often the best remedy.

Young people should be instructed in the significance and care of all the different organs of the body, including the development, significance, and hygienic care of the generative organs; they should know of the harm they can inflict upon themselves through care lessness and ignorance.

Young people should learn first and foremost for their own sakes, but also from a purely national point of view, how to take care of their bodies and health, so that they may have a real foundation of physical and moral strength when they become older, and in their turn build a home and family. We should remember that the moral power of a nation ultimately depends upon the moral strength of the individual and the home, and that good examples are of the great est importance in education.” pg. 20-21

We as a society must find a way to return to our ways of building moral and physical health, to increase our young people’s activity level outside of organized sports and organized, periodized strength training. Their future and the future generation’s happiness and quality of life depend on it.