The Aeneid

Virgil's word choice for the introduction to this book has always interested me very much, and this particular translation caught my eye because it keeps the flow, though in a different meter, of the original, and has a rhyme scheme, which helps the english version maintain energy. Here is the introduction in verse english (translated by Dryden), and in the original latin:

Arms, and the man I sing, who, forc'd by fate,
And haughty Juno's unrelenting hate,
Expell'd and exil'd, left the Trojan shore.
Long labors, both by sea and land, he bore,
And in the doubtful war, before he won
The Latian realm, and built the destin'd town;
His banish'd gods restor'd to rites divine,
And settled sure succession in his line,
From whence the race of Alban fathers come,
And the long glories of majestic Rome.

Arma virumque cano, Troiae qui primus ab oris
Italiam, fato profugus, Laviniaque venit
litora, multum ille et terris iactatus et alto
vi superum saevae memorem Iunonis ob iram;
multa quoque et bello passus, dum conderet urbem,
inferretque deos Latio, genus unde Latinum,
Albanique patres, atque altae moenia Romae.

Reading through the Formalism lens i noticed how Virgil chooses the word 'altae' to describe Rome, which normally is accepted to mean 'high', which is a word often used to describe the Christian heaven. I also noticed the translator's word choice in this passage, and i am thoroughly impressed by the fact that he was able to create a translation that sounded like poetry without losing most of the meaning of the passage. I also find it interesting how Virgil describes Aeneas' eventual location as a "Lavinian shore" (referencing the woman Aeneas meets there, named Lavinia) and though this may seem crucial Dryden chooses to leave this out.

The Aeneid (1-140)

Earlier in the year we read The Odyssey, a story of a Greek hero escaping troy and having a perilous journey home. The Aeneid is a very similar story, but instead of a victiorious greek excaping, it is a fleeing trojan named Aeneas. In This portion, Jupiter sends Mercury, his messanger, to go talk to aeneas, and i particularly liked the description here.

Jove had spoken. Mercury made ready at once to obey the reat commands of his almighty father. First he fastens under his feet the golden sandals, winged to sweep him over the waves and earth alike with the rush of gusting winds. Then he seizes the was that calls the pallid psirits up from the underworld and ushers others down to the grim dark depths, the wand that lends us sleep or sends it away, that unseals our eyes in death. Equipped with this, he spurs the winds and swims through billowing clouds till in mid-flight he spies the summit and rugged flanks of Atlas, whose long-enduring peak supports the skies.

I really like the imagery the Virgil uses, and the translation by Fagles. It gives a sense that Mercury, like the other Gods, has unfathomable power over the Human Race, and can fly through the air like a regular old super hero. his wand , or caduceus, is somethihng i have found very interesting in other passages, for there are so many uses for it. He can lead the dead to the underworld, or summon the winds.

The Aeneid (208-425)

This is a passage from the Aeneid, a story of a trojan son of Venus, escaping from the fallen troy, and continuing to found a city in Italy that would someday become rome. With this passage, There was a trojan prophet who warned the city against letting the horse inside, but then two large snakes came out of the water and ate him and his family.

But look, twin snakes, i shudder even to talk about this, from tenedos, loom
over the calm, deep sea, with huge coils and they stretch side by sidde towards
the shores. Their chests race among the waves and their bloody crests overpower
them. The rest of their body, trailing behind them, skims over the sea, and each
snakes twists its huge body into a coil, they hiss while the salt is spreading.
And now they overwhelm the plowed fields, having suffused their burning eyes,
with blood and fire, they were licking their hissing mouths with flickering
tongues.

In my opinion, this passage is just ridiculous, i have no idea how he thought of it. Vergil's language is excellent, it is really descriptive. It would be crazy if this happened in real life, although some might say that it did happen, just think of how frightening it would be to see two giant snakes coming out of the water to devour you?

The Aeneid (103-207)

The Aeneid (1-102)

The Aeneid is the epic that Virgil wrote, based in the beginning shortly after the fall of Troy, where a trojan warrior, Aeneas, escapes the burning city with his son Ascanius, later called Iolus, and his father Anchises. In this passage, he is in the middle of telling his story of his escape from Troy to queen Dido, whose shore he is cast upon after his ships were wrecked by a storm. He is telling particularly about the death of Priam, the last king of Troy.

Perhaps you wonder how Priam met his end

when he saw his city stormed and seized, his gates

wrenched apart, the enemy camped in his palace depths,

the old man dons his armor long unsused, he clamps it

round his shoulders shaking with age and, all for nothing,

straps his useless sword to his hip, then makes

for the thick of battle, out to meet his death.

I find this particular passage interesting, partially because of Fagles' word choice in the translation, and also because of how in 7 lines, Virgil describes the direness of the situation for the Trojans. An old king who is far too weak to be fighting, is forced to put on his armor and run into battle, only to be killed shortly thereafter. I am very excited to read the rest of this book, because it is a very interesting story, parts of which i am familiar with and parts i am not. I have also noticed alot of similarities with the Odyssey by Homer, a greek poet whom Virgil admired.

Virgil. The Aeneid (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition) (Penguin Classics Deluxe Editio). New York: Penguin Classics, 2008. Print.

Three Cups of Tea (90-215)

As Mortenson travels around Pakistan, he heard many stories, and many of those are retold in this book. Here is part of the story of a girl who lived in Pakistan during the war against India.

Fatima Batool remembers the first "whump," clearly audible form the indian artillery battery, just twelve kilometers across the mountains. She remembers the firs shell whistling gracefully as it fell out of the blameless blue sky, and the way she and her sister Aamina, working together sowing buckwheat, looked at each other just before the first explosion

This passage reminded me of both A Long Way Gone and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, in that it is images of war and destruction burned into a person's mind. I cant imagine having so traumatizing happen to me, and i would have a very hard time retelling it. This scene like the bombing of Dresden in EL&IC really depicts well how war can affect the most peaceful people, even when they did nothing to start it.

Mortenson, Greg, and David Oliver Relin. Three Cups of Tea One Man's Mission to Promote Peace . . . One School at a Time. New York: Penguin (Non-Classics), 2007. Print.

Three Cups of Tea (57-90)

Greg Mortenson goes to third world countries in the middle east and builds schools. He has to travel great distances by very treacherous means, but does not give up. In this scene he is almost at a village, but has to go through a mountain pass and cross a roaring river.

The jeep stopped next to a zamba, swaying over the Shyok, and Mortenson got out He'd never been comfortable crossing these yak-hair bridges, since they were engineered to support Balti half his weight. And when Akhmalu and Changazi piled on behind him, shaking the structure violently, he struggled to keep his feet beneath him. Mortenson grasped the twin handrails and shuffled his size-fourteen feet tightrope-walker-style along the single braded strand between him and the rapids fifty feet below. The zamba was slick with spray, and he concentrated so successfully on his feet that he didn't notice the crowd waiting to greet him on the far bank until he was nearly upon them

This can be applied to our lives. Although not all of us have life threatening situations that keep us from saving the world, we have day to day struggles that keep us from the right thing. Mortenson didn't have to go to the middle east, he could have found a normal job in America. He chose to go there, he chose to face all of those dangers, so that he could help the lives of the children there. We all should look to Mortenson as an example. We need to take a deep breath and go across our rope bridges to greet the people on the other side, and make a difference in their lives.

Mortenson, Greg, and David Oliver Relin. Three Cups of Tea One Man's Mission to Promote Peace . . . One School at a Time. New York: Penguin (Non-Classics), 2007. Print.

Three Cups of Tea (1-56)

This book is about the influence of Greg Mortenson, who is an american man who was in the military and was an avid mountaineer. It was on one of his trips to a mountain in Pakistan where he discovered his extreme humanitarianism. He started a group who goes to Pakistan and Afghanistan and builds schools and helps out wherever they can. This passage shows just how influential this man is.

Illiterate high-altitude porters in Pakistan's Karakoram have put down their packs to make paltry wages with him so their children can have the education they were forced to do without. A taxi driver who chanced to pick Mortenson up at the Islamabad airport sold his cab and became his fiercely dedicated "fixer". Former Taliban fighters renounced violence and the oppression of women after meeting Mortenson and went to work with him peacefully building schools for girls. He has drawn volunteers and admirers from every stratum of Pakistan's society and from all the warring sects of Islam

This goes to show how all it takes is one person to do something good for the world. Now take Mortenson's actions and multiply them by the 6.5 billion people living on the planet today, and you would get some serious change for the better. Its amazing how much harm one person can do what they try, but it is nowhere near the amount of good a person could do if he or she really devoted their life to it. Most people havent yet realized that they have more control of the good doings in the world than they think. I really wish everyone would at least do something small benefiting others, not necessarily as large-scale as building schools in third-world countries, but just something. The whole world would be a much better place.

Mortenson, Greg, and David Oliver Relin. Three Cups of Tea One Man's Mission to Promote Peace . . . One School at a Time. New York: Penguin (Non-Classics), 2007. Print.

Speak What We Feel (1-46)

This passage is from the introduction to Buechner's book, after he talks about how genuine writing is like "sit[ting] down and a typewriter and open[ing] a vein", in the words of Red Smith. He is saying how the best writers put themselves into their stories, instead of making things up that dont apply to them. He says how real writing has a certain risk factor to it, how you have to risk making a fool of yourself

But the four writers these pages are about each did it at least once, and that is the most important single thing they have in common. Shakespeare and Gerard Manley Hopkins are both great writers. Mark Twain is a very good but very uneven writer. G.K. Chesterton, for all his wit and intelligence, is a writer who wrote too much for most of it to be first-rate. But what brings them together here is that in at least one work apiece, it seems to me, each of them wrote in his own blood about the darkness of life as he found it and about how for better or worse he managed somehow to survive it, even to embrace it-Hopkins in the "terrible sonnets" of his final years, Mark Twain in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, G.K. Chesterton in The Man who was Thursday, and Shakespeare in King Lear. It is at the very end of King Lear, in fact, that the Duke of Albany says,"The weight of this sad time we must obey,/Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say," and that seems to me to be precisely what Shakespeare himself did in writing this greatest of all his plays and what in their own entirely different ways the other three did after him.

I agree with Buechner's and Shakespeare's point in this passage, how more people need to write and speak more from their heart and less from what society wants them to do. This is something i have been pondering for awhile, and it makes me very excited to read the rest of this book, and learn more about these four great authors and how they applied their own life to their stories and their stories to their own lives.

Buechner, Frederick. Speak What We Feel New York, New York: HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. 2001

Speak What We Feel (Not What We Ought to Say) (1-20)

Buechner, Frederick. Speak What We Feel New York, New York: HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. 2001

The Screwtape Letters (105-185)

The Screwtape Letters (63-104)

In this letter, Screwtape is advising Wormwood on one of the main things we think of demons as doing; temptations. He is telling Wormwood that after awhile, humans do not need temptations to bring them further away from God, they just need guilt of temptations they have already given into.

You no longer need a good book, which he really likes, to keep him from his prayers or his work or his sleep; a column of advertisements in yesterday's paper will do. You can waste his time not only in conversation he enjoys with people whom he likes, but in conversations with those he cares nothing about on subjects that bore him. You can make him do nothing at all for long periods[...] so that he may say, as one of my own patients said on his arrival down here, "I now see that i spent most of my life in doing neither what i ought nor what i liked". (63)

I think that Lewis is telling his readers to not only avoid doing things that are unclean and unholy, but avoid doing nothing at all. Boredom is a waste of God's creation, and so is spending your life doing meaningless tasks. People should go out there and actually live. I feel that people often are so concerned about not doing the wrong thing, that they end up not doing anything at all, which is sometimes just as bad. Don't spend all of your free time doing the things that bore you, go out and live out your dreams. "Every man dies, not every man really lives" says William Wallace in Braveheart, and i could not agree more, and i would assume that neither would Lewis.

Lewis, C.S. The Screwtape Letters Westwood, New Jersey: Barbour and Company, Inc. 1961

The Screwtape Letters (1-62)

This book, The Screwtape Letters, by C.S. Lewis, is a fictional story about two demons writing letters back and forth. The uncle, Screwtape, is mentoring his nephew, Wormwood, on how to do the main job of a demon, bringing humans away from "the Enemy", the Christian God. In one of my favorite letters, Screwtape is telling Wormwood about the undulation of human faith, how it reaches peaks and troughs.

And that is where the troughs come in. You must have wondered why the Enemy does not make more use of His power to be senseibly present to human souls in any
degree He chooses and at any moment. But you now see that the Irresistible and
the Indisputable are the two weapons which the very nature of His scheme forbids
Him to use. Merely to over-ride a human will (as His felt presense in any but
the faintest and most mitigated degree would certainly do) Would be for him
useless. He cannot ravish. He can only woo. For His ignoble idea is to eat the
cake and have it; the creatures are to be one with him, but yet themselves;
merely to cancel them, or assimilate them, will not serve. (46)

Lewis makes a very interesting point in this passage, which i feel like i need to first explain with a quote from the prolouge; "For of course [the book's] puprose was not to speculate about diabloical life but to throw light from a new angle on the life of men". He is saying that he is not saying to convert to Satanism, but to look at Christianity in a new way. He is saying not to loose hope during these "trough periods" of one's faith, but to remember in both the troughs and peaks to look for God. God cannot make you believe in him, but he must show people that he is the better way, and not to turn to tempation.

Lewis, C.S. The Screwtape Letters Westwood, New Jersey: Barbour and Company, Inc. 1961