Italian Art, Birth Privilege, Language Books
Three Point Thursday
Happy Three Point Thursday!
This week’s edition features a message from a Renaissance man, a reflection on living in America, and some words about words.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Italian Journey.
“I cannot tell you how much I wished you were here, for until you have seen the Sistine Chapel, you can have no adequate conception of what man is capable of accomplishing. One hears and reads of so many great and worthy people, but here, above one's head and before one's eyes, is living evidence of what one man has done. I hold conversations with you constantly in my head; I only wish I could put them all down on this piece of paper. You say you want to hear about me. If I were really to tell you how I have been reborn, how renewed and fulfilled I feel, how fortified in all my faculties, it would take pages. Let me merely say that I shall hope to accomplish something. For some time, I have been seriously preoccupied with landscape and architecture and I now see what will come out of my efforts and how far I can go.”
Birth luck breaks my brain.
Not many days go by when my brain doesn’t break considering how lucky I am to have been born in the United States. Simply looking at some basic economic data about how poor the rest of the world is relative to the U.S., or considering the brutal pain, war, and death happening in places like Ukraine, Gaza, and Sudan, makes you infinitely more grateful to be here in the States. Despite the many, many flaws of this country, I believe that to live in America and truly hate it reflects an astonishing level of ignorance about how much less peaceful and prosperous much of the rest of the world is in comparison.
Words, oh words.
I recently started reading The Language Instinct by Stephen Pinker, and it seems promising. I suspect that reading about language is something that either bores you out of your skull or grips your mind with fascination. You know what camp I’m in. Some other books about language I’ve enjoyed include The Power of Language by Viorica Marian and The Power of Babel by John McWhorter. Related, some classics about using language to write include On Writing by Stephen King, Novelist as a Vocation by Haruki Murakami, and The Elements of Eloquence by Mark Forsyth. I’ve also heard reports that the dictionary by Merriam-Webster is a good one.