Hi friends,
Greetings from Brooklyn!
This week, I learned that a spot opened up for a coveted reading group with The Catherine Project (huge fan, check them out). I’ll be spending three months scooping up the bone marrow out of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. I’ve always been weirdly skeptical of reading groups but I have a feeling that I’m about to change my mind.
Speaking of reading goals, if 2025 is the year you feel like leveling up your reading, shoot me an email or drop a comment with what’s holding you back and I’ll reply with some tips!
Until next time,
Florian
Polonius and I
There is a scene in Hamlet where Polonius, the King's chief counselor, gives some last-minute advice to his son Laertes before he boards a ship to France.
Here are some of my favorite bits which I have dared reformulate in plainer language.
“Give thy thoughts no tongue,
Nor any unproportioned thought his act.” / Think before you speak and don’t act impulsively.
[...]
“Beware of entrance to a quarrel but, being in,
Bear’t that thy opposed may beware of thee.” / Don’t seek fights but if you find yourself in one, make sure you’re feared.
“Give every man thy ear but few thy voice; / Be a generous listener but a parsimonious confider.
Take each man’s censure, but reserve thy judgement.” / Be open to criticism but careful with your own.
[...]
“This above all: to thy ownself be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.” / Above all, be true to yourself and honesty with others will follow.”
The wise words of a father to his son. What’s not to like?
Well, first of all Polonius is notoriously bad at following his own advice. He boasts that “brevity is the soul of wit” and then burdens his already-late son with twenty-seven lines of instruction. He is constantly scheming, spying and eavesdropping and yet will urge his son not to “be false to any man”.
And look, I get it. I too suffer from a dash of schizophrenia when it comes to embodying my own parental advice. The aspirational self takes over the carnal version that loses it over a tantrum, skips pages during storytime, and abuses pasta-for-dinner as a bribe.
But even assuming Polonius and I had the character to always live by our word, we’d still be left with the delusion we share with millions of other parents. The idea that years of experience and hard-earned wisdom can somehow be wrapped up into a five-minute sermon. One can hardly blame us for wanting to believe that out of words, we have the power to forge an armor that will keep our child unharmed in the next schoolyard scuffle.
Hamlet is there to remind us however, that these words are merely...well… “words, words, words”.
Siddhartha is similarly skeptical but even more categorical:
“Knowledge can be communicated, but not wisdom. A man can find it, live it, be fortified by it, do wonders through it, but he cannot tell and teach it.”
So where does that leave us parents, then?
Surely there must be a balance to be found between the foolishness of Polonius and accepting the rather cynical prospect that we have no role to play in the crafting of our children's inner compass.
When I think back to my own parents' advice, much of it only started to make sense in the past few years, long after the words were uttered.
Perhaps wisdom is not something you can slip into your children's backpack alongside the warm mittens, hoping they'll use both at recess time. It is rather like the sowing of a seed that can only grow out of a soil fertile with experience. And when a tree rises, it looks reassuringly familiar, as if it had been there all along.
Lateral Thought
“The life of study is austere and imposes grave obligations. It pays, it pays richly; but it exacts an initial outlay that few are capable of. The athletes of the mind, like those of the playing field, must be prepared for privations, long training, a sometimes superhuman tenacity.”
Antonin-Gilbert Sertillanges, O.P. (The Intellectual Life)
It's been quite a few years since I've read, or recited, Shakespeare. Maybe it's time!
Enjoy the reading group!