Literature and life
How to read a play without getting stuck
If you open a play and get stuck on the headings and who is speaking, the problem is not you. It's the format. See the method to unlock reading.
History of Ideas and Civilization
Purgatory in England in 1601
The England that saw Hamlet's premiere had been Protestant for more than sixty years, and the Reformation had abolished purgatory. A ghost that comes from there was technically a forbidden ghost.
Literature and philosophy
Ophelia, the Only One Who Truly Goes Mad
The most reproduced painting in the English language depicts a scene that the play never stages. And that is exactly what happened to Ofélia from beginning to end, a suffering that no one sees up close.
Literature and philosophy
Hamlet, by Shakespeare: summary and analysis
He is not the indecisive one: he is the only character on the scene who calculated the price of acting. The summary that follows the play act by act and explains why the sword does not come down.
Literature and philosophy
Hamlet's Ghost: Purgatory or Hell?
The question that organizes the entire play is not whether Hamlet will take revenge. That's where that voice from under the stage came from, and to obey it is to honor your father or fall into a trap.
Great Books and Literature
Paideia: formation is not instruction
For the Greeks, the point of everything was not to accumulate matter in a head. It was to form the entire human being. Werner Jaeger recovered this word in Paideia.
Literature and politics
Why Hamlet didn't inherit the throne
It's not a plot hole. The Denmark of the play chooses its king by council, and this changes everything that Claudius did, and what Hamlet would do if he killed the elected king.
Philosophy and theology
Why Hamlet doesn't kill Claudius by praying
The audience has just heard Claudius confess that prayer itself does not rise. Hamlet didn't listen. And therein lies the harshest irony of the play.
Applied Philosophy
Moral dilemma: when no way out is clean
The difference between the conflict of duties that is resolved and the genuine moral dilemma, in which any choice exacts a price. The name that philosophy gives to the impasse with no clean exit.
Greek philosophy
The truth left the temple and went to the square
In the temple, the word went from those who knew to those who listened. In the Greek square it began to be said between equals, and anyone who disagreed responded right there.
Applied Philosophy
Is doubting what I was taught a lack of faith?
Examining what tradition has taught you is not born against faith. It is born from the same capacity that Christian tradition calls the image of God in you.
Greek philosophy
The alphabet that made the argument checkable
Just over twenty signs, learned in weeks, against hundreds of signs and years of training. The technique that took the argument out of a caste's hands and put it to anyone's test.
Applied Philosophy
Thaumazein: the astonishment that won't settle
Everyone has been amazed at the world. Philosophy is not born from astonishment, it is born from astonishment that refuses to stop at the first answer that sounds good.
Great Books and Literature
The Greeks who died before Christ
Saint Justin, philosopher and martyr, answered a question that most people avoid, about the Greeks who thought righteously without ever hearing about Christ.
Greek philosophy
Philosophy was not born from Greek democracy
Thales thinks back almost eighty years to the reforms of Cleisthenes, on the other side of the Aegean. Philosophy and democracy were born from the same habit, and philosophy came first.
Intellectual life
Critical analysis is not a summary: what remains
The summary returns the plot, which is forgotten. Critical analysis asks what the work teaches, what it argues against, and what it requires you to change. This is what decides what remains of the reading.
History of ideas
China and North Korea: reeducated to love the regime
It's not science fiction: children who spy on their parents, camps that teach to love the regime, and room 101 that Orwell only named.
History of ideas
Orwell didn't predict 1984: he recognized time itself
He didn't invent Oceania looking to the future, he looked sideways: Stalin, Hitler and Thomas More's utopia, turned inside out.
History of ideas
Rewriting the past is the most efficient power move
Surveillance requires apparatus, torture requires time. Changing a record is silent and definitive: the sharpest argument of 1984.
Literature and philosophy
1984, by Orwell: the warning that became routine
Oceania, the three classes of the Party and the perpetual war that perhaps is just theater. Why 1984 didn't predict the future, it recognized the present.
Philosophy
Conviction or fear: the line between authority and power
Illegitimate power dominates through fear, manipulation or force. Legitimate authority is followed by conviction. The distinction that separates a government from a tyranny, and a faith from emotional domination.
Philosophy
God and the State, by Bakunin
Bakunin wanted to abolish all authority, religious or state, in the name of individual freedom. The pendulum effect asks: does this solve the problem, or just restart it?
Philosophy
Between total control and chaos, the middle way
Neither the absolute control of 1984 nor Bakunin's absence of authority. The middle way is the re-education of citizens in virtues and duties, and it begins in the classics.
Philosophy
Escaping from one extreme rarely leads to balance
Bakunin reacted to state and religious oppression by proposing the total abolition of authority. The pendulum effect explains why this type of reaction rarely finds the middle ground.
Literature and philosophy
Room 101 and the end of Winston Smith
O'Brien doesn't want Winston to confess, he wants Winston to believe. Why the outcome of 1984 is worse than death, and what room 101 has become today.
Literature and philosophy
The Party's three slogans in 1984
"War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength." Why 1984 slogans aren't catchphrases, and how modern euphemisms do the same job.
Church History
Castel Gandolfo, the residence of the popes
Why popes have spent their summers above a volcanic crater since the 17th century, and why that's changed twice in recent decades.
History and travel
Castelli Romani, what to see
Frascati, Castel Gandolfo and Lake Albano, in the volcanic crater that the Roman elite chose to escape the city more than two thousand years ago.
Art and Renaissance
The Italian garden is an idea of the world
Geometry, axis and water tamed, level after level. The Italian Renaissance garden does not describe nature, it argues against it.
Philosophy
Otium: why leave the city to think
Roman otium is not leisure, it is method. From Cicero in Tusculum to the popes in Castel Gandolfo, retreat has always been part of the work of thinking.