December 2025
encompassing
30 December 2025, around 17.31.
Out of humane authors take these few cautions, Know thyself. Be contented with thy lot. Trust not wealth, beauty, nor parasites, they will bring thee to destruction. Have peace with all men, war with vice. Be not idle. Look before you leap. Beware of Had I wist. Honour thy parents, speak well of friends. Be temperate in four things, lingua, locis, oculis, & poculis. Watch thine eye. Moderate thine expenses. Hear much, speak little, sustine & abstine. If thou seest ought amiss in another, mend it in thyself. Keep thine own counsel, reveal not thy secrets, be silent in thine intentions. Give not ear to tale-tellers, babblers, be not scurrilous in conversation: jest without bitterness: give no man cause of offence: set thine house in order: take heed of suretyship. Fide et diffide, as a fox on the ice, take heed whom you trust. Live not beyond thy means. Give cheerfully. Pay thy dues willingly. […] Seek that which may be found. Seem not greater than thou art. Take thy pleasure soberly. Ocymum ne terito. Live merrily as thou canst. Take heed by other men’s examples. Go as thou wouldst be met, sit as thou wouldst be found, yield to the time, follow the stream. Wilt thou live free from fears and cares? Live innocently, keep thyself upright, thou needest no other keeper, &c. Look for more in Isocrates, Seneca, Plutarch, Epictetus, &c., and for defect, consult with cheese-trenchers and painted cloths.
The crows caw and chitter as daylight fades, rustling the last of the leaves like taffeta. The black dog pulls toward home.
Adversaria (33)
31 December 2025, around 4.09.
‘With the rise of universities and humanist inquiry into Latin and Greek literature and rhetoric, a picture of the author as an originator began to take shape. This shift, coupled with mechanization, would prove instrumental to reframing the book as content rather than object—its form a mere vessel for the information it contained’ —Amaranth Borsuk (The Book, p. 62)
‘Whether the volume in question is a travel guide or a romance novel, the perception that books are little worlds enclosed in covers remains the same. We think of ourselves as disappearing into them, only to emerge hours later, changed by what we have read’ —Amaranth Borsuk (The Book, p. 84)
‘When the aesthetic of bookness itself is fetishized to such a adegree that it can be bough and sold (as cell phone cases, home safes, and printed sportswear, for example), we’ve come full circle to the commodification of the book as object’ —Amaranth Borsuk (The Book, p. 113)
‘The battles and politics of the Hittites are as dead as a nail in Hector’s coffin, but their verb forms and pronouns and common words are matters of live interest in American universities at this moment, since the accurate facts of the Hittite language revealed by careful decipherment are completely revolutionizing our concepts of Indo-European linguistics’ —Benjamin Lee Whorf (‘Decipherment of Maya Hieroglyphs’, in Language, Thought, and Reality, p. 176)