Adversaria (35)
‘Vagueness may be used as a vehicle for the exercise of control or for the evasion of control’ —Donald A Schön (The Reflective Practitioner, p. 305)
‘Some words cause on to behave in a certain way. Then too he likes these words because they have no synonyms, and they are able to combine technical precision with a certain amount of suggestion, eliminating everything in between’ —Daniele Del Giudice (A Fictional Inquiry, trans. Anne Milano Appel, 33%)
‘Cynics found virtue in unexpected places’ —Christopher B. Zeichmann (Radical Antiquity, p. 92)
‘…you can free yourself of characters only by telling their story, and maybe not even then’ —Daniele Del Giudice (A Fictional Inquiry, trans. Anne Milano Appel, 50%)
There were fears that they would make friends too readily with youths of insufficient social standing, or consort with those who did little or no studying and whose conduct would distract them from their studies and tempt them with a dissolute lifestyle which they would be unable to resist. This would nullify their previous upbringing at home and at school and also increase the costs of their stay at Oxford. Drunkenness, whoring, and gambling were seen at the chief threats in this respect, with the numerous alehouses and, later, coffee houses the means whereby young students were corrupted.
‘Self-education [in medicine] began in earnest when the notebook-keeper began to supplement family and college recipes with prescriptions from published collections’ —Robert G. Frank (‘Medicine’ in The History of the University of Oxford, ed. Nicholas Tyacke, p. 535)
‘Presented with the wide distribution of the relevant source material, Fell was forced to rein in his religious prejudices and moderate his customary xenophobia in the pursuit of scholarship’ —R. A. Beddard (‘Tory Oxford’, in The History of the University of Oxford, ed. Nicholas Tyacke, p. 875)
To become a public legend a man must have simple outlines. To be a tragic hero everything about him must be pared away, leaving him silhouetted against the horizon in the quintessential posture of his role, as Don Quixote is against his windmills, and the gunfighters of the mythical West are, solitary in the white sunlight of their empty midday streets.