Good stuff

From Brad DeLong, who expands on one of my favorite passages in literature, Machiavelli's letter from exile in which he writes about the course of his days:

When evening comes Niccolo Machiavelli enters his personal library. There he talks to his friends--his books, or rather those who wrote the books in his library, or rather those components of their minds that are instantiated in the hardware-and-software combinations of linen, ink, and symbols of Gutenberg Information Technology. They are 'ancient men' who receive him 'with affection,' and for four hours he 'ask[s] them the reason for their actions; and they in their kindness answer me; and... I do not feel boredom, I forget every trouble, I do not dread poverty, I am not frightened by death...'

Remember: Machiavelli lives only two generations after Gutenberg. He is thus one of the very first people in the world to have had a personal library. Before printing, libraries were the exclusive possession of kings, sovereign princes, abbots, masters of the Roman Empire (like Caesar and Cicero). The idea that a mere mortal--a disgraced ex-Assistant for Confidential Affairs to the Republic of Florence--might have a personal library would have been absurd even half a century earlier. To him, therefore, his personal library is not something he takes for granted, but something new, something he has that his predecessors did not. And so he can see clearly--more clearly than we can--what his personal library does for him, what his books are.

In disgraced semi-exile--when many he would talk to are afraid to be seen in his company, and where he is afraid to be seen in the company of almost all the rest--the ability to read and reread his personal copies of Publius Ovidius Naso, Petrarch, Dante Alighieri, Titus Livius, Plutarch, and the rest makes them his friends....

John Paul II, RIP

Okay, I know the press is all over the story, and I am a lapsed Catholic (and well-nigh lapsed blogger), so my words are belated. But if nothing else, I love the Pope for what he did for Poland, as recorded by Timothy Garton Ash in 1983:

They have come as pilgrims from all over Poland, marching softly through the nght. Now at last they are massed on the meadow before the red-brick fortress walls of Jasna Gora monastery, which is for the Poles at once Westminster Abbey and Windsor Castle. ....
Suddenly he is with them, high up on the white-and-gold dais erected before the monastery battlements. For minutes they drown him in wave after wave of emotional applause. Again and again, now from one corner, now from another, you hear the rhythmic chants: "Long live the pope, long live the pope"; "The pope with us, the pope with us." ....

Finally, his voice booms through the loudspeakers: "I want to ask you if a certain person who came today from Rome to Jasna Gora may be allowed to speak." ....

And then, as suddenly, the crowd is silent, reverent, half a million people listening with such attention that you could hear a rosary drop. It is a great and simple homily, not a political speech. He preaches a love that is "greater than all the experiences and disappointments that life can prepare for us." He shows them that he knows and shares their disappointments, without having to mention martial law directly. He tells them what they can do: to begin with the reformation of themselves, which must precede any social or political reform; to listen to their consciences; to "call good and evil by name." "It is up to you," he says, "to put a firm barrier against demoralization." Then and only then does he mention, for the first time, the word solidarity, letting it drop very quietly into the silent crowd, not Solidarity the outlawed movement, but "fundamental solidarity between human beings."