Sunday

Well, it is Sunday afternoon. My Cowboys aren't playing this week; the Steeler game isn't televised here. It wasn't as cold during the boys' walk (40 degrees) this morning. I went to Albertsons to pick up some stuff that Walmart doesn't carry. I love this time of year at Albertsons: they carry my favorite variety of apple now: MacIntosh. Nummy.

I'm thinking of taking a nap soon. That just sounds really good now that my stomach is full from lunch.

I'm currently reading a nonfiction book from the library called THE SWERVE: How the World Became Modern by Stephen Greenblatt. Here is a description:

Stephen Greenblatt has crafted both an innovative work of history and a thrilling story of discovery, in which one manuscript, plucked from a thousand years of neglect, changed the course of human thought and made possible the world as we know it. Nearly six hundred years ago (around 1417), a short, genial, cannily alert man in his late thirties (a former papal secretary whose Pope had been overthrown and replaced) took a very old manuscript off a library shelf, saw with excitement what he had discovered, and ordered that it be copied. That book was the last surviving manuscript of an ancient Roman philosophical epic, On the Nature of Things, by Lucretius—a beautiful poem of the most dangerous ideas: that the universe functioned without the aid of gods, that religious fear was damaging to human life, and that matter was made up of very small particles in eternal motion, colliding and swerving in new directions. Lucretius had been a Epicurean philosopher during the Roman Empire, who taught that the soul did not survive death and that all living things were made up tiny particles or atomi. Epicureans called on people to enjoy a good life (not a hedonistic one as is often supposed) without worrying about the wrath of God or the gods, who did not concern themselves with anything so insignificant as human affairs. The copying and translation of this ancient book-the greatest discovery of the greatest book-hunter of his age-fueled the Renaissance, inspiring artists such as Botticelli and thinkers such as Giordano Bruno; shaped the thought of Galileo and Freud, Darwin and Einstein; and had a revolutionary influence on writers such as Montaigne and Shakespeare and even Thomas Jefferson.

Publish in 2011 and has 368 pages. Winner of the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Non-Fiction; Winner of the 2011 National Book Award for Non-Fiction. I am loving this book. It is written in a style that just makes me keep reading. I read 100 pages yesterday when I started it. You know I love the history; this has medieval and ancient all in one book. And I am dismayed at how much has been lost from the Greek and Roman writers. As a book lover it breaks my heart; as a philomath (lover of learning) I hate to think of what is gone.

Tomorrow at work I start training a new temp. My freedom is gone again. And I hope to hear about the job for which I interviewed. Tomorrow I have The Voice. Not sure if I'll be able to post. I will try.

Much love,
PK the Bookeemonster