The work itself needs no introduction: foundational for nearly all subsequent English poetry, it has also graced millions of readers across the centuries with laughs; pathos; homespun wisdom; insights psychological, spiritual, and religious; frequent experiences of beauty; and simply unforgettable stories. We’ll read as many of the Tales as we can cover well, starting with the short and sweet and progressing toward the long and profound. With luck we’ll finish in the spring with a reading of Chaucer’s second masterpiece, Troilus and Criseyde, a lovely but wrenching exploration of freedom, agency, love and betrayal.
Weekly, meeting time TBD -- so please contact us ASAP to express a preference!
Is it a way to become a Sturdy Oak when most people would bend like reeds? Or is it a way to distinguish the right time to be an oak from the time to bend? To distinguish Goods of Fortune from Goods of Virtue? Things we cannot control from things that we can? (Or is it, as a look around the Web might suggest, mostly a handy way to get ahead in business, or in war?)
Whatever else it may be, the ancient school of Stoicism has played a major role in the mental formation of almost every citizen of “the West” today -- whether through its decisive influence on the Renaissance, its powerful effects on the ethics of Christianity, or the allegiance pledged to it by all sorts of groups during the last two centuries. This group will be a rare chance for real dialogue with your intellectual ancestor, by reading the surprisingly accessible texts of authors like Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus, and Zeno of Citium from which all these influences derive. Whether you agree or disagree with their teaching, you may well find yourself transformed by the encounter.
Every other week, time TBD -- contact us to express a preference!
TheTreasures.org hosts online reading groups designed to provide access to texts that are endlessly engaging, thought-provoking, possibly life-transforming — and typically texts that few people would work their way through on their own.
When one no longer has to work on one’s own, what once seemed a daunting task changes into a joyful experience, a highlight of the week: discovering that a “classic” like Dante’s Divine Comedy or Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy is not a far-off block of impenetrable literary marble, but a living, changing artwork that has vital things to say to us, and perhaps to do to us, in our twenty-first-century lives.