Scott and Zelda and Edith and us!

THURSDAY, MAY 16, 2013

Not far from our own sprawling campus: With all the excitement about The Great Gatsby, we decided to take a break from the action.

We walked over to Park Avenue to brush up on Scott and Zelda.

That’s right! Just a little more than a block from the northeastern corner of our campus, an historical marker tells the world that Scott and Zelda once lived there.

And not only that! Directly across the street from that spot, a second historical marker remembers part resident Edith Hamilton. In 1930, she wrote The Greek Way, in which she praised "the calm lucidity of the Greek mind."

It’s one of the questions we get most often. When we started the project Socrates Reads, did we have Hamilton in mind?

We get that all the time.

Truly, it’s a good question. But as you may already have guessed, we never discuss our personal thoughts concerning Edith Hamilton.

In our plot for Socrates Reads, the greatest of Greeks returned to earth to examine the work of America’s press corps. What might he have thought of last evening’s Hardball?

You don’t have to be a world-famous scholar to offer a pretty good guess.

4 comments:

  1. I'm listening to the greek way right now. Hamilton seems to have a gift for jumping to conclusions and for overgeneralizing.
    I've never read anything by Pindar, so all I can say about her comparison of Pindar to Kipling is that it seems wierd, but Aristophanes and Gilbert?

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  2. I watched the 70s movie version of The Great Gatsby on Amazon streaming last night.

    I was struck again at how understated it is for these times. Struck too on how beautiful and perfect a Daisy, Farrow was, and that Redford woefully lacked any sense of Gatsby's edgy brilliant gamey desperation.

    I'm going to try and trick my husband into going. I plan to tell him that this modern version has lots of nudity.

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    1. Don't forget to bring a box of wine.

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    2. No way. I'm saving the Franzia for the new Star Trek movie.

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