Morning twilight is another good time to watch the stars as the myriad dimmer stars fade in the growing light, leaving only the brighter ones to sing in the morning. Around six o'clock the dawn is growing strongly in the east but the sky is still dark enough to see Orion high in the south; lower to the east is Sirius, the Dog Star, the brightest star in all the skies; higher and a little further to the east is Procyon, the Little Dog. Higher yet and still further east are Castor and Pollux, the Twins, Gemini. And straight in the east, half up the sky, is Regulus, the bright star of Leo the Lion and one of the four Royal Stars of the ancient Babylonian magi. Almost exactly overhead is Capella, the bright star in Auriga the Charioteer with the other stars of Auriga still dimly showing around it. By half  past six even these bright stars have faded into the brightening blue.

"Classical education was always literary education par excellence."

"Not to know Greek is to be ignorant of the most flexible and subtle instrument of expression which the human mind has devised... and not to know Latin is to have missed an admirable training in precise and logical thought."

"The modern revolt against centering the school curriculum around the study of Latin and Greek is understandable in an age of hyper-utilitarianism, though it's deplorably mistaken."

"The passing of classics from our schools has in fact crippled the larger culture."

"Any school with more than four or five subjects doesn't know what it wants to be - or, we may shudder to think, perhaps it does. Most public schools in America now strive to be cut-rate educational malls for the intellectually lame - whether or not students first darken the school doors that way, so most of them leave - while even some private schools pose as little more than colorful felt boards for the earnestly shallow, commonly confusing pious or patriotic piffle with read education."

--Tracy Simmons, Climbing Parnassus

Ruth died a few days ago. She wasn't much older than me. Her memorial service was held today in the little Presbyterian church here in my tiny town, and it was wonderful. Not because it was elaborate or because she was a great person in the eyes of the world - it wasn't and she wasn't. The service was simple and straightforward; the pastor didn't describe Ruth as a pure saint but as a sinner like all of us, who loved the Lord. She was aging, in pain, worried, often afraid, no beauty queen, and not known beyond her family and local friends. But it was wonderful because we remembered Ruth, a child of God made in His image and bought in love by His blood, and the Gospel was preached clearly and plainly. And we were exhorted to comfort in Christ and to love each other well.

And what is Ruth now? Remember the glorious queen striding through the dawn of eternity in Lewis's The Great Divorce who had been only a common housemaid in this life? Ruth is a queen now, glorious, shining, free from her terrible life-long illnesses, free from her all-too-human worries, anxieties, and complaints, terrible in beauty (out-Helening Helen a billionfold), free forever from the taint of sin, and standing before the Throne, ready to worship with us tomorrow morning in the communion of the saints, she in Heaven, we lifted up to the Heavenlies in worship.

See you Tomorrow, Ruth.

Faith has done it again - she's posted a truckload of beautiful pictures on her blog, this time of our family cider-making yesterday. All those apples were from just one smallish tree.

Twilight is a delightful time to stargaze because the sky isn't yet cluttered with thousands of dim extras - only the bright ones show up at first. But wait - let me tell you about the three kinds of twilight. Civil twilight is the approximately half hour between sunset and the moment when the sun is six degrees below the horizon - during which time you can still see by natural light and don't legally have to have your headlights on when you drive and you can still hunt. Nautical twilight is the next roughly half hour when the sun is between six and twelve degrees below the horizon, and during which time navigators at sea can still see the horizon but can also see the bright stars used for navigation and so can take sights with their sextants; but you have to turn your headlights on now and the hunters go back to their pickups. Astronomical twilight is the third half hour when the sun moves from twelve to eighteen degrees below the horizon; the horizon disappears and mariners can no longer use it for sightings, and when astronomical twilight ends at roughly an hour and a half past sunset full dark has arrived - the sky is as dark as it will ever be all night long.

At the time of the autumnal equinox - which coincides with Bilbo's, Frodo's, and my birthday - the first star to appear after sunset (toward the end of civil twilight or shortly after 7:00 PM), is Vega, almost directly overhead in mid and northern US latitudes. Vega is the 5th brightest star in the heavens and is part of the constellation Lyra (the Lyre). The second and third stars to appear are Arcturus, the 4th brightest star, in the constellation Bootes the Herdsman, high up above the sunset in the west; and Capella, the 6th brightest star, in the constellation Auriga the Charioteer, very low in the north-north-east. These three stars - high overhead, high in the west, and low in the north - are lovely markers of the season at sunset and lead the pageant as the rest of the Host of Heaven appear and join them in the growing darkness.

Many of my friends probably have bigger libraries than I do. I would guess I have somewhere between 1,500 and 2,000 books, which isn't huge compared to, oh say, Peter Leithart's library. But I have what I think is a good library - a good selection of the classics from every age, some great sets, decent language references, and lots of random fill-in-the-gap categories. If I never bought another book I'd have good reading for the rest of my life. Er, I will buy more books, I'm just saying.....

And I'll repeat what I've said before and will continue to say, to everyone's great annoyance, till the day I die. This is the heart of a good education: a small but well-chosen library, a place to sit and study, some friends to do it with, and the time and tranquility to do it in. There's such an immense, mind-bogglingly complicated tangle of extraneous issues attached to the concept of education, it's a wonder anybody ever gets one or even knows what one is. It's not about grades or credits. Those things may be necessary to get into college, but they're not part of education and it's all we can do to keep them from interfering with real education; mostly we fail at that. It's not about getting a job; that's for machines, not men and women created in the image of God. It's not about schedules and buildings and administrations and academic years and budgets and playgrounds and buses and meetings and athletics and art and field trips and curricula and email lists and offices and secretaries and science fairs and trips to the principal's office for misbehavior and lunchroom tables and drama departments and spirit week and community service and field day and school newspapers and multimedia. It's about Mark Hopkins on one end of a log and the student on the other.

Read the best books and talk about them with like-minded friends. That's been the essence of real education since antiquity, and nothing about our modern world changes that except perhaps the pandemic idiocy that gives this idea even greater urgency and even less chance than ever of being taken seriously.

Way too much has happened since my last post, which is a good thing because otherwise I'd be tempted to summarize it. And we don't want that, do we, O Best Beloved. So instead of narrating stuff, I'll give in to - and by the way, this is the first time this has ever happened to me - the tag laid on me by my own dotter, Ghillies.

1. One book that changed your life:  Many Dimensions, by Charles Williams. Coulda been any of his seven but that's the first one I read. I blew off all my college classes one day and read it straight through. When I left the Blue Buckets (the U of I student union coffee shop) that October twilight, I expected to see the supernatural peeping around the edges of my peripheral vision at every turn.

2. One book that you've read more than once: The Name of the Rose, by Umberto Eco.

3. One book you'd want on a desert island: The Iliad, of course.  

4. One book that made you laugh: The Grasshopper Trap, by Pat McManus. 

5. One book that made you cry: Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. I laughed till I wept....

6. One book you wish had been written:  Autobiography, Homer.

7. One book you wish had never been written: the owner's manual for my phone.

8. One book that you are currently reading: Innocents Abroad, by Mark Twain. He's so cynical I have to put the book down sometimes but at other times his power of description is amazing. "Odi et amo..."

9. One book you've been meaning to read: Barchester Towers, by Anthony Trollope.

10.  Tag five others:

Constant Comment
The Bourne Loser
Calvinist Finch
Classical Chemist
The Inkwell

I'll have the next Aegean Tour page up soon, incorporating Kaorline's latest post. (In which she says, "Six-winged seraphim are very hard to disguise.")

I just finished another Latin In A Week, this one in Lancaster, PA. *gasp, pant, sag, wilt* Tired - very tiring - but such great fun. I love doing it.

One of my students made a photographically realistic drawing of me telling the class how easy a grammatical principle is......

Going home tomorrow. Woo, as they say, hoo!

Sorry for the delay. My family went camping. But yes, the Greece/Turkey Tour site is once more updated - with page 7 - with pictures to accompany Kaorline's (and my) text about Troy.