A New Institution in a Time of Trouble https://xitter.cf/t.co/vuuU20AV6s I provide aristocratic tutoring, small courses, and gc reading groups.
Joined June 2021
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I remember a professor in grad school giving me around 100+ negative / corrective comments and zero praise on a paper.
Very few in the academy today have the spine, intellect, and care required to give such a generous gift.
I sometimes suspect that, in certain fundamental and humanistic (dare I say "trivial"?) respects, comparing @WYOCathCollege's standards to those of Harvard is an instance of "punching down."
thecrimson.com/article/2026/…
Montana Classical College retweeted
First deer!
My daughter shot a 10 point buck at 130 yards on her first hunt.
And then my wife, @apgarlick, made it into a wonderful medieval meat pie.
My small group gobbled it up while discussing the Timaeus.
Montana Classical College retweeted
“Ishmael is working over the great truth about
freedom. He will know it, have it, be it, when he rises from the coffin of Queequeg.
A symphony brings many voices together into a unified chorus. All the themes and
forces of the novel are surging together now into the symphony.”
Montana Classical College retweeted
You've read the great books. But you don't understand the future task of "political" thought unless you have engaged with the challenges posed by Heidegger and Schmitt. I write about this.
Montana Classical College retweeted
So, for seven years I have been building a real community online. When I say “real community”, I mean that together we share and strive for a common good: strengthening the habits by which we discover and communicate the truth.
Last month, I was privileged to meet many of these people face-to-face for the first time. Along with many of our Faculty and some friends, members of the Lyceum came out to St. Louis for our first conference.
It was a small gathering, but profound. It revealed the depth of relations we had formed, the vitality of that common good. Felt a touch overwhelmed, at times, to see so many friends turn up from far and wide so that we could have deep conversations about important questions.
We are continuing to build our community. Visit our website (lyceum.institute) to learn about our many and growing educational programs.
And if you want to see this initiative succeed—to see it continue its growth from the experiment I started 7 years ago into a lasting institution much larger than me—consider making a donation: lyceum.institute/beyond
Montana Classical College retweeted
One of the best but also one of the most humbling parts about being a dad is watching your children surpass you. My oldest is now taller than me. He regularly beats me in chess and he’s better at math than I am. If anything, it encourages me to achieve more so that he has more to surpass.
Montana Classical College retweeted
One of the unique challenges of promoting our catalog is deciding which of our authors’ works best helps us understand current goings-on.
This one is a doozy. I’ll just go ahead and tell you how our authors might relate to this.
Yarvin: The political marketplace of ideas does not function and is designed to eliminate anything that isn’t proto-leftist or worse. Excluding right-wing parties from the demos is the next logical step.
Gottfried: The drift from postwar anti-extremism to anti-fascism to anti-right-wing ideologies is endemic in Western nations. The extreme far left waves the flag of anti-fascism to resist any right-wing influence in the nation.
Derbyshire: For decades, questions regarding immigration, national identity, tax structures, and human nature have been put so far outside the Overton window that asking the important questions of our time makes you persona non grata in the West. “The central problem... is not that people’s brains are encrusted with filth but that they have been scrubbed so clean by puritan Left ideology that we have lost the ability to talk, even to think, about what ails us... We cannot discuss what needs discussing.”
Peachy Keenan: The people working tirelessly to remove you from the culture have names.
Data Republican and Joshua Lisec: You have been paying NGOs and other states to suppress your political ideology for decades.
Montana Classical College retweeted
10/10 difficulty post. Sorry I'm too tired to write the essay yet, or write this tweet well, but I likely will unpack more in some form: the same revelation and rationale of explicit encryption I always talk about in paradise lost book vii lines 1-40 happens in book ii of the aeneid:
directly after checking the content of the Trojan horse by spear, two snakes come out of the ocean and kill three men associated with prophecy in the exact descriptive manner which parallels the Trojan horse which came by sea.
In other words, Troy falls due to a failure of hermeneutics of the exact symbolic sort one finds in classical literature (Earth water air fire). As a stretch hypothesis, this might make the aeneid a continuation of the symbolic portends which must be interpreted lest you surely die.
Either way, both Paradise Lost and the Aeneid deal with the loss involved with a lack of ability to discern the power of the snake.
And in case you missed me talking about it yesterday, many ancient Greek writers obscure the fact that they interpret the walled Troy as a walled garden with a snake and a traitoresssss
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Shilo Brooks of the Bush Center in conversation with Rafe Major on great books and self-government.
youtu.be/qCY2xsGxGXg?si=sfXB…
Strauss: “Is our present concern with liberal education and our present expectation from such liberal education not due to the void created by the decay of religious education? Is such liberal education meant to perform the function formerly performed by religious education? Can liberal education perform that function?”
Montana Classical College retweeted
The first episode of The Good Lives from the @SnowInstitute is now live. It features Borden Flanagan of American University, my first teacher (@Blahbliptyblah)
The Good Lives is an intimate and confessional interview series with people who have spent their lives reading Great Books.
Borden helped me to see that this project has legs. His interview was amazing to shoot. It covers his early encounter with close reading (through a Jehovah's Witness, of course), encountering nature and death in the mountains of Washington as a teenager, discovering the possibility of articulating the world through reading Genesis, working through the dilemmas of reason through ancient political philosophy, and much more. It's fascinating and a real delight. I hope you'll watch and share it.
This series is for everyone, but most emphatically for young people who in our times are less and less aware of what role good reading can play in forming, or opening the possibility for, an interesting and worthwhile life. For the rest of us who already engage in the same kind of activity Borden does it is interesting and, in Borden's case, tremendously amusing to hear him speak about his own life; for a high school or college kid, it could be the difference between being aware that there is a world wider and a life richer than they could imagine out there and being stuck. As Borden puts it: “What the good life means is, by way of these books, of conversations and thoughts, you increase your contact with the phenomena of life, which are inherently problematic and filled with paradox. But that's being alive, and that's joyful, and that's better than survival.”
In this connection I'll say that we've shot many interviews so far with great people and look forward to bringing them to you soon, but I'll note one theme that keeps coming back in each one. The reading of these books and leading of a life tutored by them often depends on an accident: having a teacher see something in you, a friend hand you a copy of a book which you wouldn't have picked up for yourself, witnessing for the first time an excellent human being who was shaped by reading or being horrified for the first time by seeing anew lives disconnected from learning and thinking: "I won't let this happen to me". If one of these videos can make its way to one kid for whom it can be an accident of this kind, the project will have been a success. So I ask again: please do share the interviews, send them to your kids, your friends with kids, your friends who teach, and whoever might help these lifelines reach the people who need them.
We're honored by your viewership and trust you'll enjoy watching. Thank you - NA
youtube.com/watch?v=-CcNqvm4…
Montana Classical College retweeted
“But tell me, Mohi, how many of your deities of rock and fell think you there are? Have you no statistical table?”
“My lord, at the lowest computation, there must be at least three billion trillion of quintillions.”
#MelvilleMonday
Mardi, Pt 2, C110
Montana Classical College retweeted
Birthday today. I have failed to achieve notable death as a 27 year-old wunderkind. Must settle for someday becoming an old master. Life: a series of consolation prizes.
Montana Classical College retweeted
"you must linger among a limited number of master-thinkers...everywhere means nowhere"
Celebrated Mrs. MCC's bday, hiked, re-read the end of the Aeneid, dreamed about Angola, stoked the fire, guy at the bar told me that communists on X said that they thought the best way to split the Right was to blame Charlie K's murder on Israel, listened to millennial indie trash while dancing in the cabin, the stars are blotted out by Diana's glory, glory which illuminates the snowy mountains.
Montana Classical College retweeted
“Why do people who leave nothing unchallenged still make demands of their own? They live off the fact that gods, fathers, and poets used to exist. The essence of words has been diluted into empty titles.
In the animal kingdom, there are parasites that clandestinely hollow out a caterpillar. Eventually, a mere wasp emerges instead of a butterfly. And that is what those people do with their heritage, and with language in particular, as counterfeiters.”
–– Ernst Jünger, Eumeswil
I had a dream that I flew to Angola with some friends, and when we got there, the customs agent was a cyclops.
@miltonappl3 was there, and he was most appalled by whatever the cyclops symbolised, but I couldn't get him to tell me what he was thinking. (not joking!)
Montana Classical College retweeted
Imagine Captain Ahab coming back and watching this video how pissed he would be
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