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“And my final advice is to try, every week or so, to learn something by heart. A surprising amount will remain in the memory, and more and more as you train it; and then, as you walk or work or sit in the subway, you will have something more than daily trivialities to occupy your mind.”  One can’t imagine a university professor today making such a suggestion to anyone, let alone the public or even his own students. To make the advice seem even more exotic, consider that the speaker is a professor of classics at Columbia University who hosted a weekly radio show broadcast on Tuesday evenings at 9:05 p.m. on WQXR in New York City. His only stipulation from the station was that he confine himself to “books of a high standard or else open up some question of broad literary or social interest.”   Gilbert Highet’s show aired on hundreds of stations in the U.S. and Canada from 1952 to 1959 and was picked up by the Voice of America and BBC. Highet edited his radio talks into essays and published them in five volumes, including People, Places, and Books (1953), A Clerk of Oxenford (1954), The Powers of Poetry (1960), and Explorations (1971). I’ve been reading Talents and Geniuses: The Pleasuresof Appreciation (1957). Highet’s tone is not dry and academic but conversational, man-to-man. It must have been a pleasure to hear him on the radio. There’s no hint of condescension. He flatters us by assuming we are interested and able to follow him and appreciate what he’s saying. The essay quoted above is “Permanent Books.” Highet (1906-78) was a “small-d” democrat, a Jeffersonian:     “For civilized people, reading is an essential activity. Those who do not read, in the middle of a literate society, are in danger of making themselves into half-savages. Now, reading is of two different kinds. Some reading is temporary; some reading is what might be called permanent.”   The “temporary” sort includes newspapers, popular magazines, detective stories, “light romances,” etc. “These are like modern motorcars and modern buildings,” he writes, “constructed to look bright and shiny and smart, to be worn out quickly, and to be replaced by something brighter and shinier in a few months or years.”   Highet is probably best known for writing The Classical Tradition: Greek and Roman Influences on Western Literature (1949), though the book I remember most fondly is Poets in a Landscape (1957). In “Permanent Books” he states the obvious: some books never become obsolete and are “built to last,” as he puts it. He cites obvious candidates: Dante’s Commedia, Goethe’s Faust, Shakespeare, Rabelais and Cervantes. “These books and others like them can be read by an intelligent man,” he writes, “not once, but many, many times at different periods throughout his life; they will never seem boring; they will always give him some new intellectual and emotional experience; they are versatile companions and tireless teachers.”   Such books are not to be confined to the classroom or otherwise segregated from life. Often in his essay, I feel Highet is rather eerily describing my experience with reading and books. He lived in a happier, healthier world in which scholars could reasonably assume substantial numbers of common readers sought pleasure and “self-improvement” in the books they read, and that they would find it. He concludes:   “That is part of the answer to the question ‘Why does one study and teach Greek and Latin?’ It is because the best books are lasting books; many Greek and Latin books are lasting; and only such books are truly worth teaching for a lifetime, and studying for a lifetime.”

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John Allyn Smith, Jr. was eleven when, early one morning in the interlude between two world wars, not long after his parents had filed for divorce, he was awakened by a loud bang beneath his bedroom window. He looked to see his father dead by his own gun. Within months, his mother had remarried, changing her last name and that of her son, who became John Berryman (October 25, 1914–January 7, 1972). He would spend the rest of his life trying to comprehend the incomprehensible. Art being the best instrument we have invented for our suffering, he would become a… read article

Writing, giving, and soliciting feedback via your inbox. For over 25 years, I’ve been using email to collaborate and work with people. Before there were any messaging platforms, project management tools, and hybrid tools like Slack and Discord, phone calls, Skype and email were most of what you had. Along the way, and to this day, I’ve developed some simple rules for getting your point across, and receiving the right feedback in return. Write an email like you’re a lawyer. Stick to the facts and keep it brief. Clarity and conciseness are your friends. Keep your sentences trim and strive for non-ambiguity. Use headers. Or bold them. And even use italics. I like to break up longer emails or denote themes by using section headers. Rich text email can be your friend here. Lists are your best friend though. I love to use lists. There is nothing better than utilizing the format to allow people to scan specific pieces of feedback that they need to pay attention to. Even better, use a numbered list. Give the recipient a number to hook onto. It’s much easier to reference “In 3, let’s go with…” than to say, “In the fourth list item…” when visually, the numbers are already there and cognition is formed on both ends. Order your asks or feedback in lists by order of importance. Go from biggest to smallest, most important to least important. Unless the item you’re addressing is sequential by time or order and is easier to follow as experienced. Consider length and device context. An email that looks good on your deskop computer or viewport is much longer on a mobile device. Respect the end recipients. See 1 and 2 (see what I did there?!). Mind your manners. There’s a fine line between brusqueness and being an ass. Kindness and politeness still go a long way. Read your email before you send it. Does it make sense to you? Are the important parts addressed with clarity and feel actionable? Rewrite or edit if you need. Here’s an example email I’d write: Hi, Jamie, Thanks for your time on the call yesterday. The video draft you cut is shaping up great. Below is some feedback: Typography 1. Let's use our brand fonts for all titles. The Dropbox folder is here. 2. For each speaker's name, let's reduce the size by about 20%. Music and vibe 1. The music could use some energy. Are there some other tracks we could try? 2. The footage is a bit dark. Can we brighten it up? 3. The color feels a bit cold. The event was sunny, and we'd love to see some of that warmth come through. Thank you, and look forward to the next cut, Naz. In summary: stick to the facts, write clearly, keep it brief, use headers, sections and lists, and be kind. Visit this post on the web or Reply via email