Thursday Things: Technical Difficulties Edition
27 March 2025. Vol 7 No 13. By Dan McGirt. #294
Thursday Things is here! This week we’re having extreme technical difficulties, so this will be a relatively linkless edition about books and poems.
If you enjoy this edition, please click the heart icon in the header or at the end of the post to let me know.
Serenity now. Photo by Peter Thomas on Unsplash
Books I’m Reading
Thursday Things items are usually based on articles and websites I find in my incessant online roaming. But in honor of the hard drive meltdown on my main computer (I’m typing this on a backup laptop I pulled out of mothballs) this week we’ll draw from some of my offline browsing.
I’m usually reading several books at once. Now is no exception. I enjoy reading books on seemingly unrelated topics at the same time. This often inspires creative ideas, insights, or serendipitous stumbling across unforeseen cross-conceptual connections. If you’re into that sort of thing.
Last week I discussed a book I first read in high school, 2081: A Hopeful View of the Human Future by Gerard K. O’Neill. It’s really about building permanent human settlements in space — that was O’Neill’s big idea — but along the way is about both forecasting the future and trying to shape that future with ideas. After sending out last week’s edition I decided to reread 2081. I’m about 75 pages in.
The book was published in 1981 and looking ahead to 2081, so we’re almost halfway through the “window of prediction”. I’m enjoying comparing O’Neill’s forecasts with the actual results to date. I think we’re not as far along in the human “breakout into space” as he expected we’d be by 2025, though we may be making up for lost time with SpaceX and others developing reusable rockets. Nor do we yet have the solar power satellites he advocated. On the other hand, we’re ahead of what he foresaw in the development of computers, automation, and communications technology.
Last year I read The Histories by Herodotus, about the conflict between the Persian empire and the Greek city-states. (This is our source for the story of “The 300” at Thermopylae, along with the epic battles of Salamis, Marathon, and others).
I had high hopes of commenting as I read The Histories in the Thursday Things: Read Along section, but that never got going for various reasons. (My enthusiasm for ideas often exceeds my execution of those ideas.) I did finish Herodotus and moved on to what I consider the natural sequel, History of the Peloponnesian War by Thucydides. This is my bedtime reading (with 2081 being my current daytime book) and I’m on the last chapter.
The war between Sparta and Athens, along with their respective allies, kicked off in 431 B.C. and lasted 27 years. Lots of twists and turns, with one side up and then the other. You can get lost in all the battles and Greek names. But what stands out is how little has changed about human nature and human conflict in the last 2400 years or so.
The third main book I’m reading now is Leonardo da Vinci by Walter Isaacson. I caught the Kindle edition on sale a while back, so this is the book I read on my phone when I’m out and about, eating lunch, riding a train, waiting around, etc. A couple of years ago I read Fortune is a River, about the time Niccolo Machiavelli hired Leonardo to move the River Arno so this is not my first dip into Leonardo’s biography, but I’m enjoying getting a fuller picture of his life and genius.
Most of his genius seems to have rested on careful observation, relentless curiosity — asking questions no one else asked — along obsession with figuring out the answers, whether by researching what others had to say on the topic or conducting his own experiments.
I’ve always been fascinated by the Italian Renaissance period. The warring city-states paired with artistic and scientific flourishing evokes the similar conditions in Classical Greece. Which absolutely makes sense, since rediscovering classical forms and ideas is what the Renaissance was renaissancing.
I’ll leave it to Happy Subscribers to connect the dots between these three books. You can probably see some of the connecting themes even without reading them. Nevertheless, I recommend them all. Maybe I’ll get the Read Along going again and delve into these books in more depth there.
Lines Written in Early Spring
I heard a thousand blended notes,
While in a grove I sate reclined,
In that sweet mood when pleasant thoughts
Bring sad thoughts to the mind.
To her fair works did Nature link
The human soul that through me ran;
And much it grieved my heart to think
What man has made of man.
Through primrose tufts, in that green bower,
The periwinkle trailed its wreaths;
And ’tis my faith that every flower
Enjoys the air it breathes.
The birds around me hopped and played,
Their thoughts I cannot measure:—
But the least motion which they made
It seemed a thrill of pleasure.
The budding twigs spread out their fan,
To catch the breezy air;
And I must think, do all I can,
That there was pleasure there.
If this belief from heaven be sent,
If such be Nature’s holy plan,
Have I not reason to lament
What man has made of man?
William Wordsworth, written in April 1798. Discuss.
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Good read Dan