All intellectual interests are in abeyance; those who follow culture lecture to empty rooms, in out-of-the-way places. The halls of the professor and the philosopher are deserted; but what a crowd there is in the cafés! How many young fellows besiege the kitchens of their gluttonous friends!
cessat omne studium et liberalia professi sine ulla frequentia desertis angulis praesident. in rhetorum ac philosophorum scholis solitudo est; at quam celebres culinae sunt, quanta circa nepotum focos iuventus premitur!
"A peculiar anthologic maze, an amusing literary chaos, a farrago of quotations, a mere olla podrida of quaintness, a pot pourri of pleasant delites, a florilegium of elegant extracts, a tangled fardel of old-world flowers of thought, a faggot of odd fancies, quips, facetiae, loosely tied" (Holbrook Jackson, Anatomy of Bibliomania) by a "laudator temporis acti," a "praiser of time past" (Horace, Ars Poetica 173).
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Saturday, April 26, 2014
The Decline of Intellectual Pursuits
Seneca, Letters to Lucilius 95.23 (tr. Richard M. Gummere):