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Alexander Solzyenitsyn
From www.acton.org |
It's happened again! I found a text I love! I am in a class titled "History of Ideas." Essentially, it deals with the best way to attain human happiness and success. Sounds interesting right? I thought so too...until I sat down and looked at the materials we would be reading. I'd never seen so many classical or political texts on one list. From the very beginning, I was prejudiced against the class material. I trudged through the language of Plato, the odd play by Aristophanes, the repetition in Aristotle, the politics of Machiavelli, and many other miserable journeys. Believe me. I've enjoyed bits and pieces along the way. There does tend to be the occasional oasis in the desert. The class itself was interesting once my professor translated the text into the language of my people: the language of the American youth. The class discussions could get passionate depending on what we were reading, and the professor always knows how to pick our brains for deeper analyses of the material. While I have not enjoyed the homework - or some of the ideas being conveyed (Marx and Nietzsche were my favorite philosophers to criticize) - the class concept is interesting.
This is the class that led me to Alexander Solzhenitsyn's
"A World Split Apart," a speech that received "boos" at Harvard University in 1978.
