Status Updates From Harvard Classics, Vol. 3: E...

Thomas Browne’s Religio Medici is so wildly and unashamedly antisemitic it descends into what feels like self-parody but is in fact simply deplorable.

Why am I continuing to read this meandering, dogmatic spasm of superstition and xenophobia?

I could write a four-page paragraph, as obsequious as it is verbose, on why I also abandoned the second Milton piece (On Education) but I'd hate to try to compete with the Master Himself.

I must admit that the first paragraph of John Milton's Areopagitica has defeated me. It is a three densely-packed pages long mealy-mouthed flattery of the parliament that I just… can't. Apparently Milton got the law banning privately owned printing presses overturned so he would shut up and go away.

I've finished the Francis Bacon section with "The New Atlantis," an unfinished science fiction novel that's essentially one huge info dump of epic proportions. It's a list of things this secret island nation knows, has, does, has done, and might someday do. Many, many, many diverse things.

Francis Bacon on everyone who works for or supports Donald Trump:

And certainly it is the nature of extreme self-lovers, as they will set a house on fire, and it were but to roast their eggs; and yet these men many times hold credit with their masters, because their study is but to please them and profit themselves; and for either respect they will abandon the good of their affairs.

I don't know… Francis Bacon is kind of an asshole.

Sir Francis gets dark, doesn't he.