Tuesday, January 21, 2014

Compendium Continued: Introductions

Just about a year ago I revisited my compendium project. Perhaps it's something about January, but at the start of this year I decided to revisit the old back-burner project.

I have now only 11 entries to finish (Aquinas, Archimedes, Boyle, Carson, Dante, De Beauvoir, Gibbon, Heisenberg, Pizan, Sophocles, Viete). The main work now lies in composing the personal sections, the introductions.

Compiling the work has been a pain of formatting, editing, and correcting. Each 20 page section often took a couple of hours. But the sections on their own are no good without an introduction - the context, the author, the themes to note. As such these one page intros are quite time consuming. They tie the whole project together and lend coherence to the aim of the work, as a primer for understanding western civilization.

So far I've completed and edited 34 of these little intros. As a spur to completing more I figured I might post some of these as a mans of elucidating the work's style. My list compulsion may move me to finish them as I do the series. Maybe not.

Often, while writing, I hear a British stuffiness come through, but hopefully this hasn't marred the texts. With regard to their manner it strikes me as something between David Landes and Kenneth Clark. Maybe they are stuffy...I leave the judgement to you, faithful reader(s).

Do note: they will not be presented in anything like chronological order.

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