Book Enthusiast GO!

To continue the philosophy groove of this volume we come to Marcus Aurelius. So far his Meditations have been interesting if a little different. He orders his work like a list with numbered chapters. The first chapter contained only people he knew and their profound effect upon him. Each person was then given a number. Pretty straight forward. It also reads a little easier than the previous two authors in that Marcus comes across a little like a child to me. At least in this first chapter, his style of writing is essentially a wonderfully long run-on sentence in the style of Dickens (i.e. it was punctuated well, but went of for days (and, yes, I know that makes it not technically a run-on sentence)).

The only other thing I’d like to mention for now on the subject is the curious appearance of Severus in Marcus’ list of influential people. (I’m about to segue into Harry Potter so if that’s not your cup of tea feel free to scroll to the next post.) Now one of the things I most enjoy about the Harry Potter series is J.K. Rowling’s intense research into names and words for her series. I love suddenly finding out that Kreacher is German for Creeper (though spelled Kriecher in the German) or that Durmstrang is an accepted amalgam of  Sturm und Drang (also German) or that Lupin, which is a derivative of Lupine, or wolf, (bet you know where I’m going with that one) turns into a werewolf, coupled with the name Remus (one half of the orphaned boys, raised by wolves, who eventually founded Rome in mythology). I think I’ve proved my point about Rowling and her research (and these are just the ones off the top of my head). Having found Severus in an unrelated text I am now compelled to look further into his origins and see what, if anything, Rowling borrowed for her characters.

I apologize for my obscene usage of parenthesis in this post.