7:30 a.m. This morning will be devoted to making some notes on this page that correspond to my reading and hand written notes from yesterday. This activity of rewriting notes is a sound studying strategy. The goal of this overall set of activities is to genuinely learn some material that I did not know before. Review, and review again, and again, is a critical component of my approach

First, I now have three different themes .in play:

1. Classic Literature
1. Early Greeks (Homer, Aristophanes)
2. Ovid "The Metamorphoses"
3. Virgil "The Aenid"
4. Dante "The Divine Comedy"
2. Modern Literature
1. Italo Calvino
2. Alice Munro
3. Jorges Luis Borges
3. Japan
1. Bushido
2. The Soil
3. Japanese Civilization

The bright bold blue above indicates themes that am am currently involved with. Topics below the blue are candidates for next steps.

Italo Calvino

I completed the second chapter from his book, "Six Memos for the Next Millennium". It is entitled Quickness, and represents another characteristic of good literature.

Calvino's writing is full of references to other works. I love this. He mentions that one of the finest essays in English literature is The English Mail Coach by Thomas De Quincey (1849). Now to see if I can find this on the web. I was able to locate this complete reference: The English mail-coach, and other essays. London: Dent, 1912. xii, 339 p. but was not able to locate the actual essay. Even Project Gutenberg did not have it, although there is another essay by De Quincey called Confessions of an Opium Eater that is very popular.

Calvino associates "good thinking" with

• quickness
• agility in reasoning
• economy in argument
• use of imaginative examples

He also suggests that for each virture (of literature) there is also the opposite virtue

• lightness  - weight
• quickness  - lingering

I think this is a very profound observation. Rather than argue for one perspective, it is better to examine both the original point of view and then consider the opposite. Then in the traditional Canadian way, look for the golden mean.

Some pages, some entire books, are to read very slowly with much repetition as the words are themselves so finely crafted. Not all books are a race to the finish line.

Calvino also mentions that he admires Jorges Luis Borges. I recently bought his "Collected Fictions", and have now put it on my TODO list for this Year of Learning. However I want to complete the latest Alice Munro short stories book first.

Calvino also talks about the idea of a one sentence story. His favorite is

• When I woke up, the dinosaur was still there.

One that I can think of is

• Dr. Livingstone, I presume.

Here are three I have created:

• Paul and Mary walked, hand in hand, toward the lake.
• Napoleon and Plato surveyed the carnage below them.
• Deep in central Africa, the monkey approached the boy and then suddenly, without warning, gave him a little nip on the arm.

I will provide my notes on Japanese Civilization tomorrow.