Flirting with reading the Aeneid again. Found a Williams + Latin Parallel, Kline, Macktail, and a paper copy of Rhoades. Paper copy is +15% reading comprehension vs a screen (and growing). Finding out which is my favorite is part of the fun. I will use them all. When you get to proper nouns that an author uses to set values or link with allusions, you have to rotate between copies and look up the original word. You'll get to stuff and you can feel the bottom dropping out and meaning falling apart. That's an encrypted section. No other way to put it. Slow down and don't move on. It might take days to figure this page. Reading out loud reduces text complexity by two grade levels (I know this is not in the same unit of measurement as the other text complexity reduction value. Nothing I can do about that.) If you're a young guy, I can understand not wanting to go as slow as I'm suggesting. There's value in just making bookmarks mentally or otherwise to come back to sections when you're older. I used to make a code 2D4M which meant too deep for me. If you're young it's better to cover ground somewhat more quickly. I would suggest in the first half of your reading career cutting your academic reading speed down by a lot but just maintaining that speed mostly to start becoming conversant in a lot of classic texts. In the second half, and I'm making this up because it's at about the 20 year mark of reading classics for me maybe. Maybe 22. But I've slowed way down now. The deep page, the Mariana trench randomly in the middle of a novel, is where all the coolest stuff is hidden. And you have to be really good to tease it out. The best authors bury stuff so that only the worthy have access. It reminds me of how the government tried to figure out how to get rid of nuclear waste and one of the ideas is to bury it so deep that only someone with sufficient technology to unbury it would also have sufficient technology to know the dangers of radiation. And don't take my word for it. What I'm talking about, burying the good stuff deep underground, is one of the primary themes of Shakespeare's tempest for example. Anyways I'll see if the aeneid hooks me in again. This is a fun hobby to have.

it's wild that the revelation of the information singularity happened at the conjunction of peak femininity in world history just like all those now-lost chiasmi in the Bible predicted. Or if you didn't know about all that, how about the chiasmi where woman brings man the apple. it'd be wild if marx knew this when he was openly talking about capitalism dying a natural death when in fact he was secretly writing all his works in cramped little chiasmi on purpose (that's precisely what he was doing). Maybe he didn't have the guts to call capitalism feminine like virgil did in the first two pages of the Aeneid. And Plato did in the Republic (but you'll get a community note for saying that last part trust me). At any rate, the epoch is coming to an end. It's been a wild ride. My advice is to believe in a loving father God who cares about the sparrows, so how much more will he care about you. The worst thing you can do is go into it spiritually tired. Now that that's covered, come read old books with me. It's a lot of fun. I just started the Aeneid again. I'm on Page 2.