Would you like to have a good life?

But you still cannot explain what was happening to your intellect then...until you stumble upon them again in late life and in some sense experience your own epiphany. This was exactly the case with me as I was drawn, in the beginning of the year, to re-read and dwell upon Plato’s book, the “Republic,” in the circumstances of our country’s impending 2024 general elections. (The “Republic” is Plato’s greatest and most famous work and it is written as a Socratic dialogue, an ancient precursor of what we would now call podcasting by geniuses, if we could have it.)

In his book, “Lectures on Literature,” Vladimir Nabokov wrote that, “a good reader, a major reader, an active and creative reader is a re-reader.” To him, when you re-read, you “notice and fondle” the particularities of the world that the author has rendered in words. I would consequently encourage a re-reading of any book.