How to learn a bit more about everything

They say you never stop learning. But between car pools and soccer practice, it's hard to find time to brush up on American history or revisit Emily Dickinson's poetry. “The Intellectual Devotional” contains 365 distinct passages on seven subjects — history, literature, visual arts, science, music, philosophy and religion — one for each day of the week, designed to inspire and invigorate. Authors Noah Oppenheim and David Kidder visited “Today” to discuss the book. Here's an excerpt:

MONDAY-HISTORY
Sparta vs. Athens: The Battle for the Ancient World
Sparta, a small city in the rugged mountains of southern Greece, fielded the most feared military in the ancient world. Spartan soldiers, hardened by grueling training that began at birth, never lost a battle in the bloody conflicts that raged almost constantly between the small city-states of ancient Greece. To build this remarkable army, elders in Sparta tested every newborn for weakness and deformities. Babies deemed unlikely to become strong soldiers were tossed into a gorge. For those that passed the test, training was cruel and relentless. The Greek historian and essayist Plutarch wrote that for many of the Spartan soldiers marching to battle was a relief: “For the Spartans, actual war was a holiday compared to their tough training.”

Rodale

The rivalry between militaristic Sparta and its neighbor Athens dominated the history of ancient Greece. Athens, the birthplace of democracy, was a far less rigid society. Unlike Sparta, where there was little time for culture, Athens was home to some of the most extraordinary accomplishments of philosophy, art, and science in human history. The playwrights Aeschylus, Aristophanes, Euripides, and Sophocles, as well as philosophers Aristotle, Plato, and Socrates were born in Athens during the city’s golden age in the fifth century BC.

While Athens and Sparta temporarily joined forces to defeat two attempted Persian invasions, they spent much of the classical period competing for the leadership of the Hellenic world. When the cities fought, as they did repeatedly between about 550 and 350 BC, it was a clash of civilizations in the fullest sense. While Sparta’s famed soldiers held the advantage on land, Athens made up the difference with its sea power. The rivalry came to an abrupt end when Philip of Macedonia invaded from the north. The Greek city-states were swallowed up into the empire that Philip and his son, Alexander the Great, extended over much of Greece and Asia.

Additional Facts
1. Sparta was the capital of the Greek region of Laconia. The word laconic in modern English is derived from the taciturn attitude of hardened Spartan soldiers.

2. To prove their toughness, Spartan boys competed to see how much whipping they could endure.

3. Many of the buildings on the Acropolis in Athens, including the famous Parthenon, were constructed during the city’s golden age in the fifth century BC.

TUESDAY-LITERATURE
Don Quixote
Miguel de Cervantes Don Quixote (Part I, 1605; Part II, 1615) is arguably the most prominent cultural landmark of the Spanish-speaking world. It is celebrated as the preeminent work of Spanish literature and widely considered the first modern novel in any language.

The title character is a fifty-year-old man from the region of La Mancha in central Spain. Influenced by books about chivalry, he announces one day to his bemused family that he has changed his name to Don Quixote and that he is going out into the world on his noble steed—really his skin-and-bones barn horse, Rocinante—to do great deeds and right all wrongs. He enlists a “squire,” an illiterate peasant named Sancho Panza, who thinks Don Quixote is crazy but plays along, half-believing his new master’s promise that he will give Sancho an island to govern.

The pair sets off on a long string of misadventures. Don Quixote continually misinterprets the world around him, mistaking innkeepers for knights, prostitutes for maidens, monks for enchanters, and windmills for giants. Often, his exploits harm their intended beneficiaries more than they help. He dedicates all his deeds to a “princess,” Lady Dulcinea del Toboso—really a peasant girl who is completely indifferent to the actions being performed in her name.

Don Quixote both parodies and pays homage to the chivalric romance—a genre that was a staple of secular literature during the Middle Ages. These epic poems told loosely connected tales of heroic knights, typically featuring themes of courtly love. Some were based on true events, but others were purely legend. In Don Quixote, Cervantes tackled the same subject matter, but with a more cohesive narrative, unprecedented psychological depth, and ironic self-awareness. He also added surprisingly postmodern twists: After another writer published a fake sequel to the first part of Don Quixote in 1614, Cervantes decided to write the fake sequel into the real second part of the novel. He makes Don Quixote and Sancho aware of this false account, enabling them to comment on it with derision.

Though we take such characteristics for granted in today’s literature—and indeed take the novel form itself for granted—they were enormous innovations at the time. The character of Don Quixote himself is a great achievement, a figure whom different eras and groups have variously interpreted as a buffoon, a tragic hero, and a courageous figure refusing to conform. His embodiment of so many qualities is precisely what has made Cervantes’ protagonist one of the most timeless characters in fiction.

Additional Fact
1. Of all the books published throughout history, Don Quixote is second only to the Bible in terms of total number of copies printed.

To learn more about "The Intellectual Devotional," you can visit: http://www.theintellectualdevotional.com/

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