against my (acquired) skepticism of anything published in the last 50 years (exceptions: Kazuo Ishiguro's novels, The Selfish Gene), I picked up Nassim N. Taleb's Antifragile.

I'm about 75% through but wanted to pause and open this text file to say that it is one insightful, exciting, and amusing book.

Written with Taleb's entire being: intellect, emotions, soul, flesh.

And what makes the book even more special to me: Taleb loves (and reads) the classics and the great authors of our literary tradition.

Here is an excerpt:

“All I hear is how to live longer, richer, and, of course, more laden with electronic gadgets. We are not the first generation to believe that the worst possible thing to befall us is death. But for the ancients, the worst possible outcome was not death, but a dishonorable death, or even just a regular one. For a classical hero, dying in a retirement home with a rude nurse and a network of tubes coming into and out of your nose would not be the attractive telos for a life."

There's no need for a direct quote from Virgil or Plutarch. One can sense that the knowledge and the reverence for history are there.

Enough to connect me to notes I took about The Odyssey when Achilles laments that Agamemnon did not die a good death:

“But you [Agamemnon] were doomed to encounter fate so early,
you too, yet no one born escapes its deadly force.
If only you had died your death in the full flush
of the glory you had mastered-died on Trojan soil!
Then all united Achaea would have raised your tomb
and you’d have won your son great fame for years to come.
Not so. You were fated to die a wretched death.”

And in the more philosophical sections of Antifragile -the ethics of antifragility- I encounter not only the classics, but also the precepts of Dr. Johnson's.

Life is not about rights and privileges, it's about responsibilities.