16Ruth said, “Don’t urge me to leave you, and to return from following you, for where you go, I will go; and where you stay, I will stay. Your people will be my people, and your God my God. 17Where you die, I will die, and there I will be buried. May Yahweh do so to me, and more also, if anything but death parts you and me.” 18When she saw that she was determined to go with her, she stopped urging her. 19So they both went until they came to Bethlehem. When they had come to Bethlehem, all the city was excited about them, and they asked, “Is this Naomi?” 20She said to them, “Don’t call me Naomi. Call me Mara; for the Almighty has dealt very bitterly with me. 21I went out full, and Yahweh has brought me home again empty. Why do you call me Naomi, since Yahweh has testified against me, and the Almighty has afflicted me?” 22So Naomi returned, and Ruth the Moabitess, her daughter-in-law, with her, who returned out of the country of Moab. They came to Bethlehem in the beginning of barley harvest.
Ruth makes a plain promise to stay with Naomi when leaving would have been easier and safer. Her loyalty is not dramatic; it shows up as walking the road together and settling into an uncertain place. Naomi, meanwhile, is honest about her bitterness and grief and does not pretend otherwise. The passage suggests that faithful love often begins with showing up and telling the truth about where we are.
The pleasure of eating is very short. It lasts only while the food is in the mouth and passing down the throat. Digestion takes far longer than eating, and it is digestion, not tasting, that nourishes the body. So food does its work for us when it is digested, not while it is enjoyed on the tongue. It is foolish, then, to chase the brief pleasure of the palate as if it were the real good of eating, and shameful to be ruled by it.
Translated for Dalton Daily
Musonius Rufus was a Roman Stoic of the first century who taught Epictetus and was exiled more than once by emperors. He wrote nothing himself. His talks survive in notes made by a student, Lucius, and in extracts preserved by later anthologists such as Stobaeus. This reading is a paraphrase-style translation of the argument, not a word-for-word rendering, because no English translation from before 1929 exists.
Most of us decide what to eat by how it will taste for a minute or two, then live with the result for hours. Musonius asks us to judge a meal by what it does for us afterward. The same test works well beyond the table, on the scroll, the purchase or the second helping of anything. Pleasure that lasts a moment is a poor reason to give up a good that lasts all afternoon.
PracticeAt your next meal today, ask before the first bite what this food will do for you in three hours. Eat what answers that well, and stop when the answer changes.
After the earthquake of 1 November 1755, Portugal's government asked priests to report what they had seen. It was an early large-scale, systematic attempt to study an earthquake.
At about 9:40 on the morning of Saturday, 1 November 1755, All Saints' Day, Lisbon's churches were full. The ground shook for several minutes. Survivors ran to the riverfront, where the Tagus drained away and left the mud strewn with wrecked ships. Within the hour, waves came back up the river. Candles lit for the feast had been knocked over across the city, and the fires became a firestorm. Perhaps 30,000 to 40,000 of Lisbon's people died, and about 85 percent of its buildings were destroyed.
The usual response to a disaster like this was to preach about it. Some Jesuits did, and read the quake as God's punishment. Sebastião José de Carvalho e Melo, the king's chief minister and later the Marquis of Pombal, wanted facts. He had a questionnaire sent to the parishes of Portugal, to be answered by the local priests.
The questions were practical. At what hour did the shaking begin, and how long did it last? Did it seem stronger from one direction, and did buildings fall more to one side? How many died? Did the sea rise or fall first, and by how many hands' breadth? How long did any fire burn? Another set of questions asked whether animals behaved strangely beforehand and whether the water in wells changed.
The replies went into the national archive at Torre do Tombo. Eighteenth-century officials seem not to have analysed them properly. Researchers working from the archive, including Francisco Luiz Pereira de Sousa in the early twentieth century, later used them to map the shaking, the waves and the damage. The replies also turned up evidence of an earlier Lisbon quake, in 1531. This is why the Lisbon earthquake is often called the first one studied scientifically across a wide area.
RememberPombal's questionnaire treated an earthquake as something to measure rather than only mourn, and it is a reason Lisbon 1755 is counted as an early step toward seismology.
Read nextMark Molesky, This Gulf of Fire: The Destruction of Lisbon, or Apocalypse in the Age of Science and Reason
Source: Wikipedia: 1755 Lisbon earthquake and Parochial Memories of 1758