With a little help from Aristotle, Machiavelli, and Hannah Arendt. Substack latest.
By the way, I learned that Arendt had ten books by Carl Schmitt in her library. We will have to look into their relationship.
Is that a cigarette holder she's using? A Randian touch. It would not be fair to call Ayn Rand a hack, but she comes close, and is nowhere near the level of Arendt. A is A!
Although he was decidedly of the world and not merely in it, Machiavelli knew how to retreat from its brutality into the serene precincts of the life of the mind and lose himself there, for a time, in conversations with the ancients.
I return home and enter my study; on the threshold I take off my workday clothes, covered with mud and dirt, and put on the garments of court and palace. Fitted out appropriately, I step inside the venerable court of the ancients, where, solicitously received by them, I nourish myself on that food that alone is mine and for which I was born; where I am unashamed to converse with them . . . and they, out of their human kindness, answer me. And for four hours at a time I feel no boredom, I forget all my troubles, I do not dread poverty, and I am not terrified by death. I absorb myself into them completely. And because Dante says that no one understands anything unless he retains [it], I have jotted down what I have profited from in their conversation and composed a short study, De principatibus.
See here.
Related: Studiousness as Prophylaxis against the Debilities of old Age
