About a year ago, boccaderlupo recommended On the Gods and the World to me as an introduction to Neoplatonism, and I had the exact same reaction you're having now! It's all so simple and logical until you realize that you don't have any idea what the basic cultural assumptions of the people Sallust is speaking to, are! (Hell, I don't even know the basic cultural assumptions of our time and place are! Trying to understand the assumptions of a culture distantly removed in time and space seems almost insurmountable!)
This is ultimately the trouble with books: that they're not interactive. I can't keep asking questions ad nauseam to tease apart the knot. Still, with no sane people left in the world (myself included), books seem to be what we're left with, and therefore I'm more than happy to wrap myself up in deeply nested footnotes, like a blanket.
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Date: 2021-10-31 02:46 am (UTC)This is ultimately the trouble with books: that they're not interactive. I can't keep asking questions ad nauseam to tease apart the knot. Still, with no sane people left in the world (myself included), books seem to be what we're left with, and therefore I'm more than happy to wrap myself up in deeply nested footnotes, like a blanket.