Tour

What are my choices?

Introduction to the Great Books (monthly online seminars)

(FREE) This introductory program gives a taste of slow reading at Symposium. You (and 7-12 others) are invited to a Zoom meeting for 90 minutes to look at a short passage together from one of the "great books."  There have been many brilliant books in the world, and we avoid making lists here, but we do notice that some books rise from the ordinary and capture the hearts and minds of readers for centuries or millennia. These great works tend to be (a) hard to categorize, (b) complex and challenging, but (c) they are often truly wonderful. We invite you to see for yourself why they might have their reputation.

Free Seminar Previews (one session)

(FREE) Free Seminar Previews are one-session and precede a regular a Slow Reading Seminar by a week or two  (see below). You'll get a sense of the text, the different types of participants, and the seminar leader's style.  Typically, we read a passage aloud, pose a guiding question, and discuss.

Short Seminars (For Our Moment, CrossCurrents and other experiments)

(Three or four session seminars for a lower cost) Short seminars are our lures, designed to (a) dig into a short work or poem, (b) to compare two works or authors, or (c) touch on connections between a source-text and the branches that extend out from the source: from Homer to Vergil, or Plutarch to Shakespeare.  Get hooked on slow-reading.

“For Our Moment” seminars are slow reading, slow listening, or slow looking learning experiences for those who might not have time for the longer pathways, but who would enjoy the benefits that comes from slowing down, together.

"CrossCurrents" seminars include combinations of texts, music, and/or visual arts connected historically, thematically, or explicitly.  These seminars apply the slow-reading approach to see connections among the various representations of ideas in writing, music, and artwork.  

Slow Reading Pathways  (including mathematics and music)

(Subscription supported)  Slow Reading Pathways are the heart and soul of Symposium.  We call them pathways because a particular book (or collection of poems, essays, or musical pieces) can be a lighted pathway through a dark wood, through the underworld, or out of a cave. It can be a sea journey back home (Homer's Odyssey) or a fantastic adventure out of the library into the world (Cervantes, Don Quixote).  A great book can feel like a curriculum ("a course to be run") -- we walk, however, at a leisurely pace.  Books like Euclid's Elements, no less than Plato's Republic, Aristotle's Ethics, Thucydides's Peloponnesian War, Maimonides's Guide, Rousseau's Emile,  Montesquieu's Laws, or Hegel's Phenomenology (to drop a few names) are courses in themselves and take more than a few weeks to begin to understand.

We honor the practice of slow-reading, over an extended period, in conversation with others, for the purpose of understanding worthwhile books. We look to humanity’s greatest sources of insight: we search rather than re-search. The purpose of such seminars is to offer participants opportunities to engage with books and with others in a moderated group, in the spirit of the great conversation that exists among authors across time and place. 

Language Learning

(Subscription supported) You can Learn Greek and Latin here at your own pace, with others who take up the challenge of self-directed learning.  In this non-academic approach to language learning, you do the heavy-lifting in regular meetings with more experienced students and a guides.