And as such, much less is asked of you than those rival philosophical schools, I think.

If I can strike a slightly cynical note, we're talking about how people turn to the classics for advice on how to live their lives.

This will sound like a digression, but I promise I'm going somewhere.

Alain de Botton wrote a book a while ago, How Proust Can Change Your Life, which was all about how you can take advice from Proust on kind of what you should be eating for breakfast, which always struck me as a terribly reductionist ways to approach...

A terribly reductionist way to approach literature.

And I think we've probably all seen on social media people whose ex-accounts have pictures of Greek and Roman statues, but then you read what they're posting and they're just terribly outraged that women are sleeping with people other than them.

And I wonder if there are some people who are using the classics, I'm sure unconsciously, as a way to kind of dress up their own fairly petty concerns in this kind of grandiose ornamentation.

That's not what great literature and great ideas do.

And as such, much less is asked of you than those rival philosophical schools, I think.

If I can strike a slightly cynical note, we're talking about how people turn to the classics for advice on how to live their lives.

This will sound like a digression, but I promise I'm going somewhere.

Alain de Botton wrote a book a while ago, How Proust Can Change Your Life, which was all about how you can take advice from Proust on kind of what you should be eating for breakfast, which always struck me as a terribly reductionist ways to approach...

A terribly reductionist way to approach literature.

And I think we've probably all seen on social media people whose ex-accounts have pictures of Greek and Roman statues, but then you read what they're posting and they're just terribly outraged that women are sleeping with people other than them.

And I wonder if there are some people who are using the classics, I'm sure unconsciously, as a way to kind of dress up their own fairly petty concerns in this kind of grandiose ornamentation.

That's not what great literature and great ideas do.