Korva is a scroll of the internet’s best ideas.
A future SEAL studied Sufi mysticism
A poetry-loving home
She loved poetry and spent a lot of time reading, and he grew up liking it, with Kipling and Wordsworth in that little book. Today he sits in a library of a couple of thousand books, mostly on philosophy and poetry, with a large share on special operations.
Journalism school electives
The real change came in the school of journalism. The curriculum wanted students to learn to write and also to have a broad understanding, so it required plenty of electives. He took classes in philosophy, Sufi mysticism, and poetry, and he did not have to take advanced chemistry or calculus. He ended up with a Middle Eastern minor in 1977, when nobody really had a clue what the Middle East was, because he found it fascinating.
Monterey and the Stoics
The next push came at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, after Desert Storm. He studied a lot of history there, and the history led him sideways: what influenced Scipio Africanus, where the Greek philosophers came into play, where the Stoics and the Sophists fit, and how all of it fed the thinking of Marcus Aurelius.
How did Sufi poets use verse for mysticism?
Sufism is the mystical tradition of Islam, and poetry has been one of its main forms of expression for centuries. The thirteenth-century Persian poet Rumi wrote thousands of lines of verse about longing for the divine. His followers formed the Mevlevi order, known for a whirling ceremony that joins music, poetry, and movement. The order was founded in Konya, in what is now Turkey, after Rumi's death in 1273.
How did the Stoics get their name?
Zeno of Citium began teaching around 300 BC in Athens at the Stoa Poikile, a painted colonnade on the edge of the marketplace. The Greek word stoa means porch, and his students became known as Stoics, the people of the porch. The school taught that virtue is the only real good and that a person should accept what lies outside their control. Marcus Aurelius, Roman emperor from 161 to 180, wrote Meditations in that tradition.
Why did a Middle Eastern minor prove timely?
In September 1978, the Camp David Accords brought Egypt and Israel together under President Jimmy Carter. In 1979, the Iranian Revolution toppled the shah, and militants seized the American embassy in Tehran that November. The American hostages held in the embassy were not released until January 1981. In December 1979, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan.
More from Not Dead Yet
