In week 17 of the humanities crash course, I read a book that was completely new to me: Apuleius’s Metamorphoses, better known as The Golden Ass. I also watched a movie with a similar story (but with different aims.)

Readings

The Golden Ass was written by Apuleius around the second century CE. The only complete Latin novel to survive, it tells the story of Lucius, a man whose reckless curiositas leads him to accidentally be transformed into an ass. (What is curiositas, you ask? Read on…)

As a donkey, Lucius goes from owner to owner, exposing him to dangers, adventure, and gossip. Characters tell several sub-stories, mostly about crime, infidelity, and magic. The most famous is the story of Cupid and Psyche, a cautionary allegory that echoes the themes and structures of the novel as a whole.

Throughout his wanderings, Lucius is treated brutally. At one point a woman falls in love with him and treats him as a sex object. Eventually, the goddess Isis brings him back to human form after an initiation into her cult. He becomes an acolyte, making the story a metaphor for religious conversion.

The final section of the book, where Lucius undergoes his spiritual transformation, is one of several surprising tone shifts: the book is sometimes drama, horror, fairy tale, and bawdy farce. Overall, it gives an entertaining picture of moral codes in second century Europe.

Audiovisual

Music: Scott Joplin. Again, a composer whose work was familiar to me. Rather than the usual piano solo versions, I listened to a recording of his works featuring Andre Previn on piano and Itzhak Perlman on violin.

Arts: van Gogh, who, like Joplin, is overly familiar. This lecture from The National Gallery helped put his work in context:

I hadn’t realized the degree to which van Gogh’s paintings are the result of a tech innovation: synthetic pigments in the newly invented roll-up tubes. As always, understanding context is essential.

Cinema: Jerzy Skolimowski’s EO, a road picture that follows a donkey as he drifts through the Polish and Italian countrysides. Like Lucius, he’s exposed to humanity’s moral failings (and a tiny bit of tenderness.) While visually and aurally stunning, I found the movie overbearingly preachy.

Reflections

As usual, I entered my reflections on the book into ChatGPT to ask for what I might have missed or gotten wrong. My notes said Lucius’s curiosity about witchcraft led him to be transformed into an ass. ChatGPT corrected me: it wasn’t curiosity but curiositas.

I asked for clarification, since the two terms are so similar. As I now understand it, curiositas refers to “an immoderate appetite for forbidden or frivolous knowledge that distracts from real duties” — i.e., wasting time on B.S. of the sort one finds in tabloids or chasing after forbidden knowledge.

ChatGPT suggested as contemporary equivalents clickbait and doomscrolling, gossip culture (think the Kardashians), and “risk-blind experimentation” — i.e., the “move fast and break things” ethos — as the LLM put it, a “reckless desire to test the limits without counting the costs.”

In other words, Lucius wasn’t punished (and ultimately disciplined) because he was curious. Instead, he “messed around and found out” — literally making an ass out of himself. For the ancients, the healthy opposite was studiositas, a “disciplined study in service of truth.” We’ll spend time with Thomas Aquinas later in the course; ChatGPT suggests he makes much of this distinction.

Notes on Note-taking

Last week, I said I’d return to ChatGPT 4o for its responsiveness. I haven’t; the o3 model’s results are better enough that the slightly longer wait is worth it. That said, I remain disappointed with o3’s preference for tables.

One good sign: at one point, ChatGPT presented me with a brief A/B test where it asked me to pick between a table-based result and one with more traditional prose. Of course, I picked the latter. I hope they do away with the tables, or at least make them much less frequent.

Up Next

Gioia recommends selected readings from The Arabian Nights. While I’ve never read the original, several of these stories (Aladdin, Sinbad) are familiar through reinterpretations. I’m looking forward to reading the originals.

Again, there’s a YouTube playlist for the videos I’m sharing here. I’m also sharing these posts via Substack if you’d like to subscribe and comment. See you next week!