This is a test to make sure that posts will work in general, but also for the functional purpose of having them for my History of Mental Health in the US class. (Hello to anyone who’s traveled back here in the distant or not-so-distant future).
Did you know that the classic placeholder text “lorem ipsum” is actually nonsense Latin? Derived from the Roman statesman Marcus Tullius Cicero’s work De finibus bonorum et malorum, it’s cobbled together from different parts of the text. Here’s lorem ipsum as it most commonly appears:
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.
While gibberish, the part it draws from is a passage of Cicero’s thoughts on Epicurianism, which translates roughly to this:
But I must explain to you how all this mistaken idea of reprobating pleasure and extolling pain arose. To do so, I will give you a complete account of the system, and expound the actual teachings of the great explorer of the truth, the master-builder of human happiness. No one rejects, dislikes or avoids pleasure itself, because it is pleasure, but because those who do not know how to pursue pleasure rationally encounter consequences that are extremely painful. Nor again is there anyone who loves or pursues or desires to obtain pain of itself, because it is pain, but occasionally circumstances occur in which toil and pain can procure him some great pleasure. To take a trivial example, which of us ever undertakes laborious physical exercise, except to obtain some advantage from it? But who has any right to find fault with a man who chooses to enjoy a pleasure that has no annoying consequences, or one who avoids a pain that produces no resultant pleasure?
Cicero, Marcus Tullius, De finibus bonorum et malorum, trans. Harris Rackham, (New York: Macmillan, 1914), 36.
For more on this, click here. Thanks for reading!
