The whole Symposium reading community invites you to join us for one or more seminars that begin the first week of October 2026 or later.

If you're looking for calm seas in turbulent times, you could reach for hot beverage and a book. Or, better yet: a hot beverage, a book, and real live ordinary people like you who enjoy literature, philosophy, mathematics, music, and poetry, and thoughtful conversation.

Our shared approach to reading worthwhile books gives you access to treasures of the world with the benefit of other perspectives. Here we compare notes, "whisper results to our neighbor" (Keats). No professor-'splaining here. Books like the Iliad and the Odyssey, Job, Henry VI Part 3, War and Peace are big doors to big worlds. Sor Juana Ines letters, Nabokov's Lolita, and Joyce's Dubliners, Early Irish poetry narrow the portals... or do they? Euclid, Heraclitus, and Ptolemy show us that we can learn from old science and return to the original questions with fresh eyes. We're also learning ancient Greek and Latin and exercising our mathematical and musical sense because they seem to be keys to such access. If you've always wanted to learn ancient Greek and brush up on your Latin, now is your affordable chance.

There is a scene in Plato's Phaedrus (offered this Fall) in which Socrates and Phaedrus, walking outside of the city, find shade under a plane tree (recall Aesop's "Plane Tree"). The scene is a beautiful image of our individual and communal efforts to slow down, one or more evenings a week, and pay attention to the world, to listen to authors and to each other. Keep a eye open for our Symposium Institute newsletter, Under the Plane Tree, re-turning this Fall.

HIGHLIGHTS (some times have been updated since the last mailing)

Homer, Odyssey (24 sessions) Sundays, 10:30a-12p ET | Oct 4-Mar 21 - try Eva Brann's Do You Know What an Odyssey Is?​

Nabokov, Lolita (12 sessions) Sundays, 4:30-6p ET | Oct 4-Dec 20 - timely and untimely.

Beginning Ancient Greek (12 sessions) Sundays, 7:30-9:30p ET | Oct 4-Dec 27 - plenty of support, you can do it!

Euclid, Elements Books II-III (12 sessions) Mondays, 2:30-4p ET | Oct 5-Dec 21 - continue on to planes and circles

Zola, Germinal (12 sessions) Monday, 5-6:30p ET | Oct 5-Dec 21 - La Voreux, a ravenous beast of a coal mine

Vergil in Latin (cont.) Mondays, 7-9p ET | Oct 5 - even beginners can enjoy its most celebrated author

Homer, Iliad (24 sessions) Mondays, 8-9:30p ET | Oct 5-Mar 22 - war and glory, and death FILLING FAST

Music: Early Jazz (6 sessions) Tuesdays, 12-1:30p ET | Nov 10-Dec 15 - It's swings. It's cool.

Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz & Benito Feijoo (12 sessions) Tuesdays, 3-4:30p ET | Oct 6-Dec 22 - feminist writings of the 1600s

Pre-Socratics: Inquiries into Nature (12 sessions) Tuesdays, 8-9:30p ET | Oct 6-Dec 22 - what is nature, really?

An Introduction to Symposium: Marcus Aurelius, Meditations (8 sessions) Tuesdays, 8-9:30p ET | Oct 20-Dec 8 - FULL

Shakespeare, Henry VI-3 (12 sessions) Wednesdays, 2-3:30p ET | Oct 7-Dec 23 - the saga continues

Plato, Phaedrus (12 sessions) Wednesday, 5:30-7p | Oct 7-Dec 23 - take flight on a horse-drawn chariot of love...of wisdom

Joyce, Dubliners (12 sessions) Wednesdays, 7-8:30p ET | Oct 7-Dec 23 - the narrative arc of life

Ptolemy, The Almagest, Book I (11 sessions) Thursdays, 2:30-4:00 pm ET | Oct 1-Dec 17 - move over flat-earthers, make way for the geocentric universe!

Early Irish Poetry (6 sessions) Thursdays, 4-5:30p ET | Oct 15-Nov 19 - the monks take a break from their scrivener duties ($125)

Great Books, Great Readers: The Book of Job w/ Sacks commentary (22 sessions) Thursdays, 8-9:30p ET | Oct 8-Mar 25 - a strangely human work about a man

Tolstoy, War and Peace (cont.) Fridays, 3:00-4:30p ET | Oct 9-Dec 18 - continuing with Book IV, and the rest is Epilogue

Descriptions and updates are posted on our website at: www.symposiuminstitute.org​

$200 for one 12-session seminar, or $250 (total) for two or more. Support our reading community.

If you are ready to register now, go to https://www.symposiuminstitute.org/programs/register​

Write to us directly if you have any questions -- we are the real human beings who manage the institute.

Email: mailroom@symposiuminstitute.org to reach Jason Happel or Reynaldo Miranda