Learning Vacations and Toronto Seminars from Classical Pursuits

As children we constantly wondered “Why?” and “So what?” Return to the big questions now, in convivial conversation about great books, music, and art.

Travel Pursuits are learning vacations rooted in place and transcending time. See with your own eyes and through discussion of the works of some of a country’s most celebrated authors and artists. Explore the mutual influence of artist on place, and place on artist.

Travel Pursuits 2008

Savannah & Milledgeville, Georgia
Mystery & Manners in Savannah
Selected Works of Flannery O'Connor
April 6–10 (4 nights)

Cornwall, England
In Search of Arthur
Selected readings
May 3–10 (7 nights)

Lyon, France
The French Resistance
St. Exupery, Camus and Jules Vercors
May 11–18 (7 nights)

Galicia, Spain
A journey through the animated forest
Monsignor Quixote by Graham Greene and Pilgrim of Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard
June 23–30 (7 nights)

Montreal, Canada
Jewish Montreal
Selected works by Mordecai Richler, Leonard Cohen, and Irving Layton
September 14–19 (5 nights)

Bayfield, Ontario
Alice's Wonderland
Alice Munro, Carried Away
October 5–9 (4 nights)

POSTPONED
Istanbul, Cappadocia and Ephesus, Turkey
Caught Between East and West
Elif Shafak’s
The Bastard of Istanbul and Orhan Pamuk’s
My Name is Red
Spring 2009

In the Summer 2008
July 13–July 18
We will celebrate our Tenth Anniversary with a celebratory program, LATE EDITIONS. The entire week will focus on creativity in later life – crowning achievements of Beethoven, Shakespeare, Rembrandt, Dostoevsky and many others. Twelve small group seminars to choose from; a featured series on late works of five opera composers, a retrospective of the life's work of Clint Eastwood, talks, walks, small group dinners, and an optional trip to the Stratford Festival. Join us!

Toronto Pursuits:
10th anniversary
LATE EDITIONS
July 13–18

1. The Play's the Thing: The Tempest & Long Day's Journey into Night

2. Old Wineskins (Bible)

3. Late Beethoven

4. The Search for Meaning in Later Life (C.G. Jung, Joseph Campbell, Rumi, Auden, Rilke)

5. Really Old Masters (Michelangelo, Goya, Monet and more)

6. The Education of Henry Adams

7. Dostoyevsky: The Brothers Karamazov

8. George Eliot: Daniel Deronda

9. The Leopard and Lampedusa's Art of Memory

10. Blindness and Wisdom in Art and Literature (Sophocles, Rembrandt and Monet)

11. Hemingway, First and Last

12. A Country of Old Men (and Women) – Elizabeth Bishop, Wallace Stevens, and W.B. Yeats

Classical Pursuits on Bloor

Reading James Joyce’s Ulysses in Toronto
Six Sundays in March and April
Approach this unread masterpiece with the able guidance of Michael Groden, Distinguished University Professor at the University of Western Ontario, and Dublin-born thespian, Mary Durkan. Set on one day in June 1904 in Dublin, Ulysses gives a picture of modern city life that remains astonishingly up-to-date and presents one of the most detailed depictions of the way human beings think that anyone has ever attempted. It offers a realistic and unblushing look at love, marriage, and human sexuality in all their complexity. In places it is one of the funniest books ever written. Click here.