The inclination to withdraw himself from the public as far as possible is regarded as one of Virgil’s most salient characteristics: this at least is the impression given by the few testimonia and numerous anecdotes of his life. The guiding principle of Virgil’s life as a poet of the res publica Romana could be described as an ‘art of disappearing’, which becomes evident in different ways. By means of this Virgil sometimes succeeds in withdrawing himself spatially even from Augustus, the mightiest designer of space, and in establishing certain limits to his ‘topotactic’ power. To present the ‘withdrawing technique’ practised by Virgil, this chapter draws on information gathered from biographical texts on Virgil as well as on relevant passages of Virgil’s work, naturally without ignoring the documentary fragility of the texts considered. Nevertheless there are conspicuous correspondences between the texts about Virgil and the poetological messages within his literary works, which give an impression at least of his effective seclusion. His reception by his contemporaries and immediate successors proves his greatest success in this respect.

Chapter 6 examines the period from 1944 to May 1945. How did chaplains deal with impending defeat? The chaos of retreat brought many challenges. Chaplains witnessed the death throes and killing frenzies of Hitler’s Germany, as atrocities continued to the bitter end. Chaplains ministered to the Wehrmacht amid the destruction of the Jews of Hungary, assault on civilians in the name of anti-partisan warfare, and death marches as concentration camps were shut and guards forced prisoners out onto the road. The physical demands of the chaplains’ work increased as their numbers dwindled and those left lacked supplies of all kinds. Newly created NSFOs, Nazi leadership officers, competed with them for soldiers’ hearts and minds. Yet chaplains found they were more valued in times of defeat. At the front they reminded soldiers of their oath of obedience, while they comforted bereaved families at home. Some Greek Orthodox chaplains were allowed to minister to Ukrainian Waffen-SS men in the Galicia Division. Yet even as chaplains continued to serve, they began quietly to disregard the regime’s will when it conflicted with institutional self-interest, e.g. in appointing new base chaplains.

Paradise Regained, which opens with an “eremite” (I.10) and ends at home, examines different recurring response to the conditions of modernity: how some people attempt a retreat from the world. By expanding on the Temptation of Jesus (the Son of God in Paradise Regained) by Satan, a set of stories told in the Gospels of Matthew (4:1-11), Mark (1:12-13), and Luke (4:1-13), Milton’s Paradise Regained revises the Temptation in the Desert, casting the world as a series of temptations to be avoided, just four years after Paradise Lost narrates giving into temptation as a felix culpa. To generations of readers, “retreat” comes freighted with political or military connotations that can unfortunately lead the contextual scholar back to the Restoration, i.e., with Milton in retreat from the Stuart monarchy. Paradise Regained proposes a spiritual domestic retreat, and one in which the particular government is irrelevant.

Most meetings are not run efficiently or effectively, and very few leaders put the time and energy into running a meeting well, not only wasting the time of their audience but their own as well. Without question, some meetings, or at least portions of meetings, are necessarily informative and perfunctory, such as updates on the financial situation of a department or the medical center or school. But not all meetings have to be like that, and nor do all portions of a given meeting. This chapter gives some tips for running an effective meeting, getting the most out of your group in the process, and having the group feel not only updated but engaged, respected, and perhaps even inspired. We talk about how to get people engaged from the get-go and the importance of setting the tone and expectations for meetings at the very start. We discuss the importance of setting the agenda and giving people prework so that they come prepared and ready for discussion. We get into the importance of establishing trust in meetings, so that people can speak freely and without fear of recrimination or attack. We talk about how to foster a constructive dialogue, allowing people to spread their wings and explore their creative sides, but also how to deal with a negative team member who makes others uncomfortable. And we talk about how to wrap up a meeting, discuss next steps, and have the group leave excited for the next meeting. We conclude with how to conduct a retreat for your group.

Grandfathers took great pride in their grandchildren and in the continuation of the family line, but they contributed far less to their families than did their wives. As they aged they moved into a pleasant, quiescent stage of life. There were/are many gentle, calming pursuits to pass the time: keeping songbirds, practising taiji, doing calligraphy, writing poetry. Old men spent time in the company of other old men, often in teahouses or parks. Their remaining family responsibilities were agreeable. The literate ones taught their grandchildren calligraphy. They were responsible for the complex practices of choosing the grandchildren’s names. They passed on family history and lore.

Affluent men could practice polygamy. A woman could only marry once, but her husband could take as many concubines as he wanted – and could afford. He might have children who were younger than his oldest grandchildren. Polygamous families were usually full of conflict, far from the men’s ideal. Formal polygamy is now outlawed, though the practice of keeping a ‘little wife’, in a separate establishment, is not.

If the incentives to undertake drastic mitigation remain inordinately weak, those in favor of transformational adaptation to climate change will prove very strong, so humanity will spend vast sums of effort and money in this arena. These will range from the personal (buy another air conditioner) to the national (strengthen emergency response capabilities). Agricultural and food systems will need to transform to remain productive in a warmer world. More human intervention including “assisted evolution” will be required to protect natural systems that may increasingly struggle to protect themselves. Cities will need to become more resilient to resist and rapidly recover from the stresses that a changed climate will bring. Infrastructure to hold back rising seas such as the mighty Dutch Delta Works will become common all over the globe. However, over the longer run, humanity will need to surrender lesser value portions of coastline to the waves and execute a broad and painful retreat.

Chapter 3 describes the brutal opening battles of the war during August–September 1914 and their disastrous result for Austria-Hungary. Conrad’s strategic planning and late altering of his plans proved fatal and led to the near total destruction of the prewar Habsburg Army. The Habsburg Army, forced into a full retreat, was in desperate need of German assistance. The losses had been so severe that it had now become a militia.

The chapter examines the Spiritual Exercises of Loyola, the foundational text for Jesuit practice, and finds there a rich psychoanalytic dynamism between satisfaction and frustration, imagination and reality, and an insistent demand for a creative, affective response to the problems it forces the exercitant to face.

The American Civil War presented an exceptional state of affairs in modern warfare, because strong personalities could embed their own command philosophies into field armies, due to the miniscule size of the prior US military establishment. The effectiveness of the Union Army of the Tennessee stemmed in large part from the strong influence of Ulysses S. Grant, who as early as the fall of 1861 imbued in the organization an aggressive mind-set. However, Grant’s command culture went beyond simple aggressiveness – it included an emphasis on suppressing internal rivalries among sometimes prideful officers for the sake of winning victories. In the winter of 1861 and the spring of 1862, the Army of the Tennessee was organized and consolidated into a single force, and, despite deficits in trained personnel as compared to other Union field armies, Grant established important precedents for both his soldiers and officers that would resonate even after his departure to the east. The capture of Vicksburg the following summer represented the culminating triumph of that army, cementing the self-confident force that would later capture Atlanta and win the war in the western theater.

The story of Red Army military culture in 1917–1945 is a story of selective continuity with centuries of Russian military tradition, as well as dramatic innovation and discontinuity. The Bolshevik Party set out to create a new kind of state, a new kind of army, even a new kind of human being, the New Soviet Man. It never achieved the total transformation it envisioned, but the attempt shaped a unique military culture that blended new ideals with old traditions. For all the discontinuities in the revamped Red Army, the military culture of the Soviet era cannot be considered sui generis; continuities with the old imperial army were also in evidence. However, it was not the intention of the new Soviet state to allow such continuity. In fact, the state had intended just the reverse. Military culture in the Soviet period was dynamic. There were attempts to "change everything" with dramatic pendulum shifts from one end of the spectrum to the other, in terms of organization, recruitment, hierarchies, and political oversight. Most of those efforts settled somewhere in the middle through a long process of debate and compromise. This produced a unique dialectic that distinguished Soviet military culture in 1917–1945 from any other.