I have been reading the Journal of Jules Renard, as translated and edited by Louise Bogan and Elizabeth Roget. Originally published in 1964, it was reprinted a couple of years ago by Tin House Books. The complete journal runs to more than 1,200 pages. The Tin House edition, at 304 pages, provides a representative sampling. [Read more →]
“I mistrust all systematizers and avoid them,” Nietzsche writes in Twilight of the Idols. “The will to a system is a lack of integrity.”
Well, no one will ever accuse Nietzsche of thinking systematically. I actually don’t have much regard for him as a thinker at all. He has brilliant insights that he expresses brilliantly, but a good deal of what he says is pretty goofy — though even that is usually entertaining.
But I have no problem with the unsystematic nature of Nietzsche’s thinking. [Read more →]
Much pleasure and enlightenment can be had from desultory reading. I mean the sort when you don’t read a particular book from cover to cover, but just pick up first this one, then that, reading a little here and a little there. The different passages that catch your attention often fit surprisingly well together, like the bits and scraps that go to make up a collage. [Read more →]
There is a poem by that fine, but neglected poet George Barker called “Allegory of the Adolescent and the Adult.” It has long been a favorite of mine. “It was when weather was Arabian,” it begins. “I walked / Like Saint Christopher Columbus through a sea’s welter / Of gaudy ways looking for a wonder.”
But the wonder proves elusive. Our young speaker tells us that “hollyhock here and rock and rose there were,” but “I wound among them knowing they were no wonder.” A bird with a worm and a fox in a wood fail to meet muster as well, for “I was / Wanting a worse wonder, a rarer one.”
So he goes on, “expecting miraculous catastrophe,” though a bit anxious as well: “How shall I know my marvel when it comes?” [Read more →]
One usually hears Judaism, Christianity, and Islam referred to as “the three great monotheistic religions.” Apparently, however, that noted deity Yahweh would disagree: “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery; you shall have no other gods before me” (Exodus 20, 2-3).
That second verse is a simple imperative; there really is no way of reading it other than literally. Yahweh acknowledges the existence of other gods besides himself. [Read more →]
I have been paging through Dag Hammarskjöld’s Markings, which happens to be the first book I reviewed professionally. I don’t know how many people remember Hammarskjöld. He was the second Secretary-General of the United Nations and by far its most effective. Indeed, I would argue that, for all practical purposes, the UN died the day Hammarskjöld was killed in an air crash in what is now Zaire.
Markings was published posthumously. It is a kind of journal. Hammarskjöld himself described it — I am relying on memory — as a white paper concerning his negotiations with himself and God. [Read more →]
“Death is the mother of beauty,” Wallace Stevens declares in “Sunday Morning.” Put that together with Keats’s dictum that ” ‘Beauty is truth, truth Beauty’ — that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know,” and it all adds up to a pretty grim poetic assessment of life.
Stevens’s point, of course, is that a satisfying cadence is an aesthetic necessity:
Is there no change of death in paradise?
Does ripe fruit never fall? Or do the boughs
Hang always heavy in that perfect sky,
Unchanging …
“To philosophize is to learn how to die,” said the redoubtable Montaigne, and I’m sure he was right. [Read more →]
I recently posted on my blog a quote from William Lyon Phelps:
The happiest people are those who think the most interesting thoughts. Those who decide to use leisure as a means of mental development, who love good music, good books, good pictures, good company, good conversation, are the happiest people in the world. And they are not only happy in themselves, they are the cause of happiness in others.
Bill Peschel sent along in response a quote from Dorothy Parker: [Read more →]
“The universe,” the poet Muriel Rukeyser wrote, “is made of stories, not of atoms.” This seems eminently sound to me. After all, what exactly do atoms amount to?
In The Nature of the Physical World, Sir Arthur Eddington notes that if you imagine the nucleus of an atom to be a grain of sand suspended halfway between the floor and the apex of the dome of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome, the orbit of the electrons would be circumscribed by the curve of the dome itself. In other words, the distance between the nucleus and the electrons is astronomical. A creature standing on the nucleus would likely be unable to see the electrons spinning about. [Read more →]
Every morning, the first post on my blog is titled “Thought for the day.” It is simply a quote I find interesting from a writer (usually, it’s a writer) born on that date. Recently, the one I chose was by Italo Svevo, author of The Confessions of Zeno: “God gave us memory so that we might have roses in December.”
This struck me as a magical turn of phrase. [Read more →]
Live long enough and you will start to grow old. As someone who has crossed that threshold I can say that, so far, it isn’t exactly turning out as expected. Not that I expected much, mind you, just what I took to be the usual. I figured I’d put on a bit of weight, get a little paunchy, and have some more aches to put up with. That’s all come to pass, but what I didn’t expect is how, at some point, it all seems to come together into some sort of critical mass, and it’s no longer something that’s happening, but something that has happened. It’s a bit like when you notice that all the leaves are off the trees and realize it’s not really autumn anymore. [Read more →]
St. Nicholas has become indelibly associated with Christmas, but his actual feast day is celebrated a few weeks earlier, on Dec 6, a date that is also notable for something extraordinary that happened in the history of philosophy. The year was 1274. A Dominican monk known to history as Thomas Aquinas said Mass that morning, as priests do every morning. What happened next, as recounted in the records of the process that led to Thomas’s canonization, is nicely summarized by Josef Pieper in his book The Silence of St. Thomas: [Read more →]
In my last column, I remarked in passing that while great music is always original, originality alone doesn’t account for its greatness. The same is true of all art, of course, not just music
As for why this so, something C.S. Lewis had to say on the subject, which I came upon just the other day, is especially insightful: [Read more →]
Recently, my wife and I attended a Philadelphia Orchestra concert that featured, as the concluding work, the Danish composer Carl Nielsen’s fifth symphony, which is perhaps best-known — even notorious — for its first movement duel between snare drum and orchestra (a note in the score instructs the drummer to improvise “as if at all costs to stop the progress of the orchestra”).
At its premiere in 1922, the symphony was pretty well-received by both critics and the public. But a couple of years later, when performed in Stockholm, about a quarter of the audience is said to have fled the hall. Those who remained in their seats were none too pleased, either. My wife, more than 80 years later, felt their pain. [Read more →]
Thanks to the Internet — and, in particular, to blogging — the capacity for dialogue has, along with much else, increased exponentially. Now, the aim of this column is to take something someone has said and see where thinking about it leads. But there is no reason why the quoted matter I choose to discuss need be a remark that is famous or one uttered by someone famous.
Recently, I linked on my blog to a piece by Mark Vernon called “How to be agnostic,” in which he quoted something written by Daniel J. Boorstin: “I have observed that the world has suffered far less from ignorance than from pretensions to knowledge. It is not skeptics or explorers but fanatics and ideologues who menace decency and progress.” [Read more →]
What St. Augustine says of time could just as well be said of love, that we know what it is until we try saying what it is. Nevertheless, a lot has certainly been said about love. Poets, prophets and philosophers have all weighed in on the subject. Songwriters have made a cliché of it. [Read more →]
My bedtime reading last night consisted of a few pages of John Cowper Powys’s The Art of Growing Old. Since I am only two years shy of the Biblical age, I figure it’s high time to get some pointers on how to deal with my impending dotage. [Read more →]
“Everything comes in time to those who can wait.” I thought this was a French proverb, but I have seen it attributed to Rabelais. Maybe it’s just a proverb Rabelais quoted. Like Cervantes, Rabelais knew his proverbs.
Whatever its origin, its purport is clear enough. It’s a pitch for patience, which is a virtue I doubt any of us is born with. If the behavior of babies is any evidence, our wish to have what we want when we want it comes naturally to us. [Read more →]
“Autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful,” George Orwell declares at the start of his review of Salvador Dali’s autobiography, called The Secret Life of Salvador Dali. “A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying,” Orwell continues, “since any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats.”
I’m not sure about that first sentence. [Read more →]
Albert Jay Nock was fond of quoting something said by Joseph Butler, an 18th-century Anglican bishop: “Things and actions are what they are, and the consequences of them will be what they will be: why then should we desire to be deceived?”
The first part of this is just a more elegant form of the proposition about something looking like a duck being a duck. It’s the second part that is interesting. Do we in fact desire to be deceived? [Read more →]
I keep running into George Santayana. Last week, for example, I was rummaging in the basement and came upon a galley of Irving Singer’s book George Santayana: Literary Philosopher. I’ve only had time to read about half of it, but it’s a wonderful book. If Singer, a professor of philosophy at MIT, is as good in class as he is on paper, he must be one hell of a teacher.
I find Santayana — an atheist with a passionate attachment to Catholicism — a fascinating figure, principally because I share two of his fundamental notions. [Read more →]
I suppose we all think we have a handle on reality. Of course, that itself may be a problem. Thinking may just possibly not be adequate to reality.
“Whatever is a reality today,” Luigi Pirandello wrote, “whatever you touch and believe in and that seems real for you today, is going to be — like the reality of yesterday — an illusion tomorrow.” This may seem a typical sentiment from the author of Right You Are (If You Think You Are), but there is, nonetheless, more than a little truth to it.
Is yesterday as real as today? [Read more →]
“Liberty is not a means to a higher political end,” Lord Acton wrote. “It is itself the highest political end.”
As a classical liberal, like Acton, I naturally agree with this, and I think most other Americans would also, especially if presented with a clear and present threat to their liberty. I am not sure if most Europeans would, however. [Read more →]
“I have sinned.”
These were, apparently, the last words English playwright John Osborne wrote. His wife found them scrawled on a cigarette pack beside his bed when he died in 1994. [Read more →]
I have been reading George Santayana’s The Life of Reason. I downloaded all five volumes into my Kindle a few months ago and started reading it while ensconced in a cabin in Pennsylvania’s Endless Mountains region. I’m not sure if I quite grasp Santayana’s line of argument, not because it is unclear, but because his prose is so intoxicating. It is all so perfectly phrased, one hardly bothers wondering if any of it is true, especially since, from time to time, he punctuates his discourse with aphorisms that seem so right that one simply presumes that everything leading up to them must have been eminently sound. [Read more →]
The poet Frank O’Hara’s friend Joe LeSueur tells the story somewhere — I’m pretty sure it’s in Digressions on Some Poems by Frank O’Hara — that after O’Hara’s memorial service in Greenwich Village, the composer Ned Rorem invited everyone in attendance back to his apartment. Impressed by how smoothly Rorem handled matters, LeSueur took a moment to compliment and thank him. According to LeSueur, Rorem leaned over and murmured, “You must understand, I don’t feel things deeply.” [Read more →]
“Poetry is not the proper antithesis to prose, but to science,” Samuel Taylor Coleridge declared in “Definitions of Poetry,” adding that “poetry is opposed to science, and prose to metre. The proper and immediate object of science is the acquirement, or communication, of truth; the proper and immediate object of poetry is the communication of immediate pleasure.” [Read more →]
I wanted to riff this week on a more light-hearted quote than those I have lately considered, so I googled P.G. Wodehouse quotes, thinking that if anyone had uttered something memorably light-hearted, it would have to be the creator of Jeeves.
Oddly, the one that caught my fancy was this: “Flowers are happy things.” [Read more →]
Recently, I quoted on my blog something by the 17th-century Jesuit Baltasar Gracián: “Nothing really belongs to us but time, which even he has who has nothing else.” Later on, my friend Susan Balée posted a comment: “Odd how many of us want to “kill” this sole possession.”
All of which, not surprisingly, got me thinking about time, which is as mysterious as life itself. [Read more →]
Earlier this year, I received an email from fellow WFTC contributor Olga Gardner Galvin suggesting that I consider doing a column about “Only connect,” the epigram attached to E.M. Forster’s novel Howards End. I wrote back that I thought it was a good idea, but I would first have to reacquaint myself with Forster’s novel. Shortly thereafter I downloaded Howards End onto my Kindle, where it remained unread until a few days ago.
Unfortunately, now that this reacquaintance has taken place, I am not at all certain I understand the epigram any better than I did before. [Read more →]
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