Month: June 2018
-
A Theory on Mandeville
Preparations for my course on travel (still time to sign up!), led me to reread one of my favorite medieval works recently, Mandeville’s Travels. The merits of the book are many. It’s wondrously imaginative, with all the sciapods, fountains of youth, and mighty Christian kings of the East that you could ask for, made all the more charming…
-
Against Flatness in Baseball
Lawrence Ritter’s The Glory of Their Times is the greatest book on baseball ever written. It’s an oral history of the game at the turn of the century, and it’s utterly charming. The love of the game, the sheer fun of playing shines through on almost every page. The game was more colorful then, chaotic and…
-
Priorities
It is a very serious perversion to view professional work as the serious part of life, and family life as relaxation. No, the time we spend with our loved ones is not the time to relax and take it easy, but rather the moment to put on our festival garment, the moment to accomplish a…
-
Of Angels and Motes
Every once in awhile you read something that makes everything click into place, a puzzle long scattered in your mind comes together all at once.1 A passage from Tolkien recently set this clicking together in motion, on the subject of the angels: I had not long ago when spending half an hour in St Gregory’s before…
Dan Yingst 