Category: Book Notes
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On Prayer
Prayer is by nature a dialog and a union of man with God. Its effect is to hold the world together. John of Climacus, Ladder of Divine Ascent, 274 John’s claim here is no empty piety. He truly believes that prayer is the binding that holds creation together. We must understand that, for John, man represents…
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The Habit of Thought
So acquire the habit of being present at this activity of the material and moral universe. Learn to look; compare what is before you with your familiar or secret ideas. Do not see in a town merely houses, but human life and history. Let a gallery or a museum show you something more than a…
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On Memory
A pleasure is full grown only when it is remembered. You are speaking, Hman, as if the pleasure were one thing and the memory another. It is all one thing. The seroni could say it better than I say it now. Not better than I could say it in a poem. What you call remembering…
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(one of the reasons) why I love the Proslogion
Alongside the Divine Comedy, St. Anselm’s Proslogion is my favorite piece of medieval writing, and it’s my favorite because it’s beautiful. That might surprise those who are only familiar with the text for the so-called “ontological argument,” the arguments of the second and third chapters that demonstrate not only that God exists but that He cannot…
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2016 in Books
Overall, I feel that 2016 was an average year, reading-wise. In part, this stemmed from a lack of ambition on my part. In 2015, I really strove to improve my knowledge of poetry and had the grand scale project of reading the complete works of Shakespeare, both of which were immensely enjoyable. This year, there…
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Prelude to a Future Post
His second night in Talkingham, Hazel Motes walked along down town close to the store fronts but not looking in them. The black sky was underpinned with long silver streaks that looked like scaffolding and depth on depth behind it were thousands of stars that all seemed to be moving very slowly as if they…
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Mission to Asia
One of my great frustrations is that the very thing which draws me to a subject is the degree to which it outstrips the ability of my words, and even conceptions, to describe it. It’s the space beyond the edges of the text that fascinates me. Those things of which we only catch glimpses, brief…
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Book Notes
I’m hoping to make this a regular feature, just short notes on what I’ve been reading lately (potentially on movies, tv, etc. as well). This week’s notes are fairly scanty. Hopefully, I’ll figure out what precisely I’m trying to do, how I want to organize things, and so forth over the next few posts. In…
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More on Nature on the Fringes
In the last post, we noted that, at the edges of things, the order of nature breaks down. Exhausted by the work of creation, she begins to tire of her labor and the whole tapestry begins to fray. It resembles the sea, unfathomable and vast, mysterious and dangerous. There’s another factor on this particular edge, Ireland,…
Dan Yingst 