Category: de umbris idæarum
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Memory and History
Inspired by the passage from Plutarch quoted below. Memory[i] and history are inextricably linked, the latter having its origin in the former. With their typical perceptiveness the Greeks recognized this lineage, all the arts descend from memory and the God. Hesiod: [The muses] in Pieria[ii] did Mnemosyne (Memory), who reigns over the hills of Eleuther,…
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A Brief Note on Method
Socrates: I cannot help feeling, Phaedrus, that writing is unfortunately like painting; for the creations of the painter have the attitude of life, and yet if you ask them a question they preserve a solemn silence. And the same may be said of speeches. You would imagine that they had intelligence, but if you want…
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Thoughts (borrowed) while Riding the Red Line at Rush Hour
Further thoughts, looking down on Michigan Avenue from the 12th floor:
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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…
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Why I Haven’t Written Much Lately
There is not a fragment in all nature, for every relative fragment of one thing is a full harmonious unit itself. All together form the one grand palimpsest of the world. Muir, The Spiritual Writings, 48, TMW, 151-64 There’s just too much to say. Where do you start when it’s all so densely woven? where do you end? …
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Preview of my Kalamazoo paper
Next Thursday, I’ll be presenting at the International Medieval Congress on “Creation and Conversion in Northern Europe.” The general idea is that creation featured heavily in both medieval missionary preaching and in the conception of what those missionaries were accomplishing. The subject was first suggested to me by a reading of Bede’s Ecclesiastical History. Creation,…
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A Sand County Almanac
Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac is a classic of environmental literature and is quite good, with beautiful sketches of Leopold’s life and work on a sand farm in Wisconsin and his travels through Mexico, Canada, and the American west. These sketches alone would make the book well-worth reading, but his underlying philosophy is also very…
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Avoiding Acedia in Intellectual Work
I have a small library of notes on things I want to write about, yet feel daunted every time I try. Sometimes I’m tempted to simply say “read ____,” and leave it at that. Resisting that urge today, I’m going to try to write a little about one of the most important of my companion…
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Something I Wish I Had Made Explicit in My Dissertation
I’m never particularly satisfied with anything I’ve written. The end result never tallies with the original vision in my mind. When I go back and read again, I find so many lapses, so much unexplained and implicit. What was entirely clear to me as I wrote is now muddled and slow on the page. Does…
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Windows
When I’m sitting in the back of class, feeling useless as a TA, I stare out the window to remind myself the world exists. It’s an oddly solitary experience in a room filled with chatter, solitary and strange. As we’re inevitably many floors up, all you can see are rooftops. The only movement is steam,…
Dan Yingst 