Category: Writing Challenge
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14. The End
Well, I did it, successfully completed the little challenge I laid out for myself. Just some general observations. One thing that surprised me was that I didn’t run out of things to talk about. In fact, my biggest problem was the opposite. The posts that gave me the most difficulty did so precisely because I…
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13. Sea and Forest
Such traditions as belong to the time before the city was founded, or rather was presently to be founded, and are rather adorned with poetic legends than based upon trustworthy historical proofs, I purpose neither to affirm nor to refute. Livy, The History of Rome Foundation establishes place and historical time.* Before foundation there is…
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12. Reading Tea Leaves
Picking up some threads. Recall that Vico imagined the beginning of society as a consequence of the giants, degenerate humans in the aftermath of the Flood, first encountering thunder and lighting. This encounter terrified them and motivated the institution of marriage and burial. The god of thunder, of the sky, was the first god. Alongside…
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11. History, Suffering, and Sin
Suffering is simultaneously one of the most manifest facts of history and its greatest offense. Therefore, any schema of history must offer an account of suffering, if it is to be in any way satisfying. I wonder a little bit here, consider this a meditation. Ancient history was essentially cyclical, seeing suffering as baked into…
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10. Reifying the Model
The problem of abstraction is a perpetual one. We can’t help but abstract, thinking itself would be impossible without it, but despite its tremendous utility, abstraction leads us into trouble when we confuse our abstractions for things themselves. This confusion is an inversion of the hierarchy of being. Abstractions are constructions of our minds. They…
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9. More notes on Genesis
Still banging my head against the wall on the post I mentioned yesterday, so continuing on with reflections on Genesis and beyond. In Lamech, violence intensifies as does alienation from God. He cries out, “Sevenfold vengeance shall be taken for Cain: but for Lamech seventy times sevenfold.” Note that it was God who decreed sevenfold…
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8. Marauders, Walawbum
As so often happens, I started a series of posts without having a clear idea of where I was going, and, as often happens, I didn’t do a particularly good job taking notes on Ogburn, something I only realized after I lent the book away. So, the second post in this series on the Marauders…
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7. Vico, Language, Barbarism
I mentioned yesterday that, for Vico, the degradation of civilization was tied to a sort of forgetting which began in the corruption of language. I promised to elaborate, so here we are. Recall that the foundation of civil society is exteriorized memory, preserved in things such as grave markers, statues, the structure of cities, and,…
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6. Burial and Memory
“The human mind rethinks its prior modes of synthesis and carries them over into its subsequent modifications” – Vico Vico writes that places and on places, society, are founded upon the dead. In his account, it is the act of burial that marks a place as a place and from this marking comes the claim…
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5. Place and No-Place
I’m really not happy with this one, struggled to get started, had too much to say, and my thoughts were too jumbled to express all I had to say. Were it not for the dictates of the challenge I’ve set for myself, I would have let it percolate for a few days and tried again. …
Dan Yingst 