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Unwelcome
Another poem from the Oxford Book, Unwelcome by Mary Elizabeth Coleridge (great grandniece of the more famous poet). We were young, we were merry, we were very very wise, And the door stood open at our feast, When there passed us a woman with the West in her eyes, And a man with his back…
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St. Agnes’ Eve
I’ve been (very) slowly making my way through an old edition of The Oxford Book of English Verse, inspired by the fact that Patrick Fermor carried a copy with him on his journey through Europe. Since I’ve stalled a bit on posts lately, I thought I’d highlight some of the poems that have caught my eye on…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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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Whoops
The intellectual consciousness of modern Europe as commonly delineated and accepted even in our day proclaimed those three ideas: a Nature subsisting in itself; an autonomous personality of the human subject; a culture self-created out of norms intrinsic to its own essence. The European mind believed further that the constant creation and perfection of this…
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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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Dan Yingst 