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Thomas Browne
I was first introduced to Thomas Browne in one of my favorite books, W.G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn. How could I not be intrigued by Sebald’s distillation of Browne’s thought? What we perceive are no more than isolated lights in the abyss of ignorance, in the shadow filled edifice of the world. We study the…
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2017 in Books
Prior entries: 2015, 2016 Over the past few years, I’ve lowered the total of books I hoped to read, in an effort to better savor my reading and also because there’s a glut of very long books on my To-Read shelf. Thus, I aimed to read 125 books in 2017 and surpassed that goal, reading…
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The Hollow Earth
The wonder of history lies in the fact that it is only available to us in fragments, tantalizing scraps that glimmer amidst the obscurity of the past. Take, for example, this brief mention found in the letter of Pope Zachary to Boniface, the indomitable English missionary and destroyer of pagan oaks. For Boniface, the greatest threat…
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A Mysterious Fellow
Herodotus is full of wonderful things. Aristeas, they say, was in lineage the equal or superior of any citizen in his town. One day he entered a fuller’s shop in Proconnesus and died there, so the fuller locked up his workshop and went to announce to Aristeas’ relatives that he had died. The news of his death…
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The Listeners, Walter de la Mare
‘Is there anybody there?’ said the Traveller, Knocking on the moonlit door; And his horse in the silence champed the grasses Of the forest’s ferny floor: And a bird flew up out of the turret, Above the Traveller’s head: And he smote upon the door again a second time; ‘Is there anybody there?’ he said.…
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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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Annunciation
The dove descending breaks the air With flame of incandescent terror Of which the tongues declare The one discharged from sin and error. The only hope, or else despair Lies in the choice of pyre or pyre – To be redeemed from fire by fire. Who then devised the torment? Love. Love is the unfamiliar…
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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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Dan Yingst 