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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,…
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Loneliness on the Edge of the World
A passage in J.A. Baker’s obsessive, wonderful little book, The Peregrine, brought together a number of threads which have been tossing around my head lately. He writes, describing his home in the south of England “out there at the edges of things,” Farms are well ordered, prosperous, but a fragrance of neglect still lingers, like a ghost…
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The Poem of the Cid
Ultimately, I found The Poem of the Cid rather disappointing. The straightforward style lacked both the grandeur of other classic medieval epics–The Song of Roland, The Alexandreis–and the sparse, haunting beauty of the Anglo-Saxon poetry that I enjoy so much. The first part of the poem, perhaps 50 lines, has apparently been lost, and this…
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2015 in Books
Every year I read a lot of books and spend far too much time playing around with spreadsheets tracking them all. I then promise myself that I’ll use that tracking data to write a lengthy summary of my reading, only to break that promise as soon as humanely possible. This year, I shockingly didn’t break…
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Josef Pieper, A Brief Reading on the Virtues of the Human Heart
I’m not a fan of most modern philosophy. No one ever seems to just come out and say what they mean, instead burying their points in a mass of verbiage so difficult to penetrate that when you do, it’s inevitably a disappointment. More, they seem to have forgotten the fundamental duty of philosophy, to inform how…
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Poems I like
Recently I promised myself that I would post at least once a week. Unfortunately, I’ve been extremely busy lately, and haven’t had much time to compile even the bare amount of material I’ve been posting recently. Nevertheless, to satisfy the obligation, here are some poems I discovered recently and enjoy. From The Essential Haiku,by Basho Even…
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Three Fragments of Tacitus
I remembered Tacitus as a grumpy stick-in-the-mud, and, while that’s not necessarily an incorrect characterization, I actually enjoyed re-reading him more than I expected. Three passages which stood out to me, all from the Agricola: There is no great difference in language [between the Gauls and the Britons], and there is the same hardihood in…
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Dan Yingst 