Tag: History
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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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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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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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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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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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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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Framing and the Loyalists
Trying to post more, and thus gathering some scraps that have found their way into my notebook over the past few months. The plight of the Loyalists during and after the Revolutionary War is interesting to me, especially how they’re portrayed in our history books. For instance, look at the framing here in Joseph Ellis’s…
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Accounts of Medieval Constantinople
Reading Accounts of Medieval Constantinople, which contains a lot of really fascinating stuff. Constantinople has a fundamentally different feel than the Latin West. This passage sums it up nicely, I think: And Constantine the Great set up this lofty column and the statue of Apollo as Helios in his name, affixing nails from those of…
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Zing!
(Gawain and some of Arthur’s other knights are at the court of the leader of the Romans, Lucius Hibernius) As Lucius was replying that he had not come there in order to withdraw, but rather that he might govern the country, his nephew Gaius Quintillanus who was present was heard to mutter that the Britons…
Dan Yingst 