Wednesday, March 13, 2024
A Sam Levinson Special — Wednesday in Whanganui:
Nevermore Academy Meets Cullinane College
Comments Off on A Sam Levinson Special — Wednesday in Whanganui:
Nevermore Academy Meets Cullinane College
Nevermore Academy Meets Cullinane College
Friday, June 8, 2012
For Cullinane College*
A remark from the prepared text of Salman Khan,
who spoke at the MIT commencement today—
"I always tell people that MIT is the closest
thing to being Hogwarts— Harry Potter’s
wizarding school— in real life."
A detail from one computer's view of
the webcast of the commencement—
Time elapsed (from the start
of the browser's window, not
from the start of the webcast)
This suggests a look at the date 11/27—
Click on St. Patrick's for further details.
* See June 6, 2007.
Comments Off on For Cullinane College*
Saturday, March 16, 2024
For Jena’s Word Farm …
See other posts now tagged Word Farm and Whanganui.
… And for Whanganui's Cullinane College, an "OED" that
does not mean "Oxford English Dictionary" . . .
Comments Off on For Jena’s Word Farm …
Saturday, January 16, 2016
Global and Local
Two approaches to philosophy —
For a global perspective, see Cullinane College in this journal.
For a local perspective, see last night's post on a Pennsylvania philosopher.
Comments Off on Global and Local
Sunday, February 12, 2012
Tuesday, December 28, 2010
Dry Bones
The webpage of Cullinane College — "For Love of God…."
Related material —
From a post for the opening of Cullinane College on January 29, 2003:
"Young man sings 'Dry Bones'"
Illustrations:
What prompted the above meditation —
From an obituary of Bill White (who reportedly died at 66 on November 14)—
"During his career, he was consulted by, among others,
the crime writer Patricia Cornwell, and the artist Damien Hirst
(who used his expertise when working on his 2007 piece
For the Love of God, a platinum cast of a skull, encrusted with diamonds)."
Comments Off on Dry Bones
Thursday, August 20, 2009
Thursday August 20, 2009
Sophists
From David Lavery’s weblog today—
Kierkegaard on Sophists:
“If the natural sciences had been developed in Socrates’ day as they are now, all the sophists would have been scientists. One would have hung a microscope outside his shop in order to attract customers, and then would have had a sign painted saying: Learn and see through a giant microscope how a man thinks (and on reading the advertisement Socrates would have said: that is how men who do not think behave).”
— Søren Kierkegaard, Journals, edited and translated by Alexander Dru
To anyone familiar with Pirsig’s classic Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, the above remarks of Kierkegaard ring false. Actually, the sophists as described by Pirsig are not at all like scientists, but rather like relativist purveyors of postmodern literary “theory.” According to Pirsig, the scientists are like Plato (and hence Socrates)– defenders of objective truth.
Pirsig on Sophists:
“The pre-Socratic philosophers mentioned so far all sought to establish a universal Immortal Principle in the external world they found around them. Their common effort united them into a group that may be called Cosmologists. They all agreed that such a principle existed but their disagreements as to what it was seemed irresolvable. The followers of Heraclitus insisted the Immortal Principle was change and motion. But Parmenides’ disciple, Zeno, proved through a series of paradoxes that any perception of motion and change is illusory. Reality had to be motionless.
The resolution of the arguments of the Cosmologists came from a new direction entirely, from a group Phædrus seemed to feel were early humanists. They were teachers, but what they sought to teach was not principles, but beliefs of men. Their object was not any single absolute truth, but the improvement of men. All principles, all truths, are relative, they said. ‘Man is the measure of all things.’ These were the famous teachers of ‘wisdom,’ the Sophists of ancient Greece.
To Phaedrus, this backlight from the conflict between the Sophists and the Cosmologists adds an entirely new dimension to the Dialogues of Plato. Socrates is not just expounding noble ideas in a vacuum. He is in the middle of a war between those who think truth is absolute and those who think truth is relative. He is fighting that war with everything he has. The Sophists are the enemy.
Now Plato’s hatred of the Sophists makes sense. He and Socrates are defending the Immortal Principle of the Cosmologists against what they consider to be the decadence of the Sophists. Truth. Knowledge. That which is independent of what anyone thinks about it. The ideal that Socrates died for. The ideal that Greece alone possesses for the first time in the history of the world. It is still a very fragile thing. It can disappear completely. Plato abhors and damns the Sophists without restraint, not because they are low and immoral people… there are obviously much lower and more immoral people in Greece he completely ignores. He damns them because they threaten mankind’s first beginning grasp of the idea of truth. That’s what it is all about.
The results of Socrates’ martyrdom and Plato’s unexcelled prose that followed are nothing less than the whole world of Western man as we know it. If the idea of truth had been allowed to perish unrediscovered by the Renaissance it’s unlikely that we would be much beyond the level of prehistoric man today. The ideas of science and technology and other systematically organized efforts of man are dead-centered on it. It is the nucleus of it all.
And yet, Phaedrus understands, what he is saying about Quality is somehow opposed to all this. It seems to agree much more closely with the Sophists.”
I agree with Plato’s (and Rebecca Goldstein’s) contempt for relativists. Yet Pirsig makes a very important point. It is not the scientists but rather the storytellers (not, mind you, the literary theorists) who sometimes seem to embody Quality.
As for hanging a sign outside the shop, I suggest (particularly to New Zealand’s Cullinane College) that either or both of the following pictures would be more suggestive of Quality than a microscope:
For the “primordial protomatter”
in the picture at left, see
The Diamond Archetype.
Comments Off on Thursday August 20, 2009
Saturday, January 31, 2009
Saturday January 31, 2009
Catholic Schools Week
Today is the conclusion of
Catholic Schools Week.
From one such school,
Cullinane College:
Cullinane students
display school spirit
Related material:
|
James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man:
He turned to the flyleaf of the geography and read what he had written there: himself, his name and where he was.
That was in his writing: and Fleming one night for a cod had written on the opposite page:
He read the verses backwards but then they were not poetry. Then he read the flyleaf from the bottom to the top till he came to his own name. That was he: and he read down the page again. What was after the universe? Nothing. But was there anything round the universe to show where it stopped before the nothing place began? |
|
Alfred Bester, Tiger! Tiger!:
|
"Guilty! Read the Charge!"
— Quoted here on
January 29, 2003
The Prisoner,
Episode One, 1967:
"I… I meant a larger map."
— Quoted here on
January 27, 2009
Comments Off on Saturday January 31, 2009
Thursday, July 19, 2007
Thursday July 19, 2007
Volta da Morte:
Friday the 13th
TV listing from Brazil
for Friday, Jan. 13th, 2006:
| Veja quais são os melhores filmes DESTA SEMANA na TV! Sexta, 13 de Janeiro Abracadabra — http://www.jornalonorte.com.br/
|
Related material:
If Cullinane College
were Hogwarts,
Friday the 13th
of January, 2006,
and
Comments Off on Thursday July 19, 2007
Monday, July 9, 2007
Monday July 9, 2007
Harry Potter and
the Xbox 360
the Xbox 360
Harry Potter and the Order of The Phoenix for Xbox 360 “is based on the fifth book and is timed to coincide with the release of the movie of the same name…. The game consists of Harry walking around and talking to characters and performing spells and tasks in order to advance the plot. I jokingly considered calling this review ‘Harry Potter and the Order of the Random Tasks Needed to Advance the Plot.'” —July 9 review at Digital Joystick
Today’s lottery numbers
in the Keystone State:
in the Keystone State:
Mid-day 220
Evening 034
Related material:
2/20 and
Hexagram 34 in the
box-style I Ching:
The Power
of the Great
Let us hope that Harry fans remember the meaning of Hexagram 34 (according to Richard Wilhelm)– “Perseverance furthers” and “That is truly great power which does not degenerate into mere force but remains inwardly united with the fundamental principles of right and of justice. When we understand this point– namely, that greatness and justice must be indissolubly united– we understand the true meaning of all that happens in heaven and on earth.”
Related material:
“If Cullinane College
were Hogwarts“
(continued) and
the four entries
that preceded it
on July 5-6, 2007
Comments Off on Monday July 9, 2007
Friday, July 6, 2007
Friday July 6, 2007
Log24, June 6:
“If Cullinane College
were Hogwarts….”
A word to the wise:
desconvencida.
Related material:
Comments Off on Friday July 6, 2007
Tuesday, June 19, 2007
Tuesday June 19, 2007
Faustus is gone:
regard his hellish fall
— Marlowe
I have just read, in the New York Times Book Review that arrived in yesterday's mail, a review of Segre's Faust in Copenhagen. The review, on news stands next Sunday, was titled by the Times "Meta Physicists."
On Faust— today's noon entry and yesterday's "Nightmare Lessons."
On "Meta Physicists"– an entry of June 6, on Cullinane College, has a section titled "Meta Physics."
On Copenhagen— an entry of Bloomsday Eve, 2004 on a native of that city.
Another Dane:
"Words, words, words."
— Hamlet
Another metaphysics:
"317 is a prime,
not because we think so,
or because our minds
are shaped in one way
rather than another,
but because it is so,
because mathematical
reality is built that way."
— G. H. Hardy,
A Mathematician's Apology
Comments Off on Tuesday June 19, 2007
Wednesday, June 6, 2007
Wednesday June 6, 2007
It is now 3:07 AM
June 7 in New Zealand.
Today at Cullinane College:
June 7 in New Zealand.
Today at Cullinane College:
Examination Day
(For the college curriculum,
see the New Zealand
Qualifications Authority.)
If Cullinane College were Hogwarts–
Last-minute exam info:
The Lapis Philosophorum
"The lapis was thought of as a unity and therefore often stands for the prima materia in general."
— Aion, by C. G. Jung"Its discoverer was of the opinion that he had produced the equivalent of the primordial protomatter which exploded into the Universe."
— The Stars My Destination, by Alfred Bester
And from Bester's The Deceivers:
Meta Physics
"'… Think of a match. You've got a chemical head of potash, antimony, and stuff, full of energy waiting to be released. Friction does it. But when Meta excites and releases energy, it's like a stick of dynamite compared to a match. It's the chess legend for real.'
'I don't know it.'
'Oh, the story goes that a philosopher invented chess for the amusement of an Indian rajah. The king was so delighted that he told the inventor to name his reward and he'd get it, no matter what. The philosopher asked that one grain of rice be placed on the first square of the chessboard, two on the second, four on the third, and so on to the sixty-fourth.'
'That doesn't sound like much.'
'So the rajah said. …'"
Related material:
Comments Off on Wednesday June 6, 2007
Saturday, July 1, 2006
Saturday July 1, 2006
Zen and the Art
continued:
continued:
Zen and The Art.
Related material:
Open House Day
at Cullinane College
and Log24, June 1-15.
Comments Off on Saturday July 1, 2006
Sunday, October 2, 2005
Sunday October 2, 2005
Happy Birthday, Wallace Stevens
Readings for today:
At the Wallace Stevens online concordance, search for X and for primitive.
In the e-book edition of Bester's The Deceivers, search for X.
"We seek
Nothing beyond reality. Within it,
Everything, the spirit's alchemicana
Included, the spirit that goes roundabout
And through included, not merely the visible,
The solid, but the movable, the moment,
The coming on of feasts and the habits of saints,
The pattern of the heavens and high, night air."
— Wallace Stevens,
Oct. 2, 1879 – Aug. 2, 1955,
"An Ordinary Evening in New Haven"
IX.1-18, from The Auroras of Autumn,
Knopf, NY (1950)
Related material:
(Added Monday, Oct. 3, 8:45 AM)
"What if Shakespeare had been born in Teaneck, N.J., in 1973?
He would call himself Spear Daddy. His rap would exhibit a profound, nuanced understanding of the frailty of the human condition, exploring the personality in all its bewildering complexity: pretension, pride, vulnerability, emotional treachery, as well as the enduring triumph of love.
Spear Daddy would disappear from the charts in about six weeks."
— Gene Weingarten in the Washington Post,
Sunday, Oct. 2, 2005
Presenting…
Spear Daddy!
Continuing Bester's Maori theme,
students from Cullinane College:
(See Literature and Geography.)
Comments Off on Sunday October 2, 2005
Sunday, September 5, 2004
Sunday September 5, 2004
Symmetry and Change
in the Dreamtime
Notes from the Journal
of Steven H. Cullinane
Summary:
| Aug 31 2004 07:31:01 PM |
Early Evening, Shining Star |
 |
| Sep 01 2004 09:00:35 AM |
Words and Images |
 |
| Sep 01 2004 12:07:28 PM |
Whale Rider |
 |
| Sep 02 2004 11:11:42 AM |
Heaven and Earth |
 |
| Sep 02 2004 07:00:23 PM |
Whale Road |
 |
| Cinderella’s Slipper |
 |
|
| Sep 03 2004 10:01:56 AM |
Another September Morn |
 |
| Noon |
 |
|
| De Nada |  |
|
| Ite, Missa Est |  |
Symmetry and Change, Part 1…
Early Evening,
Shining Star
Hexagram 01
The Creative:
The Image
Heaven
Heaven
The movement of heaven
is full of power.
Click on picture
for details.
The Clare Lawler Prize
for Literature goes to…
|
For the thoughts on time |
Symmetry and Change, Part 2…
Words and Images
Hexagram 35
Progress:
The Image
Fire
Earth
The sun rises over the earth.
|
“Oh, my Lolita. I have only words “This is the best toy train set “As the quotes above by Nabokov and Welles suggest, we need to be able to account for the specific functions available to narrative in each medium, for the specific elements that empirical creators will ‘play with’ in crafting their narratives.” |
For
James Whale
and
William French Anderson —
Words
In the Spirit of
Dave Barry’s Book of Bad Songs:
Stay for just a while…
Stay, and let me look at you.
It’s been so long, I hardly knew you.
Standing in the door…
Stay with me a while.
I only want to talk to you.
We’ve traveled halfway ’round the world
To find ourselves again.
September morn…
We danced until the night
became a brand new day,
Two lovers playing scenes
from some romantic play.
September morning still can
make me feel this way.
Look at what you’ve done…
Why, you’ve become a grown-up girl…
— Neil Diamond
Images
In the Spirit of
September Morn:
The Last Day of Summer:
Photographs by Jock Sturges
“In 1990, the FBI entered Sturges’s studio and seized his work, claiming violation of child pornography laws.”
Related material:
and
Log24 entries of
Aug. 15, 2004.
Those interested in the political implications of Diamond’s songs may enjoy Neil Performs at Kerry Fundraiser.
I personally enjoyed this site’s description of Billy Crystal’s remarks, which included “a joke about former President Clinton’s forthcoming children’s
“Puff, puff, woo, woo, off we go!”
Symmetry and Change, Part 3…
Hexagram 28
Preponderance of
the Great:
The Image
Lake
Wind
The lake rises
above the trees.
“Congratulations to Clare Lawler, who participated very successfully in the recently held Secondary Schools Judo Championships in Wellington.”
For an explanation of this entry’s title, see the previous two entries and
Oxford Word
(Log24, July 10, 2004)
Symmetry and Change, Part 4…
Heaven and Earth
Hexagram 42
Increase:
The Image
Wind
Thunder
Wind and thunder:
the image of Increase.
“This time resembles that of
the marriage of heaven and earth”
|
|
|
you gotta ride it like you find it.
Get your ticket at the station
of the Rock Island Line.
in Rock Island, Illinois
“What it all boiled down to really was everybody giving everybody else a hard time for no good reason whatever… You just couldn’t march to your own music. Nowadays, you couldn’t even hear it… It was lost, the music which each person had inside himself, and which put him in step with things as they should be.”
— The Grifters, Ch. 10, 1963, by
James Myers Thompson
“The Old Man’s still an artist
with a Thompson.”
— Terry in “Miller’s Crossing”
For some of “the music which
each person had inside,”
click on the picture
with the Thompson.
It may be that Kylie is,
in her own way, an artist…
with a 357:
(Hits counter at
The Quality of Diamond
as of 11:05 AM Sept. 2, 2004)
For more on
“the marriage of heaven and earth,”
see
Plato, Pegasus, and the Evening Star.
Symmetry and Change, Part 5…
Whale Road
Hexagram 23
Splitting Apart:
The Image
Mountain
Earth
The mountain rests
on the earth.
“… the plot is different but the monsters, names, and manner of speaking will ring a bell.”
— Frank Pinto, Jr., review of Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf
Other recommended reading, found during a search for the implications of today’s previous entry, “Hexagram 42”:
This excellent meditation
on symmetry and change
comes from a site whose
home page
has the following image:
Symmetry and Change, Part 6…
Cinderella’s Slipper
Hexagram 54
The Marrying Maiden:
The Image
Thunder
Lake
See
“… a Thoreau-like retreat
by a nearby lake….
Both men have
a ‘touch of the poet’….
The symmetry is perfect.”
by a nearby lake….
Both men have
a ‘touch of the poet’….
The symmetry is perfect.”
Symmetry and Change, Part 7…
Another September Morn
Hexagram 56:
The Wanderer
The Image
Fire
Mountain
Fire on the mountain,
Run boys run…
Devil’s in the House of
The Rising Sun!
Friday, September 3, 2004
Symmetry and Change, Part 8…
Hexagram 25
Innocence:
The Image
Heaven
Thunder
Friday, September 3, 2004
Symmetry and Change, Part 9…
Hexagram 49
Revolution:
The Image
the image of Revolution.
“I sit now in a little room off the bar at four-thirty in the morning drinking ochas and then mescal and writing this on some Bella Vista notepaper I filched the other night…. But this is worst of all, to feel your soul dying. I wonder if it is because to-night my soul has really died that I feel at the moment something like peace. Or is it because right through hell there is a path, as Blake well knew, and though I may not take it, sometimes lately in dreams I have been able to see it? …And this is how I sometimes think of myself, as a great explorer who has discovered some extraordinary land from which he can never return to give his knowledge to the world: but the name of this land is hell. It is not Mexico of course but in the heart.”
— Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano
Friday, September 3, 2004
Symmetry and Change, conclusion…
Ite, Missa Est
Hexagram 13
Fellowship With Men:
The Image
Heaven
Fire
“A pretty girl —
is like a melody —- !”
For details, see
A Mass for Lucero.
Comments Off on Sunday September 5, 2004
Wednesday, September 1, 2004
Wednesday September 1, 2004
Symmetry and Change, Part 3…
Hexagram 28
Preponderance of
the Great:
The Image
Lake
Wind
The lake rises
above the trees.
“Congratulations to Clare Lawler, who participated very successfully in the recently held Secondary Schools Judo Championships in Wellington.”
For an explanation of this entry’s title, see the previous two entries and
Oxford Word
(Log24, July 10, 2004)
Comments Off on Wednesday September 1, 2004
Saturday, July 10, 2004
Saturday July 10, 2004
Oxford Word
From today's obituary in The New York Times of R. W. Burchfield, editor of A Supplement to the Oxford English Dictionary:
"Robert William Burchfield was born Jan. 27, 1923, in Wanganui, New Zealand. In 1949, after earning an undergraduate degree at Victoria University College in Wellington, he accepted a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford.
There, he read Medieval English literature with C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien."
For more on literature and Wanganui, see my entry of Jan. 19. 2003, from which the following is taken.
|
"Cullinane College is a Catholic co-educational college, set to open in Wanganui (New Zealand) on the 29th of January, 2003." The 29th of January will be the 40th anniversary of the death of Saint Robert Frost. New Zealand, perhaps the most beautiful country on the planet, is noted for being the setting of the film version of Lord of the Rings, which was written by a devout Catholic, J. R. R. Tolkien. For other New Zealand themes, see Alfred Bester's novels The Stars My Destination and The Deceivers. The original title of The Stars My Destination was Tyger! Tyger! after Blake's poem. For more on fearful symmetry, see the work of Marston Conder, professor of mathematics at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. |
Thursday, October 16, 2003
Thursday October 16, 2003
Cursing the Darkness
From my entries on this date last year…
“…we shall this day light such a candle in England as I trust by God’s grace shall never be put out.”
Thought for today:
Render unto Rome that which is Rome’s.
See also my remarks of January 29, 2003,
on the opening in New Zealand of
Cullinane College.
Comments Off on Thursday October 16, 2003
Friday, September 5, 2003
Friday September 5, 2003
Recommended Reading
for Cullinane College:
- Trifecta
- The Pegasus Prize
- The Bone People
- Alchemical Kubrick 2001
- The Diamond Archetype
- The Deceivers
- The Demolished Man
- To Ride Pegasus
“The Talented form their own society and that’s as it should be: birds of a feather. No, not birds. Winged horses! Ha! Yes, indeed. Pegasus… the poetic winged horse of flights of fancy. A bloody good symbol for us. You’d see a lot from the back of a winged horse…”
— To Ride Pegasus, by Anne McCaffrey.
“Born in Cambridge, MA, on April Fool’s Day 1926 (‘I’ve tried very hard to live up to being an April-firster,’ she quips), McCaffrey graduated from Radcliffe College in 1947.”
Born on March 9, 1947, in Christchurch, Keri Hulme won the Pegasus Prize for her Maori novel, The Bone People.
Comments Off on Friday September 5, 2003
Friday, June 20, 2003
Friday June 20, 2003
The Order of the Phoenix
Some links of interest
on this day of Potter-mania:
The Royal Order of the Phoenix
Knight’s Gold Cross
With Swords
awarded to
Arthur Edmonds,
Royal New Zealand Engineers,
attached to Special Operations Executive and parachuted into occupied Greece
1 October 1941,
serving with Greek guerrillas.
St. James Church Cemetery,
Kerikeri, New Zealand
In Loving Memory of
Arthur Edmonds
who died June 20th,
1914, aged 88 years:
Logo,
Anglican Diocese
of Auckland
Logo,
Catholic Diocese
of Phoenix
See also Cullinane College.
“The dark lord re-emerges, but thinking he can now kill Harry, discovers that Harry is still protected, since both his wand and Harry’s wand have as their essence two feathers from the same phoenix, a phoenix that has only given two feathers, and they cannot be used against one another.”
— Harry Potter:
Social Activist for the 21st Century
“The question is — why does the same story keep getting told? The answer is that we’re still trying to figure it out.”
Thursday, February 6, 2003
Thursday February 6, 2003
Happy Waitangi Day
Today is Waitangi Day in New Zealand; 2:00 AM EST Feb. 6 in the USA is 8:00 PM Feb. 6 in New Zealand.
Today is also the birthday of Gigi Perreau, star of “Journey to the Center of Time,” which at least one reviewer thought was the worst movie ever made. These properties of Feb. 6 make it a suitable holiday to be observed at the newly opened Cullinane College in New Zealand.
For starters, students can review the five log24.net entries that end with a brief tribute to Gigi on January 22, 2003. Also a tribute to Gigi, tonight’s site music is “Song of Time,” from “The Legend of Zelda.”
These cultural activities seem appropriate for those who, in the Roman Catholic tradition, prefer stories to truth.
Comments Off on Thursday February 6, 2003
Wednesday, January 29, 2003
Wednesday January 29, 2003
|
Inaugural Address |
|
Cullinane College was scheduled to open its doors officially on January 29, 2003. The following might have been an appropriate inaugural address.
From The Prisoner: Comments
on the Final Episode, “Fall Out”:
“When the President asks for a vote, he says: ‘All in favor.’ But he never asks for those opposed. (Though it appears that none will be opposed — and though he says its a democratic assembly, it is hardly that. The President even says that the society is in a ‘democratic crisis,’ though without democracy present, it’s just a sham.)
#48/Young Man sings ‘Dry Bones,’, which is his rebellion (notice its chaotic effect on ‘society’). But then the song gets taken over, ‘polished,’ and sung by a voice-over (presumably set up by #1). Does this mean that society is stealing the thunder (i.e. the creative energy) of youth, and cheapening it, or does it mean that youth is just rebelling in the same way that their fathers did (with equal ineffectiveness)? Perhaps it is simply a comment on the ease with which society can deal with the real rebellion of the 1960’s, which purported to be led by musicians; one that even the Beatles said was impossible in ‘Revolution.'”
President: Guilty! Read the Charge!
#48 is guilty, of something, and then the society pins something on him.”
The Other Side of the Coin
|
The Weinman Dime |
From the CoinCentric website: In 1916, sculptor Adolph A. Weinman produced a new design for the dime called the Liberty Head type. The motif features Miss Liberty facing left, wearing a Phrygian cap with wings, symbolizing “liberty of thought”. The word “LIBERTY” encircles her head, with “IN GOD WE TRUST” and the date below her head. The reverse depicts Roman fasces, a bundle of rods with the center rod being an ax, against a branch in the background. It is a symbol of state authority, which offers a choice: “by the rod or by the ax”. The condemned was either beaten to death with the rods or allowed the mercy of the ax. The words “UNITED STATES OF AMERICA” and “ONE DIME” surround the border. “E PLURIBUS UNUM” appears at the lower right. |
Excerpt from the poem that Robert Frost (who died on this date in 1963) meant to read at the 1961 inauguration of John F. Kennedy:
It makes the prophet in us all presage
The glory of a next Augustan age
Of a power leading from its strength and pride,
Of young ambition eager to be tried,
Firm in our free beliefs without dismay,
In any game the nations want to play.
A golden age of poetry and power
Of which this noonday’s the beginning hour.
I greatly prefer Robinson Jeffers’s “Shine, Perishing Republic“:
While this America settles in the mould of its vulgarity,
heavily thickening to empire,
And protest, only a bubble in the molten mass, pops and sighs out,
and the mass hardens,
I sadly smiling remember….
See also the thoughts on Republic vs. Empire in the work of Alec Guinness (as Marcus Aurelius and as Obi-Wan Kenobi).
Sunday, January 19, 2003
Sunday January 19, 2003
|
Literature “Literature begins |
|
“Cullinane College is a Catholic co-educational college, set to open in Wanganui (New Zealand) on the 29th of January, 2003.”
The 29th of January will be the 40th anniversary of the death of Saint Robert Frost.
New Zealand, perhaps the most beautiful country on the planet, is noted for being the setting of the film version of Lord of the Rings, which was written by a devout Catholic, J. R. R. Tolkien.
Here is a rather Catholic meditation on life and death in Tolkien’s work:
Frodo: “…He deserves death.”
Gandalf: “Deserves it! I daresay he does. Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement.”
Personally, I prefer Clint Eastwood’s version of this dialogue:
The Schofield Kid: “Well, I guess they had it coming.”
William Munny: “We all have it coming, Kid.”
For other New Zealand themes, see Alfred Bester’s novels The Stars My Destination and The Deceivers.
The original title of The Stars My Destination was Tyger! Tyger! after Blake’s poem.
For more on fearful symmetry, see the work of Marston Conder, professor of mathematics at the University of Auckland, New Zealand.
Comments Off on Sunday January 19, 2003