See as well "Plato and Shakespeare" in this journal.
Saturday, April 23, 2022
Sunday, October 23, 2016
Quartet
“The man who lives in contact with what he believes to be a living Church
is a man always expecting to meet Plato and Shakespeare to-morrow
at breakfast.”
— G. K. Chesterton
Or Sunday dinner.
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Platonic |
Shakespearean |
| Not to mention Euclid and Picasso. | |
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In the above pictures, Euclid is represented by |
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Friday, December 17, 2010
Fare Thee Well
Excerpt from a post of 8 AM May 26, 2006 —
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A Living Church "The man who lives in contact with what he believes to be a living Church is a man always expecting to meet Plato and Shakespeare to-morrow at breakfast." – G. K. Chesterton
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A related scene from the opening of Blake Edwards's "S.O.B." —
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Saturday, February 9, 2008
Saturday February 9, 2008
The timestamp of this entry, 4:23 AM, may be regarded as a memorial to Fra’ Andrew Bertie (see Andrew Cusack’s journal). It was at about this time that I heard of Fra’ Andrew’s death. The timestamp is a reference to Shakespeare’s birthday and to the following thought:
Page 162 of Orthodoxy, by G. K. Chesterton (1908), reprinted in 1995 by Ignatius Press, San Francisco–
The man who lives in contact with what he believes to be a living Church is a man always expecting to meet Plato and Shakespeare tomorrow at breakfast. He is always expecting to see some truth that he has never seen before.
The entry itself was written later… on the morning of Monday, Feb. 11, 2008. For a similar reference of sorts, to Plato, see “Epiphany for Roy, Part II” (timestamped 7:59 AM Sunday, Feb. 10, 2008).
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Sunday, May 20, 2007
Sunday May 20, 2007
Plato and Shakespeare:
Solid and Central
Solid and Central
"I have another far more solid and central ground for submitting to it as a faith, instead of merely picking up hints from it as a scheme. And that is this: that the Christian Church in its practical relation to my soul is a living teacher, not a dead one. It not only certainly taught me yesterday, but will almost certainly teach me to-morrow. Once I saw suddenly the meaning of the shape of the cross; some day I may see suddenly the meaning of the shape of the mitre. One free morning I saw why windows were pointed; some fine morning I may see why priests were shaven. Plato has told you a truth; but Plato is dead. Shakespeare has startled you with an image; but Shakespeare will not startle you with any more. But imagine what it would be to live with such men still living, to know that Plato might break out with an original lecture to-morrow, or that at any moment Shakespeare might shatter everything with a single song. The man who lives in contact with what he believes to be a living Church is a man always expecting to meet Plato and Shakespeare to-morrow at breakfast. He is always expecting to see some truth that he has never seen before."
— G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, Ch. IX
From Plato, Pegasus, and the Evening Star (11/11/99):
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"Nonbeing must in some sense be, otherwise what is it that there is not? This tangled doctrine might be nicknamed Plato's beard; historically it has proved tough, frequently dulling the edge of Occam's razor…. I have dwelt at length on the inconvenience of putting up with it. It is time to think about taking steps." "The Consul could feel his glance at Hugh becoming a cold look of hatred. Keeping his eyes fixed gimlet-like upon him he saw him as he had appeared that morning, smiling, the razor edge keen in sunlight. But now he was advancing as if to decapitate him." |
"O God, I could be
bounded in a nutshell
and count myself
a king of infinite space,
were it not that
I have bad dreams."
— Hamlet
From today's newspaper:
Notes:
For an illustration of
the phrase "solid and central,"
see the previous entry.
For further context, see the
five Log24 entries ending
on September 6, 2006.
For background on the word
"hollow," see the etymology of
"hole in the wall" as well as
"The God-Shaped Hole" and
"Is Nothing Sacred?"
For further ado, see
Macbeth, V.v
("signifying nothing")
and The New Yorker,
issue dated tomorrow.
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Friday, May 11, 2007
Friday May 11, 2007
Two-Part Invention
"O for a muse of fire,
that would ascend
The brightest heaven
of invention"
— Henry V, Prologue
"The man who lives in contact with what he believes to be a living Church is a man always expecting to meet Plato and Shakespeare to-morrow at breakfast." –G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, Ch. IX
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Sunday, October 8, 2006
Sunday October 8, 2006
Today’s Birthday:
Matt Damon
Matt Damon
“The man who lives in contact with what he believes to be a living Church is a man always expecting to meet Plato and Shakespeare to-morrow at breakfast.”
— G. K. Chesterton
 Natasha Wescoat, 2004 Shakespearean Fool |
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| Not to mention Euclid and Picasso | |
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(Click on pictures for details. Euclid is represented by Alexander Bogomolny, Picasso by Robert Foote.)
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See also works by the late Arthur Loeb of Harvard’s Department of Visual and Environmental Studies.
“I don’t want to be a product of my environment. I want my environment to be a product of me.” — Frank Costello in The Departed
For more on the Harvard environment,
see today’s online Crimson:
| The Harvard Crimson, Online Edition |
Sunday, Oct. 8, 2006 |
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POMP AND
Friday, Oct. 6: The Ringling Bros. Barnum & Bailey Circus has come to town, and yesterday the animals were disembarked near MIT and paraded to their temporary home at the Banknorth Garden. |
OPINION At Last, a By THE CRIMSON STAFF The Trouble By SAHIL K. MAHTANI |
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Monday, September 18, 2006
Monday September 18, 2006
Apology
| Excerpts from Log 24, January 18, 2004: A Living Church "Plato has told you a truth; but Plato is dead. Shakespeare has startled you with an image; but Shakespeare will not startle you with any more. But imagine what it would be to live with such men still living. To know that Plato might break out with an original lecture to-morrow, or that at any moment Shakespeare might shatter everything with a single song. The man who lives in contact with what he believes to be a living Church is a man always expecting to meet Plato and Shakespeare to-morrow at breakfast. He is always expecting to see some truth that he has never seen before." — G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy C. P. Snow on G. H. Hardy in the foreword to A Mathematician's Apology: "… he had another favourite entertainment…." … If, as Chesterton might surmise, he… met Plato and Shakespeare in Heaven, the former might discuss with him the eternal Platonic form of the number 17*, while the latter might offer…. * Footnote of 9/18/06: For the Platonic form of 17, see Feast of the Triumph of the Cross (9/14/06) and Medal (9/15/06). |
A Living Church,
continued…
Apology:
An Exercise in Rhetoric
An Exercise in Rhetoric
Related material:
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ON 6-6-6 —
"Seamus Davey-Fitzpatrick stars in a scene from the R-rated movie 'The Omen.' An official of the Australian bishops conference took on the superstition surrounding the movie's release date of June 6, 2006, noting that 'I take evil far too seriously to think "The Omen" is telling me anything realistic or important.'" (CNS/20th Century Fox) |
and
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Friday, May 26, 2006
Friday May 26, 2006
A Living Church
continued from March 27
"The man who lives in contact with what he believes to be a living Church is a man always expecting to meet Plato and Shakespeare to-morrow at breakfast."
— G. K. Chesterton
Shakespearean Fool |
Related material:
Yesterday's entries
and their link to
The Line
as well as
and the remarks
of Oxford professor
Marcus du Sautoy,
who claims that
"the right side of the brain
is responsible for mathematics."
Let us hope that Professor du Sautoy
is more reliable on zeta functions,
his real field of expertise,
than on neurology.
The picture below may help
to clear up his confusion
between left and right.
His confusion about
pseudoscience may not
be so easily remedied.
flickr.com/photos/jaycross/3975200/
(Any resemblance to the film
"Hannibal" is purely coincidental.)
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Monday, March 27, 2006
Monday March 27, 2006
A Living Church
A skeptic’s remark:
“…the mind is an amazing thing and it can create patterns and interconnections among things all day if you let it, regardless of whether they are real connections.”
— Xanga blogger “sejanus”
A reply from G. K. Chesterton
(Log24, Jan. 18, 2004):
“Plato has told you a truth; but Plato is dead. Shakespeare has startled you with an image; but Shakespeare will not startle you with any more. But imagine what it would be to live with such men still living. To know that Plato might break out with an original lecture to-morrow, or that at any moment Shakespeare might shatter everything with a single song. The man who lives in contact with what he believes to be a living Church is a man always expecting to meet Plato and Shakespeare to-morrow at breakfast. He is always expecting to see some truth that he has never seen before.”
Mid-day: 024
Evening: 672
Evening: 672
A meditation on
Sunday’s numbers —
24
The Star
of Venus
“He looked at the fading light
in the western sky and saw Mercury,
or perhaps it was Venus,
gleaming at him as the evening star.
Darkness and light,
the old man thought.
It is what every hero legend is about.
The darkness which is more than death,
the light which is love, like our friend
Venus here….”
— Roderick MacLeish, Prince Ombra
From Log24, Oct. 23, 2002:
An excerpt from
Robert A. Heinlein‘s
classic novel Glory Road —
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“I have many names. What would you like to call me?” “Is one of them ‘Helen’?” She smiled like sunshine and I learned that she had dimples. She looked sixteen and in her first party dress. “You are very gracious. No, she’s not even a relative. That was many, many years ago.” Her face turned thoughtful. “Would you like to call me ‘Ettarre’?” “Is that one of your names?” “It is much like one of them, allowing for different spelling and accent. Or it could be ‘Esther’ just as closely. Or ‘Aster.’ Or even ‘Estrellita.’ ” ” ‘Aster,’ ” I repeated. “Star. Lucky Star!” |
Related material:
672 Astarte and
The Venerable Bede
(born in 672).
672 illustrated:
The Venerable Bede
and the Star of Venus
The 672 connection is, of course,
not a real connection
(in the sense of “sejanus” above)
but it is nevertheless
not without interest.
Postscript of 6 PM
A further note on the above
illustration of the 672 connection:
The late Buck Owens
(see previous entry for
Owens, Reba, and the
star of Venus)
once described
his TV series as
“a show of fat old men
and pretty young girls”
(today’s Washington Post).
A further note on
lottery hermeneutics:
Those who prefer to interpret
random numbers with the aid
of a dictionary
(as in Is Nothing Sacred?)
may be pleased to note that
“heehaw” occurs in Webster’s
New World Dictionary,
College Edition, 1960,
on page 672.
In today’s Washington Post,
Richard Harrington informs us that
“As a child, Owens worked cotton and
maize fields, taking the name Buck
from a well-liked mule….”
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Thursday, January 19, 2006
Thursday January 19, 2006
Plato and Shakespeare
at Breakfast
at Breakfast
"Plato has told you a truth; but Plato is dead. Shakespeare has startled you with an image; but Shakespeare will not startle you with any more. But imagine what it would be to live with such men still living, to know that Plato might break out with an original lecture to-morrow, or that at any moment Shakespeare might shatter everything with a single song. The man who lives in contact with what he believes to be a living Church is a man always expecting to meet Plato and Shakespeare to-morrow at breakfast. He is always expecting to see some truth that he has never seen before."
For Plato:
Inscapes.
Inscapes.
For Shakespeare:
Hopkins on Inscape.
For both:
Click on the picture
for related remarks.
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Sunday, January 18, 2004
Sunday January 18, 2004
A Living Church
"Plato has told you a truth; but Plato is dead. Shakespeare has startled you with an image; but Shakespeare will not startle you with any more. But imagine what it would be to live with such men still living. To know that Plato might break out with an original lecture to-morrow, or that at any moment Shakespeare might shatter everything with a single song. The man who lives in contact with what he believes to be a living Church is a man always expecting to meet Plato and Shakespeare to-morrow at breakfast. He is always expecting to see some truth that he has never seen before."
— G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
C. P. Snow on G. H. Hardy in the foreword to A Mathematician's Apology:
"… he had another favourite entertainment. 'Mark that man we met last night,' he said, and someone had to be marked out of 100 in each of the categories Hardy had long since invented and defined. STARK, BLEAK ('a stark man is not necessarily bleak: but all bleak men without exception want to be considered stark')…."
S. H. Cullinane on religion and Hollywood:
"If the incomparable Max Bialystock were to remake 'Up Close and Personal,' he might retitle it 'Distant and Impersonal.' A Google search on this phrase suggests
a plot outline for Mel Brooks & Co."
In memory of
producer Ray Stark,
an excerpt from that plot outline:
The Oxford University Press summary of
God:
Myths of the Male Divine,
by David Leeming and Jake Page
"They [Leeming and Page] describe the rise of a male sky God as 'the equal to, the true mate, of Goddess, who was still associated with Earth.' In the Iron Age, the sky God became more aggressive, separating from the Goddess and taking his place as the King God, as Zeus, Odin, and Horus. Ultimately he emerged as the creator, a more distant and impersonal force. Here Leeming and Page also illuminate an important trend–a sense that the divine is beyond gender, that it permeates all things (as seen in the Chinese Tao and En Sof of the Kabbalah). They see a movement in the biography of God toward a reunion with the Goddess."
As for the Goddess, see
(December 17, 2002).
Stark, a saint among Hollywood producers, died yesterday, January 17. If, as Chesterton might surmise, he then met Plato and Shakespeare in Heaven, the former might discuss with him the eternal Platonic form of the number 17, while the latter might offer the following links on Stark's new heavenly laptop:
This concludes the tribute to Stark. For a tribute to Bleak, click here.
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Thursday, July 17, 2003
Thursday July 17, 2003
A Constant Idea: 759
From Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 1919:
| NUMBER: | 759 |
| AUTHOR: |
William Shakespeare (1564–1616) |
| QUOTATION: | I had rather have a fool to make me merry than experience to make me sad. |
| ATTRIBUTION: |
As You Like It. Act iv. Sc. 1. [text] |
"Plato has told you a truth; but Plato is dead. Shakespeare has startled you with an image; but Shakespeare will not startle you with any more. But imagine what it would be to live with such men still living, to know that Plato might break out with an original lecture tomorrow, or that at any moment Shakespeare might shatter everything with a single song. The man who lives in contact with what he believes to be a living Church is a man always expecting to meet Plato and Shakespeare tomorrow at breakfast. He is always expecting to see some truth that he has never seen before."
— G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
The number 759 is courtesy of Plato; the quotation 759 above is courtesy of Shakespeare. The song that Shakespeare suggests is "A Day in the Life of a Fool."
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