Saturday, June 11, 2022
Tuesday, April 23, 2019
A Certain Dramatic Artfulness
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Tuesday, April 9, 2019
Thursday, March 28, 2019
Culture
The previous post, "Dream of Plenitude," suggests . . .
"So here's to you, Nordstrom-Robinson . . . ."
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Tuesday, September 9, 2014
In Memoriam
For Loren D. Olson, Harvard '64:
"Even 50 years later, I remember his enthusiasm for a very young
and very gifted Harvard professor named Shlomo Sternberg, one
of whose special areas of interest was Lie groups. I still have no real
understanding of what a Lie group is, but not for want of trying on
Loren’s part. Loren was also quite interested in the thinking of the
theologians Paul Tillich and Reinhold Niebuhr, who were then at
Harvard. He attended some of their lectures, read several of their
books, and enjoyed discussing their ideas."
— Harvard classmate David Jackson
See also today's previous post.
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Tuesday, May 25, 2010
Sisteen
“Nuvoletta in her lightdress, spunn of sisteen shimmers,
was looking down on them, leaning over the bannistars….
Fuvver, that Skand, he was up in Norwood’s sokaparlour….”
— Finnegans Wake
To counteract the darkness of today’s 2:01 AM entry—
Part I— Artist Josefine Lyche describes her methods—
A— “Internet and hard work”
B— “Books, both fiction and theory”
Part II— I, too, now rely mostly on the Internet for material. However, like Lyche, I have Plan B— books.
Where I happen to be now, there are piles of them. Here is the pile nearest to hand, from top to bottom.
(The books are in no particular order, and put in the same pile for no particular reason.)
- Philip Rieff— Sacred Order/Social Order, Vol. I: My Life Among the Deathworks
- Dennis L. Weeks— Steps Toward Salvation: An Examination of Coinherence and Substitution in the Seven Novels of Charles Williams
- Erwin Panofsky— Idea: A Concept in Art Theory
- Max Picard— The World of Silence
- Walter J. Ong, S. J.— Hopkins, the Self, and God
- Richard Robinson— Definition
- X. J. Kennedy and Dana Gioia, eds.— An Introduction to Poetry
- Richard J. Trudeau— The Non-Euclidean Revolution
- William T. Noon, S. J.— Joyce and Aquinas
- Munro Leaf— Four-and-Twenty Watchbirds
- Jane Scovell— Oona: Living in the Shadows
- Charles Williams— The Figure of Beatrice
- Francis L. Fennell, ed.— The Fine Delight: Centenary Essays on the Poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins
- Hilary Putnam— Renewing Philosophy
- Paul Tillich— On the Boundary
- C. S. Lewis— George MacDonald
Lyche probably could easily make her own list of what Joyce might call “sisteen shimmers.”
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Sunday, December 24, 2006
Sunday December 24, 2006
The Edge of Eternity
(in memory of George Latshaw,
who died on Tuesday, Dec. 19, 2006)
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Brightness Doubled Seven is Heaven “Love is the shadow Witness the man who — Roger Waters, quoted in |
“At Home in Landscape:
Mannheim’s Chiliastic Mentality
in ‘Tintern Abbey’“
Garrett comments on Wordsworth’s approach to landscape, citing Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia, translated by Louis Wirth and Edward Shils (page numbers below refer to the 1998 Routledge edition):
“… ‘the present becomes the breach through which what was previously inward, bursts out suddenly, takes hold of the outer world and transforms it’ [p. 193]. This breaking through into ecstasy can only be brought about through ‘Kairos‘ or ‘fulfilled time'”….
See translators’ note, p. 198: “In Greek mythology Kairos is the God of Opportunity– the genius of the decisive moment. The Christianized notion of this is given thus in Paul Tillich‘s The Religious Situation [1925, translation by H. Richard Niebuhr, New York, Holt, 1932, pp. 138-139]: ‘Kairos is fulfilled time, the moment of time which is invaded by eternity. But Kairos is not perfection or completion in time.'”
Garrett quotes Wordsworth’s 1850 Prelude:
There are in our existence spots of time,
That with distinct pre-eminence retain
A renovating virtue … (12.208-210)
“And in book 14 Wordsworth…. symbolizes how man can find transcendent unity with the universe through the image of himself leading his group to the peak of Mt. Snowdon. Climbing at night in thick fog, he almost steps off a cliff, but at the last instant, he steps out of the mist, the moon appears, and his location on the brink is revealed. Walking in the darkness of reason, his imagination illumed the night, revealed the invisible world, and spared him his life.”
See also Charles Frazier on the edge of eternity:
“They climbed to a bend and from there they walked on great slabs of rock. It seemed to Inman that they were at the lip of a cliff, for the smell of the thin air spoke of considerable height, though the fog closed off all visual check of loftiness…. Then he looked back down and felt a rush of vertigo as the lower world was suddenly revealed between his boot toes. He was indeed at the lip of a cliff, and he took one step back….”
Part II — 7/15
From Log24 on 7/15, 2005:
an optimistic faith in God
and humanity, evoking,
in his words, ‘a world
in which we are poised
on the edge of eternity,
a world which has
deeps and shadows
of mystery,
and God is anything but
a sleeping partner.'”
Accompanying illustration:
Adapted from cover of
German edition of Cold Mountain
From Log24 on 7/15, 2005:
Christopher Fry’s obituary
in The New York Times—
“His plays radiated
an optimistic faith in God
and humanity, evoking,
in his words, ‘a world
in which we are poised
on the edge of eternity,
a world which has
deeps and shadows
of mystery,
and God is anything but
a sleeping partner.'”
Accompanying illustration:
Adapted from cover of
German edition of Cold Mountain
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Sunday, October 13, 2002
Sunday October 13, 2002
Two Literary Classics
(and a visit from a saint)
On this date in 1962, Edward Albee's classic play, "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" opened on Broadway.
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As I was preparing this entry, based on the October 13 date of the Albee play's opening, after I looked for a picture of Marshall's book I thought I'd better check dates related to Marshall, too. This is what I was surprised to find: Marshall (b. Oct. 10, 1942) died in 1992 on today's date, October 13. This may be verified at
The James Edward Marshall memorial page,
A James Edward Marshall biography, and
Author Anniversaries for October 13.
The titles of the three acts of Albee's play suffice to indicate its dark spiritual undercurrents:
"Fun and Games" (Act One),
"Walpurgisnacht" (Act Two) and
"The Exorcism" (Act Three).
A theological writer pondered Albee in 1963:
"If, as Tillich has said of Picasso's Guernica, a 'Protestant' picture means not covering up anything but looking at 'the human situation in its depths of estrangement and despair,' then we could call Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? a 'Protestant' play. On any other definition it might be difficult to justify its religious significance except as sheer nihilism."
— Hugh T. Kerr, Theological Table-Talk, July 1963
It is a great relief to have another George and Martha (who first appeared in 1972) to turn to on this dark anniversary, and a doubly great relief to know that Albee's darkness is balanced by the light of Saint James Edward Marshall, whose feast day is today.
For more on the carousel theme of the Marshall book's cover, click the link for "Spinning Wheel" in the entry below.