So, why is speed needed to say poetry? It is the sound of sense waking up the latent agility of the tongue: “speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to you, trippingly on the tongue.” It is attention to sharper contrasts, to multiplying facets, to a superabundant collation of angular things all [...]
Archive for the ‘love?’ Category
The Speed of Verse, II
Posted in Charles Williams, Dante, God, Herbert, John Crowe Ransom, Pound, Vergil, Yeats, art, beginnings, birds, books, crannies, dialogue, dreaming, eccentric, history, idiosyncrasy, labor, language, latin, love?, rule, speed, stars, sun, the body, time, translation, verse on October 10, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
Equality
Posted in Equality, God, beginnings, dialogue, love? on August 19, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
Friendship creates a kind of equality between persons. Other kinds of friendship may create other and debased kinds of equality, but the noble friendship that is directed toward what is good in itself, what is good for another and oneself, creates a noble equality–an equality that is not a leveling, but a lifting up, a [...]
approach to meaning restores the experience/ in a different form
Posted in John Donne, T.S. Eliot, anyone, art, books, cosmos, dialogue, fate, history, indirect discourse, language, letters, library, love?, necessity, the grave, time, translation on April 18, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
John Donne:
All mankind is of one author, and is one volume. When one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated. God employs several translators; some pieces are translated by age, some by sickness, some by war, some by [...]
My Aim
Posted in God, Socrates, anyone, beginnings, books, conjunctions, cosmos, dialogue, greek, history, language, logic, love? on April 3, 2009 | 1 Comment »
In his beautiful reflection on the Catholic Intellectual Tradition given at Regensburg Pope Benedict affirms the “profound harmony between what is Greek in the best sense of the word and the Biblical understanding of faith in God.” He points to this “profound harmony” at work in the beginning of John’s Gospel. “In the beginning [...]
The Voice of the Athenian: the city begins where the city ends, part ii
Posted in Socrates, anyone, athens, beginnings, defeat, dialogue, eccentric, exceptions, fate, greek, history, love?, melos, polis, the impossible, tragedy on March 17, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
I wanted to give my post below as an example of the scenario I was trying (and failing) to articulate last fall. In this scenario, the failure of a speaker’s effort – an effort that up to this point seems determine the meaning of a conversation relative to a certain goal of longed-for persuasion or [...]
another angle on cosmos
Posted in Equality, Geometry, God, Socrates, Sophistry, anyone, athens, beginnings, cosmos, dialogue, eccentric, greek, hubris, idiosyncrasy, love?, necessity, polis, wisdom on March 12, 2009 | 3 Comments »
At the tail end of prosecuting his interlocutor Callicles, who has scorned his offer of friendship, balked at his refutations, and threatened him with murder, Socrates withdraws for a moment from the struggle of argument, having won something like the moment of calm perception that an exhausted warrior receives beside the ongoing fray, seeing the [...]
for my novel class
Posted in Dostoevsky, Goethe, Indian Summer, Jean Paul Friedrich Richter, Kant, Werther, books, crannies, dialogue, eccentric, exceptions, fate, idiosyncrasy, language, latin, letters, logic, love?, mania, necessity, nooks, novel, speed, spring, stars, summer, sun, the grave, time, wind, wisdom, wit on March 3, 2009 | 1 Comment »
Jean Paul Richter’s Maria Wuz: Inversions of Time, Nooks, Exceptions to the Rule, Interpolations and a Room for Man Cut out of, or Built into, the Universe
Proceeding according to no a priori principle, but seeking rather to treat of Jean Paul’s “Life of Maria Wuz, Merry Dominie of Auenthal” without wronging its delightfully angled discourse [...]
Vivant Dr. Sampo, Dr. Mumbach, Miss Bonifield, Mr. Shea, Miss Enos, and the others! — Semper Sint in Flore
Posted in Indian Summer, Janus, annihilation, anyone, art, athens, autumn, beginnings, bells, books, crannies, cry, defeat, dialogue, eccentric, exceptions, fate, flowers, greek, history, hubris, idiosyncrasy, language, letters, love?, mania, melos, mosaic, necessity, nemesis, nooks, polis, rain, rule, spring, stars, summer, the fall, the impossible, time, tragedy, wind, winter, wisdom, wit on February 24, 2009 | 1 Comment »
What Is Catholic About a College Degree
Peter V. Sampo
President, Thomas More College
Let us assume the college has a Catholic liturgy, teaches Orthodox Catholic theology, and is under the auspices of a religious order, a diocese, or is, at least, canonically recognized by a diocese. Further, let us assume loyalty to the Magisterium. As necessary as [...]
from my “Intellectual Autobiography”
Posted in Janus, anyone, beginnings, history, love?, pretentious, stars, sun, water, wind, wisdom on February 13, 2009 | 1 Comment »
This participation in the action of the truth, then, draws us into a deeper life where the deeds of the past enrich and enliven our present. It is not unlike the listening in which Faulkner’s Ike McCaslin first receives his paradoxical inheritance through the stories of Sam Fathers – an inheritance which to accept will [...]
something I wrote for my Lucretius class
Posted in Aphrodite, God, Homer, Lucretius, Venus, anyone, beginnings, conjunctions, fate, greek, history, ladies, language, latin, love?, sailing, sun, traffic, voluptas, water, wind on February 9, 2009 | 1 Comment »
y calling Venus “Aeneadae genetrix” Lucretius both accepts a mythic inheritance and returns it to his reader strangely transformed. The phrase focuses our attention on the overwhelming nearness of Aphrodite to Anchises that produced Aeneas, and seeks to extend the brilliance and force of that strange and momentary relationship of the human and divine – “hominum divumque voluptas” – over the begetting of each of the Aeneadae. But, by an odd sort of logic, the poet’s extending her particular role in the birth of Aeneas over the births of men in general, Venus herself, the brilliant, dissembling, shame-faced goddess who shines in the Homeric hymn is allowed to recede farther from our sphere. The intimacy of Aphrodite’s union with Anchises is evoked mutedly here only to release her from it into the more general and metaphorical motherhood that befits the respectful distance Lucretius grants the gods. By “pluralizing” this union, this highest pleasure of men and gods – “hominum divumque,” Lucretius prepares us to let that “and” assume a more disjunctive and subdued force, in contrast to the conjoining violence at the meeting-point of gods and men which is the center of the Homeric cosmos.
