http://solent-art.co.uk/jobs The name of Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq has recently come to my attention, and now I’m very curious to lay my hands on a real copy of the Epistulae Turcicae in Latin. Apparently, while de Busbecq was in Turkey he transcribed the famous Monumentum Ancyranum, which contains the text in Greek and Latin of Augustus’s […]
Category Archives: Essays on Literature
Reading a fair amount of Plutarch recently, the lives of Timoleon, Aemilius Paulus, Pelopidas, and Marcellus. What a superb man. Below is very nearly a summa of the highest, deeds-oriented (as opposed to eloquence-oriented) Classicism. You can hear how much he shaped the writerly outlook on Montaigne fifteen centuries later – what a thought, that […]
Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire.
06-Nov-11I spent a few evenings in the past week reading Desert Solitaire, which I did with pleasure. The book is hardly perfect but then again, neither are we. A popular book such as this must be flawed. It does not have the polish of a book like Walden and will not last as long, but […]
Bertrand Russell’s Atheist Essays.
14-Sep-11There is a fine little collection of essays about atheism by Bertrand Russell, entitled Why I Am Not A Christian, which I read on subway rides about the city the past week. It is light reading, and his mature essays are in a lucid style which offers no difficulties (some of his earlier essays, such […]
Camus.
10-Sep-11Reading Bertrand Russell lately, I remembered a photo I had seen, which I had always thought was him, of a mid-twentieth-century intellectual, a handsome man, well-dressed, with a kind of hopeless seriousness in his eyes. I know no more of faces than to say that we are all affected by them, and such a face […]
Camus and The Cure.
10-Sep-11Listening to The Cure recently, I was surprised to discover that their song Killing an Arab – which to my youthful mind seemed merely the intentional offensiveness we are so often told is the proper province of (modern) art – is in fact a fairly close pop-song rendition of Albert Camus’ The Stranger. I didn’t […]
As You Like It.
06-Sep-11“Then is there mirth in heaven, When earthly things made eaven attone together.” – 5.4 As a subject for an essay I would prefer one of Shakespeare’s “problem plays,” such as All’s Well That Ends Well, or Measure for Measure, which in performance simply do not satisfy our sense of propriety; but for an afternoon’s […]
When I tried to read Thomas Merton’s Seven Storey Mountain while in college – a book compared (by the publishing trade) with Augustine’s Confessions – I was astounded to find the book self-promoting, egotistical, petty, and posturing, without a single elevated thought or even sentence that could place it with the Confessions. This is one […]
Saint Francis, Nature, and Poverty.
23-May-11I have been reading Thomas of Celano’s two lives of Saint Francis, with all the complicated pleasure of advancing age. In 1973 the Franciscan Herald Press put out a lovely edition of the early writings about Francis, Saint Francis of Assisi: Omnibus of Sources, a beautifully executed book, hardbound, with maps of Italy and Assisi, […]
Plutarch on Timon of Athens.
22-Nov-11Unterkrozingen From the Life of Antony. Antony, at the end of his life, his hopes shattered, said that he just wanted to end his days living the life of Timon of Athens. Plutarch thus digresses: This Timon was a citizen of Athens, and lived much about the Peloponnesian War, as may be seen by the comedies […]