much and earnest

In the Petrarchan sonnet the problem [posed in the octet] is often solved by reasoned perception or by a relatively expansive and formal meditative process, for the sestet allows enough room for the undertaking of prudent, highly reasonable resolutions. But in the Shakespearean sonnet, because resolution must take place within the tiny compass of a twenty-syllable couplet, the “solution” is more likely to be the fruit of wit, or paradox, or even a quick shift of sophistry, logical cleverness, or outright comedy.

- Paul Fussell, *Poetic Meter and Poetic Form*, chp 7

Moreover, the seemingly automatic assumption that “sophisticated” works such as Rushdie’s somehow pack a potent (if nebulous) political punch is closely related to the assumption, by now thoroughly ingrained in the discourse of Western literary studies, that complexity is by definition a good thing, a clear sign (and for that matter, a prerequisite) of “genuine” art and thorough thought.

…. But there is a certain value in clarity…

- M. Keith Booker, “Midnight’s Children, History, and Complexity: Reading Rushdie after the Cold War,” Critical Essays on Salman Rushdie, ed. M. Keith Booker (New York: G.K. Hall & Co.), 284. I’m not (yet, anyway) sympathetic with Booker’s Marxist commitments, but I was delighted to read this earlier tonight.

In calling a text a space, then, Barthes has diverged from reality and has started to write not so much an argument as a kind of fantastical poem.

- more from Carey.

In a book that argues that relativism is not the defining characteristic of postmodernism, Peter Leithart has this objection to the real relativists:

In fact–and it’s a subtle point–if everything is different from everything else, then differences are all the same. For the relativist, a walnut is different from a candlestick in the same way and to the same degree that a buffalo nickel is different from a quasar. But if we can’t distinguish different sorts and degrees of difference (which is the same thing as distinguishing sorts and degrees of similarity), then saying that everything is the same makes as much sense as saying everything is different. So it is that the extreme celebrant of difference joins hands with the celebrant of sameness, the absolute pluralist is blood-brother to the absolute moralist.

- Solomon among the Postmoderns, ch. 2, note 1

“Abusus non tollit usum,” which I just ran across in a FT review of Stephen Greenblatt’s Hamlet in Purgatory. According to Merriam-Webster, the phrase translates “abuse does not take away use.” Need to remember that one.

I first encountered the work of René Girard about a year ago, while studying the Gospel of Matthew. First Things recently interviewed him. Here are a few things he says:

I think the most influential aspect of my work is to show that Judaism and Christianity exist in a continuity with archaic religions.

The religion of the Incarnation should be an anthropology as well as a theology. Incarnation means man and God together. Theology is pure God and is built on schemes that completely neglect what we call Incarnation in Christianity.

…religion is a very concrete phenomenon that means to prevent people from killing each other completely.

Here’s the full interview.

But to find Frankford neurotic, or despicable, or cold and complacent, and thereby to implicate him in the tragedy is to seek to rationalize the events. It is to squirm against the fact that tragedy teaches us nothing but empathy. Which, after all, is everything.

- Brian Scobie, editor of Thomas Heywood’s A Woman Killed With Kindness, Introduction

Ceremony keeps up all things; it’s like a penny glasse to a rich spirit or some excellent water; without it the water were spilt; the spirit lost.

- one John Selden, 17C English polymath, also qtd in Maltby, ch. 1

Here’s a snip:

LOPEZ: What is “real freedom” and should Americans worry about its future when voting?

FR. WILLIAMS: “Real freedom” is more than the absence of external constraints on our choices. It involves an accomplishment, a conquest of ourselves that allows us to govern our own actions. There is a slavery that we impose on ourselves from the inside, when we don’t have the upper hand over our impulses, passions and inclinations. As has been said, “a man has as many masters as he has vices.”

You and I may be “free” to climb Mount Everest, in that no one will stop us. But we are only truly free to do so if we have trained enough to be able to make the climb.

What applies to the individual applies to the nation as well. A virtuous nation is a free nation, since its people are able to discern good and evil, and have the willpower to choose the good. A nation where vice is celebrated, and virtue is scorned, can have no claim to true freedom.

- from “A Matter of Conscience,” an NRO interview with Fr. Thomas D. Williams

The point of Christian scholarship is not recognition by standards established in the wider culture. The point is to praise God with the mind. [...] The real point is valuing what God has made, believing that the creation is as “good” as he said it was, and exploring the fullest dimensions of what it meant for the Son of God to “become flesh and dwell among us.”

- The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, ch. 9

I’m trying to make myself study modernity (and post-modernity), in order to overcome the backwards chronological snobbery to which I have been subject for some time. As an undergraduate, I told myself I’d be happy to get lost in old books, old ideas, old debates. I think I’ve found two good reasons to turn over a new leaf:

1. To acquire the ability to critically examine others’ and one’s own philosophical principles.
2. To be more attuned to my students.

What others can you think of?