Literature
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The Hatred of Poetry
I am reading a book by the poet Ben Lerner entitled The Hatred of Poetry. I'll probably have more to say about it another time, but he takes on the resistance most of us feel when we see lines of verse on the page. It's a resistance I feel, as I'm sure most of you
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Why Nobody Cares about the Humanities
As a humanist — someone who reads, teaches and researches primarily philosophy but also, on the side, novels and poems and plays and movies — I am prepared to come out and admit that I do not know what the value of the humanities is. I do not know whether the study of the humanities
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Some Thoughts on ‘The Banshees of Inisherin’
Martin McDonagh's movie opens with Padraig walking at the edge of the world in the paradisal beauty of western Ireland. As he makes his way toward his friend Colm's modest, oceanside cottage, we hear a haunting women's choral piece full of longing in a language I don't recognize. Is that Gaelic? I would expect it
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Civilization and Its Discontents
It's always been interesting to me that Freud's dour assessment of civilization was written at that moment in Europe when Enlightenment rationalism came crashing down and lay all about him in shards. That book and T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland, likewise written in the 1920s, stand as cultural benchmarks for the end of the civilizing impulse that
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The Logos
We do not prove the existence of the poem. It is something seen and known in lesser poems.It is the huge, high harmony that soundsA little and a little, suddenlyBy means of a separate sense. It is and itIs not and, therefore, is. In the instant of speech,The breadth of an accelerando moves,Captives the being, widens–and
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Much Madness
Much madness is divinest senseTo a discerning eye;Much sense the starkest madness.’T is the majorityIn this, as all, prevails.Assent, and you are sane;Demur,—you ’re straightway dangerous,And handled with a chain. (Emily Dickinson, "Much Madness") Since One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest, it's been something of a cliche that the crazy people are sane and the
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Some Thoughts on Christian Liberty
Whatever the nature of my politics, it should be clear that I am by no means a theological liberal. I acknowledge that in order to develop a high level of spiritual maturity, it is necessary to restrain one's open-ended freedom in order to submit to one kind or another of spiritual discipline, just as it
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More on ‘Lost’ and Dante’s Island Down Under
About a month ago, I wrote a too long post about how Cuse's and Lindelof's Lost was an creative exercise in postmodern religious syncretism and mythopoesis, but leaning perhaps a little more heavily on retrieval themes from Dante and by extension Catholic iconography. I think after watching the finale last night, that assessment holds up