Antiquitopia

When a mind has a tendency towards day-dreams, it's a mistake to shield it from them, to ration them. So long as you divert your mind from its day-dreams, it will not know them for what they are; you will be the victim of all sorts of appearances because you will not have grasped their true nature. If a little day-dreaming is dangerous, the cure for it is not to dream less but to dream more, to dream all the time. One must have a thorough understanding of one's day-dreams if one is not to be troubled by them.... (Marcel Proust, Within a Budding Grove , In Search of Lost Time ; trans. Moncrieff, Kilmartin, and Enright) Here the character speaking is the painter Elstir, relaying this information to our day-dreaming narrator at his studio in seascape vistas of Balbec. He almost comes off as a Platonist in his desire to move from the appearances of things to the things themselves, but the true nature here to be grasped is not the form or idea of the good or beautiful, but the tr...

According to the NYTimes , the Dude abides in academe: December 30, 2009 BOOKS Dissertations on His Dudeness By DWIGHT GARNER Joel and Ethan Coen’s 1998 movie, “The Big Lebowski,” which stars Jeff Bridges as a beatific, pot-smoking, bowling-obsessed slacker known as the Dude, snuck up on the English-speaking world during the ’00s: it became, stealthily, the decade’s most venerated cult film. It’s got that elusive and addictive quality that a great midnight movie has to have: it blissfully widens and expands in your mind upon repeat viewings. “The Big Lebowski” has spawned its own shaggy, fervid world: drinking games, Halloween costumes, bumper stickers (“This aggression will not stand, man”) and a drunken annual festival that took root in Louisville, Ky., and has spread to other cities. The movie is also the subject of an expanding shelf of books, including “The Dude Abides: The Gospel According to the Coen Brothers” and the forthcoming “The Tao of the Dude.” Where cult films go, acade...

A powerful idea communicates some of its power to the an who contradicts it. Partaking of the universal community of minds, it infiltrates, grafts itself on to, the mind of him whom it refutes, among other contiguous ideas, with the aid of which, counter-attacking, he complements and corrects it; so that the final verdict is always to some extent the work of both parties to a discussion. It is to ideas which are not, strictly speaking, ideas at all, to ideas which, based on nothing, can find no foothold, no fraternal echo in the mind of the adversary, that the latter, grappling as it were with thin air, can find no word to say in answer. (Marcel Proust, Within a Budding Grove , I n Search of Lost Time ; trans. Moncrieff, Kilmartin, and Enright) This reminds me of a saying by Oscar Wilde: "When people agree with me, I always think I am in the wrong." Similarly, Proust suggests that when your ideas encounter no opposition, they are simply flimsy, lacking robustness; they la...

For full discussion, see here . Ancient Book of Mark Found Not So Ancient After All ScienceDaily (Dec. 15, 2009) — A biblical expert at the University of Chicago, Margaret M. Mitchell, together with experts in micro-chemical analysis and medieval bookmaking, has concluded that one of the University Library's most enigmatic possessions is a forgery. The book, a copy of the Gospel of Mark, will remain in the collection as a study document for scholars studying the authenticity of ancient books. Scholars have argued for nearly 70 years over the provenance of what's called the Archaic Mark, a 44-page miniature book, known as a "codex," which contains the complete 16-chapter text of the Gospel of Mark in minuscule handwritten text. The manuscript, which also includes 16 colorful illustrations, has long been believed to be either an important witness to the early text of the gospel or a modern forgery, said Mitchell, Professor of New Testament and Early Christian Literature...

Members of the earth's earliest known civilization, the Sumerians, looked on in shock and confusion some 6,000 years ago as God, the Lord Almighty, created Heaven and Earth. According to recently excavated clay tablets inscribed with cuneiform script, thousands of Sumerians—the first humans to establish systems of writing, agriculture, and government—were working on their sophisticated irrigation systems when the Father of All Creation reached down from the ether and blew the divine spirit of life into their thriving civilization. "I do not understand," reads an ancient line of pictographs depicting the sun, the moon, water, and a Sumerian who appears to be scratching his head. "A booming voice is saying, 'Let there be light,' but there is already light. It is saying, 'Let the earth bring forth grass,' but I am already standing on grass." "Everything is here already," the pictograph continues. "We do not need more stars." Hist...

The New York Times has a nice obituary on Yosef Yerushalmi, who passed away earlier this week: Yosef Haim Yerushalmi, a groundbreaking and wide-ranging scholar of Jewish history whose meditation on the tension between collective memory of a people and the more prosaic factual record of the past influenced a generation of thinkers, died on Tuesday in Manhattan. He was 77 and lived in Manhattan. .... An elegant writer and mesmerizing raconteur, Dr. Yerushalmi earned his reputation as one of his generation’s foremost Jewish historians by plumbing eclectic subjects like the history of the Jews expelled from Spain and Portugal in the 1490s, messianism, the intellectual history of modern German Jewry and Freud’s relationship with his religion. In 1982, Dr. Yerushalmi, then the Salo Wittmayer Baron professor of Jewish history, culture and society at Columbia University, published perhaps his most influential work, “Zachor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory,” a slim volume whose title bore the...

Other than having a cool name, this band has some catchy, somewhat addictive songs, such as the following called "Kings and Queens": Ok...I don't quite get what's going on with all the bicycles. And I am not quite sure what that resuscitation (resurrection?) moment was doing there. Perhaps that is the "promise" in the "kings and queens of promise" or the juxtaposition of self-destruction and promise, the the moment of being in between heaven and hell? But the lyrics pick up on elements of fragmentation, brokenness, perhaps alienation (unless that is too existentialist): Into the night Desperate and broken The sound of a fight Father has spoken We were the kings and queens of promise We were the victims of ourselves Maybe the children of a lesser God Between Heaven and Hell Heaven and Hell Into your eyes Hopeless and taken We stole our new lives Through blood and pain In defense of our dreams In defense of our dreams We were the Kings and Queens ...

The Feast of St. Nicholas has already passed (it was Dec. 6), but since so many people relate him to Christmas it is still relevant news that his face has been reconstructed using forensic anthropology. While many people may not have realized that Santa Claus was based upon a real person, St. Nicholas was an ancient bishop who lived in the late third to mid fourth century CE. He was born and died in Myra, a city in ancient Anatolia--modern Turkey. He attended the famous Council of Nicaea. He was particularly known for his acts of charity and giving anonymous gifts, hence many of the familiar traits and legends that began to grow around him. But what I didn't know was that his relics--including his skull--lie in the Basilica de San Nicola in Bari, Italy, and having taken measurements of his skull, his facial features have been reconstructed. So, here's what Santa Claus may have actually looked like: For background on the history of St. Nick and his remains, and the report o...

I just received news that the esteemed and highly influential Columbia Professor of Jewish Studies, Yosef Yerushalmi, passed away yesterday. I particularly enjoyed his book on history and memory, Zakhor .

I am reading Yi-Fu Tuan's very clearly written, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience . In his chapter on "Architectural Space and Awareness," which ranges from China, ancient Sumer, medieval European Cathedrals to modern architecture, he discusses the symbolic importance of space in a larger coherent worldview that is reflected in how we build, whether a home, a village, a church, or a skyscraper. While much of the chapter emphasizes continuities in how each society constructs its buildings and shelters in relationship to its larger symbolic system (to borrow a phrase from Mary Douglas), he notes something different is now happening in the modern world. Firstly, because of the high rates of literacy, the use of material and physical symbols are fading as the importance of verbal symbols rise: "verbal symbols have progressively displaced material symbols, and books rather than buildings instruct" (117). But there is something more, or something le...

Earlier I noted a typo in my particular edition of the RSV that I use for class in which the LORD says to Cain that sin is "couching" at the door (Gen. 4:7). I took it as a typo, since it would be better rendered as "crouching." It would be a simple typographical error of the omission of one letter, but would totally change the meaning of the verse from a menacing predator to sexually seductive. Kevin Edgecomb, however, noted that all the RSV editions he could find say "couching," and so it might be the actual translation choice of the RSV. I had a hard time believing this, since "couching" just did not make sense, and "crouching" does, in fact, work with the Hebrew at this point. Other translations, for example, use "lurking" (NRSV). I suggested in the notes to that post that this might be an even bigger modern scribal error--one in the base text of the RSV that never got emended. Nonetheless, Kevin's suggestion th...

Perhaps in the alliterative tradition of Shakespeare's "Full fathom five thy father lies" (Tempest 1.2.329), T.S. Eliot renders in his own play about Thomas Becket, "Murder in the Cathedral": The fool, fixed in his folly, may think He can turn the wheel on which he turns. These lines come in the midst of a scene highly reliant upon the Devil's temptation of Jesus in the Gospels. Here four different tempters come to Becket with different types of temptations that vary in subtlety from obvious physical temptation to the temptation of power. The tempter here seeks to remind Becket of his previous life of "mirth" and love, a life of pleasure, before he became archbishop of Canterbury. These lines are Becket's reply. The point is that one cannot return--literally turn back the wheel. What is done is done. If one seeks one's old life, one will find that this time around, things are different. He suggests that similar things happen from gen...