Antiquitopia

The classic, To Kill a Mockingbird , which has not been out of print since its publication, turns fifty this year with fifty parties and events set up across the country in celebration. See here : Few novels have achieved both the mass popularity and the literary cachet of “To Kill a Mockingbird.” The book was originally published in 1960 by J. B. Lippincott and Company (now part of HarperCollins), won a Pulitzer Prize and has not been out of print since. It has sold nearly one million copies a year and in the past five years has been the second-best-selling backlist title in the country, beaten out only by the novel “The Kite Runner.”

His Holiness the Dalai Lama (number 14), Tenzin Gyatso, has an op-ed article in the NYTimes . It isn't every day that you see an article in the Times by a world religious leader. He writes on religious intolerance and the need to learn from other faiths while remaining faithful to one's own: Though intolerance may be as old as religion itself, we still see vigorous signs of its virulence. In Europe, there are intense debates about newcomers wearing veils or wanting to erect minarets and episodes of violence against Muslim immigrants. Radical atheists issue blanket condemnations of those who hold to religious beliefs. In the Middle East, the flames of war are fanned by hatred of those who adhere to a different faith. Such tensions are likely to increase as the world becomes more interconnected and cultures, peoples and religions become ever more entwined. The pressure this creates tests more than our tolerance — it demands that we promote peaceful coexistence and understanding...

So, I've talked about the Symbiosis of Heaven and Hell with Blake and Bulgakov, and the Hellish Heaven and Heavenly Hell with Blake and Calvino. Let's give Blake a little rest and turn to Yeats! The Rose of Peace If Michael, leader of God's host When Heaven and Hell are met, Looked down on you from Heaven's door-post He would his deeds forget. Brooding no more upon God's wars In his divine homestead, He would go weave out of the stars A chaplet for your head. And all folk seeing him bow down, And white stars tell your praise, Would come at least to God's great town, Led on by gentle ways; And God would bid His warfare cease, Saying all things were well; And softly make a rosy peace, A peace of Heaven with Hell. W.B. Yeats, "The Rose of Peace," The Rose , 1893) Yeats transfixes Michael, God's archangelic general, in a domestic moment. He does not stand on the field of battle, but in his heavenly home. A homely and very physical home: "door...

But imitation requires not only the absence of any unconquerable originality but also a relative fineness of ear which enables one first of all to discern what one is afterwards to imitate. (Proust, Guermantes Way , In Search of Lost Time ; trans. Moncrieff, Kilmartin, and Enright) Famously, since Plato and Aristotle, art has been defined as the imitation of life or nature. Ovid, in his Metamorphoses , fascinatingly, reversed the direction of imitation, saying in his portrayal of Actaeon's transformation by Diana into a stag that is torn apart by his own dogs that nature imitates art--he is speaking of the rock formations around Diana's pool that are in the form of arches--the famous Roman architectural feature. Dante, on the Ledge of Pride in his Purgatorio , similarly, depicts an ecphrasis that is so real that nature could not compete with it. Art imitates life; life imitates art; it is an endless circle of mimesis. This is a fairly creative view of mimesis; Proust, howev...

I have returned to working on a book review that I have been dreading--partly because I am now receiving some pressure from the journal to do it. And in the same chapter the author uses two phrases that I find jarring. Phrase 1: "The burden of proof lies with those who..." This phrase always pertains to the position one opposes. It assumes that the consensus lies with you and that others must argue against it. It also indicates that you are not going to provide an argument yourself. To say that the "burden of proof lies" with whoever opposes your assumptions is just scholarly laziness, saying you will not (or perhaps cannot) effectively demonstrate your assumption. The burden of proof lies with whoever is making an argument, meaning, it lies with all of us. Phrase 2: "The exception that proves the rule." No, it is just a plain old exception. That it might stand out among a great deal of evidence, making it striking by comparison can be duly noted....

From the NYTIMES , a discussion of what a philosopher is, from the silly to sublime. See more commentary (which refers to other blogger responses) here .

Stanley Fish writes a fascinating opinion piece in the NYTimes on a recent Supreme Court decision concerning a Cross used in a memorial on public land in the Mojave desert. The argument that won the day was to argue that the cross did not violate the Establishment Clause because it was a secular rather than a religious symbol (something, I should note, is similar to why French students can wear cross necklaces to school, but other religious symbols are excluded). The irony is quite apparent: Notice what this paroxysm of patriotism had done: it has taken the Christianity out of the cross and turned it into an all-purpose means of marking secular achievements. (According to this reasoning the cross should mark the winning of championships in professional sports.) It is one of the ironies of the sequence of cases dealing with religious symbols on public land that those who argue for their lawful presence must first deny them the significance that provokes the desire to put them there i...

My old banner subtitle of "my musings on antiquity, religion, and other phenomena and ephemera," while perhaps complete, since all things perhaps fall under "other phenomena and ephemera" still seemed incomplete to me given the many postings I have done on Proust, Shakespeare, etc--basically the increased occurrence of non-antique literature. Thus, I have included "literature" into my subtitle to represent more accurately the content you might find here--still heavily biblically and anciently oriented, but inclusive of a great deal of musings on other literature. Thank you for reading!

I confess I never really thought of Hamlet's last words until I watched the PBS production of the recent Royal Shakespeare Company's performance . They take out the aftermath of Fortinbras picking up the shattered pieces of Denmark, and end simply with Horatio's words: "Good night, sweet prince, / and fights of angels sing thee to thy rest." Yet just before this, Hamlet's final words just before death are quite strange, eerie, interesting: "The rest is silence" (V.ii). The rest is silence. As in the interview for the PBS special, the actor who plays Hamlet says he is going off into oblivion. It is as if he has gotten his answer to the problem in the "to be or not to be" speech. For, indeed, it is the fear of things to come, the "undiscover'd country" that makes cowards of us all--that is, if living is cowardly. I am struck, as a specialist in the study of religion, in this particular phrasing--"the rest is silenc...

People foolishly imagine that the broad generalities of social phenomena afford an excellent opportunity to penetrate further into the human soul; they ought, on the contrary, to realise that it is by plumbing the depths of a single personality that they might have a chance of understanding those phenomena. (Proust, Guermantes Way, In Search of Lost Time; trans. Moncrieff, Kilmartin, and Enright)

Although it was simply a Sunday in autumn, I had been born again, life lay intact before me, for that morning, after a succession of mild days, there had been a cold fog which had not cleared until nearly midday: and a change in the weather is sufficient to create the world and ourselves anew. Formerly, when the wind howled in my chimney, I would listen to the blows which it struck on the iron trap with as keen an emotion as if, like the famous chords with which the Fifth Symphony opens, they had been the irresistible calls of a mysterious destiny. Every change in the aspect of nature offers us a similar transformation by adapting our desires so as to harmonise with the new form of things. The mist, from the moment of my awakening, had made of me, instead of the centrifugal being which one is on fine days, a man turned in on himself, longing for the chimney corner and the shared bed, a shivering Adam in quest of a sedentary Eve, in this different world. (Marcel Proust, Guermantes W...

Without Contraries is no progression. Attraction and Repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and Hate, are necessary to Human existence. From these contraries spring what the religious call Good & Evil. Good is the passive that obeys Reason[.] Evil is the active springing from Energy. Good is Heaven. Evil is Hell (William Blake, Marriage of Heaven and Hell ) This past week I just finished up my Literature class by reading Mikhail Bulgakov's amazing Master and Margarita , which happens to be one of my favorite books. One thing often commented on about the novel is the prominent solar and lunar imagery: the sun and the moon align the scenes as they alternate between 20th century Stalinist Russia and first century Jerusalem. The sun is often portrayed as merciless, unbearable, taking away one's breath. The moon allows one to breath, but can be deceptive, creating shadows in the dark. Yet, considering the dark, in the end Night personified strips away all illusions--it...

There is an ancient truism that is the inversion of the Genesis statement that God made humans his God's image that humans always image God in their own image, and that if horses could speak, they would speak of God as a horse (I do not quite recall the reference off-hand, but if someone would like to supply it in the comments, it would be much appreciated). But such truisms, however true, seem trite to just speak it outright, and so to help make the point, I have enlisted a poet (W.B. Yeats): The Indian Upon God I passed along the water's edge below the humid trees, My spirit rocked in evening light, the rushes round my knees, My spirit rocked in sleep and sighs; and saw the moorfowl pace All dripping on a grassy slope, and saw them cease to chase Each other round in circles, and heard the eldest speak: Who holds the world between His bill and made us strong or weak Is an undying moorfowl, and He lives beyond the sky. The rains are from His dripping wing, the moonbeams from h...