Antiquitopia

This morning as I read Jim Davila’s blog , my heart sank. I saw that my advisor, friend, and colleague had passed away yesterday. I felt the wind being knocked out of me. Reading April DeConick’s moving blog post later, I felt appreciation and grief over the brilliant fragility of a life who was known to most of us as an important scholar, but who was also known as a father, husband, son, and friend. April’s posting took me back to his last published book, Life after Death . She quotes the last full paragraph, but it was the penultimate paragraph that caught my eye: Besides being intellectual adventurers, our ascending souls serving as symbols of our lives’ journey, we are all also martyrs as mortality eventually defeats us. Shakespeare tells us what our religious imagery tells us: the victories of our life outlives its difficulties. The effort to transcend ourselves is all. “The rest is silence.” That his final published book was on Life after Death takes on an appropriatene...

Jim Davila has reported that my advisor, Alan Segal, passed away yesterday. April DeConick has a very beautiful remembrance of him here . I will write more later, but for now my thoughts are with his family and the many friends who knew him.

Jennifer Wright Knust has an op-ed piece on the belief blogs of cnn.com concerning the multiple, mixed, and contradictory messages the Bible has about sexuality. Check it out here .

I have been spending my two snow days finishing up the seven-volume novel by Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time . It all only took me a few months short of two years to read. And it is finished. Here is a snippet I read today in the last volume, Time Regained : In reality every reader is, while he is reading, a reader of his own self. The writer's work is merely a kind of optical instrument which he offers to the reader to enable him to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have perceived in himself. And the recognition by the reader in his own self of what the book says is the proof of its veracity, the contrary also being true, at least to a certain extent, for the difference between the two texts may sometimes be imputed less to the author than to the reader. (trans. Mayor, Kilmartin, and Enright)