I’ve had a semi-productive day despite a pounding sinus headache, by which I mean I read/noticed several things.
The University of Utah has a Great Books program—which in principle I approve of, though the books which were chosen for its most recent iteration left something to be desired. In the first place, I don’t think plays should be part of such programs, because the point is to read books; and plays are not books, and should be watched, not read. I realize this is a somewhat idiosyncratic view. Several folks in a private group chat to which I belong, including more than one person who actually teaches books, strongly disagreed with me, for example. But leaving that aside, three of the books were published within the last six years. I have no disagreement—again, in principle—with the notion that “greatness is still open to individuals thinking and writing today,” and I certainly am not passing judgement on these books, not having read them. Though to be quite honest, I rather doubt how much “staying power” a book on early twenty-first century social media is going to have in a hundred years, much less a thousand. But…maybe we should, y’know, give them a chance to show themselves to be great? The remaining book is a 1901 novel by Charles W. Chestnutt, with which I was not previously familiar, but it does seem like a good candidate for this sort of program.
@ayjay wrote about Dorothy Sayers and Robert Graves which of course caught my eye because I’ve been on such a Sayers kick this year and Graves' I, Claudius is a perennial reread. Jacobs' brief runthrough of Sayers' gripes with Graves made me realize that aside from the aforementioned I, Claudius, I haven’t really read much Graves: Claudius the God, Count Belisarius, his translation of Suetonius—and I think that’s it. (I started Goodbye to All That but didn’t care for it and put it down.) Between Jacobs' post and Adam Roberts' which he links to, I don’t think I’m in a hurry to change that.
Jacobs also put me on to a recent post from Freddie de Boer, and I am going to pull exactly the same quote he did (but do go read the whole thing):
People sometimes ask me why I care. “Why do you care if a 38-year-old woman has a Squishmallow collection?” “Why do you care if a grown man cries over finally deciding on his Hogwarts House?” And I admit that this is a good-faith question. There are many things I don’t care about. If you’re not hurting anyone, if your regression is private, if you want to let your inner child out to play on weekends, go with God. But when the collective orientation of a society shifts away from maturity, and when entire media ecosystems are devoted to protecting people from the experience of being challenged or confronted, we don’t just lose some abstract dignity. We lose the capacity to solve real problems. Adults who refuse to be adults leave no adults to run the world. And somebody has to.
In another vein, Fr. Stephen Freeman writes on love:
Love is ontological, a matter of true being. Its absence in our lives, in whatever measure, diminishes our existence, our lives becoming thin and stretched. Bilbo Baggins, Tolkien’s hobbit character who carries the Ring of the Dark Lord for decades, describes himself in this classic manner: “I feel thin, sort of stretched, like butter scraped over too much bread.” In an age of information, we fail to see that we are wielding the ring of a dark lord, marveling at our power while we ourselves become less and less.
Last but not least, Gracy Olmstead reflects on chronos versus kairos through the lens of a Wendell Berry poem:
But obsessive worry does not allow us to “live where we are.” And if we are to inhabit kairos—God’s time—it is vital that we do just that. To live in kairos is to become “entirely present, entirely trusting.” It is not that everything is perfect. Quite the opposite. It is not that we ignore the sadness of the world, either. But the poet who lives in the moment has learned that eternity—not chronos—must reign over both heart and mind.