He is, however, not a gardener—he doesn't like the labor. And besides, he's too busy lecturing at Harvard and being the pre-eminent critic of contemporary English-language letters to pick up a watering can.
In "Education by Poetry," one of his finest essays, Frost argued that an understanding of how poetry works is essential to the developing intellect. He went so far as to suggest that unless you are at home in the metaphor, you are not safe anywhere. Because you are not at ease with figurative values, "you don't know how far you may expect to ride it and when it may break down with you."
For Aquinas, freedom “is a means to human excellence, to human happiness, to the fulfillment of human destiny,” Weigel writes. Freedom helps us to “choose wisely and to act well as a matter of habit.” Only then can we pursue happiness suitable for a rational, moral creature and “build free and virtuous societies in which the rights of all are acknowledged, respected, and protected in law.”
It is a pretty klutzy piece of work. The prose is frequently disfigured by eruptions of adjectivitis ("treasonous Jane Fonda"). The chapter headings and subheadings read like the front page of a tabloid - "Kerry's Antiwar Secrets," "The War Crimes Kerry Doesn't Want Investigated. " The tone throughout is intemperate. ... Still, in the midst of all this, they do manage to score a direct hit on Kerry's credibility. ... [Douglas Brinkley's Tour of Duty] done with Kerry's cooperation, "is based largely on journals and correspondence Kerry kept while on his tours of duty. " But by his own account, Kerry was in
Historians have long posited a bewildering array of consequences of the plague. The reduced population made the peasantry more valuable as workers, made them aware of their value, gave them muscle in the market, and gave rise to social mobility. Language changed as people moved across the land, and dialect was diluted. More land became available. Food supplies increased. The failure of the church to offer good reason for the pestilence weakened its hold, giving new power to skepticism and secularism.
"I'm not a big fan of overly manicured gardens. They're like office parks," Crawford says. "I like to let things go a little bit wild."A man after my own heart.
No Place affords a more striking Conviction of the Vanity of human Hopes, than a publick Library … Of the innumerable Authors whose Performances are thus treasured up in magnificent Obscurity, most are undoubtedly forgotten, because they have never deserved to be remembered, and owed the Honours which they once obtained, not to Judgement or to Genius, to Labour or to Art, but to the Prejudice of Faction, the Stratagems of Intrigue, or the Servility of Adulation.
Consider physics: Newtonian models were crude approximations of the truth (wrong at the atomic level, but still useful). A hundred years ago, statistically based quantum mechanics offered a better picture — but quantum mechanics is yet another model, and as such it, too, is flawed, no doubt a caricature of a more complex underlying reality. The reason physics has drifted into theoretical speculation about n-dimensional grand unified models over the past few decades (the "beautiful story" phase of a discipline starved of data) is that we don't know how to run the experiments that would falsify the hypotheses — the energies are too high, the accelerators too expensive, and so on.Now biology is heading in the same direction. The models we were taught in school about "dominant" and "recessive" genes steering a strictly Mendelian process have turned out to be an even greater simplification of reality than Newton's laws. The discovery of gene-protein interactions and other aspects of epigenetics has challenged the view of DNA as destiny and even introduced evidence that environment can influence inheritable traits, something once considered a genetic impossibility.
One reads at a glance how He scolded the Baptists a little,
Was firm with the Catholics, practical with the Friends,
To Unitarians pleasantly noncommittal.
Always on Monday morning the press reports
God as revealed to his vicars in various guises—
Benevolent, stormy, patient, or out of sorts.
God knows which is the God God recognizes.
Just imagine the world picture of somebody whose primary — or even (God forbid!) sole — source of news is the New York Times.
In essence, then, what one understands about the world and oneself is
really not what actually exists but what is constructed by one’s mind with
the use of other cognitive tools. The problem with this is that it makes
no sense in the end because what the researchers are telling us would also
be covered by their claim and so it is also just some mental construction,
which then is also some further mental construction, ad infinitum and ad
nauseum. But that cannot be. At some point the researchers would have to
accept that what they are telling us about the human mind is actually so,
not also just a construct or invention.
At 6 tonight, Peter Krok will read from Looking for an Eye, at the Thomas J. Donatucci Library, 1935 Shunk St. in Philly, followed by an Open Reading. Hosted by Richard Bank. For information phone 215-685-1755..
Speaking by phone from S.J. House in Tokyo, the Rev. William Johnston, a Jesuit priest who published Christian Zen in 1971, said, ``the Pope regretted that statement and after that the Vatican arranged for a dialogue in Taiwan between Christianity and Buddhism. The Pope has said very nice things about Buddhism also, and the Asian bishops speak beautiful things about Buddhism. ''
An Irishman who has lived in Japan for 47 years - ``I tell my students that Ireland is my mother and Japan is my wife'' - Father Johnston said, ``The basic thing for a Christian is the commitment to Jesus Christ and to the Gospel. . . . When I do Zen, that basic commitment is always there. The Buddhists have their commitment to the Buddha and to dharma.
``I myself am committed to dialogue,'' Father Johnston said, but ``my basic commitment is to Christianity, to Christ and the Gospel. . . . Christ is always a person, the risen person, the glorified Jesus of Nazareth. . . . The Buddha-nature is a way of speaking of the unity of being, [but] the personal dimension is not there. ''
The Japanese word zen is a translation of the Chinese word ch'an, which is itself a translation of the Sanskrit word dhyana. All mean simply meditation. But, as Father Johnston points out in Christian Zen, it is ``not the discursive meditation wherein one reasons and thinks and makes resolutions. . . . It is meditation without an object. . . . One pays no attention to the thoughts and images that pass across the surface of the mind. . . . It is not preoccupied with past or future, right or left, up or down. One is simply present . . . in the eternal now, face to face with reality. ''
Father Johnston emphasized that Christians who practice Zen need to be aware of their own spiritual tradition. ``We get people coming to Japan - even priests and sisters sometimes - and they want to do Zen and they've never had any Christian experience in their lives and . . . that's not good. ''
Father Johnston pointed out that Buddhists exhibit great respect for Jesus. ``They see Jesus as a great mystic. . . . The recent scriptural movement with its emphasis on Jesus the man [has led us to] think that Jesus was just like the man in the street. [The Buddhists] may not recognize [Jesus'] divinity, but they see him as a Bodhisattva and a model for people who would seek enlightenment.
``There's great wisdom in Buddhism, so the thing is marriage, to put them together. That's the big challenge that's going to confront us in the 21st century. The future of Christianity is in Asia . . . not only geographically, but in Asian spirituality, and we will come more and more to the contemplative dimension. I think the Gospel has a very big future in Asia. ''
Here is my review of Ambition and Survival: A poet reconciling verse and living.All ambition has begun to have the reek of disease to me, the relentless smell of the self. We want to stamp our existence upon existence, our nature upon nature. We are pursuing a ghost—even my image of the dead participates in this—rather than a god.And that is the issue, at least for me. I do think a life in poetry is a calling, but for a long time I was unwilling to admit that the call might come from God. And if he is the one calling, then he is the only one who can ratify your response.
"I really don't have a stake in any of this," he said. "I'm not a cheerleader for a certain outcome. Most liberals who despair of the current state of things, most of them think there's a solution and so they're naturally disappointed. It's built into their thinking system.
"I know there's no solution, so I just enjoy what's here and I enjoy the journey."
I knew there was a reason why I liked Carlin - and am not a liberal.She does remember the plane, though. "The plane, in the thickening darkness, was now but a thicker darkness, and distinguishable only because her eyes were still fixed on it. If she moved she would lose it. If she lost it, she would be left in the midst of this - this lull. "
A lull that feels peculiar:
All the lulls she had ever known were not as deep as this, in which there seemed no movement at all. . . . She was alone with this night in the City . . . but all in a silence she did not know, so that if she yielded to the silence she would not know those other things, and the whole place would be different and dreadful.
Lester briefly encounters her husband, Richard, but he soon fades, "as if he were a ghost. " Then she meets Evelyn Mercer, the young woman she had been with before her eyes became fixed on the plane and the lull settled. Evelyn does not fade. Together they wander the silent city, where "there was never any sun" and where the moon, "large and bright and cold . . . hung in the sky," though "there was no moonlight on the ground. "
All Hallows' Eve, first published in 1945, the year of Charles Williams' death, was the last of his seven novels, which T.S. Eliot - who wrote the introduction - aptly described as "supernatural thrillers. " Williams was one of the Inklings, the informal literary group whose best-known members were C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien. Born in 1886, Williams was older than the others, and he spent most of his adult life working for the Oxford University Press.
All Hallows' Eve, of course, is another name for Halloween - the eve of All Saints' Day. Williams' choice of title is significant. No cutesy witches, ghosts or goblins in these pages. The central character here is an evil wizard named Simon the Clerk, a direct descendant - by profession if not heredity - of Simon Magus. Simon aims to dominate the world in a most thorough-going way: by enslaving the souls of its inhabitants. (Early in life, Williams had been a member of a Rosicrucian temple that had some connection with the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, whose most notorious member was Aleister Crowley. So Williams knew more than most about high magic. )
All Hallows' Eve, in other words, is about genuine evil on a cosmic scale, and Williams' skill at depicting the interpenetration of the temporal and eternal is downright uncanny. Thanks to "the first grace of a past redeemed into love," Lester's vision and perception are both cleansed and enlarged:
She saw a glowing and glimmering city, of which the life was visible as a roseal wonder within. The streets of it were first the streets of today, full of business of today . . . Then, gently opening, she saw among those streets other streets . . . into which her own London opened or with which it was intermingled. No thought of confusion crossed her mind; it was all very greatly ordered, and when down a long street she saw, beyond the affairs of today, the movement of sedan chairs and ancient dresses, and beyond them again, right in the distance and yet very close to her, the sun glittering on armor, and sometimes a high battlemented gate, it was no phantasmagoria of a dream but precise actuality. She was . . . looking along time.
The action takes place on two planes simultaneously: the here and now of London in 1945 and the twilight world that Lester and Evelyn find themselves in. The intended means of Simon's world domination is his daughter, Betty Wallingford. Betty's mother, Lady Wallingford, is Simon's principal disciple. She has told Betty - whom she hates - that she was adopted. Betty is able, through Simon's hypnotic skills, to enter the time-encompassing city where Lester and Evelyn, her onetime schoolmates, are.
The artist Jonathan Drayton has fallen in love with Betty, and to please her mother has painted a portrait of Simon. Lady Wallingford, however, finds the portrait - which seems to give the magician an abstracted, almost imbecilic look and to depict his followers as an army of beetles - revolting and offensive. The Clerk himself, however, is taken with it, telling Drayton, "That is I."
Richard, Drayton and Lester must rescue Betty from Simon and by so doing thwart his grand scheme. Compared with their self-possessed - indeed self-obsessed - antagonist, they seem quite ordinary. But that is Williams' point: Great evil happens not only when men and women commit horrendous crimes, but as often as not because they fail to perform ordinary acts of kindness and generosity, take others for granted, and are too quick to compromise on behalf of petty ambition and personal convenience and advantage. In Williams' vision of Halloween, we are our own goblins - and not at all cute.
