Meanderings of Yore

I meander between different genres of lit--lit which often happens to be from days of yore--and enjoy posting from many of said meanderings. Other stuff may also occur (like book reviews or personal reflections). I'm interested in the humanities, Christian theology, classic literature, et al.

[meanderingsofyore]

Scientists animated by the purpose of proving themselves purposeless constitute an interesting subject of study.

Alfred North Whitehead

[meanderingsofyore]

Divine reality is like a fugue. All His acts are different, but they all rhyme or echo to one another. It is this that makes Christianity so difficult to talk about. Fix your mind on any one story or any one doctrine and it becomes at once a magnet to which truth and glory come rushing from all levels of being. Our featureless pantheistic unities and glib rationalistic distinctions are alike defeated by the seamless, yet ever varying, texture of reality, the liveness, the elusiveness, the intertwined harmonies of the multi-dimensional fertility of God. But if this is the difficulty, it is also one of the firm grounds of our belief. To think that this was a fable, a product of our own brains as they are a product of matter, would be to believe that this vast symphonic splendour had come out of something much smaller and emptier than itself.

C. S. Lewis, "Miracles" (the essay)

[meanderingsofyore]

Faith in God is regularly attributed to memetic processes within the canonical writings of the 'New Atheism,' often being compared with infection with a virus. The naive reader might gain the impression that she is being presented with a synopsis of cutting-edge scien­tific research, when she is really being offered a distillation of speculative moonshine. For example, in The God Delusion, Dawkins sets out the idea of memes as if it were established scientific orthodoxy, making no mention of the inconvenient fact that the mainstream scientific community views it as a decidedly flaky idea, best relegated to the margins. The 'meme' is presented as if it were an actually existing entity, with huge potential to explain the origins of religion. Dawkins is even able to develop an advanced vocabulary based on his own convictions - such as 'memeplex.' Belief in God may be attributed to a well-adapted meme, whose potency is inversely proportional to the grounding of this belief in reality. Dawkins thus posits, without evi­dence, a meme for 'blind faith,' opening himself to the charge that such a belief in memes is itself a form of 'blind faith.'

Alister McGrath, Darwinism and the Divine

[meanderingsofyore]

Look at that sea, girls—all silver and shadow and vision of things not seen. We couldn’t enjoy its loveliness any more if we had millions of dollars and ropes of diamonds.

Anne of Green Gables by L. M. Montgomery

[meanderingsofyore]

Analogy (in the spirit of CSL) of current debates between theists and atheists: "It is rather as if a dispute over the question of Tolstoy’s existence were to be prosecuted by various factions trying to find him among the characters in Anna Karenina, and arguing about which chapters might contain evidence of his agency (all the while contemptuously ignoring anyone making the preposterous or meaningless assertion that Tolstoy does not exist at all as a discrete object or agent within the world of the novel, not even at the very beginning of the plot, and yet is wholly present in its every part as the source and rationale of its existence)." -David Bentley Hart, The Experience of God

[meanderingsofyore]

'Pigs mean less than nothing to me.' 'What do you mean, less than nothing?' replied Wilbur. 'I don't think there is any such thing as less than nothing. Nothing is absolutely the limit of nothingness. It's the lowest you can go. It's the end of the line. How can something be less than nothing? If there were something that was less than nothing, then nothing would not be nothing, it would be something - even though it's just a very little bit of something. But if nothing is nothing, then nothing has nothing that is less than it is.'

E. B. White, Charlotte's Web

[meanderingsofyore]

... the universe is not a finished work. Every mind within it is in the position of the audience sitting in the stalls and seeing the play for the first time. Or rather, every one of us is on the stage, performing a part in a play, of which we have not seen either the script or any synopsis of the ensuing acts.

Dorothy Sayers, The Mind of the Maker

[meanderingsofyore]

An ancient Stoic on the nature of virtue or righteousness, and the influence our moral state has on our perception of morality:

"At this moment the man who measures the souls of all men by his own is shaking his fist in my face because I hold [this] ... For such critics think that whatever they themselves cannot do, is not done; they pass judgment on virtue in the light of their own weaknesses. Why do you marvel if it helps a man, and on occasion even pleases him, to be burned, wounded, slain, or bound in prison? To a luxurious man, a simple life is a penalty; to a lazy man, work is punishment; the dandy pities the diligent man; to the slothful, studies are torture. Similarly, we regard those things with respect to which we are all infirm of disposition, as hard and beyond endurance, forgetting what a torment it is to many men to abstain from wine or to be routed from their beds at break of day. These actions are not essentially difficult; it is we ourselves that are soft and flabby. We must pass judgment concerning great matters with greatness of soul; otherwise, that which is really our fault will seem to be their fault. So it is that certain objects which are perfectly straight, when sunk in water appear to the onlooker as bent or broken off. It matters not only what you see, but with what eyes you see it; our souls are too dull of vision to perceive the truth."

-Seneca, Moral Letters

[meanderingsofyore]

Until quite modern times all teachers and even all men believed the universe to be such that certain emotional reactions on our part could be either congruous or incongruous to it—believed, in fact, that objects did not merely receive, but could merit our approval or disapproval, our reverence or our contempt. The reason why Coleridge agreed with the tourist who called the cataract [waterfall] sublime and disagreed with the one who called it pretty was of course that he believed inanimate nature to be such that certain responses could be more ‘just’ or ‘ordinate’ or ‘appropriate’ to it than others. And he believed (correctly) that the tourists thought the same. The man who called the cataract sublime was not intending simply to describe his own emotions about it: he was also claiming that the object was one which merited those emotions.

C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man

[meanderingsofyore]

Sin is easy for historians to grasp; salvation is the rub.

James Bratt, "The Legacy of Christopher Lasch"

[meanderingsofyore]

Our heart wanders lost in the dark woods. Our dream wrestles in the castle of doubt. But there's music in us. Hope is pushed down but the angel flies up again taking us with her. The summer mornings begin inch by inch while we sleep, and walk with us later as long-legged beauty through the dirty streets. It is no surprise that danger and suffering surround us. What astonishes is the singing. We know the horses are there in the dark meadow because we can smell them, can hear them breathing. Our spirit persists like a man struggling through the frozen valley who suddenly smells flowers and realizes the snow is melting out of sight on top of the mountain, knows that spring has begun.

Jack Gilbert, Horses At Midnight Without A Moon

[meanderingsofyore]

Her name sprang to my lips at moments in strange prayers and praises which I myself did not understand. My eyes were often full of tears (I could not tell why) and at times a flood from my heart seemed to pour itself out into my bosom. I thought little of the future. I did not know whether I would ever speak to her or not or, if I spoke to her, how I could tell her of my confused adoration. But my body was like a harp and her words and gestures were like fingers running upon the wires.

James Joyce, Araby

[meanderingsofyore]

They walked as old friends walk, without often speaking, sharing the kind of silence that is not so much silence as a kind of still communication.

Susan Cooper, The Dark is Rising

[meanderingsofyore]

Torah laws on how to treat "outsiders": 

You shall not oppress a hired worker who is poor and needy, whether he is one of your brothers or one of the sojourners who are in your land within your towns. ... You shall not pervert the justice due to the sojourner or to the fatherless, or take a widow's garment in pledge, but you shall remember that you were a slave in Egypt and the Lord your God redeemed you from there; therefore I command you to do this. (Deut. 24:14, 17-18)

When a stranger sojourns with you in your land, you shall not do him wrong. You shall treat the stranger who sojourns with you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God. (Lev. 19:33)

[meanderingsofyore]

Descartes goes into a café and orders a coffee. The waiter asks him if he would like a pastry to go with it. Descartes replies, “I think not,” and promptly vanishes.

~Glenn Sunshine, Why You Think the Way You Do

[meanderingsofyore]

Funny early reception of Impressionist painting (1876):

The rue le Peletier is a road of disasters. After the fire at the Opera, there is now yet another disaster there. An exhibition has just been opened at Durand-Ruel which allegedly contains paintings. I enter and my horrified eyes behold something terrible. Five or six lunatics, among them a woman, have joined together and exhibited their works. I have seen people rock with laughter in front of these pictures, but my heart bled when I saw them. These would-be artists call themselves revolutionaries, "Impressionists". They take a piece of canvas, colour and brush, daub a few patches of paint on it at random, and sign the whole thing with their name. It is a delusion of the same kind as if the inmates of Bedlam picked up stones from the wayside and imagined they had found diamonds.

~From The Story of Art by E. H. Gombrich

[meanderingsofyore]

Last come the Twins, who cannot be described because we should be sure to be describing the wrong one.

J. M. Barrie, Peter Pan