#christopher howell

[anaxerneas]

Love Unmasked: Nietzsche on Eternal Hell

by Christopher Howell, Ph.D. Through me you pass into the city of woe: Through me you pass into eternal pain: Through me among the people lo

Nietzsche’s unmasking of Christianity is a potent challenge. It is, I believe, unanswerable without apokatastasis. But with universal reconciliation, Nietzsche’s charges fall by the wayside. The accusations of secret animosity, of glee in the face of eternal suffering, become untenable. Nietzsche himself is not beyond the scope of redemption and we can—and must—learn to love him too. We will have no need for masks in the afterlife, for we will be unafraid to bare our faces in all honesty. “For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.”

I believe, in his own way, Nietzsche knew this. In 1885, after winning a settlement against his publisher, the perpetually impoverished Nietzsche came into some extra money. Once he took care of his debts, the first thing he did was buy an engraved tombstone for his father. Pastor Carl Ludwig Nietzsche had been dead for over thirty-five years, but it is clear that Nietzsche continued to love him and think about him, even as he turned so viciously against his father’s faith. As he wrote in Ecce Homo only a short time before his breakdown, “I regard it as a great privilege to have had such a father.” In this new tombstone, Nietzsche carved an inscription, a truth we have been striving towards this entire essay. He chose “Love never fails.”

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[allyourprettywords]

“Love’s Last Number,” Christopher Howell

      for Emma, in memoriam

She was four years old when she told me the children at her daycare had been arguing over which was greater, infinity (pronounced "finity") or the last number.

Sometimes we're speechless because we deserve to be. Sometimes love leaps out beyond enumeration or the vast, starry spaces in the skull of time.

With a secret, satisfied smile, she said, almost to herself, "Jeremy says it's the last number, but we really know it's finity."

And now she has gone like a sprite into the genius of her answer, leaping every number, sailing into the endlessness of that smile, and left us plodding knee-deep in starless equations in which X equals loss, again and again and again, to the nth power.

Jesus said our days are numbered. Hermes Trismegistus said numbers were the secret words by which the world and heavens told each other what would ever be.

And now we say a thing that matters "counts." And when it stops counting it is dross.

We say to measure is to know and to know is to possess. But love burns without consuming and weighs nothing,

like faith, like a fool's precision or the dream of a memory of a child's face.

The seventy-two names of God, the ten thousand things, too, are nothing to the one indivisible life, the sweet and singular falling plum and the spirit that flies away.

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2012

Louise Plowright (Madame Morrible), Christopher Howell (Dr. Dillamond) & Louise Dearman (Elphaba)

West End Company; UK - Photo by Matt Crockett

[oughttobeclowns]

Review: Yeast Nation - The Triumph of Life, Southwark Playhouse

Review: @YeastNationUK - The Triumph of Life @swkplay

A musical that is truly unique for better or worse, Yeast Nation – The Triumph of Life is certainly an experience at Southwark Playhouse “I will partake of the muck” Those noted sages of our times Girls Aloud once told us that you can’t mistake your biology but the writers of Urinetown Mark Hollman and Greg Kotis would have us believe that there’s more to science that we previously knew,…

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[uwmspeccoll]

It’s Fine Press Friday!

This week we present the second imprint from Abigail Rorer’s Lone Oak Press, The Wu General Writes from Far Away, printed in 1990 at Petersham, Massachusetts, in an edition of 120 copies with text by Christopher Howell and original wood engravings by Abigail Rorer. The text is printed in Cochin on Japanese mulberry paper. Both the text and the wood engravings were printed by Darrell Hyder at the Sun Hilll Press in North Brookfield, Massachusetts. Marbled paper by Faith Harrison of Easthampton, Massachusetts was bound as the covers for the book in a Chinese-style stab binding by Barbara Blumenthal of Northampton, Massachusetts, who also constructed the magnetic case in red cloth. 

Abigail Rorer began her career as an illustrator and has built a strong reputation as a fine printmaker. In an interview for Fine Books & Collections, Rorer notes that she founded The Lone Oak Press in 1989 “because I love books and wanted the freedom to make a book and illustrate it without editorial restrictions.” She also claims that since she designed Lone Oak’s first two books herself, “That’s why the designs are boring.” These were the last of her imprints she would design herself. We disagree with her, however. One of the things we like about Rorer’s design for General Wu is how she uses the translucency of the mulberry paper to frame the text with the wood-engraved image on the reverse, creating a reading and a sense of movement that is rhythmic and very satisfying. Our copy of General Wu is signed by both the author and artist.

View more Fine Press Friday posts.