Blake

Eternity is in love with the creations of time.

Leithart

Reading a profoundly good book recommended by a friend (thanks Matthew!), Peter Leithart's "Against Christianity". (It is a collection of essays: Against Christianity, Against Theology, Against Sacraments, Against Ethics, and For Constantine) If you are intrigued by the title, get it and read it. If you are intimidated by the title, or slightly unsettled, get it and read it. Etc. You get the idea. Here are a couple of excerpts:

Ritual is simultaneously conservative and revolutionary in the way carpentry is. Once you have mastered the technique of driving a nail, there is no reason to experiment with new ways of doing it; but you learn to drive nails because you want to build /new/ things. Far from yearning for a golden, changeless past "ritualists" are the most progressive of men, fearlessly facing the unknown future so long as they can take along their prayer books and water, their wafers and their wine.
(from Against Sacraments)

The psalms are also a textbook of prayer, frequently employing language that is unnerving in its vehemence. Psalms indicate that an overwhelming desire for justice should animate our prayers, that we should express our disappointment with honesty, that prayer is not "quiet time" but a time of wrestling and passion. Contemporary hymnology, by contrast, gives words for a small segment of our experience, the happy, fluffy, light experiences of life. If we are trained in prayer by contemporary praise choruses, when we face the pains and tests of life we will lack the vocabulary to name them.
(from Against Theology -- I think)

Jesus ate with the wrong /people/, thus establishing the theology of baptism.
Jesus /ate/with the wrong people, thus establishing the theology of the supper.
(Against Sacraments)

and finally for tonight:

Romans normally excluded children from the dinner table until the age of fifteen or sixteen, at which age boys received the /toga virilis/ that marked their entrance to manhood. Family dinner as we know it was a Christian invention, not some "natural" form of family life. The family dinner is a reflection of the eucharistic meal, the meal that welcomed all members of Christ to the table.
Opposition to communion of children is pagan and seeks to reverse th revolutionary table fellowship established by the Church. It is an attempt to return to Egypt.
(Against Sacraments)

Leithart's writing is so spare and muscular you could pull out just about any paragraph at ranndom and stand it up on its own, as I have done with a few above. Best of all: he only uses commas when /absolutely/ necessary; a practice I highly approve of. (As you can see I don't give a fig about the 'don't end a sentence with a preposition' thing. If you gotta, you gotta. As someone whose name escapes me now said, "Everyone regards everyone else's usage as pedantic or philistine except his own" -- it went something like that.)

oh dear

Two things went wrong with some nice folks who knocked on the door tonight. They were canvassing for the SPCA -- a worthy cause to be sure. Well, the young man rather /pounded/ on the door -- it was so loud it made me jump. I had been peacefully slicing peaches for a pie* and spacing out to Hildegard of Bingen. I swung the door open, feeling quite wrathful (we had /just/ put Heulwen down to sleep a couple of minutes earlier and I wasn't sure it had 'taken' yet) and unfortunately gave him a bit of an earful, about how he knocked too hard, how they should be more aware of things like kids going to bed at that time of the evening, etc etc. Well, they apologised sheepishly and tried to go ahead with their speech; I politely cut them off and explained that while I appreciated what they were doing we had our set charities that we give to, etc etc.

So the two things that went wrong: one, I was kinda mean (at first) and remembered afterward that we have ample evidence out front that we are Christians, including a fish on the van and a cross /on the front door/. And I didn't exactly embody the soul of compassion toward those poor innocent door-pounding animal lovers.

The second thing? After I got inside I realized I was wearing my old 'Rattlesnake Roundup at Wigham, Georgia' t-shirt, which commemorates an annual event where a bunch of -- rednecks, presumably -- chase all the snakes in the area into a big pit and then have their evil way with them. I believe barbequing is involved.

What can I say? It was one of the first things my husband ever gave me, sentimental fool.

*I love pie

is happening soon!

St John of Damascus on icons

. . . images are books for the illiterate and silent heralds of the honour of the saints, teaching those who see with a soundless voice and sanctifying the sight. . . I may not have many books, nor much time to read, but strangled with thoughts, as if with thorns, I come into the common surgery of the soul, the church; the luster of the painting draws me to vision and delights my sight like a meadow and imperceptibly introduces my soul of the glory of God. . .

Shall I not paint in words and in colours the martyrdom of the martyrs and embrace with eyes and lips "what is wonderful to angels and the whole creation, painful to the devil and fearful to demons", as the same beacon of the Church [St John Chrysostom] said? Or his words at the end of the homily in which he praises the Forty Martyrs:

O holy chorus, O sacred condition, O unbroken phalanx. . .most powerful ambassadors, stars of the inhabited world, flowers of the Church. . .the earth did not hide you, but heaven received you. The gates of paradise were opened to you, a sight worthy of the army of the angels, worthy of patriarchs, of prophets, of the just.

-- Treatise 1, On the Divine Images
trans. Andrew Louth

outside on the sidewalk now: an excerpt from Wind in the Willows

Breathless and transfixed, the mole stopped rowing as the liquid run of that glad piping broke on him like a wave, caught him up, and possessed him utterly. He saw the tears on his comrade's cheeks, and bowed his head and understood. For a space they hung there, brushed by the purple loosestrife that fringed the bank; then the clear imperious summons that marched hand-in-hand with the intoxicating melody imposed its will on Mole, and mechanically he bent to his oars again. And the light grew steadily stronger, but no birds sang as they were wont to do at the approach of dawn; and but for the heavenly music all was marvellously still.

Hebrew vowel system (An update)

What have I started. Do I need this headache?

Seinfeld on the Airport

Do you think that the people at the airport that run the stores have any idea what the prices are every place else in the world? Or do you think they just feel they have their own little country out there and they can charge anything they want?

"Little hungry? You want a tuna sandwich? It's 28 dollars. If you don't like it, go back to your own country." I think the whole airport/airline complex is a huge scam just to sell the tuna sandwiches. I think that tuna profit is what's supporting the entire air travel industry. The planes could fly empty, they'd still make money. The terminals, the airplanes, the parking, the giftshops, it's all just to distract you so you don't notice the beating you're taking on the tuna.

Another thing

I lost an earlier version of that post about Hebrew, and in trying to reconstruct it I forgot to say that there are perfectly good historical reasons for the weirdness of the spelling system of English, and all the other idiosyncracies you may have noticed, which I won't tire anyone with here. No, really, I won't. But you have only to ask.

I love the language and would defend it "to the pain"( in the immortal words of Wesley in The Princess Bride), if not to the death. In no way should it be considered ridiculous, or silly, or randomly dorky, as do some writers of popular books/internet dross about "that crazy, mixed up English!" (yuk yuk! Why do we drive on a parkway and park in a driveway! yuk yuk!) All those commentaries do is perpetuate misinformation and display the writers' ignorance (whether genuine or disingenuous) of their own subject. English is not crazy or mixed up-- if it were it could not function as a language, much less become the most dominant language on the planet -- okay, that has had something to do with many of its speakers' overweening lust for power, love of money and moral turpitude, but you get the idea.

And let's stop claiming that English is 'less expressive' than x or y language. Pure twaddle/ poppycock/pish tosh/rot/rubbish/crapola -- that claim says a lot more about the speaker than it does about English. "Er, yeah. The reason I can't express myself is I speak this useless language. If only I were Greek/French/Italian/Vanuatuan I could tell you how I /really/feel." Tell Shakespeare that English isn't expressive enough! Tell Dylan Thomas and Bob Dylan! W.H. Auden! Or just about any Irish person with a writing instrument and not very much money, apparently.

If English were a garden it would be a slightly wild, unkempt garden, a welcoming garden: Hey! Wanna grow here? Come on in! There's room for all you weirdos! -- an English garden, in short -- no less beautiful in its weedy way than the more orderly Japanese or Italian gardens.

Okay, I must slink off to do something constructive before King of the Hill comes on. Don't laugh, it's brilliant.

Hebrew

Started learning the Hebrew alphabet for kicks -- I suspect it is really work avoidance (aka Resistance!) . It is very challenging, though -- I have a pretty good eye for little visual details (calligraphy), an ability to make truly shocking noises with my throat when the need arises (high school drama), and a degree which included phonology, dialectology and comparative linguistics, and I /still/ have a dickens of a time telling my 'Aleph from my elbow! It's great though -- like a really challenging puzzle. What's especially difficult -- besides the fact that the letters are so different from anything European and the fact that many of them look almost identical -- is that the relationship between the letters and sounds seems so counterintuitive. This is of course only because we are essentially brainwashed from an early age to believe that there is a necessary connection between letters and their sounds -- in OUR language, of course. Naturally all other languages are just /dumb/ (goes the thinking). All the stranger an attitude inspeakers of English, a language which has a seemingly endless lack of respect for anything resembling consistency.

In reality letters (of any alphabet) and their sounds have a completely arbitrary relationship, and it is fun to tackle a system so foreign that one is confronted with this fact again and again.
I mean, how can it be that upon this little tail-y thing depends the difference between a 'b' and a 'k'? How can this dumb little dot make an 'f' sound like a 'p'? How can a molecule-sized difference in length turn a perfectly good 'w' into an 'n', but /only at the end of a word/!? Arrrrrrgh!

And I haven't even attempted the vowel system yet. In my naivete I thought there wasn't one. Sigh.