Salacious Dalliances with Disciplined Reading

For almost two years now, Paul Mathers has been shamelessly dallying with the Harvard Classics. When he started this affair, I was quite tempted to abandon my lifelong commitment to dissolute reading. I have been seduced by the glamour of disciplined reading plans before, but eventually one wakens with shame and disgust at having so strayed from the ideal of disarray. All that is then left is to crawl back to one’s proper mistress and beg forgiveness for having attempted such a bit of tawdry erudition. After every such affair a heavy sourness clings to the palate as a lingering reminder of having once again fallen into appalling discipline. And so long as that memory lasts, one permits one’s self to feel safe from one’s darker urges, safe in the arms of arbitrary whim. But sooner or later temptation must again visit as a proof that we are yet fallible. Listen to her now—the siren…

Leave the safety of your ships! Forget your wandering, meandering lives and join the stream of the ages! Bury your head in my bosom, and you shall feel the fruit of wisdom within your grasp! You shall be like unto the gods!

As much as I try to resist I cannot endure—I love my wayward whim, but I can almost taste enlightenment zipping down my spine, rushing with the libidinal glee of Kundalini.

But wait… what’s that? Adler’s 10 year reading plan for the Great Books of the Western World comes out to 125 pages per month for 11 months per year for 10 years? Why… but that’s nothing! You mean I can have my salacious dalliance with disciplined reading, and eat my words of whimsy, and still have time for the mercury baths???

---

[…with apologies to Paul.]

Quotes from G.K. Chesterton’s Chaucer

Some quotes from the 1^st chapter of G.K. Chesterton’s
Chaucer:

The greatest poets of the world have a certain serenity, because they have not bothered to invent a small philosophy, but have rather inherited a large philosophy. It is, nine times out of ten, a philosophy which very great men share with very ordinary men.

---

The poet makes men realize how great are the great emotions which they, in a smaller way, have already experienced.

---

The great poet exists to show the small man how great he is. A man does not learn from Hamlet a new method of Psychoanalysis, or the proper treatment of lunatics. What he learns is not to despise the soul as small; even when rather feminine critics say that the will is weak. As if the will were ever strong enough for the tasks that confront it in this world! The great poet is alone strong enough to measure that broken strength we call the weakness of man

I stayed up until 2A.M. watching Apocalypse Now Redux. The movie was very good, but took a serious wrong turn with the French Plantation scene. It seemed an ill attempt at adding discursive philosophy to the film. It was unnecessary and broke the spell of the river travel.

Apocalypse Now is very much a symbol-journey, such as Dante’s Commedia. Hellish and absurd. An insane carnival of what is commonly bad in men, and what is truly horrific. It made me want to read Conrad.

Dark Matter, Faith

…for we all of us, grave or light, get our thoughts entangled in metaphors, and act fatally on the strength of them.

Middlemarch, I.x

---

Last night I watched a Ted presentation by a famous string-theory proponent, Brian Greene. He discussed, armed with the trappings of media savvy, the argument for the multiverse, how it’s the only idea which solves certain scientific problems.

To what ends? It is fascinating to contemplate, but mostly in a literary sense, wherein two universes interact and relate in some way. And yet scientific enquiry is important. I believe in curiosity and meditation on the baubles of possibility.

Middlemarch: Fetters

1st Gent:	Our deeds are fetters that we forge ourselves.
2nd Gent:	Ay, truly: but I think it is the world That brings the iron.

Middlemarch, I.iv

Reading Journal: Comics

I started reading Persepolis two days ago. In it Marjane Satrapi gives us a memoir and bildungsroman—she grew up during the Iran-Iraq War. It is an incredibly interesting look into another culture with different fundamental perspectives. (Although, truth be told, most of the perspectives illustrated are uncontroversial in their Western secularism.) The author’s family are mostly communist, which brings them into conflict with the post-Islamic Revoltion government.

Reading Journal

Finished V for Vendetta last night. I still feel that Alan Moore tends to glorify perversity. However, his technique is effective, and literate—the layering of meaning through text that contrasts or mirrors the imagery while literally applying to something not pictured.

By the time I finished, I think the political aspect of the story, the themes of it, had grown larger than the specific perversities. It had meaning, or at the least implication. Next up from Moore will be From Hell.