Reading Log (or I wish I were sleeping like a...)

Just for the sake of my own records, here’s what I’ve read recently:

• Sir Thomas Browne, Hydriotaphia, Chapter I, (unfinished)
• Samuel Johnson, “The Life of Sir Thomas Browne”
• C.S. Lewis, The Discarded Image, Chapter I, “The Medieval Situation,” (unfinished)
• C.S. Lewis, A Preface To Paradise Lost, Chapters I–VI
  • I. Epic Poetry
  • II. Is Criticism Possible?
  • III. Primary Epic
  • IV. The Technique of Primary Epic
  • V. The Subject of Primary Epic
  • VI. The Style of Secondary Epic
• C.S. Lewis, Reflections On The Psalms, Chapter III, “The Cursings”
• John Milton, Paradise Lost, Books IV-V, (unfinished)
• Miguel de Unamuno, Our Lord Don Quixote: The Life of Don Quixote and Sancho with Related Essays, “Glosses on Don Quixote”

Unfortunately I’m exhausted and can’t be troubled to wake my brain up enough to retrace my reading in this blog. I know this will come as a shocking blow to my legions of impatient adherents. So sorry. You may flog me lightly.

Lewis on Narrative Verse and Ritual

I found this paragraph and a half of C.S. Lewis’s A Preface To Paradise Lost to be too good of an introduction to the particularities of narrative verse, and too good an apology for the proper place of ritual for me to cut it up into digestible blog-bites. Read on. It’s only 500 words.

Lewis Quotes Browne

I just started C.S. Lewis’s A Preface To Paradise Lost and what should I find but a quote from Sir Thomas Browne’s Religio Medici in the epigraph:

How so many learned heads should so far forget their metaphysicks, and destroy the ladder and scale creatures.

Browne, Rel. Med. I, XXX.

Pasternak: The Star of the Nativity

As a somewhat response to Laurie and to Hydriotaphia as well as to the Brodsky poem I posted on the 23rd, I offer this from Boris Pasternak, as translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky in their new edition of Doctor Zhivago.

Joseph Brodsky: Star Of The Nativity

This was found on Bishop Seraphim Sigrist's LiveJournal:

Star Of The Nativity

[December 24, 1987]

In the cold season, in a locality accustomed to heat more than

to cold, to horizontality more than to a mountain,

a child was born in a cave in order to save the world;

it blew as only in deserts in winter it blows, athwart.

To Him, all things seemed enormous: His mother's breast, the steam

out of the ox's nostrils, Caspar, Balthazar, Melchior—the team

of Magi, their presents heaped by the door, ajar.

He was but a dot, and a dot was the star.

Keenly, without blinking, through pallid, stray

clouds, upon the child in the manger, from far away—

from the depth of the universe, from its opposite end—the star

was looking into the cave. And that was the father's stare.

Joseph Brodsky, Nativity Poems

Excuse My Latin...

With the kids out of school for Christmas Break (I’m supposed to call it something ridiculously colorless and meaningless, though, aren’t I?) my reading time has taken a header. I have, however, received my Wheelock’s Latin and Scribbler’s, Sculpters, and Scribes: A Companion To Wheelock’s Latin And Other Introductory Textbooks in preparation for the Latin Study Group I’m joining in January. Learning Greek and Latin have been lifelong goals that I’ve never made good on. May I have better luck this time around.

Pax foras canis.

Browne On The Cure Of All Diseases

...we all labour against our owne cure, for death is the cure of all diseases. There is no Catholicon or universall remedy I know but this, which thogh nauseous to queasie stomachs, yet to prepared appetites is Nectar and a pleasant potion of immortality.

Sir Thomas Browne, Religio Medici, Part II:10

Immediately this brings to mind scenes from George MacDonald's Lilith—the sexton’s house, where sleep is more than sleep, a blessèd balm, the rest of the soul for healing. In that work I experienced a deep longing, a salve, and I felt somehow like I had the innocence and lightness of childhood upon me.