Reading Log

Compared to the last reading log entry, this one is embarrassingly short.

Literature

• C.S. Lewis, A Preface To Paradise Lost, Chapters V–XXI
• John Milton, Paradise Lost, Book V–VI (unfinished)

I’ve finished with Lewis’s Preface but continue to listen to the Yale lectures by Prof. John Rogers. The lectures are interesting for all of their information about Milton’s life, and for its exploration of Milton’s other writings. Less interesting, however, are the key points of the lectures. Professor Rogers is painting a portrait of Milton as a rebellious heretic against orthodox Christianity, and one who is scandalously sensual. The thing is, however, that the line of orthodoxy against which Milton is being contrasted is either very particular to his time and circumstances or else theoretically derived without much of a relationship to the actuality of Christian theological understanding. I have thought time after time that these lectures sound like the professor has determined his thesis and is working like a sculptor in clay to make the details all fit and point the right way. I was just this weekend commenting to my wife that I’m betting he had a book in the offing during the lectures and that the lectures were part of his working out of the details. Revisiting the Open Yale site today I see that, “He is currently working on a book on Milton’s relationship to antitrinitarian heresy, entitled Milton and the Heresy of Individualism.”

Lewis’s biases are that of orthodox Christianity. His reading allows Milton his Christianity, and keeps primarily to what is to be discovered within the poem. This approach is less sensational, but makes far more sense to someone experienced with Christianity from the inside. I’m with Lewis in thinking that it’s better to temporarily try to fit myself to the work’s view of the world than to try to make the work fit my view of the world. I guess I’m guilty of being scandalously old fashioned.

Technology

• Paul Barry, Head First Python, Chapters I–IV (unfinished)

I normally have a difficult time with programming books. They are either too rudimentary and I lose interest because it’s not keeping up with my brain, or they are too advanced and I get bored and then lost in the endless stream of technical information. This book strikes a nice balance. It’s relatively entertaining, and relatively fast paced. It certainly feels like I’m learning useful stuff and making quick progress.

Lewis Regained

Before I started reading Paradise Lost I picked up the Norton Critical Edition and was pleased to find C.S. Lewis among the authors excerpted in the selection of modern criticism. Pleased, and somewhat surprised… after all, he takes Milton’s Christianity seriously, he insists on the ridiculousness rather than the heroism of Milton’s Satan, and he’s of that quaint school of criticism which gives consideration to authorial intention.

Lewis was one of the major figures helping me find my way into adulthood. At some point, though, I kind of drifted away from him. I seem to recall reading Miracles in 1998 or 1999 and then sometime in the last 5 or 6 years I re-read all of the Narnia books and that was it. Reading A Preface to Paradise Lost brings with it a sense of coming full circle. It was Lewis (and Tolkien) that really spurred my interest in Homer, Virgil, and Beowulf, and there’s something deeply comforting and rewarding in reading him again.

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