More specifically concerning: religion
22 December 2000 – Rome
22 December 2000, around 19.37.
Spent the best part of the day sitting in and ambling through the Pantheon; one wonders what it must have been like before the later Romans came with their god and their saints, tearing out the older deities and the bronze rosettes for the baldacchino at St. Peter’s. The Pantheon is on such a scale, […]
23 December 2000 – Rome
23 December 2000, around 19.40.
To the Musei Vaticani in the morning; the streets were deserted and trees cast pale shadows onto the Tiber. Having not the faintest clue of a suitable direction, I wandered vaguely Vaticanwards and found I needn’t have worried: one can’t miss it. Waited in a rather long line for admission, then darted away to see […]
Loxias
21 June 2001, around 12.30.
Funerary
21 June 2001, around 12.31.
little bird
21 June 2001, around 12.32.
28 June
28 June 2001, around 14.13.
What is one looking for in these cases, anyway? One could find an object lesson, an unexpected symbol, but one is unlikely to find what it all meant; it is a void, then, and scholarship a waste of time? Perhaps. One little thing, this fixation on an object, whether worthy or no; wisdom and understanding […]
Citation (1)
19 October 2002, around 16.50.
a quiz…
Codes of Misconduct
5 November 2002, around 16.16.
‘Entrance into the sanctuary is allowed: forty days after the miscarriage of a woman, a dog, or a donkey; forty-one days after sexual intercourse with a virgin; forty-one days after a death in the family; seven days after washing a corpse; three days after entering [the house where a death has occurred?]; three days after […]
Wednesday
13 November 2002, around 16.24.
Hellenistic figure of a mime Louvre (from Rostovtzeff, SEHHW) Seminar (1) Of John the Baptist: ‘he was as clean as a baby.’ ‘Stupidity is also a blemish.’ Rapid, fluid interchange: ‘ ‘No, not boring…’ ‘You have too good manners to say that.’ ‘Or indeed to feel it, in such a case as this.’ ’ The […]
Citation (10)
12 July 2003, around 8.05.
a glimpse in the mirror.
‘could it be J— H— herself?’
9 September 2003, around 13.27.
Jane Ellen Harrison, 1850–1928 Independent lecturer in London, later a fellow of Newnham College, Cambridge, Jane Harrison was author of (among other things): Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Relgion (1903) and Themis: a Study of the Social Origins of Greek Religion (1912). She is also one of the few women mentioned in the who’s […]
nb
23 October 2003, around 8.55.
Talk of religion, it is odds you have infidel, blasphemer, atheist, or schismatic, thundered in your ears; touch upon your politics, you will be in luck if you are only charged with a tendency to treason. —Richard Porson, from the Orgies of Bacchus (1797) qtd. 2003.145, p. 47.
Crambe repetita (1)
25 October 2003, around 8.47.
Hipponax, fr. 104.
pedant
4 December 2003, around 10.05.
One of the strangest footnotes I have ever written: On the knee as a seat of power, see Deonna (1939); on the knee as a gathering place for seminal fluids, see Onians (1951): p. 173–86. This lends credence to the theory that one channels the powers beyond when writing, because really, I don’t think I […]
when in Rome
24 January 2004, around 13.04.
διόπερ οἱ μὲν ἄνδρες τὰ τείχη προκατελάμβανον καὶ τοὺς πρὸ τῆς πόλεως εὐκαίρους τόπους, αἱ δὲ γυναῖκες περιπορευόμεναι τοὺς ναοὺς ἱκέτευον τοὺς θεούς, πλύνουσαι ταῖς κόμαις τὰ τῶν ἱερῶν ἐδάφη· τοῦτο γὰρ αὐταῖς ἔθος ἐστὶ ποιεῖν, ὅταν τις ὁλοσχερὴς τὴν πατρίδα καταλαμβάνῃ κίνδυνος. —Polybius (9.6.3–4) ploratus mulierum non ex priuatis solum domibus exaudiebatur, sed undique […]
Crambe repetita (18)
15 December 2010, around 11.09.
Isabel Fonseca, Bury Me Standing.
хийд
2 September 2011, around 18.19.
Books. There’s an invoice there, too.
hope against hope (1)
22 June 2012, around 18.24.
in which nothing much is said, especially about Hope Mirrlees.
hope against hope (3)
4 November 2012, around 7.41.
a counter reformation.
substantiation
22 November 2012, around 19.22.
I was almost exactly halfway through Céleste Albaret’s recollections of Monsieur Proust when I realized I had erred in the matter of genre. I had supposed it was merely a servant’s memoir of her eccentric employer. Given the pains she takes to clarify her stances on her employer (not crazy, not malingering, not a bit […]
hope against hope (4)
24 March 2015, around 11.44.
A bit of Caravaggio’s painting of ‘Saint Jerome Writing’ It’s taken me a while to get through Hope Mirrlees’ Collected Poems, perhaps because it confounded my expectations (which were admittedly a bit confused). Eager readers of Mirrlees’ work or those interested in her life should, of course, pick up a copy, as it is contains […]
Montaigne 1.32
21 August 2015, around 7.49.
‘Contre les astrologues’, Gilles Corrozet, Hecatomgraphie (1540) We can neither understand the arbitrary and personal meaning of the stars, nor why Heliogabalus died in a privy.1 Montaigne seems to suggest that we should be content with not knowing and, while he would believe in a greater meaning for these things – a meaning perceptible only […]
springes
26 March 2016, around 15.48.
Forgot Easter is tomorrow. A gaggle of families carried four outsize crosses (not sturdy enough to bear human weight, but strong enough for faith I dare say) in the direction of the river. A few minutes later, a fifth cross scurried down the sidewalk to catch up. Or so it seemed from the coffee shop. […]
daybreak
21 July 2022, around 9.07.
Philalethes. What is the use of grounds of consolation and peacefulness over which is constantly hanging the Damocles-sword of deception? Truth, my friend, truth alone holds firm, endures and stays steadfast: truth’s consolation is the only solid consolation: it is the indestructible diamond. Demopheles. Yes, if you had truth in your pocket to favour us […]
facta est lux
19 January 2023, around 4.26.
The supreme paradox of all thought is the attempt to discover something that thought cannot think. This passion is at bottom present in all thinking, even in the thinking of the individual, in so far as in thinking he participates in something transcending himself. But habit dulls our sensibilities, and prevents us from perceiving it. […]
moth-eaten notions
5 May 2024, around 4.35.
Minerva and Arachne, engraving by Johann Wilhelm Baur (1641) …a garment becomes a real garment only in the act of being worn; a house where no one lives is in fact not a real house… —Marx (Grundrisse, trans. Martin Nicolaus, p. 91) But truly, for mine own part, if I were as tedious as a […]
beside oneself
25 May 2024, around 4.33.
Ecstatic experiences bring perception of perfection, not of hitherto unnoticed incongruity. Ecstatics find delight in proportion and harmony, not humour in what is awry. Nothing humorous is ever a trigger to ecstasy. In ecstasy there is no fun whatsoever. —Marghanita Laski (Ecstasy in Secular and Religious Experiences, p. 270) When I put Marghanita Laski’s Ecstasy […]
mythos
2 September 2024, around 9.05.
Here the compensation certain did not fall out as the dreamer would wish, by handing him a solution on a plate; rather it confronted him with a problem to which I have already alluded, and one which life is always bringing us up against: namely, the uncertainty of all moral valuation, the bewildering interplay of […]