There's Beauty in the Bellow

Critics depend upon structured arguments to make their points. A novelist primarily structures not arguments for the reader but experiences. Unlike our more random encounters with the actual world, the experiences we find in a novel are entirely verbal in origin, and they are shaped by their creator specifically with us, the readers, in mind. As we progress through a novel, we live in its world with an intense, imaginative participation very rarely, if ever, generated in us by any kind of purely expository writing. Thus somewhere--exactly where, no artist and no critic has ever discovered--between the immediacy of a lived, concrete encounter, and the limited intellectual engagement created by expository prose, exists the mysterious participatory experience offered by imaginative literature. The Religious Dimension of Jane Austen's Novels , Gene Koppel, 122.

At Cattle Point. Feather duster worms. You poke them and they shrink back into their tubes. Bread crumb sponge (the green stuff) and pink encrusting algae. Aggragating anemone A little Isopod Barnacles. They were everywhere! Really quite handsome. More anemones, above tide. They've pulled in their tentacles to conserve moisture. Their bodies are very soft and gelatinous. My friend's feet. She finds shoes inconvenient. Well, she did grow up in West Africa where she did everything barefoot! I just couldn't stop taking pictures of the anemones! They were so lovely. They spread out everywhere in whatever wet crevice was availible during the nice low tide. (Nice for us at least.) And then I dropped my camera in a tiny shallow little pool. So I didn't get pictures of the rest of the trip. (The following were taken earlier on.) But I took the battery and memory card out, left it open for a couple days and the camera works just as well as ever--to my great relief! Flotsam a...

Blogger has been acting impossible and refusing to let me copy and paste. But hopefully this link will take. Before steam starts coming out. Nancy Wilson just gave a commencement address to a Christian school not too far away from me--the class was all girls. And she describes the kind of person I've been wanting to become.

A gem of wisdom from my Greek professor: In giving an answer, "if you don't know what the question is, you're just blogging."

This is a poem my professor read the other day; we're studying Thomas Aquinas and he thought that the poem rather echoed some of Aquinas' metaphysics. (Mr. McIntosh stated that he thought that good metaphysics and good poetry are essential to one another . . . could I say essential to one another's existence?) Every Riven Thing by Christian Wiman God goes, belonging to every riven thing He’s made Sing his being simply by being The thing it is: Stone and tree and sky, Man who sees and sings and wonders why God goes. Belonging, to every riven thing He’s made, Means a storm of peace.Think of the atoms inside the stone. Think of the man who sits alone Trying to will himself into the stillness where God goes belonging. To every riven thing He’s made There is given one shade Shaped exactly to the thing itself: Under the tree a darker tree; Under the man the only man to see God goes belonging to every riven thing. He’s made The things that bring Him near, Made the mind that makes ...

From a discussion on the New York Times website as the value of a BA To the Editor: Charles Murray needs to recognize that the liberal arts degree, at its best, validates its holder as one who has skills needed for some of our biggest jobs. A good half of the liberal arts curriculum is about thinking analogically. The degree says this person has studied “humane letters” and so knows his or her way around a metaphor: how it opens up vistas, alters viewpoints, both frees and constrains thought and affects decisions. No one should try to motivate a work force, lead a corporation, plan military strategies or run a government who does not know how a metaphor works. Math and science, the other half of the liberal arts curriculum, develop skills that are scarce, yet needed, in our society. They are all about knowing a fact from a factoid, reasoning from data to underlying patterns and practical implications, all while feeding careful observation through the strainer of valid logic. The libera...

From Ovid: the giant, Polyphemus of Homeric fame, tries to woo the recalcitrant Galatea: A forest of hair towers over my strong stern features and shades my magnificent shoulders. Don't think me ugly because my body's a bristling thicket of prickly hair. A tree is ugly without any foliage; so is a horse, if a mane doesn't cover his tawny neck; birds are bedecked in plumage, and sheep are clothed in their own wool. Men look well with a beard and a carpet of hair on their chests. Metamorphoses 13: 845-850