Extraordinary chart of antitheses depicting the “Dualism of Experience in This World” composed by W.H. Auden for a seminar he was teaching at Swarthmore.
Moving out of one of the most beautiful apartments in Philadelphia today and feeling incredibly sad about it. Steinbeck must have been wrong about Americans overrating roots as a psychic need.
Un court extrait où Ernst Jünger parle de ce qu'il a lu pendant la guerre - notamment Gide, Huysmans et "Léon Bloy, beaucoup de Léon Bloy" ( !) - et répond à la question de savoir comment on peut être un esthète en temps de guerre.
@providenceluvr
My take is if you’re that beautiful (which you are) and they still can’t overcome their discomfort and disdain, then they are just homosexual and there’s no saving it.
Slightly belated post, but I recently finished undergrad and will be attending graduate school at Uchicago divinity school in September.
Any advice or counsel is welcome and appreciated, and I would be glad to meet anyone either living there or passing through.
Bizarre how some people think one of our biggest problems wrt writing & argument nowadays is an excess of rhetorical flourishes, and not an epidemic of restrained, sterilized stylists who seem to think that parsimony& recorded facts automatically make one’s writing worth reading
@iltimorediddio
It is from the introduction to the 2005 reprint of Auden’s ‘The Sea and the Mirror,’ which is a commentary on Shakespeare’s ‘The Tempest.’ He writes that it is his attempt at hammering out a theory of Christian art, which is the topic of a paper I’m in the middle of writing
From the Chicago Bellow archive, an interview (not sure of the date; can’t find traces online)— I am writing a long personal essay where I quote this because I find it strangely and uniquely encouraging. We can all make it— no descent into the nihilistic pit!
Took a skirt to the tailor and the lady gave me a discount because she thought I was sixteen and that it was my high school uniform. I didn’t have the heart to tell her it was the one from that skirt suit set designed by Emily Ratajkowski to subvert propriety in the workplace
The best female friend I ever made I met in a bar at 11 pm when I was just running in to use the restroom. She complimented me on my hair and introduced me to her buddy sitting next to her who she’d met the previous year in a mental hospital. We had like six tequila pineapples
In honor of Valentine’s Day and Ash Wednesday falling on the same day, I wanted to share the most beautiful thing I’ve read related to love in the past year. It is from the letters of French writer Léon Bloy to his wife, Jeanne. My rough translation is on the right:
It is hilarious and absurd to me when Germans say “getriggered”— the language has bits of brilliance like “Schadenfreude” and “Verschlimbessern” and you’re settling for this American bastardization?
Unmöglich.
Aquinas ‘On Charity’ :
“To love that good [in which the blessed participate] for its own sake in order that it might remain and be made wide-spread, and that nothing might act against that good, this does dispose man well toward that society of the blessed.”
I think almost every conservative public intellectual should be sent to a sort of internment camp where instead of role-playing as Joseph de Maistre or whatever they should be forced to work a minimum wage job & read something other than Dostoevsky or bad translations of Homer
“The technical is not just the machinery; the technical is a disposition to life.”
The internet has severely inhibited our capacity for humility by aggravating our predisposition towards self-deception, and this in turn makes us even more uncharitable and nasty in debate.
'is it time for your nap ?' (recent post). I've tried to engage with this pile in. As anyone who's read what I've written knows, I cherish disagreement & debate. Noone knows that they're right. It'd be great & good to debate without the ageism (crone, witch, coffin dodging). Eh?
W.H. Auden: “When someone..says..I know what I like,'he is really saying 'I have no taste of my own but accept the taste of my cultural milieu', because, between twenty and forty, the surest sign that a man has a genuine taste of his own is that he is uncertain of it.”
What many academics do not seem to get is that taste is deeply relevant to how we judge the work of others. Are we interested in it? Do we care about it? 1/x
@_belalugosisdad
My problem is not with valid, substantive critiques whatsoever. In fact, I think they should be welcomed.
My issue is simply with academics who see women sincerely engaging with philosophy on the internet and immediately assume they are shallow bimbos.
Was on the phone with my mother about my romantic trials earlier, & instead of consoling me she goes: “You ended a relationship with an investment banker, had a dalliance with an ex-alcoholic painter, & are now being courted by a Harvard lawyer—stop complaining and write a book!”
American universities are so damn uptight.. They have to make up for their dilettantism and lack of effortless genius with endless bureaucracy and neurotic punctuality.
The muse doesn’t always sing on command! Sometimes ‘eureka’ is five pints in!
Can any of these conservatives who moan about Beauty explain what they mean by it? Do they all concur on one definition, do they have any knowledge of aesthetics— or does the term simply evoke some Abstract Thing they believe they possess privileged knowledge of
The best thing I ever did in college was become best friends with this (now retired) Penn History professor who beat Amy Gutmann for the title of Harvard Valedictorian in ‘69. He sends me a mad text just about every day:
Le seul avantage d'être une jolie femme est que les hommes font semblant de s'intéresser à votre carrière et à vos talents et parfois les soutiennent (la plupart du temps accidentellement/incidemment)
The extraordinary Saul Bellow on madness in ‘Mr. Sammler’s Planet,’—
“Madness is the attempted liberty of people who feel themselves overwhelmed by giant forces of organized control. Seeking the magic of extremes. Madness is a base form of the religious life..”
@sharghzadeh
I don’t think it’s accurate to imply that “white” = observant Christian, especially in NY(C). It would be a more apt observation if you stated that people who were actively practicing their faith were the ones having children. Catholics and Mormons have more than the natl average
@TLiterarian
Haha I know; this is my —normally fairly modest and refined—boyfriend who sent this message as a joke, I posted it here (also as a joke + with his permission) not thinking anything would happen and here we go 😆 🤷♀️
Mary Beard’s grace and patience in response to insufferable—mostly American—academics using her tweet as a soapbox to masturbate and virtue signal is further proof of her intellectual superiority
The idea that these mysterious notions of “taste” and “enthusiasm” have nothing to do with the interpreter’s identification with or (dis)approval of the producer’s class or cultural background is laughable-that is what “Taste” and “enthusiasm” are born of.
This elitism is a rot.
Sincere points made here.
Notable philosophers of the past century (see: Jacques Maritain, Edith Stein, etc). also converted after reading novels and about the lives of the saints.
Catholics in my mentions acting like the solution to self-destructive nihilism in the culture today is just getting everybody to go to church… you realize that where you see God, others see nothing, right? These people need to be reached too. Only philosophy can bridge the gap
If university newspapers were honest, they’d have headlines that read like tabloids, ex: “Female Student Realizes Greatest Allies are Aged Professors Nostalgic For When Their Wives Were Thin,” and not nonsense like “Future Venture Capitalist Discusses Passion for Women’s Rights”
What no one ever told me about writing a thesis about a fairly tortured, complicated man, was that when you begin to inhabit said fellow in order to describe his situation the peculiar melancholy is very likely to bleed into your own life. A case of ‘method -writing’ maybe
It is always perplexing to me how many women lose their faith in college. Mine has never been stronger— is there any greater proof for the existence of God than a profusion of beautiful and clever men at their physical peak?
Do you ever get to a point where you go to all the Catholic community events they offer? I am going to the Filipino mass and potluck this evening just to feel some human warmth
Just got to my parents’ home and found my childhood journal.
It has unfortunately confirmed to me that I was always absolutely off the wall, and that this isn’t a more recent development, as I was hoping.
Having children is the most meaningful thing you can do with your life. Intellectuals and creatives can't accept this because it means their vocations aren't supremely meaningful and any fool can have a more worthwhile life. But it's true and all the counterarguments are cope.
@providenceluvr
nightmare + almost everyone doing graduate degrees at elite institutions is already so damn wealthy. are you telling me I have to while away my last few years of good looks & any free time I have working some minimum wage job just to be able to keep up.
Thinking about how I put off buying AirPods until til five years after they came out because Leon Kass told me when I was sixteen that he believed they heralded the complete dissolution of our civilization
Some of the pushback against this statement—on the grounds of insufficiency— is asinine.
One has 280 characters maximum per tweet to make a few points in defense of the humanities. Do you want her to write a dissertation?
If you ask : what is the value of the humanities? I would say that it teaches you to read with acuity, to analyse wild claims, to argue responsibly to questions to which there are no right answers. Do we need the humanities? Let’s hear it for yes!!!
Watched four credit cards decline last night (this morning?) at the bar. Feeling very lucky to have a whole Benjamin in my bank account this Sunday. It's a good day when your net worth is 20+ beers. AMDG.