S’io credesse che mia risposta fosse A persona che mai tornasse al mondo, Questa fiamma staria senza piu scosse. Ma percioche giammai di questo fondo Non torno vivo alcun, s’i’odo il vero, Senza tema d’infamia ti rispondo. If I believed my reply were to one that was ever to return to the world, this flame, […]
Books & Literature
What’s With This Title: The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
In a previous post, I introduced T.S. Eliot’s poem, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” and promised to try and pry a basement window open and provide some low-level access to the poem’s meaning. In this post, we’ll simply investigate the poem’s title. There are two primary aspects worthy of consideration in this initial […]
Basement Window Access into T. S. Eliot’s Poetry: An Analysis of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that an abandoned house in possession of notoriety for being haunted, must be in want of young boys seeking adventure. So, in kind, is the poetry of T. S. Eliot. It continues to attract curious intruders more than a century later. Many literary adventurers are brave enough to scale […]
Don Quixote and His Agreeable Delusions for Chivalry
Like many books that already I should have read, Don Quixote had been neglected for far too long—Tsundoku and everything. I am now reading Cervante’s hilarious novel for the first time and am immediately tickled by the Jared and Jerusha Hess comedic style (Nacho Libre and Napoleon Dynamite definitely come to mind). Lines such as […]
Reader Looke, not on his Picture, but his Booke
In Jeanett DeCelles-Zwerneman’s instructive treatise, A Lively Kind of Learning: Mastering the Seminar Method, she makes an important claim about learning to read a work on its own merits, rather than with the prejudices that frequently arise out of one’s intimate knowledge of the author. She writes, Ray Carver was an alcoholic and Rousseau abandoned […]
We Are Humans; We Are Not Gods
I have been reading through Jorge Louis Borges’ Selected Poems. One of the poems to which I keep returning is one of life’s refrains. The poem is called Límites. It reminds me there is something human about boundaries because boundaries—be they natural or artificial (that is, political)—remind us of our own limits, especially the fact […]
Don’t Read My Blog Every Day!
…if you don’t want to. As a matter of fact, you may have only signed up for my Saturday Substack Newsletter, Rumbling Toward Heaven, and are now wondering why you’re getting something from me in your inbox on a Monday. Well, this is a courtesy email to let you know that I will be publishing […]
C. S. Lewis’s Confession to T. S. Eliot
In the open stanza of Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, the narrator says, Let us go then, you and I, When the evening is spread out against the sky Like a patient etherized upon a table; Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets, The muttering retreats Of restless nights in one-night cheap […]
Two Books About Books
There have been two book discoveries that remain marked in my memory as being most serendipitous. The first—and I cannot recall how or from whom I discovered it—is the Education of a Wandering Man by Louis L’Amour. Ironically, it played a part in shaping my view of education. I say ironically because Louis Dearborn LaMoore […]
On Education: A Review
I recently reviewed On Education, for Ad Fontes, A Journal of Protestant Letters. On Education documents Abraham Kuyper’s involvement with the Netherlands’ seventy-year political battle over parents’ rights to choose schools representative of their religious convictions. On Education is more than just a helpful resource; it is a uniquely prescient guide for everyone concerned with […]