In my end is my beginning

I'm in a seminar on T.S. Eliot this semester, and lately we've been reading his Four Quartets. The final stanzas of "East Coker" struck me as particularly beautiful. I've often encountered poetic interventions in life, when a piece crosses my path precisely when I need it most; it's both poignant and cathartic. This was one of those.

Home is where one starts from. As we grow older
The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated
Of dead and living. Not the intense moment
Isolated, with no before and after,
But a lifetime burning in every moment
And not the lifetime of one man only
But of old stones that cannot be deciphered.
There is a time for the evening under starlight,
A time for the evening under lamplight
(The evening with the photograph album).
Love is most nearly itself
When here and now cease to matter. 

Old men ought to be explorers
Here and there does not matter
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion
Through the dark cold and empty desolation,
The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters
Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning.

My life is not my own; I do not reserve the right to tell God how I serve Him. Peace comes from obedience. 

A concession

Obligatory Impressionist painting accompanying Victorian novel

 

"We all of us, grave or light, get our thoughts entangled in metaphors, and act fatally on the strength of them." 

 George Eliot, Middlemarch

I recently sat for my MA exam, and studying for this meant ingesting as much of a 36-author reading list as possible. The idea is to produce graduates who are generalists in Anglophone literature, so the list included everyone from Marie de France (who is a PARTAY and deserves a post of her own) to Salman Rushdie.* One of the authors I had to meet for the first time was George Eliot. Going into it, I was pretty stoked to read Middlemarch, because I had heard so much about it from authors I respect, who highlighted its discussion of female agency and intellectualism. Unfortunately, my longstanding struggle with literary Realism was not about to dissipate, and Middlemarch required some of the most stamina I have ever needed in order to finish a book. I couldn't deal with all....that....detail. The entire time reading, I couldn't help thinking that what Eliot would take 150 pages to write, Austen could say in one paragraph. Oh well. (Also Dorothea Brooke is one of the most annoying characters I have encountered. So much for cool, intellectual heroines.)

ANYWAY, I didn't intend for this post to be a rant about Victorian novels. Instead, the above quote turned itself over and over in my head as I read Middlemarch, and I think it's a perfect summary of the novel as a whole. Hypothetical Reader, do not bother trying to tackle all 800 pages of that book; this quote is all you need to know. #lifehacks However, beyond the quote's nature as a key to reading the novel, I really liked it for its own merit as well. Eliot was spot on in diagnosing why we make so many of the stupid decisions we later (or instantly) regret. I was going to try writing a whole blog post expanding on this quote, but the more I try, the more I realize that it really just stands on its own. There is a tangible power to metaphor, and having the self-awareness to recognize how this plays on your perception of the world is incredibly valuable.

Even though I hated almost my entire experience of reading Middlemarch, I consider it worth it for just that one insight.

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* No, I did not read all 36. This is grad school, remember? The true learning objective is being able to correctly guess which items on an unreasonable reading list are the ones you're supposed to know. Pamela did not make the cut.**

** I would like to add that said exam, in an administrative decision undoubtedly sadistic, took place DURING SPRING BREAK.***

*** All professors seemed to have forgotten the imminence of said exam and assigned us EXTRA homework in the weeks leading up to it. Ok, rant over, I promise.

Grad school Stockholm syndrome

too good to keep on fb

I seem to be unable to shake the habit of writing here when I have imminent term paper deadlines. Going to keep justifying the practice as a "warm-up writing exercise." That sounds good. Anyways, in the past few months, I've had all kinds of profound thoughts on such topics as feminist literary theory, privilege, and the horror movie election that just took place. Most likely, they are offensive to both sides of their respective debates, which I find highly entertaining but nevertheless will only discuss in such backwater locations as this blog. That moderate lifestyle though. Going to save those for later and just do a quick school update for now.

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The particular paper I'm avoiding at the moment (as much as I love it) is on Chaucer's Knight's Tale and what appears to be its semi-allegorical narrative of love and salvation. Basically, I was desperate for a topic, so I fell back on my old standby, of rereading the story and hoping for some thread of an idea to jump out at me. Bingo, I wasn't disappointed. There's this interesting moment where Chaucer hints that the conflict between the two knights ultimately comes down to love: they both love the same woman, but for different reasons. It reminded me of a popular idea in Medieval theology, originating in St. Augustine, where all of morality comes down to love: it's a good thing in itself, but it becomes bad when you either love the wrong object, or fail to recognize how a good object ultimately points you back to God. This is huge in Dante's Divine Comedy, especially in Purgatorio, which is about loving earthly things more than God. So my paper will talk about how these ideas show up in Chaucer, and how he seems to advocate a view of salvation as a phenomenon that reorients your love back to God Himself.

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In other research-related news, I had an exciting epiphany late the other night regarding potential PhDs. I've long been contemplating taking the plunge (and I'm still very undecided), but I think I've moved a step forward in finding a potential subject. Both of my college senior thesis projects explored facets of early Baptist literature. In spring, I discovered Benjamin Keach, aka the "it guy" of early Baptist culture. I hadn't been able to do much research on him since, but in procrastinating my current project this past week, I delved a little deeper into some of his collected works. I was shocked to find out he was a bit of a prolific poet.

Being a non-conformist Puritan, Keach would have taken a strongly conservative stance on theological and cultural issues. However, he produced a treasure trove of poetry, especially of the epic genre. This is slightly huge, because the epic was considered the highest form of art in pre-modern culture; in other words, it was the most cosmopolitan, sophisticated, elite type of poetry. With its conventions of florid language, prominent Greek mythology, and humanist themes, it would seem to be the ultimate form of the "worldliness" the Puritans vehemently rejected. But here Keach, one of the leading Baptist theologians, is using it to talk about his faith. Fascinating. He also produced a lot of lyric poetry (much of which was hymn material) that connects him to another of my 17th Century heroes, George Herbert.

A lot of the church scholarship on the early Baptists focuses on their doctrinal treatises, which is understandable, given the fact that today's form of our denomination is still new (50 years or so); we're still in the process of rediscovering the theology of our forefathers. At the same time, I think that it would be a mistake to overlook Keach's penchant for literary experiments; being a representative figure of his contemporary Baptists, his interest in literary theology has a lot to say about early Baptist culture in general.

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That got really long, but writing always helps me sort out my thoughts. Sometimes I think I'm in too deep now - as if, having discovered this gap in scholarship, I have a moral responsibility to address it. I've had professors describe it as a type of calling: you can run from it as much as you want, but it always manages to find you. Maybe I'm not that far yet. But maybe I am.

And now this post has come full circle.

A reminder to self of why I do what I do

One of the perks of being at a big (to me) research university is that we have access to a lot of English-related databases. There's stuff I've never heard of before, and it seems like each week I find out about some new place that sounds fun to aimlessly browse helpful for grown-up research. One of my friends mentioned that  EEBO (Early English Books Online) has some pretty crazy theological stuff, so naturally I had to check it out. Anyway, somehow I ended up looking up first-ish editions of the King James and Geneva Bibles. HOLY MOLY THESE ARE COOL! Even though the days of Catholic manuscripts are gone, these Bibles are still way prettier than anything we have today. Woodblock prints and design-y stuff all over the place, right next to the text. They're also straight up study Bibles. Maps, explanatory notes, summaries, cross-references, read-the-Bible-in-a-year-calendars.

 

There's also this. Might have to click on it to see it more clearly, but I loved the pastoral care behind the decision to include advice on how to get the most out of your reading:

CHARTS FOR THE WIN!

That is all.

(Maybe a life update later.....the past few weeks have been nutty)

Week 2 and still alive

Titus Andronicus living the dream

So I think I discovered my dream job.

Only half of my work as an MA student is the actual coursework - the usual stuff like attending class, reading/annotating homework, writing. For those of us who were fortunate enough to get into the program with full funding, however, the other half takes the shape of a (bottom-of-the-totem-pole) department job. Most people work as TAs, teaching freshmen English; I'll let you imagine what it's like to teach a curriculum you had no hand in developing to people who don't want to be there. I have the utmost respect for my fellow grad students, because they are down in the trenches.

There are a handful of us, however, who do other things. I have no idea how I lucked out on this, but I wound up being an RA ("research assistant," not dorm supervisor). RAs have a less clearly-defined set of duties. When I got the official job description, there was everything from proofreading faculty manuscripts to actual research on authors or bibliographies. I have a hard time thinking of this as a job, because it is so much fun to do. Currently, I work for three different professors. For one, I hunt around for a very specific type of poetry for use in an upcoming paper; another has me transcribing correspondence of a 20th century political activist for a book project; and for the third, I'm gathering sources for the bibliography of yet another upcoming book.

Along the way, I find myself learning a lot about topics that wouldn't normally have captured my attention; I'm surprised by how intellectually invested I'm getting in other people's projects! The icing on the cake came today, when I handed one of the professors the files of my work from last week - I have never seen such joy come over a person. I am not exaggerating when I say that "giddy" is a relevant keyword. How can that kind of enthusiasm not rub off? So in a first-world kind of way, I feel like I'm helping people, which is a very satisfying thought. As far as I know, no such thing exists, but if there was any way to do this kind of job full-time, this would be my first choice in careers.

On the academic front:

Medieval Literature: We read books 1 & 2 of Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy this week, which pleased me, because this marks the third time I've studied this book: highschool, college, and now grad school. I think that of all the choices to follow me through each stage of my education, this is one of the most appropriate. We touched on allegory today, which I hear will be developed further in subsequent weeks. I'm excited about that, since it dovetails nicely with my own research interests (Pilgrim's Progress and The Divine Comedy come to mind).

Shakespeare: This week focused on Revenge Tragedy. Titus Andronicus was the focal point. Good heavens. This has to be - by far - the darkest of any of Shakespeare's plays, at least that I've read. There is so much gore happening onstage that I had to wonder exactly how they depicted somebody's hand getting chopped off back in the 16th Century. A lot of the class discussion had to do with the impact of revenge on the character executing it. Does it strengthen or weaken them? It could be read as a glorious assertion of self or as a descent into caricature. I tend toward the latter. Watching Titus or Hieronimo (Spanish Tragedy) go on their quests for vengeance, I saw them gradually lose touch with the world around them; they were no longer able to constructively interact with society, which I believe is a crucial virtue in Shakespeare. I also read Harold Bloom's analysis of Titus, and he commented that the over-the-top melodrama of the play is too bad to be taken seriously; he's of the opinion that it was a parody. That was illuminating, and helped explain why I felt like I was reading something straight out of gothic Romanticism.

Roughly 1/70th finished with my masters...or, Grad School: Week 1

16th century rebound

I'm still kind of in shock that I'm actually a grad student. It feels like this unattainable plane of existence, like it's up there with the land of the Beautiful People. But here I am, student ID and all, with a week of classes under my belt. I walk around campus, with old buildings nearby and giant edition of Shakespeare in hand, and feel like the people in The Theory of Everything or Gaudy Night. AND DID I MENTION I HAVE AN OFFICE? Well, I share it with two (lovely) people, but......still.

My college (which I like referring to as Mayberry) was very conservative, so the transition to my new gig has been fascinating and entertaining and occasionally bewildering. I'm now in the world of trigger warnings and fluid gender identity. The religious skepticism isn't unfamiliar though, from the Cambridge-University-divinity-lectures days. So for the time being, I'm trying to figure out the nuances of this new environment and how I can fit into it, with the strongly conservative theology of my research interests.

My experience in starting grad school has been very different from starting college. The latter sometimes felt like a continuation of highschool: Constant social activities and low probability that more than 1-2 close friends share the same major. Now, the only people I have met have been in my department. Since academics is the focus, I haven't really felt the need to "find" friends, because we're all down in the basement together and it's happening organically throughout the day.

The tower of my building reminds me of Ely Cathedral AND IT MAKES ME VERY HAPPY

Also, a point of existential struggle: I have no idea what to make of the homework. The workload, per class, is rather astonishing (Monday: read two Elizabethan plays by Wednesday, k thanks bye), but I only have 2 classes. So I think I'm living out what I dreamed of in the trenches of senior year; gone are the days of being distracted by 6 competing classes (=trains of thought). If this keeps up, grad school is looking to be easier than college. (I anticipate future me laughing/crying at this statement)

This may be a failed experiment a month from now, but I've been thinking of writing more about my academics here, both to have something to look back on, and also as a way to think through some of our class discussions more thoroughly. We'll see.

• My first class deals with romance, war, and classical reception in Medieval literature. Not too much to report on yet, except the beginning of what could become a very incendiary discussion on the ethics of writing about experiences that are not personal or first-hand. On of my classmates was vehemently opposed to the idea of monetary gain for writing someone else's story. There are several assumptions in that statement that make me inclined to take the other side: first, that the end of writing is financial or social limelight; second, that the only people qualified to accurately depict an experience are those who lived through it (as opposed to careful research, including consultation with witnesses, by an outsider); third, that people can "own" experiences; fourth, that it is better to leave some stories untold (for lack of a witness's willingness or ability to write it down) than to have them written by someone else. It seems like a very low view of the relationship between imagination and truth.
• My other class is on Shakespeare. A big point of discussion is the theme of greatness. I have a seminar-length (20-25pp) term paper for this one, so I'm already brainstorming potential theses (I think I've narrowed it down to the relationship between greatness and altruism/public good). Anyway, this past week, we compared Henry VI.3 and Kyd's Spanish Tragedy. I think I'm a little fixated on Margaret in 3H6. She has Lady-Macbeth capacity for ruthlessness, but isn't motivated by personal ambition or devoid of human feeling. I can't figure out if she's sympathetic or not.

To be continued.

Academia

Magdalen College, Oxford

Grad school starts a week from today. Leaving this idealized vision of university life here to settle the butterflies:

"Mornings in Bodley, drowsing among the worn browns and tarnished gilding of Duke Humphrey, snuffing the faint, musty odor of slowly perishing leather, hearing only the discreet tippety-tap of Agag-feet along the padded floor; long afternoons, taking an outrigger up the Cher, feeling the rough kiss of the sculls on unaccustomed palms, listening to the rhythmical and satisfying ker-lunk of the rowlocks, watching the play of muscle on the Bursar's sturdy shoulders at stroke, as the sharp spring wind flattened the thin silk shirt against them; or, if the days were warmer, flicking swiftly in a canoe under Magdalen walls and so by the twisting race at King's Mill by Mesopotamia to Parson's Pleasure; then back, with mind relaxed and body stretched and vigorous, to make toast by the fire; and then, at night, the lit lamp and the drawn curtain, with the flutter of the turned page and soft scrape of pen on paper the only sounds to break the utter silence between quarter and quarter chime." 

(Gaudy Night, 242)

History thesis update #2: Wherein I don't want Bunyan to feel left out

I continue writing. It's been going at a snail's pace, but the end is in sight.....down to the last four pages. Yesterday was a Keach party, and tonight it's Bunyan. I just read through his "Apology" for Pilgrim's Progress for the first time (an embarrassing confession made even more so by the fact that it's less than 240 lines long), and I absolutely loved his concluding stanza. It's both a shameless plug for his own novel and also a daydreamy tribute to the pleasures of reading literature in a Christian context. Leaving it here for further enjoyment.

 This Book is writ in such a Dialect   
As may the minds of listless men affect:
It seems a novelty, and yet contains   
Nothing but sound and honest Gospel strains.   
  Would’st thou divert thyself from Melancholy?   
Would’st thou be pleasant, yet be far from folly?   
Would’st thou read Riddles, and their Explanation?
Or else be drowned in thy Contemplation?   
Dost thou love picking meat? Or would’st thou see   
A man i’ th’ Clouds, and hear him speak to thee?   
Would’st thou be in a Dream, and yet not sleep?   
Or would’st thou in a moment laugh and weep?
Wouldest thou lose thyself, and catch no harm,   
And find thyself again without a charm?   
Would’st read thyself, and read thou know’st not what,   
And yet know whether thou art blest or not,   
By reading the same lines? O then come hither,
And lay my Book, thy Head, and Heart together.

Uncanny research

So, for my history thesis, I'm tracing the connection between the prominence of metaphors in (Reformed) Baptist theology and the seventeenth century Baptists' involvement in the rise of the novel in England. John Bunyan, I'm looking at you. Anyways, researching this topic, which I might add is a wild goose chase because apparently nobody else has thought to write about Baptist literature, has led me to the figure of Benjamin Keach, otherwise known as the Reformed Baptist star of the late 1600's. He casually helped write the 1689 in addition to scandalizing everyone by saying we should sing hymns (in addition to psalms) in worship. He also had a crazy son, whose story will never cease to entertain me. You just can't make some of this stuff up.

Have you ever had one of those moments where you've just met someone, and after five minutes of talking, you realize you have everything in common? I'm kind of going through this with Keach. Not so much biographically, because, well, I'm not a male pastor-theologian from the 17th century. It's more that his collected works basically deal with all the big things I'm interested in studying: literature as a means of discussing theology, typology, covenant theology, poetry & worship.....I could go on, but I think that conveys the general idea. It's slightly weird to come across someone born 350 years before you who seems to have been on the same wavelength. Like you're playing a game of chess, and they're always one step ahead of you, but you're actually both on the same side anyways. He is now on my list of people I wish I could have a dinner party with. But since I can't have that any time soon, I kind of just want to go read everything he's written. You know, basic stuff.

The struggle is real. But really, it actually is, because I'm supposed to be writing my thesis right now, and I'm procrastinating by blogging. So the struggle is really real, and, well, you can see how that's going. 15 days before I walk....not that I'm counting or anything.

Thesis tangents

Any day I get to reference the Divine Comedy in a paper is a good day. Initially, I was interested in the passages surrounding this for their discussion of Dante's treatment of the Christian life. But then Beatrice came up and I had to repeat it here and everything happened so quickly:

When Dante and his poem venture, as best they may, into the world of Reality, his guide is Beatrice, who represents his own personal experience of the immanence of the Creator in the creature. In her he had seen, in those moments of revelation which he describes in the Vita Nuova, the eternal Beauty shining through the created beauty, the reality of Beatrice as God knew her.

(From Barbara Reynolds' introduction to Paradise, p. 20)

This is why I love Dante.

On O'Connor (on Easter weekend)

"O'Connor's stories are about people struggling with one another, trying to wrest victories from the recalcitrance of love and fate. They are about the triumph and failure of the will, the divine and the human, and about the tragic consequences of our flawed perceptivity, which quietly stalk us all, like age and death. In spite of the brutal fates that so often befall her characters, O'Connor possesses a genuine sympathy for them, even as she modelled the majority after the secular humanists and materialists she so vehemently decried. This sympathy is born from a common humanity, the awareness on O'Connor's part that all of us share in concert the fundamental condition of sin and the possibility for spiritual advancement once we recognize the devil's hand within our own.

Flannery O'Connor remains one of the most difficult writers of the modern period, not because her tales are necessarily more complex than another's, but because her sensibilities and values are so foreign to her era. O'Connor's literary vision comes burning out of a distant time and place; it slashes like a demon's talon, repudiating modernity's complacent conviction that God had died a Victorian. To appreciate fully O'Connor's art, we must accept it in the religious context from which it was written. To do so requires the type of struggle that virtually forces the reader to identify with her own children - Francis Tarwater or, better still, her uncle Rayber. The secular reader wrestles with O'Connor in a manner similar to a willful child who is forever testing his parents' authority. The child may well become an adult with his own values that differ greatly from those of his parents, but in the end he will somehow show the influence of his parents' vision. He has to: it is in his blood."

Tony Magistrale, "'I'm Alien to a Great Deal': Flannery O'Connor and the Modernist Ethic" (97-98)

The penultimate book in my 20th Century class is Flannery O'Connor's Wise Blood. Up till this point, the only other piece I had read was A Good Man is Hard to Find, but her reputation for strong Christian themes had left me interested in reading more. I'm about 3/4 the way through, and it has been one of the most difficult books I've yet read. Very dark, very bleak, very off-putting.

Bosch, "The Garden of Earthly Delights"

Even though I don't enjoy reading the novel, it's a fantastic piece of literature. I think the above quote is key to "getting" O'Connor. The characters/stories are distasteful on purpose; O'Connor is demonstrating for us the horror of a godless, thoroughly-secular life. I admire her for her willingness to stand alone amid the dogmatism of mid-century modernism.

I like the last few sentences of the quote's first paragraph as well. As a great supporter of the liberal arts as a way to unite - rather than divide - humanity, I have often struggled to reconcile the humanism of such a worldview with the reality of Christian theology. The talk about "celebrating the human experience" etc. makes me nervous, because while humanity does have great potential (we are image-bearers of God) it will never be able to fulfill this potential on earth. I appreciated the alternative perspective O'Connor brings to the conversation: We do indeed share many qualities in common, but rather than puff us up, this knowledge ought to lead to humility, because ultimately, we are all united in our fallen need for a Savior. Our common humanity is both beautiful and broken. O'Connor demonstrates the world's vital need for the promise of Redemption.

Richard II has an Ecclesiastes moment

Reading the play in class at the moment. This passage reminded me of a similar scene in Beowulf. The Great Conversation strikes again.

Let's talk of graves, of worms, and epitaphs;
Make dust our paper and with rainy eyes
Write sorrow on the bosom of the earth,
Let's choose executors and talk of wills:
And yet not so, for what can we bequeath
Save our deposed bodies to the ground?
Our lands, our lives and all are Bolingbroke's,
And nothing can we call our own but death
And that small model of the barren earth
Which serves as paste and cover to our bones.
For God's sake, let us sit upon the ground
And tell sad stories of the death of kings;
How some have been deposed; some slain in war,
Some haunted by the ghosts they have deposed;
Some poison'd by their wives: some sleeping kill'd;
All murder'd: for within the hollow crown
That rounds the mortal temples of a king
Keeps Death his court and there the antic sits,
Scoffing his state and grinning at his pomp,
Allowing him a breath, a little scene,
To monarchize, be fear'd and kill with looks,
Infusing him with self and vain conceit,
As if this flesh which walls about our life,
Were brass impregnable, and humour'd thus
Comes at the last and with a little pin
Bores through his castle wall, and farewell king!
Cover your heads and mock not flesh and blood
With solemn reverence: throw away respect,
Tradition, form and ceremonious duty,
For you have but mistook me all this while:
I live with bread like you, feel want,
Taste grief, need friends: subjected thus,
How can you say to me, I am a king?

Richard II 3.2.150-182

Creation narrative literary theory

Amid the reckless academic decisions I have made this semester (including applying to only one grad school.....the fallout from that is another post, though), I found myself taking six classes, plus unofficially "auditing" someone else's independent study. That's 21 credits. I was slightly terrified going into it, but SO FAR it hasn't been too bad. I just slavishly keep on top of my homework every night. (In an ironic twist of fate, my completely neurotic fixation on homework this semester has made me the most productive I have yet been, and I actually have more free time* than I did before.) 

All of this is a really long-winded lead-up to the subject of this post - the aforesaid independent study audit. Another irony, despite being the class I didn't need to worry about, it was actually the one that made me the most nervous, because of the subject matter: Postmodern Semiotics.

Now, here, if you're like me, you're wondering: WHAT THE HECK IS POSTMODERN SEMIOTICS?

Semiotics is the study of how we assign things meaning and the relationship between symbols and the ideas they represent. A "famous" example of the idea behind contemporary semiotics is the painting by Rene Magritte called "The Treachery of Images":

Translation: "I am not a pipe"

Magritte is making both a joke and a statement on semiotics. The painting depicts a pipe, but the image we see isn't actually a pipe. It's only a picture of one. Ferdinand Saussure, one of the founders of modern semiotics, made a distinction between the "signifier" (in this case, the picture/painting) and the "signified" (the concept of a pipe itself). The strong Postmodernism comes in when Saussure claims that the connection between these two concepts is largely arbitrary. In language, this plays out in the way that not all words in one language directly correspond to similar words in another. One of my friends is a German major, so most of the examples I'm aware of are between English-German: We don't have a word for "schadenfreude" (pleasure in another person's pain), and apparently German has no equivalent for "creepy." Saussure and his followers would argue that different languages contain different ideas; we create words and assign meanings to them.

I had no idea what most of this was until several weeks ago, but, thanks to the classical education I was given (shameless plug), I was able to recognize that this conversation about semiotics is not new at all. In fact, the very "postmodern" approach to the connection between words and ideas simply goes back to the Medieval debates over Nominalism and Realism.

• Realism affirms Plato's theory of universals and particulars. To go back to the Magritte painting, Realists would say that every concept exists in two ways: The overarching, universal idea (pipe-ness), and each particular time it is represented in daily life (all the various pipes in the world, though different, are still tied together by their conformity to "pipe-ness"). We call a pipe a "pipe" because it embodies the idea of "pipe-ness."
• Nominalism rejects the existence of universals. We don't have any abstract ideals of "pipe-ness"; we just have pipes. We call a pipe a "pipe" because that is simply what we want to call it. In other words, when we create the word "pipe" we are also creating the concept of a "pipe." There may exist similarities between one pipe and another - and that's why they share the same name - but overall, they are their own entities. From what I understand, Saussure &co. would be more closely aligned with this view, because both emphasize the arbitrariness of language/signs.

I have always been sympathetic to Platonism, and really can't get on board with Nominalism's outright rejection of universal concepts. I find a lot to agree with in Augustine, who argued that the ideas we experience in life - love, for example - flow from the mind and attributes of God.

And now, I finally make it to the point of my post: Today, I was reading the creation narrative in Genesis 1-2. It struck me that God first created things, and then named them. In other words, ideas/objects preceded words. I've spent all morning thinking about this and I still haven't arrived at a satisfying conclusion. Would this be an argument for or against Nominalism? At first, I thought it was clearly implying a more Realist approach, because it would seem to say that "lightness" preceded the word "light." But perhaps the fact that Adam was given the task of naming the creatures would suggest that he was given the opportunity to assign differences between the species. I'm still leaning toward the former, but I would be really interested in hearing arguments from both sides.

Going to need to email my professor.

*Free time is a completely relative concept, and in this case means the homework ends with just enough time for a potential of 8 hours of sleep a night, assuming I do not (gasp) do some personal reading or go out with friends.

A new author

My honors class this semester (alas, the last one...where has the time gone?) is dedicated to Twentieth Century culture. Going into it, I was - in my infinite, college-senior wisdom - thoroughly skeptical, resigning myself to a thankless five months of trudging through existential nihilism and general godlessness. While I can't say I personally enjoyed much of Kafka or Joyce, I'm glad for the experience, because I've been taught to at least appreciate them from an academic/artistic standpoint.

And then, after successfully finishing The Metamorphosis, Dubliners, and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man with a generally-good attitude, I was rewarded by being introduced to Borges. He has been a pleasure to read.

Borges is enigmatic but precise, metaliterary (shamelessly stealing words learned in class) but playful, and has the ability to create a whole world within the space of a few pages. His sense of humor is the most sophisticated I have yet encountered....getting the joke feels like an accomplishment. 

"Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote" is my favorite piece thus far: Borges creates an imaginary author from the turn-of-the-century who sets out to recreate Cervantes' Don Quixote verbatim - without ever looking at the original. Poking fun at the ivory tower of literary criticism, Borges throws in a lot of nerdy humor, adopting the tone of an infatuated critic as he describes the "differences" between the two versions of the Quixote. This passage, besides being hilarious, reminds me of C.S. Lewis's critique of the "chronological snobbery" of modern academia. New=better:

Cervantes' text and Menard's are verbally identical, but the second is almost infinitely richer. (More ambiguous, his detractors will say, but ambiguity is richness.)

It is a revelation to compare Menard's Don Quixote with Cervantes'. The latter, for example, wrote (part one, chapter nine):

...truth, whose mother is history, rival of time, depository of deeds, witness of the past, exemplar and adviser to the present, and the future's counselor.

Written in the seventeenth century, written by the "lay genius" Cervantes, this enumeration is a mere rhetorical praise of history. Menard, on the other hand, writes:

...truth, whose mother is history, rival of time, depository of deeds, witness of the past, exemplar and adviser to the present, and the future's counselor.

History, the mother of truth: the idea is astounding. Menard, a contemporary of William James, does not define history as an inquiry into reality but as its origin. Historical truth, for him, is not what has happened; it is what we judge to have happened. The final phrases - exemplar and adviser to the present, and the future's counselor - are brazenly pragmatic.

The contrast in style is also vivid.

(Labyrinths, "Pierre Menard...", pp. 42-43)

After the heaviness of Kafka and the egotism of Joyce, Borges's lighthearted-yet poignant reflections on the literary life have been a breath of fresh air.

I admit defeat. The Twentieth Century wasn't all bad.

Never thought Joyce would make the blog

But he just did. This passage comes from "An Encounter" in Dubliners, and since the last time I left the 90-mile radius around Milwaukee was this past summer, and every moment of my spare time is spent on homework, it hit home. I've been sitting in one place for far too long. The wanderlust is strong with this one.

But when the restraining influence of the school was at a distance I began to hunger again for wild sensations, for the escape which those chronicles of disorder alone seemed to offer me. The mimic warfare of the evening became at last as wearisome to me as the routine of school in the morning because I wanted real adventures to happen to myself. But real adventures, I reflected, do not happen to people who remain at home: they must be sought abroad.

One night's homework
[weeping]

Thesis-writing

Routine research turned into spiritual edification today. Powerful words by Lewis Bayley:

"...no man knoweth God, but he that loveth him; and how can a man choose but love him, being the sovereign good, if he know him, seeing the nature of God is to enamour with the love of his goodness? and whosoever loveth anything more than God, is not worthy of God; and such is every one who settles the love and rest of his heart upon anything besides God. If, therefore, thou dost believe that God is almighty, why dost thou fear devils and enemies, and not confidently trust in God, and crave his help in all thy troubles and dangers?—if thou believest that God is infinite, how darest thou provoke him to anger?—if thou believest that God is simple, with what heart canst thou dissemble and play the hypocrite?—if thou believest that God is the sovereign good, why is not thy heart more settled upon him than on all worldly good?—if thou dost indeed believe that God is a just Judge, how darest thou live so securely in sin without repentance?—if thou dost truly believe that God is most wise, why dost not thou refer the events of crosses and disgraces to him who knoweth how to turn all things to the best unto them that love him? (Rom. viii. 28)—if thou art persuaded that God is true, why dost thou doubt of his promises?—and if thou believest that God is beauty and perfection itself, why dost not thou make him alone the chief end of all thine affections and desires? for if thou lovest beauty, he is most fair; if thou desirest riches, he is most wealthy; if thou seekest wisdom, he is most wise. Whatsoever excellency thou hast seen in any creature, it is nothing but a sparkle of that which is in infinite perfection in God: and when in heaven we shall have an immediate communion with God, we shall have them all perfectly in him communicated to us. Briefly, in all goodness, he is all in all. Love that one good God, and thou shalt love him in whom all the good of goodness consisteth. He that would therefore attain to the saving-knowledge of God, must learn to know him by love: for God is love, and the knowledge of the love of God passeth all knowledge (Eph. iii. 19; 1 John iv.) For all knowledge besides to know how to love God, and to serve him only, is nothing, upon Solomon’s credit, but vanity of vanities, and vexation of spirit (Eccles. i. 17.)

Kindle therefore, O Lord, the love of thyself in my soul especially, seeing it was thy good pleasure that, being reconciled by the blood of Christ (Rom. v. 9, 10; John xvii. 3, 22; 1 Cor. xv. 8), I should be brought, by the knowledge of thy grace, to the communion of thy glory, wherein only consists my sovereign good and happiness for ever."

 (The Practice of Piety, pp. 26-27)

I love the way he applies the attributes of God to our daily lives. If theology isn't eminently practical, I don't know what is.

Coming to an end

It seems like yesterday I was writing this post. Now, next week I'll be back home running around in Milwaukee. Where did the time go?


At the Roman Baths....in Bath

So far, 2015 has been very good to me. I've seen some of the most beautiful and important places in the world, lived in an amazing community of godly people, and most importantly, learned to trust God in ways I never understood before. Being here has felt like living in Palace Beautiful in Pilgrim's Progress. Coming over to England, I was most excited to see all the places I'd only come across in books. Leaving for America, I'm most reluctant to leave behind all the people I've come to love. All of the effort I've spent on getting into college, being accepted into the honors program, and studying abroad would still all be worth it if its only impact on my life was to bring me to the people here.


Wales is the most underrated country...ever

Being on your own in a country an ocean away from everybody you know for half a school year grows you up in a lot of ways you were blind to previously. And then running around a foreign continent where people don't always speak your language and you come close to being homeless several times grows you up even more. People my age always complain about how adulthood sucks, but being able to fend for yourself is one of the most satisfying things in life. I've learned that you need less than you think, there is nothing better than going to church with your best friends, and all those domestic skills my mom taught me are killer things to know.



Standing in the ruins of Coventry Cathedral

I can confidently say that the last four months have been the happiest of my life. I'm not ready to go back.

 

But God has other plans. He wants me to be a good steward of the blessings He has given me here and make a difference in my life back home. He has taught me to rely on Him in everything, down to where my next meal is coming from; it's getting me ready for what is going to be a year of a lot of uncertainty (including that wild safari of grad school applications). He's shown me both how important it is to have a new generation of strong leaders in the church, and also how awesome it is to meet fellow hip, radtacular young people who are defined by that enthusiasm.

I studied some pretty interesting church fathers and wrote a few papers, but here's the most relevant thing I've learned this semester: Money disappears, charm is shallow, and accomplishments are relative. The truly good life is the one spent for God's kingdom.

Wherever I end up, whether it's in Milwaukee or some far-away grad school, still writing here or something longer, teaching either my own or someone else's kids, I want to remember the words of Basil of Caesarea: "As long as we draw breath, we have the responsibility of leaving nothing undone for the edification of the churches of Christ."

Thank you, Cambridge.

It was inevitable



 

For my Pauline Epistles class, we are reading An Introduction to the Study of Paul by David Horrell as a brief overview before we dive into each of his letters. (By the way, this is the first of 10 REQUIRED books we will be reading. I am torn between giddiness and fear. Such is the nerd lifestyle.) Anyways, in the introduction, Horrell notes that his aim in writing the book is not to necessarily to present what he "thinks Paul said, one particular interpretation of Paul" (p. ix); rather, he hopes to give the reader an idea of the current critical topography in Pauline studies.

 

So far, so good. But then I started getting a little nervous, for various reasons:

• The above quote is Horrell's paraphrase of a statement by N.T. Wright. I probably don't even have to list anything else.
• In attempting to remain critically neutral, Horrell also takes a theologically "neutral" stance on the historicity of Luke's account of early church life in Acts or traditional, orthodox doctrines such as inerrancy and inspiration.
• He suspects whether half of Paul's epistles were really written by him, or even during his lifetime.

Then there was this kicker:

• "Conversely, the title 'Christ' is never found directly on the lips of Jesus in the Synoptic Gospels, but appears frequently throughout Paul's letters. Most scholars would agree that the early church developed  an increasingly high 'Christology' - that is, its view of the person of Christ - which may have been an appropriate reflection of who Jesus was, seen in light of his resurrection, but can hardly have been a reflection of how Jesus himself understood his identity." (p. 10)

Aaaanndd I am only two chapters in. This is going to be an interesting read.

 

But to depart from all of my naysaying, there are a few observations I've appreciated in the book. One of the most interesting things it highlights is Paul's tendency to utilize preexisting formulae such as creedal statements or hymns throughout the text of his letters. Some of the more obvious which come to mind:

• 1 Timothy 3:15-16
  "By common confession, great is the mystery of godliness:
  He who was revealed in the flesh,
  Was vindicated in the Spirit,
  Seen by angels,
  Proclaimed among the nations,
  Believed on in the world,
  Taken up in glory."
• Ephesians 5:14
  “Awake, sleeper,
  And arise from the dead,
  And Christ will shine on you.”

I've only mildly followed the current debate amongst Reformed Baptists over the issue of Confessionalism, so I'm not the person to consult for earth-shattering arguments. However, seeing how Paul makes robust use of creedal statements in his own apostolic writing speaks to the high value he placed on such tools in church life. In light of the arguments promoting a Bible-only approach to theology, what do we make of passages of Scripture which include preexisting creedal statements? It's kind of a paradox. All in all, I find this to be one of the strongest incentives for adopting a confessional perspective in my theology. So there's my two cents.

THANK YOU LELAND RYKEN

The other day, when presenting my paper on Christian literary theory, I matter-of-factly stated that Christian theory should not be afraid to promote the Christian agenda (duhhh). I'm pretty sure I annoyed several of my classmates. That made me happy. Anyways, I am finishing up said paper and came across this quote by Ryken, which I am going to appropriate as validation.

Modern literary theory has championed the idea of interpretive communities - readers and authors who share an agenda of interests, beliefs, and values. Christian readers and writers are one of these interpretive communities. Everyone sees the world of literature through the lens of his or her beliefs and experiences. Christians are no exception. As an interpretive community, Christians should not apologize for having a worldview through which they interpret the world and literature.  

("A Christian Philosophy of Literature" in The Christian Imagination, p. 31.)

Literature is all about understanding said  "beliefs and experiences." Reason #83582950 why I hate postmodernism is that it strips literature of all meaning. Wayne C. Booth, one of my Chicago School (=great books) homies, described two possible functions of art: "showing" and "telling." "Showing" simply draws a picture; "telling" comments on it. We have a word to describe art which simply "shows": BAD. That kind of thing is the realm of art students in Drawing 101 who need to practice their drapery, or the budding poet who needs to master the form of a sonnet. But postmodernism seems to believe that complacently stalling here indefinitely is ok. In reality, it's sophomoric. Also naïve, because who are we kidding? Everybody has an agenda, whether they admit it or not.

 

Rant over, carry on.

I am woman, hear me roar

It's finals week, and my lucky professor has a rant on feminist literary theory waiting for him. I got so personally invested in it, I decided to immortalize it here for posterity.

-----

In “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision,” Adrienne Rich argues that revision is necessary in order for women to find their place in the canon of literature. The problem with this statement rests in three underlying assumptions: First, that women cannot relate to the experiences their male counterparts describe; second, that the existing depictions of women in literature are weak and unrealistic; and third, that dwelling on this perceived disunity will somehow promote efforts to create unity.

Writing about the literary potential of the twentieth century, Rich anticipates that “at this moment for women writers in particular, there is the challenge and promise of a whole new psychic geography to be explored” (513). Rich conflates the distinction between universal realities and particular experiences. Is it really the case that men’s description of the human condition is unhelpful because it is not comprehensive? For example, one of the most universal experiences for humans is the case of falling in love. Outward factors and circumstances may vary between individuals, but everybody, regardless of gender, race, age, etc. is capable of synthesizing these experiences and thereby identifying the overarching phenomenon. Instead, by creating a fundamental dichotomy between male and female versions of the of same experience, feminists such as Rich wander dangerously close to erasing any concept of the human condition. There is no longer a single, unifying constant which brings mankind together

The second flaw is Rich’s characterization of the female presence in western literature. In western literature, a woman “meets the image of Woman in books written by men. She finds a terror and a dream, she finds a beautiful pale face, she finds La Belle Dame Sans Merci, she finds Juliet or Tess or Salome” (516). Here, Rich purposefully lists a string of pathetic (not tragic) heroines. While including Shakespeare, Rich could just as easily have mentioned Beatrice, Portia, or one of the Wives of Windsor. Instead, however, she picked an example of teenage melodrama. If Rich is to gloss over such characters as Antigone, Beatrice, and Helen because they are not relatable versions of womanhood, she must also dismiss Odysseus, Beowulf, and Arthur because they are idealized portraits of men as well. Meanwhile, Rich neglects to mention later, better-rounded examples of women whose actions directly challenge the behavior of the men surrounding them, such as Jane Eyre or Elizabeth Bennet.

Finally, Rich argues that painstaking revision (or the act of identifying female oppression in male-dominated literature) is necessary in order to move forward. “Re-vision-,” she writes, “the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction – is for women more than a chapter in cultural history: it is an act of survival” (512). By calling for a separate, female-oriented body of literature, Rich adopts the same mindset she accuses male writers of implementing: One-sided perspective. While it is necessary to address the faults of the past in order to effectively move forward, it is very easy to make the mistake of defining oneself by these problems. By understanding women as victims of patriarchy, Rich paints a reactionary image of femininity. The basis of a correct understanding of man- or woman-hood is by first understanding humanity. Variables such as gender and race add further depth.

Revision is not the answer to female oppression in literature. Instead, by searching for the common, universally-applicable threads of humanity, readers discover the shared dignity men and women can enjoy in creation.