What Is A "Liberal Ironist"?

Denis Dutton explains...

Don Quixote As A Cautionary Tale...

Henry Corbin & American Poetry

The Legacy of Henry Corbin: Corbin & American Poetry - The Continuing Series: As readers of this blog will know Robert Kelly, George Quasha and Charles Stein are among the most important poets to have been explic...

In Xanadu

The Castle

It was late in the evening when K. arrived. The village was deep in snow. The Castle hill was hidden, veiled in mist and darkness, nor was there even a glimmer of light to show that a castle was there. On the wooden bridge leading from the main road to the village, K. stood for a long time gazing into the illusory emptiness above him.

Tolstoy's Great 20th Century Afro-French Disciple

Long ago, Walter Kaufmann pointed out Camus's affinity to Tolstoy...

It's Kafka's World

We just live in it.

Bloom on Kafka (from Genius):

His larger fictions--The Trial and The Castle--do not challenge Proust's In Search of Lost Time and Joyce's Ulysses, or even Mann's The Magic Mountain. And yet one thinks of the twentieth century as the era of Kafka and Freud, rather than of Proust and Joyce.

In an age of great originals, Proust and Joyce the foremost, Kafka is more original than the originals, who according to Emerson are never original.

If Jesus Rose A Full Man In The Flesh...

He rose to continue his fight with the hard-boiled conventionalists like Roman judges and Jewish priests and money-makers of every sort. But this time, it would no longer be the fight of self-sacrifice that would end in crucifixion.



This time it would be a freed man fighting to shelter the rose of life from being trampled on by the pigs.

--D. H. Lawrence, The Risen Lord.

Plumbing the Depths...

Hoping to find...

How deep is the well of the heart.

Modern To Pre-Modern Modern

While an undergraduate, I fell in love with the work of Piet Mondrian.

I did not know then, but would eventually discover, that Mondrian's modernism was but an aesthetic prelude: preparing me for the intricate designs of Islamic art.

Camus's Mediterranean Dream

Becoming a reality?

Tipasa, Algeria

V.

Of thee the Northman by his beached galley
Dreamt, as he watched the never-setting Ursa
And longed for summer and thy light, O sacred
Mediterranean.

Unseen he loved thee; for the heart within him
Knew earth had gardens where he might be blessed,
Putting away long dreams and aimless, barbarous
Hunger for battle.

The foretaste of thy languors thawed his bosom;
A great need drove him to thy caverned islands
From the gray, endless reaches of the outer
Desert of Ocean.

He saw thy pillars, saw thy sudden mountains
Wrinkled and stark, and in their crooked gorges,
'Neath peeping pine and cypress, guessed the torrent
Smothered in flowers.

Thine incense to the sun, thy gathered vapours,
He saw suspended on the flanks of Taurus,
Or veiling the snowed bosom of the virgin
Sister of Atlas.

He saw the luminous top of wide Olympus,
Fit for the happy gods; he saw the pilgrim
River, with rains of Ethiopia flooding
Populous Egypt.

And having seen, he loved thee. His racked spirit,
By thy breath tempered and the light that clothes thee,
Forgot the monstrous gods, and made of Nature
Mistress and mother.

The more should I, O fatal sea, before thee
Of alien words make echoes to thy music;
For I was born where first the rills of Tagus
Turn to the westward.

And wandering long, alas! have need of drinking
Deep of the patience of thy perfect sadness,
O thou that constant through the change of ages,
Beautiful ever,

Never wast wholly young and void of sorrows,
Nor ever canst be old, while yet the morning
Kindles thy ripples, or the golden evening
Dyes thee in purple.

Thee, willing to be tamed but still untamable,
The Roman called his own until he perished,
As now the busy English hover o'er thee,
Stalwart and noble;

But all is naught to thee, while no harsh winter
Congeals thy fountains, and the brown Sahara
Chokes not with dreadful sand thy deep and placid
Rock-guarded havens.

Thou carest not what men may tread thy margin;
Nor I, while from some heather-scented headland
I may behold thy beauty, the eternal
Solace of mortals.

--Odes, George Santayana

The Madeleine Moment

All human endeavors are mocked and destroyed by Time. Great historical events become confused or forgotten with the passage of Time. Social values change within decades, from generation to generation. Even as individuals we forget the details of our own past and the faces of those once dear to us. Time numbs the pain we felt with the death of somebody close and exhausts the ecstasy of a love that is now gone. How soon we forget: Time conquers all.

But the good news is that Time can be defeated. It can be defeated through the chance operation of involuntary memory, such as dipping a piece of madeleine cake into a cup of tea. It can also be defeated through art.

--Patrick Alexander, Marcel Proust's Search for Lost Time, 12.

The Meaning of Ulysses

"The meaning of Ulysses, for it has a meaning and is not a mere photographic "slice of life"--far from it--is not to be sought in any analysis of the acts of the protagonist or the mental make-up of the characters; it is, rather, implicit in the technique of the various episodes, in nuances of language, in the thousand and one correspondences and allusions with which the book is studded...Ulysses achieves a coherent and integral interpretation of life, a static beauty according to the definition of Aquinas (as abridged by Joyce): ad pulchritudinem tria requiruntur: integras, consonantia, claritas."

--Stuart Gilbert, James Joyce's Ulysses, 8-9.

Which is to say, it means in Qur'anic fashion.

Ephesians 5:16

Redeeming the time, because the days are evil.