But Of Babylon We Are Told...

"Hyenas will cry in its towers, and jackals in the pleasant palaces; its time is close at hand and its days will not be prolonged."

~ Isaiah 13:22 (RSV).

MITSUKO UCHIDA Mozart Adagio in B minor K.540

Heideggerian Selfhood

The "site of the moment of the call and of the belonging."

~ MH, Contributions, p. 42.

Joycean Aesthetic Askesis

The last story in James Joyce's Dubliners, "The Dead," stands apart from the others. It is less a picture of a typical Dublin situation than a fable designed to illustrate a point. Joyce is attempting to show the change from a wholly egocentric point of view, where you regard the world as revolving round yourself, to a point of view where your own personality is eliminated and you can stand back and look disinterestedly on yourself and on the world. The hero of this story starts off in a mood of pompous egotism and, as a result of the events in the story, emerges with his personality eliminated in a mood of indifferent acceptance of all things. Written after the other stories of Dubliners and no part of the original collection, "The Dead" is a kind of afterthought expressing indirectly Joyce's preoccupation with the question of the proper aesthetic attitude. Actually, what is happening to Gabriel is that, like Stephen in the Portrait, he is moving from the "lyrical" point of view, the egocentric approach which Joyce regarded as the most immature, to the "dramatic" approach which, for Joyce was the proper aesthetic approach.

~ David Daiches, "James Joyce: The Artist As Exile," College English (1940), 202.

Return To The Word-Hoard

The great mythographers:


W. Blake


S. Freud


J. Joyce


W. Faulkner

Metaphors To Live In

The strength of these mountains.


The inescapable womb.

Pilgrimage And Feast

Burnt Norton

Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind
Cannot bear very much reality.

~ T. S. Eliot

Where I First Encountered The Mazeppa Legend

Reading Room, Main Branch, Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh.

Psalm 121

"Roderick Peattie, in his classic Mountain Geography (1936), suggests several criteria for defining mountains: (1) mountains should be impressive, (2) they should enter into the imagination of the people who live within their shadow, and (3) they should have individuality...To a large extent, then, a mountain is a mountain because of the part it plays in the popular imagination."

~ M. Price, Byers, Friend, Kohler, L. Price, Mountain Geography (2013), 2-3.



"The religious influences of a physical landscape, in this instance a chain of mountains called the Appalachians that are among the oldest in the world, is a subliminal force of extraordinary power on mountain people..."

~ D. V. McCauley, Appalachian Mountain Religion, 336.

Mazeppist Scripture

Trilling's Importance

Adam Kirsch on Lionel Trilling:

He knew that literature's victories are always achieved against the larger circumstance of defeat, that to live a literary life--which also means, to live life according to the disciplines of literature--is itself the best, most inspiring resistance to an unliterary culture. And his writing, by showing what it means to define one's self through reading, proves that this kind of readerly heroism is always a possibility for those who believe in it. The most important reason why Trilling matters for our time is that he helps us, to quote his own praise of the sociologist David Riesman,

to assert what in our day will seem a difficult idea even to people of great moral sensitivity--that one may live a real life apart from the group, that one may exist as an actual person not only at the center of society but on its margins, that one's values may be none the less real and valuable because they do not prevail and are even rejected and submerged....That this needs to be said suggests the peculiar threat to the individual that our society offers.

~ Why Trilling Matters, pp. 167-168.