Horae Canonicae – Terce

W.H. Auden After shaking paws with his dog,(Whose bark would tell the world that he is always kind,)The hangman sets off briskly over the heath;He does not know yet who will be providedTo do the high works of Justice with:Gently closing the door of his wife’s bedroom,(Today she has one of her headaches)With a sigh […]

Horae Canonicae – Prime

W.H. Auden Simultaneously, as soundlessly,Spontaneously, suddenlyAs, at the vaunt of the dawn, the kindGates of the body fly openTo its world beyond, the gates of the mind,The horn gate and the ivory gateSwing to, swing shut, instantaneouslyQuell the nocturnal rummageOf its rebellious fronde, ill-favored,Ill-natured and second-rate,Disenfranchised, widowed and orphanedBy an historical mistake:Recalled from the shades […]

Beauty & Justice

He thought the world’s heart beat at some terrible cost and that the world’s pain and its beauty moved in a relationship of diverging equity and that in this headlong deficit the blood of multitudes might ultimately be exacted for the vision of a single flower. –  Cormac McCarthy. All the Pretty Horses. Knopf, 1992. […]

Harold Bloom on the Future of the Novel

INTERVIEWER: What direction do you see the form taking? BLOOM: I would suppose that in America we are leaning more and more towards terrible millennial visions. I would even expect a religious dimension, a satiric dimension, an even more apocalyptic dimension than we have been accustomed to. I would expect the mode of fantasy to […]

I do not find, on the whole, that evangelicals are prone to unaffected removal from the world. Their world-loving God calls loudly. […] I find a great deal of intense, honest, and communal introspection—a passionate and persistent ambivalence toward the self that is of a piece with their passionate and persistent ambivalence toward their world. […]

More fearful than a final sleep, to me, is indefinite wakefulness in a world where the body can be kept plodding along, but no doctor can mend the riven heart of man. Tony Woodlief. Frozen Heads and Riven Hearts. Image Journal Blog. September 6, 2011. The past few posts have been about the new hopeful eschatology […]

Tennyson seems to have reached the end of his spiritual development with “In Memoriam”; there followed no reconciliation, no resolution. “And now no sacred staff shall break in blossom,/ No choral salutation lure to light/ A spirit sick with perfume and sweet night,”/ or rather with twilight, for Tennyson faced neither the darkness nor the […]

…[An] image deeply embedded within the created order itself: that of new birth…Paul again uses the imagery of the Exodus from Egypt but this time in relation not to Jesus, nor even to ourselves, but to creation as a whole. Creation, he says (Romans 8:21) is in slavery at the moment, like the children of […]

…meaning and truth in Dante’s world reside in the afterlife, where figurae are fulfilled and totalities formed. Mortal existence is, by contrast, incomplete, illusory, secondary. But I think the opposite can be said, with equal accuracy: it’s the afterlife that is a tissue of illusions. Dante’s afterworld may be highly structured, but he invented that […]

“It was no summer progress. A cold coming they had of it at this time of the year, just the worst time of the year to take a journey, and specially a long journey in. The ways deep, the weather sharp, the days short, the sun farthest off, in solstitio brumali, ‘the very dead of […]