My Personal Library

I recently went through the exercise (and I think you should too) of looking through my family's library and deciding which things I thought I would want to take with me, should I ever leave the library behind. I selected based on my opinion of them, whether I thought I would need my own personal copy (not just a library copy) and the likelihood of them being in another library (I didn't take Frankenstein for example). A book could either fit category 2 or categories 3+1 to be selected. Some Chesterton works only fit #1.

And then, when I was done, I arranged them. Not historically, and not alphabetically, but in quite another fashion. I arranged them in order from most Literary to Most Theoretical, which sort of corresponds to Most Dionisyian to Most Apollonian. Now that you know what Dionisian and Apollonian mean, (if you read the last post) you might want to see my list and my ordering. Please comment on my arrangement. Books that are both very Apollonian and very Dionisyan are generally placed close to the middle.

List of books from Most Literary to Most Theoretical

Category 1: Poetry

The Yale Complete works of Shakespeare
Beowulf
The Odes of Horace

Category 2: Prose

Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte, with notes by Joseph Pearce
Nancy Drew: the Thirteenth Pearl
The Hardy Boys: While the Clock Ticked

Intermediate Category 1: Historical Fiction

Come Rack! Come Rope! By Robert Hugh Benson (a story about Catholics in Elizabethian times)
Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather
Spanish Lover by Spearman (the story of Don Juan of Austria)

Intermediate category 2: Literary Criticism

A Student’s guide to Classics
The Politically Incorrect guide to English and American Literature by Elizabeth Cantor
Shadowplay by Claire Asquith (Sort of like the Da Vinci Code for Shakespeare, except that it’s
both scholarly and rabidly pro-Catholic.)

Intermediate category 3: The Silmarillion

Category 3: History, Theology, and practical matters

St. Francis of Assisi by GK. Chesterton
G.K. Chesterton on War and Peace (Nespaper articles written around WWI)
33 Questions about American History you’re not supposed to Ask by Thomas Woods
The Bible
The Everlasting man by GK Chesterton (The theoretical midpoint of the collection)
The American Boy’s handy book
The Student’s guide to the Core Curriculum by Mark Henrie
The Student’s guide to Liberal Learning by Father James V. Schall
The Philosophy of Tolkien by Peter Kreeft
Saint Thomas Aquinas by GK Chesterton
The Story of Thought by Brian Magee (history of philosophy)
The Catechism (book on Catholic doctrine)

Category 4: Art Theory

The Elements of Music by Ralph Turek
The Art of Counterpoint

Intermediate category 4: Aesthetics

Placing Aesthetics by Robert H Wood
Art And Scholasticism by Jaques Maritain

Category 5: Philosophy

Philosophy 101 by Peter Kreeft
Socrates meets Marx by Peter Kreeft
Socrates meets Descartes by Peter Kreeft
The Hellenistic Philosophers (selections from Stoics, Epicureans, etc)
Thomas Aquinas on Human Nature (Selections from Summa, commentaries, etc)
Five Texts on the Mideval Problem of Universals (If you don’t understand the title, don’t read the book.)

Whenever I think about genders, I find myself up against a big wall. They are
so complex, that any approximation of their essences is quite beyond me, and
without their essences, how can I find what qualities and behaviors match them?
So, when I try to form an opinion on the statement “Women are the superior sex,”
I find it nearly impossible to get anything beyond a vague, but highly poetic,
opinion, better expressed in poems than in philosophic word-tangles. So here
goes.

By the way, I was just beginning to write the second stanza when I was told to pick up my sister from work. In my poetical abstraction, I ran into my garage door with my car as the door was going up.


Four-And-A-Half Romantic Sonnets

O pity not my hands, sunburnt, begrit,
That rest abiding in your smoothed palm.
Abhor my dull and clumsy speech and wit
Insensitive to mental tension‘s qualms.
I will not ever rant or rave or rail
If you but ignore, deprive, insult.
I must obey my queen, or else I fail.
Respect for you befits even a dolt.
Discard me, shove this man, O shut your eyes,
Upon my dirtied clothing and visage.
Grab your silken glove and strike, despise
My swarthy cheek with royal shame-barrage.
O find uncouth all things that make a man
But Sweet, I pray thee, do not pity what I am.

O every word that from your soft speech drips
Adorns you with the wisdom learned by fire’s
Thrice-Godly edge. O when you move your lips,
Your facile mind’s Bach’s pen, Liszt of lyres.
When circumstances play you (sorrow and delight)
Or others puzzle you beyond mere mind’s
Frail power to untangle, your fright
Shows not, great heart, but insight the day does win.
I languish in the yelling, bloodied air;
Heartless, I live and act by thoughts alone
Indoors, all beauteous things are your care
And not a king could want a hol’er throne
Than the one you own in times of urgent dread
When, through love, you tend a sick one’s bed.

O what am I, but a muckle thinking sword
Whether I deal in weights or corn or steel
Bright numbers, soldiery, or Micr’soft word?
I cannot match your double mental wheel!
In what fair school, by what strong exercise
Can I obtain one-tenth of what you have
In way of love? If I am not supplied
With love, I am merely very bad.
How can I hope to have the worthiness
To speak, though I love you and you love me.
I know you burn to give me just one kiss
But my acceptance would be unworthy.
My strength must grow before I take your hand
O sap it not by pitying what I am.

TELL me not, Sweet, I am unkind
That from the nunnery
Of thy chaste breast and quiet mind,
To war and arms I fly.
True, a new mistress now I chase,
The first foe in the field;
And with a stronger faith embrace
A sword, a horse, a shield.
Yet this inconstancy is such
As you too shall adore;
I could not love thee, Dear, so much,
Loved I not Honour more. (This stanza by Richard Lovelace)

The rainbow has descended from the sky
As I return from my campaigns abroad
In which I chased the foe and he did fly
And I walked o’er newly conquered sod.
From glories of my peacock retinue
In midst of which I sit in triumphed state
And perfect peace, while clerics pay their due
To me, for God and I our foes did abate,
While as I sit, in content solemnity
In virgin white and manly martyr-red
There is one thing I want. It is to see
You, and for us twain to be be-wed.
I have returned from wars in foreign lands.
Which of us is now the better man?


Divine Irony


Our God is like a heptagon
To nothing can they be compared.
When Aquinas, the paragon,
Thinks upon God, he says “Beware!”

Our God is above smallest sense,
Too delicate and large for thought
The shape is below math-art’s talents
Drawn with the Tools, this it cannot

For God cannot be seen, and shape,
Is unlike love, or spring’s first rose,
Or mountain peak, or taste of cake
Or Catholic life that by grace grows.

But one way He is unlike the shape
For any shape cannot do this:
Reveal Himself in Human Make
So let us rejoice in this!

The Mideval Aesthetic

"The perfection of the work as a whole was sacrificed for the freedom of the
individual craftsman. And yet the many individual and imperfect creations,
which cause the whole building to fall short of perfection, somehow give it a
kind of beauty that is different from perfection."

--Dr. Elizabeth Kantor, speaking of Gothic Cathedrals as an illustration of the
general Medieval aesthetic.

What? Old Fashioned Liberal, why are you telling us this? Whatever happened
to unity, and coherence, and the discovery of exemplars that exist because they
are good and not merely because they are possible? Are you contradicting
yourself? Are you going to satirize this quote? Are you going to downplay the
ideas about art that were believed when art was governed by the Church and its
dogmas rather than the other way around? What ARE you going to do?

I'll tell you, doubtful reader, I will explain, make distinctions, and think
carefully, in all things trying to act sane.

First of all, what are the imperfections of which Dr. Kantor speaks? There
appear to be three:
1. A poorly made element made by an inferior artist within a larger work.
2. An overabundance of elements that "spoils" a work.
3. A disunity caused by such abundance.

For these imperfections to make the Medieval Aesthetic inferior to the
aesthetic based on forms/exemplars (the one we have been exploring in music up
to this point), the two aesthetics must be in fact different. If they are
different, there are only four possibilities about how they can be different.
1. M. Aesthetic must contain all the elements of Non M aes., and then some
2. Non M. Aes. must contain all the elements of M. aes, and then some
3. Each must contain some ideas that the other does not.
4. They are the same, except in what they emphasize.
If 1 is true, M. Aesthetic is superior to Non-M. If 2 is true, non-M is
superior to M. If 3 or 4 is true, we must weigh the differences and decide
which is better in which situation.

Now the idea that Medieval Aesthetic seems to oppose NonMideval Aesthetic is
that Medieval Aesthetic would risk spoiling the unity of something by the
addition of fecundities, even incongruous or inferiorly crafted ones, while
nonMideval Aesthetic consciously seeks after unities, adding fecundities when
possible.

The two ideas are not as different as they seem at first glance. Both
acknowledge that both unity and fecundity are artistic goods. Their difference
is that the medieval aesthetic is “Liberal,” willing to take a risk to achieve
its goal of incorporating both elements, while Non-Medieval aesthetic is not
willing to trade unity (which can be had or not had) for fecundity (which is
always had in one degree or another). Hence, the difference is a type 4
difference, and if the Medieval one succeeds, it is automatically going to be
superior in most cases. If they fail, a unity imperfection will be present,
Medieval Aesthetic is not automatically superior. Because we do not know all
possible imperfections, we will limit ourselves to the three imperfections
discussed above. Any artist worth his salt should be able to tell when one of
these three happens for his particular art. Hence, the Medieval Aesthetic
includes all the elements of the Non Medieval aesthetic, making followers of a
Non-Medieval aesthetic objectively inferior, though knowledge of their aesthetic
(which I have been investigating so far, and probably will continue to do) is
quite productive.

#2 deserves some mention. Overabundance does not necessarily spoil the unity
of a work; when it spoils at all it merely makes the unity less noticeable
and/or is repulsive to the observer. Either way, the fault is in us, not in the
art itself, and an subjective merit is traded for an objective one. In art,
this is a wise choice, as we can change our tastes and our level of
understanding, but we cannot change the fact that both unity and fecundity are
good. Any overabundance that does spoil the unity would do so because it is
not in unity, and thus would be incongruous and thus easy to tell.

#1 also deserves some mention. Architecture in the middle ages put the
inferior artists with the superior ones not because it was good for the art, but
because it was good for the craftsman himself. As this is a subjective element,
not an objective one, I will not discuss it here.