Helen Keller’s story is fascinating insofar as it reveals a real transformation through the power language. She is not utterly without thought prior to her awakening at the well. She describes herself as sensing, as having emotions, and even as having cognizance, for instance, of the difference between being indoors and without.1 She even had … Continue reading Helen Keller, Walker Percy, and Language
Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisted, both tragic and glorious, grave and exalted, is fittingly punctuated by one of the funniest and saddest depictions of the modern man. Rex Mottram, a man of action, of savvy and power is impotent at his core. A half-formed caricature, he only happens to have a man’s body and the habit … Continue reading Rex Mottram: Why Words Alone are Not Enough
King Edwin, in 627 AD, is hesitant to embrace Christianity and forsake his pagan faith. Though he has heard the Gospel from Paulinas, he is uncertain. Here, Bede of Jarrow in his Ecclesiastical History of England rehearses a speech made by one of the King’s men: And one of the King’s chief men presently said, ‘Thus seems … Continue reading Conversion of England in Bede of Jarrow
In the last Book of Augustine’s City of God his rhetoric shines forth as he considers what we may hope for in the next life. His argument takes the form of an extended a minori (from the weaker). Such an argument is seen when Jesus says if God cares so much for the birds or for … Continue reading On the Glory to Come
According to the laws of time, a mother who sends her child off to school can never receive back that very little one. A father who bids farewell to his brood for some space, not only forfeits the time betwixt them, but even the past, which becomes what he had and not what he has. … Continue reading On Sending Children and Loved One’s Off
Persuasion is not well read, but it is perhaps Jane Austen’s best work. Yet it is not one I would recommend for a first time reader. Its deep moral sentiments, its understated conversations, its complexity of situation amid deep simplicity make it perhaps a more difficult novel to appreciate. Emma, Pride and Prejudice, and Sense and Sensibility … Continue reading Felicitous Construal in Jane Austen’s Persuasion
Two central motifs which shape John Donne’s Good Friday, 1613. Riding Westward make the poem challenging for contemporary readers: cosmology and liturgy. To some degree, they are a single motif, as the poem seems to argue. The poem, a meditation on the Crucifixion and the narrator’s spiritual condition, is set in the context of the motion … Continue reading Direction in Donne’s Good Friday, 1613. Riding Westward
