Books
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I haven’t had time or mental space to write anything substantial this week. But here are a few interesting things I’ve run across. At First Thoughts, the First Things blog, here’s one of those silly little games that book and music lovers like to play: If you had a shelf of books to help explain…
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Here's an interesting piece at First Things by Micah Mattix comparing Flannery O'Connor and Walker Percy, and concluding that O'Connor is the better fiction writer. I agree with many of the specific observations made by the author, but I have two objections: One: O'Connor and Percy are so different, and they're attempting such different things,…
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Reading Lear in the First Week of Easter Earlier in the week some train of thought led me to pick up King Lear, and I soon found myself reading it for the first time in thirty years or so. This would seem to be on the face of it not at all what one should…
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A Ride Through Covington Last Sunday my wife and I delivered our daughter to a band camp at LSU, which is in Baton Rouge, a couple of hundred miles away on Interstates 10 and 12. Covington, Louisiana, the town where Walker Percy lived for most of his adult life, is just off I-12, and on…
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Distracted from Distraction by Distraction The phrase is Eliot’s, from the Four Quartets. I’ve always thought there was a certain amount of jive in Eliot’s work, as much as I love it, and until recently might have offered this line as an example: does it really say anything more than “distracted”? Yes, I think it…
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Some Kind of Artist A few weeks before the recent election the arts section of our local paper featured a discussion of the fact that so many artists are on the political left, sometimes the fairly radical left. The editor put the question to a number of local artists, and the unsurprising answer that many…
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Sunday Night Journal — April 4, 2004 Since my first reading, many years ago, of Perelandra, I’ve often reflected on one particular symbol from it. It comes to me unbidden when I attempt to examine my conscience and to discover what mental forces are at work in me to undo my (rather feeble) good intentions.…
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Sunday Night Journal — April 4, 2004 Since my first reading, many years ago, of Perelandra,I’ve often reflected on one particular symbol from it. It comes to me unbidden when I attempt to examine my conscience and to discover what mental forces are at work in me to undo my (rather feeble) good intentions. That…
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Sunday Night Journal — March 28, 2004 I have been listening to a recording of C. S. Lewis’s Perelandra while driving home from work most weekday evenings. This is intended to be a piece of Lenten seriousness. If listening to this reading is not penitential it is certainly a source of spiritual renewal, and it…
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Sunday Night Journal — March 28, 2004 I have been listening to a recording of C. S. Lewis’s Perelandra while driving home from work most weekday evenings. This is intended to be a piece of Lenten seriousness. If listening to this reading is not penitential it is certainly a source of spiritual renewal, and it…
Light On Dark Water 