Anti-Climacus

QUOTE FOR THE EVENING:

(Parenthetical note just in case someone from my dissertation group is reading: I'm still percolating on how I'm going to put it together--why Grotius spends so much time talking about things anyone else would call virtues but flatly refuses to call them that. I have the title, though: "Virtue without virtue?" I am reasonably convinced that academic success depends on having halfway decent titles to things. Anyway, you'll see what I have tomorrow)

"If I ask myself (to take a comparison on a higher plane) why I prefer the poetry of Dante to that of Shakespeare, I should have to say, because it seems to me to illustrate a saner attitude towards the mystery of life."

-T.S. Eliot, preface to the 1928 edition of The Sacred Wood

In my semi-irresponsible reading of other things, I am now on to Wuthering Heights. Were I more rational, I would perhaps be ashamed to admit that there are still so many lacunae in my reading, but I think there's room in life for both the deepening and broadening of taste; the Eliot quotations are the former, branching out is the latter.

Relatedly, I spent Saturday afternoon reading in Duke Gardens, an activity I highly recommend to absolutely everyone. The weather was perfect, in a mid-June-in-Michigan sort of way (this is not, incidentally, the sort of weather one expects in North Carolina in July, but, again, there you go): mid-70s, sunny, light breeze. If it hadn't been for the other people passing through, it would've been perfect. Well, that and my choice of reading material: Conrad's The Secret Agent. Between this and my vague recollections of Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday (high on the list of 'books I didn't get'), I get the sense that there was a well-defined writerly ethos in late 19th-early 20th-century England. The flaws of Conrad's style were apparent: a heavy favor shown to description over dialogue (and action, for that matter), and the tendency to use a frighteningly exact word where a general one would've served just as well. I read Heart of Darkness about six years ago, and recall being not at all impressed by it. I suppose I will eventually get around to reading Lord Jim (which I gather to be the other famous Conrad novel), but I have no problem putting that one off for another six years.