Joseph Conrad, The Mirror of the Sea
God: On thin ice - The God of the Old Testament was not a nice guy - or one who operated with a just mindset. Just consider how that leader fired Adam and Eve as property managers of Eden for one violation and without due process. And how dare ask a father like Abraham to kill his son.
One was an upstart clad in pink and purple, the other an acknowledged genius. Florence wasn’t big enough for both Michelangelo and Leonardo How to Paint a Battle and Think About War
Self-plagiarism, false memories, literary kleptomania. What happens, Oliver Sacks wonders, when our most vivid thoughts are not our own? Literal memories ... Literary criticism has become a way to pursue tenure, complains Joseph Epstein. “Literary culture itself seems to be slowly if decisively shutting down Lucking Out
Richard Burton was an Anglican priest, a scholar, and a librarian in the Human Search Engine mode. His Anatomy is stuffed with thousands of quotations, at least a dozen a page; all is patched and woven together, but "with as small deliberation as I do usually speak." ... melancholy is "the rust of the soul," an "inbred malady in every one of us," and media dragons should keep busy :-)
Robert Burton's "Rhapsody of Rags"
The king and the parking lot. He was small in stature, weak in strength, with a curved spine and a face “little and fierce.” The myth of Richard III meets reality
Our bruised arms hung up for monuments”: on August 22, 1485, the body of Richard III was stripped naked, thrown over the back of a horse, and taken from Bosworth battlefield to Leicester, “the deade corps . . . as shamefully caryed”, in the words of the mid-Tudor chronicler Edward Hall (1497–1547), “as he gorgiously the daye before with pompe and pryde departed owte of the same towne”. There, the chroniclers tell us, he was buried in the Franciscan convent of Grey Friars. In one of the earliest accounts, the antiquary John Rous (c. 1420–92) mentions that Richard was buried in the choir. In his Anglica Historia (manuscript completed in 1512–13), Polydore Vergil (c.1470–1555) extends Hall’s timespan and adds that this took place two days after the battle and without any funeral rites (“sine ullo funere”). After the Reformation, the church of Grey Friars was destroyed, and for centuries its precise location was lost.Richard |||
Galileo, Newton, Darwin, Heisenberg: Scientific progress has always required heroic minds, not necessarily heroic morals Moon Man
