More on monasticism
In the same spirit as last Sunday’s Thomas Merton quote, this:
In reading the Desert Fathers, one is warned to be careful what one brings into the desert with them. It is better, they say, to remain in the world longing for the desert than to be in the desert longing for the world.
On bishops and language-butchery
On the new lesbian Bishop of the Church in Wales:
The irony is that the more inclusive the church is in theory, the less people it includes in real life.
Irony appreciatively noted, but it should be “the fewer people it includes in real life.”
English is full of words, meaningful words, words with history and subtlety. The substitution of “less” for “fewer,” and a few related linguistic outrages, are among the things that bring out my inner priss.
The Meaning of Life
In August 1869, at 40, Tolstoy traveled to view an estate he might buy. At the inn where he stayed the night, he wrote to his wife, “something extraordinary happened to me. It was two o’clock in the morning, I was terribly tired . . . and I felt perfectly well. But suddenly I was overcome by despair, fear and terror, the like of which I have never experienced before.”
…
[W]hen he didn’t focus on the questions that drove him to despair but simply lived, “it seemed as though he knew both what he was and why he was living, for he acted resolutely.” He took care of his family, interested himself in the welfare of his peasant employees, and managed his sister’s property, not because of some “general principles” but because these actions were “incontestably necessary.” It was as impossible not to care for those dependent on him “as to fling down a child one is carrying in his arms.”
Tolstoy wanted readers to ask, as he asked himself: What would you think of someone who needed some “general principle” to decide whether to fling down a child in one’s arms? Levin’s problem is that he assumes, as intellectuals often do, that truth is a matter of theory that one applies to particular circumstances. That is how mathematics works, but questions of meaning and ethics are different.
…
One directly senses the meaning of existence by living rightly. It isn’t a proposition or philosophy that can be taught. All one can do is indicate the sort of thing meaning is by showing how someone found it—exactly what Tolstoy’s great novels do.
Gary Saul Moroson, Leo Tolstoy’s Search for the Meaning of Life – WSJ
Religious ideas have the fate of melodies, which, once set afloat in the world, are taken up by all sorts of instruments, some woefully coarse, feeble, or out of tune, until people are in danger of crying out that the melody itself is detestable.
George Elliot, Janet’s Repentance, via Alan Jacobs
[N]one of the things that I care about most have ever proven susceptible to systematic exposition.
Alan Jacobs, Breaking Bread With the Dead
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Tipsy Teetotaler ن 