The Spiral Curriculum. The liberal arts, of course, are not everything. They were not the whole of ancient education either. For Plato a rounded education would begin with “gymnastics”, meaning physical education and training in various kinds of skills, and “music”, meaning all kinds of mental and artistic training. In the Laws (795e) he describes these as physical [...]
[My recent book, Beauty in the Word, a sequel to Beauty for Truth’s Sake, is quite dense and complicated, so I thought it would be helpful to readers if I produced a “study guide”. So, in a series of posts, I look at some of the key themes and ideas in the book.] II. The Transcendentals [...]
My recent book, Beauty in the Word, a sequel to Beauty for Truth’s Sake, is quite dense and complicated, so I thought it would be helpful to readers if I produced a “study guide”. So, in a series of occasional posts, I intend to look at some of the key themes and ideas in the book. [...]
Toward the end of my undergraduate days, I came across a passage in Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Nobel Lecture which I found startling and even a bit disturbing. Solzhenitsyn begins his address on the nature and role of literature with a brief, enigmatic quotation from Dostoevsky: “Beauty will save the world.” Solzhenitsyn confesses that the phrase had [...]
T.S. Eliot by T.S. Eliot We mean all sort of things, I know, by Beauty. But the essential advantage for a poet is not to have a beautiful world with which to deal: it is to be able to see beneath both beauty and ugliness; to see the boredom, and the horror, and [...]