I imagine that on Parents’ Weekend there might be some parents attending this once weekly occasion when the college assembles to hear a lecture. By its very name, a lecture is read—but read out loud, delivered in the writer’s voice. Thus, the sequence goes: I thought, I wrote, I read, I speak. Although this is the principal way of [...]
Vast topics are notoriously easy to avoid, and those who undertake to wrestle with them in public owe their audience some concrete reason for their choice. Let me begin with mine. First, this summer I had occasion to study Supreme Court decisions bearing on freedom of religion and the public schools. The graduate students with [...]
Eva Brann Your humble(ish) host just made his annual Piraeus pilgrimage to St. John’s College in Annapolis, MD, this time to participate in a four-day seminar about Moby Dick and score a great interview. I managed to get legendary tutor Eva Brann to take a break from her crazy schedule and sit down for a 45-minute [...]
I love midnight movies, the Golden Oldies; they are the silver-lining of insomnia. Recently I caught part of an old black-and-white movie—Pressure Point—of the days when African-Americans were still called Negroes. Sidney Poitier plays a black prison psychiatrist. At one point his white patron says something about not expecting a Negro to be a successful [...]
Dr. Eva Brann The Imaginative Conservative extends a warm welcome to our new Senior Contributor, Eva Brann. Dr. Brann is a tutor at St. John’s College, Annapolis. She joined the St. John’s faculty in 1957 and served as the Dean from 1990 to 1997. Dr. Brann is the author of numerous works on Greek poetry and [...]
Tonight I shall commit the deliberate indiscretion of trying to say what may be, all in all, unsayable. Let me, therefore, begin with a little disquisition on ineffability. First, there often exists an insuperable inner resistance to speech. We may declare something to be unspeakably terrible, or unmentionably shameful, or, again, unutterably beautiful or inexpressibly [...]
I shall begin with two sets of facts and dates. On or about August 8 of 1519 Hernán Cortés, a hidalgo, a knight, from Medellin in the Estremadura region of Spain, having sailed his expeditionary fleet from Cuba to win “vast and wealthy lands,” set out from a city he called Villa Rica de [...]
My title is a question: “Do you know what an odyssey is?” I am asking each of you to ask yourself: “Do I know what an odyssey is?” In learning as in traveling and, of course, in lovemaking, all the charm lies in not coming too quickly to the point, but in meandering around for [...]
Mr. Ropoulos and I were talking in the St. John’s College Coffee Shop, and the subject of modernity came up. So he asked me to write a few pages for his issue of the Gadfly (ed., the St. John’s student paper). “Modernity” comes from Latin modo, “just-now.” Thus modernity is any generation’s own time; it [...]
Dualisms: The Agons of the Modern World, by Ricardo J. Quinones Dualisms stand at the very beginning of Western ways of viewing the world. Aristotle bears witness to this by recording in his Metaphysics the Pythagorean Table of Opposites, the contraries that are the complementary principles of all that is: good and bad, rest and [...]
Homeric Moments: Clues to Delight in Reading the Odyssey and the Iliad Featured Book: Reading Homer’s poems is one of the purest, most inexhaustible pleasures life has to offer–a secret somewhat too well kept in our time. The aim of this book is to tell anyone who might care–first-time, second-time, or third-time readers or people who [...]
The part of the title of this talk which I asked to have announced is “The Roots of Modernity.” But there is a second part which I wanted to tell you myself. The full title is: “The Roots of Modernity in Perversions of Christianity.” The reason I wanted to tell you myself is that it [...]
I want to begin with a judgment of luminous wrong-headedness. It has appeared twice in the pages of a widely-read weekly book review: The Raj Quartet is one of the longest, most successfully rendered works of 19th century fiction written in the 20th century. It is, of course, meant to be put-down, not praise. What [...]
The topic “Politics and the Imagination” is at once larger and more restricted than “Politics and the Arts,” the theme of this Tocqueville Forum. It is more restricted because I mean to exclude the practical problem of the relation between the arts and public life. Indeed, by politics I mean here not the working processes [...]