Fencing Bear at Prayer

Jonah Goldberg, Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning (New York: Doubleday, 2007). Michelle Karnes, Imagination, Meditation, and Cognition in the Middle Ages (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2011). Dennis Prager, Still the Best Hope: Why the World Needs American Values to Triumph (New York: Harper Collins, 2012). Michael Coren, Heresy: Ten Lies They Spread About Christianity (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 2012). Mark Steyn, After America: Get Ready for Armageddon (Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing, 2011). ________, America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It (Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing, 2006). David Gelernter, America Lite: How Imperial Academia Dismantled Our Culture (and Ushered in the Obamacrats ) (New York: Encounter Books, 2012). Edward Klein, The Amateur: Barack Obama in the White House (Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing, 2012). Hugh Hewitt, The Brief Against Obama: The...

"All human beings tell their life-stories to themselves, selecting and reinforcing certain memories, casting others into oblivion.  All human beings are interested in causation.  'Because I had a good Latin teacher, who caught my mind with incantatory grammar, I became a theologian, and because I chose Latin, I put aside the sciences of earth, flesh, and space.'  All human beings are interested in pure coincidence, which can act in life as surely as causation, and appear to resemble that, as though both were equally the effects of a divine putting-on.  Most of us know the flutter of the heart which comes when, out of a whole library, we put a random hand on the one necessary book , and--unerringly we should say, but what does that mean ?--open it, at the one necessary page .  In the Arabian Nights , it has been said, a man has his Destiny written on his forehead, and his character, his nature, is that Destiny and nothing else." --A.S. Byatt, A Whistling Woman ...

"[ Mombaer's book ] is divided into titles, or articles.  The first one is called 'Eruditiorium Exercitiorum', or 'Of the more learned (advanced) exercises,' and covers six folios in the Zwolle edition of 1494 .  It is divided into several sub-divisions, which deal with a great multitude of subjects, having little connection with each other.  It seems like a vast jungle of nouns and verbs , suggestive of purity, fervor, moderation, advice, congruity; dignity, doing, commanding, giving, promising, enemies, judgment, example, writing, evil, sin, pride, order, place, time, etc.  Probably this first title or article is intended as a sort of introduction, or survey." --Albert Hyma, The Christian Renaissance: A History of the “Devotio Moderna” (New York and London: The Century Co., 1925), p. 258.

Yesterday, I took the 1952 edition of Mortimer Adler's Great Books of the Western World that I bought eleven years ago for $400 back to the local used bookstore, where I got $20 worth of math books for my son in exchange.  (He helped me carry the books, it was only fair.)  Thanks to getting rid of the five-foot-shelf's worth of unreadable books (great though the works themselves may be), I was able to move the four-foot-high stack of boxes of Lego bricks out of the entryway and onto a shelf in the hallway alcove and, with a bit of rearranging, the boxes of board games out of the hallway alcove and onto the shelf where the Great Books had been gathering dust for the past nine years.  Things really started snowballing after that.  The entryway is now clear of stuff for the first time in eight-and-a-half years, the hallway alcove no longer looks like a rubbish heap, and I find that it is not in fact the case that what I need is a house.  What I need is an emptier ...

I don't understand it. I used to love books. I've even posted about how much having books has been a part of my life. Now I want nothing more to get rid of them.  All of them.* I could blame Kindle. Kindle, you see, makes it possible to have books without having to physically keep them, which is a large part of the frustration I am feeling about all of the books that I have that are not on my iPad Kindle. See, there they are on the shelves, gathering dust, piles upon piles of them, overflowing onto the dresser and floor. Now that I have a Kindle app, I don't have to find shelf space for any of the new books that I buy, I can just read them and archive them, there in the ether. You'd think that this would make me sad. It's what everyone always asks about when you start showing off how easy it is to download books into the app. "But don't you miss the feel of the book, turning the pages, having the object as a marker for the experience of reading...