Harvard Joke about Jesus
“A fine teacher, but didn’t publish.” –Quoted by George Steiner, in Lessons of the Masters, p. 33. Steiner observes, “A cardinal definition of genius points, I believe, to the capacity to originate myths, to devise…
Tag: William Shakespeare
For Sure
Surely there can be nothing to distinguish us from the beasts, if we simply devote ourselves to greed and never turn our hearts to the Buddhist truth.—Yoshida Kenkō, Essays in Idleness What is a man,If…
Two Distant Worlds?
There is nothing in mere scholarship. The object of study is to find means of knowing God and realizing Him. A holy man had a book. When asked what it contained, he opened it and…
Present Moment, Only Moment: Reminders
Let the soul be happy in the present, and refuse to worry about what will come later.–Horace, Odes You only live once. Keep yourself in the present. The past is gone, and the future is…
Imagine: The Macbeths Coming over for Dinner
Shakespeare presents them as the happiest married couple in all his work. –Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, p. 518
Memorable Scenes
It has been said of the play “Hamlet” that its best scene is the one in which Horatio first sees the ghost, or the one in which he tells Hamlet of it, or the one…
He Contains Multitudes
[Hamlet] inherits the virtues of a score of his predecessors–and some of their weaknesses. Yet he is no mere recapitulation of them. In him, rather, they recombine to make a man as individual as he…
Speed
[At this point a nurse showed up, interrupting our talk. Although he was only sixty-five {Jean-Paul} Sartre was already suffering from all the amphetamines he had taken his whole adult life and needed to receive…
With Gratitude for Harold Bloom
In 1994 I purchased Harold Bloom’s The Western Canon after I had taken a leave of absence from my doctoral program in Religion and Society at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley. Bloom offered…
Plus ça change, plus …
How yet resolves the Governor of the town?This is the latest parle we will admit.Therefore to our best mercy give yourselvesOr, like to men proud of destruction,Defy us to our worst. For, as I am…