Recently Reading

Shardik, by Richard Adams

It isn't as good as Watership Down, but it's making me really want to read Watership Down again. For one thing, Adams doesn't write about human people in the same captivating way he writes about animals, and for another, he doesn't write about made-up fantasy kingdoms with the same skill that he writes about rural England. Still, it's excellent work and I've been enjoying making my way through it during my considerable tacet periods of Mahler 1 this week.

The Naked Public Square, by Richard John Neuhaus
I've been trying to read political discourse as a philosopher. I'd almost say as a logician, but really, when you get down to it, almost anything that's put forward in modern political language coheres logically. It's when you boil down the propositions to the meaning of their words and terms that you start to see what an idea is made of. What are you supposed to do, for instance, when someone writes that "everyone" has been misled by the idea that "the past is past and the future is not yet and the present is all we have."? What you end up doing (or at least what I've ended up doing) is going through the pages with a pen and putting a mark next to every proposition that could be demonstratively proved or disproved. (So far I haven't made very many marks.)

Ezra (from the Vulgate)
I finally finished reading Kings I-IV in translation, and I'm entering that literature in the Old Testament which I couldn't say for sure I've ever actually read in English. If I have, whether in some fit of responsibility in my youth or in Old Testament class as homework, I passed through quickly and without taking much notice of what I was reading. It all goes much better when you have to go at a slower, translated, pace.