From Beowulf to Milton's Satan!

800 or so years in 16 or so weeks:

Literary Survey

and Vision-Quest (or so I hope)

Join the fun at CCSF in San Francisco

Captain, Shakespearean

Captain, helping: "Read your Shakespeare."

Note: I was in the laundry room to settle the unsettled washer again.  While I was sitting upon the washing machine, I had thought to do a little homework or a little pleasure reading.  Captain helped me to settle upon the classic.

Chesterton: "Very Big Ideas in Very Small Spaces"

On art and limitation and "very big ideas in very small spaces":

"Meanwhile the philosophy of toy theatres is worth any one's consideration. All the essential morals which modern men need to learn could be deduced from this toy. Artistically considered, it reminds us of the main principle of art, the principle which is in most danger of being forgotten in our time. I mean the fact that art consists of limitation; the fact that art is limitation. Art does not consist in expanding things. Art consists of cutting things down, as I cut down with a pair of scissors my very ugly figures of St. George and the Dragon. Plato, who liked definite ideas, would like my cardboard dragon; for though the creature has few other artistic merits he is at least dragonish. The modern philosopher, who likes infinity, is quite welcome to a sheet of the plain cardboard. . . . .

"This especially is true of the toy theatre; that, by reducing the scale of events it can introduce much larger events. Because it is small it could easily represent the earthquake in Jamaica. Because it is small it could easily represent the Day of Judgment. Exactly in so far as it is limited, so far it could play easily with falling cities or with falling stars. Meanwhile the big theatres are obliged to be economical because they are big. When we have understood this fact we shall have understood something of the reason why the world has always been first inspired by small nationalities. The vast Greek philosophy could fit easier into the small city of Athens than into the immense Empire of Persia. In the narrow streets of Florence Dante felt that there was room for Purgatory and Heaven and Hell. He would have been stifled by the British Empire. Great empires are necessarily prosaic; for it is beyond human power to act a great poem upon so great a scale. You can only represent very big ideas in very small spaces. My toy theatre is as philosophical as the drama of Athens."

--G.K. Chesterton,
     --from his essay "The Toy Theatre" from Tremendous Trifles

"When the Ancients Speak"

In a lecture given at Oxford, Wilamowitz said: 'To make the ancients speak, we must feed them with our own blood.' When the ancients speak, they do not merely tell us about themselves. They tell us about us. They do that in every case in which they can be made to speak, because they tell us who we are. That is, of course, the most general point of our attempts to make them speak. They can tell us not just who we are, but who we are not: they can denounce the falsity or the partiality or the limitations of our images of ourselves. I believe they can do this for our ideas of human agency, responsibility, regret, and necessity, among others.

--Bernard Williams
from Shame and Necessity (pages 19-20)

Here's the link to the book itself from UC Press.

"Njal's Saga": "Thief's Eyes"

          On one occasion, Hoskuld was holding a feast for his friends; Hrut was there, sitting next to him.  Hoskuld had a daughter named Hallgerd, who was playing on the floor with some other girls; she was a tall, beautiful child with long silken hair that hung down to her waist.
          Hoskuld called to her, 'Come over her to me.'  She went to him at once.  Her father tilted her chin and kissed her, and she walked away again.
          Then Hoskuld asked Hrut:
          'What do you think of her?  Do you not think she is beautiful?'
          Hrut made no reply.  Hoskuld repeated the question.  Then Hrut said, 'The child is beautiful enough, and many will suffer for her beauty; but I cannot imagine how thief's eyes have come into our kin.'

--the Icelandic classic Njal's Saga -- 
          from the first page of Chapter 1 --

Translated by Magnus Magnusson and Hermann Palsson,
Penguin Books, 1960; 1972 reprint.

Lord Byron: "My Mind Is A Fragment"

Happy 225th, Lord Byron!  The portions of this entry will move fragmentally, in honor of his Lordship.

200 years ago today, Lord Byron turned 25, footloose, if not exactly carefree in London.  I've been reading around in his letters, his journal from later in 1813, and a bit of poetry composed around that time to enjoy Byronic wit, self-absorption, and poetic talent.  I want to share a few bits from (or about) Byron's “The Giaour: A Fragment of a Turkish Tale,”  composed in pieces, fragmentary by design, from later in his 25th year, 1813, begun in March and published in early June.  ["Giaour" rhymes with "tower".]

Opening Lines: No breath of air to break the wave
That rolls below the Athenian’s grave,
That tomb which, gleaming o’er the cliff,*
First greets the homeward-veering skiff,
High o’er the land he saved in vain—
When shall such hero live again?

*A tomb above the rocks on the promontory, by some supposed the sepulcher of Themistocles. [Byron’s note]

My note:  The concern for the missing hero, the lost hero, the failed hero haunts the works, poetic and dramatic.   Byron’s excellent Don Juan opens with a call for a hero too, for none of the potential heroes of the period really qualify; he is forced to turn to the old seducer Don Juan (which for Byron & the English of  the time rhymes, quixotically perhaps for us, with “true one").


A favorite passage:
The Mind, that broods o’er guilty woes,
   Is like the Scorpion girt by fire,
In circle narrowing as it glows
The flames around their captive close,
Till inly search’d by thousand throes,
    And maddening in her ire,
One sad and sole relief she knows,
The sting she nourish’d for her foes,
Whose venom never yet was vain,
Gives but one pang, and cures all pain,
And darts into her desperate brain.—
So do the dark in soul expire,
Or live like Scorpion girt by fire;**
So writhes the mind Remorse hath riven,
Unfit for earth, undoom’d for heaven,
Darkness above, despair beneath,
Around it flame, within it death!—

**Alluding to the dubious suicide of the scorpion, so placed for experiment by gentle philosophers.  Some maintain that the position of the sting, when turned towards the head, is merely a convulsive movement; but others have actually brought in the verdict ‘Felo de se’. The scorpions are surely interested in a speedy decision of the question; as, if once fairly established as insect Catos, they will probably be allowed to live as long as they think proper, without being martyred for the sake of an hypothesis.

My note: I like the contrast between the poetic and the prosaic, between the melodramatic verse and the contrasting skeptical/satirical explanation.

Finally, a line from Byron's journal of 1813:

For my part, I adhere (in liking) to my Fragment.  It is no wonder that I wrote one -- my mind is a fragment.

--Byron's Letters & Journals: Volume 3: 1812-1814 -- 'Alas! The Love Of Women!',
edited by Leslie A. Marchand,
Harvard University Press: Cambridge, MA,
1974.