Dubliners

"We walked through the flaring streets, jostled by drunken men and bargaining women, amid the curses of labourers, the shrill litanies of shop-boys who stood on guard by the barrels of pigs' cheeks, the nasal chanting of street-singers, who sang a come-all-you about O'Donovan Rossa, or a ballad about the troubles in our native land. These noises converged in a single sensation of life for me: I imagined that I bore my chalice safely through a throng of foes."

--James Joyce, "Araby."

Walter Kaufmann On Rembrandt's Eyes

Walter Kaufmann wrote that this painting ("Large Self-Portrait") "cast a spell" on him when he first saw it in the Vienna art museum, but it affected him even more in 1962 when he saw it again after visiting Poland and an afternoon spent at Auschwitz. He explained that Rembrandt had been 12 when the Thirty Years War began, and the painting was completed four years after the carnage of that war had ended. Kaufmann remarked that Rembrandt painted many self-portraits during his life, despite the fact that there was no market for them. But he painted them to provide a record of his evolution as an artist and as a human being. "Here was integrity incarnate," he said.

These thoughts and reminiscences are contained in Kaufmann's 1978 Preface to the Princeton paperback edition of his book Critique of Religion and Philosophy, a work that "certainly did not fail to impede my career," as he put it. He wrote the book (and its sequel, The Faith of a Heretic) because he felt that he had things to say--and was willing to say--that others did not and would not say.

His conclusion was that "humanists should be concerned less with the opinions of their peers and elders than with the challenge of Rembrandt's eyes."

The Faith of a Heretic

I purchased Walter Kaufmann's The Faith of a Heretic sometime around 1980 and for the next couple of decades dipped into it regularly, as one does with wisdom literature. Then I put the book away and did not look at it again until about a year or so ago when I consulted it to find a passage I had imperfectly recalled. In the last few weeks, I've picked it up again, determined to read it through carefully. Each page, each paragraph continues to speak to me with an honesty and vigor that must have molded my thinking on human religiosity far more than I ever credited in my twenties--for the arguments, the examples, the sources are all the arguments, examples, and sources that I appeal to even now in my writing and, especially, my classroom teaching.

Kaufmann's combination of intellectual honesty and moral commitment were exceptional during his lifetime and remain so to this day. If I have been unconsciously emulating him these many years, I doubt I could have picked a better model.

Longinus: On the Sublime

Further, writing for a man of such education as yourself, dear friend, I almost feel freed from the need of a lengthy preface showing how the sublime consists in a consummate excellence and distinction of language, and that this alone gave to the greatest poets and prose writers their preeminence and clothed them with immortal fame. For the effect of genius is not to persuade the audience but rather to transport them out of themselves.

Baseball

When will the national pastime find its bard? Someone who can write about it with the same attention to detail, aesthetic eye, and ardor as Ernest Hemingway wrote about bull fighting?

Don't get me wrong, there has been some fine American writing about sports in general and baseball in particular--the musings of Hemingway's Santiago about Joe DiMaggio surely belongs to the genre. The Library of America's Baseball: A Literary Anthology contains a wide and generous selection and George Will's Men At Work: The Craft of Baseball deserves mention. In the spring of 2012, The Daily Beast published a list of 13 notable reads. But where, oh where, is baseball's Balzac?

One Of The Great Ones

Edmund Wilson.

The Unknown Prophet

Second Isaiah.