Max Ehrmann

I suppose it was an early '70's thing, but Max Ehrmann's Desiderata graced my bedroom wall from the time I was in Middle School until I went off to college.

Ehrmann was a lawyer-turned-writer from Terre Haute, Indiana. Nothing he wrote ever caught fire during his lifetime but, after his death, this particular set of admonitions took on a life of its own.

Desiderata is simple, folksy, American wisdom literature with universal appeal. Solid and unpretentious, like its author. Indeed, that is its greatest drawback: for who wants to believe that the secret to living a good and decent life could have been penned in the 20th century by a relatively obscure son of German immigrants to the United States? Where is the drama in that? And where is the tragedy?

If there is tragedy to be associated with these lines, it is not in their production but in their reception. It is tragic that such sound advice could be deemed trite. Plain-spoken common sense, in short supply these days, was, at one time, a peculiarly American virtue. When Americans became too "smart" or "worldly" for such trifles, we abandoned the only genius we had to offer history.

Coleman Barks

Interprets Mevlana.

Omar Ibn Said

Organic intellectual in the slave-holding south.

...Thereof one must be silent.

I am not certain who designed this diagram, but I encountered it here. It almost illustrates the radical constructivist epistemology (or its pre-modern and early modern anticipations) as found in the metaphysical speculations of Ibn 'Arabi and his school. If one were to move the "virtuality" circle inside the "reality" circle, I think the diagram would work well as a heuristic device.

Whereof one cannot speak...

Beata Tranquillitas

"One of the most famous and best loved pictures by the great Renaissance artist Albrecht Durer is his engraving of 'St. Jerome in His [Study].' Jerome, the perfect example of the Christian scholar and thinker, is seated undisturbed at his desk in the peaceful seclusion of his well-ordered study. The scene idealizes the vita contemplativa, life in the service of God, and the learned tradition, for Jerome, who once dreamt that he heard a voice declare him more a Ciceronian than a Christian, has his books near at hand and is writing another. The room may very well have been the study room of the Nuremberg humanist Willibald Pirckheimer, Durer's closest friend, or the library room of the sanctuary which Conrad Mutian named his beata tranquillitas..."

Lewis W. Spitz, The Religious Renaissance of the German Humanists, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press (1963), 1.

The Missing Music

in contemporary poetry.