vis Arts & Letters Daily: E J Hitchinson in The American Conservative
Credit: A. and I. Kruk/Shutterstock
It's a pleasure that infuses life with richness and it's available for the price of a library card.
“I hate to read new books.”
So begins William Hazlitt’s essay “On Reading Old Books.” The title will remind readers of C.S. Lewis’s similarly named but much more well known essay “On the Reading of Old Books,” which originally served as the introduction to a translation of Athanasius’ On the Incarnation. But beyond the general injunction to read old masters, the two essays have very little (though more than nothing) in common. Where Lewis focuses on the dangers of contemporary prejudice and the atmospheric contamination, as it were, of false assumptions—both of which we can mitigate in effect by temporarily displacing ourselves in time and space through reading—Hazlitt stresses the importance of older writers. He does this because (1) there is a greater likelihood that they are worth reading; (2) they are essential to the personal development of the individual; and (3) they are high-water marks of formal and stylistic virtuosity from which something can be learned despite philosophical disagreement.
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via the OUP blog by Michele Mendelssohn
Oscar Wilde, photographic print on card mount, circa 1882, by Napoleon Sarony. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.
In the late 1870s, when he was still a student, Oscar Wilde gathered his college friends for a late night chat in his Oxford room. The conversation was drifting to serious topics.
“You talk a lot about yourself, Oscar,” one of them said, “and all the things you’d like to achieve. But you never say what you’re going to do with your life.”
The punch bowl was empty, the tobacco had been smoked, and the lights were turned down low.
“What are you going to do?” the friend asked.
Wilde turned solemn. There was a long pause.
“God knows,” Wilde finally replied. Then, turning serious, he offered, “I’ll be a poet, a writer, a dramatist. Somehow or other I’ll be famous, and if not famous, I’ll be notorious.”
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Between the ages of 24 and 28, Wilde set about trying all these careers in turn.
via the Guardian by Ian Sample Science editor
Rocks from Cornwall and south Devon were found to be identical to those from France. Photograph: Nigel Wallace-Iles/English Herit/PA
With what can only be described as unfortunate timing, researchers have discovered that there is a corner of Britain that will forever belong to mainland Europe.
Analysis of rock from deep beneath the ground reveals that the UK only acquired Cornwall and parts of south Devon when it was struck by the landmass bearing what is now France some hundreds of millions of years ago.
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via Intereting Literature
The best clothes poems
‘Clothes maketh the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society.’ So Mark Twain is thought to have once opined; and yet poetry has been less concerned with the material features of our clothing than we might perhaps expect. How many classic poems about clothing can you name? In this post, we’ve tasked ourselves with choosing five of the very best poems about clothes.
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via the Big Think blog by Mike Colagrossi
Only the pyramids stand today. What did the other 6 look like?
The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World were marvels of architecture, human ingenuity, and engineering on a scale that even the greatest artists of contemporary times would have a hard time replicating today. These man-made structures were all built sometime during the classical era and stretched across the current known western-world at that time. In books and writings that reference the historian Herodotus (484 - 425 BCE) and Callimachus of Cyrene (305 - 240 BCE) from the Museum of Alexandria, scholars over the years discovered the lists of the seven wonders of classical antiquity.
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via About History by Alcibiades
Pericles, 494 -429 BC, was an Athenian statesman, one of the founding fathers of Athenian democracy, a famous orator, and military commander. Pericles was born in Athens to a family of aristocrats. He began his political activity by heading the political group, the Alkmeonids. Despite his aristocratic background, he was a supporter of democracy. In the struggle against Kimon, the leader of the aristocratic group, Pericles needed the support of the people. Having achieved the exile of Kimon in 461 BC, he became one of the most influential politicians in Athens and began to carry out a series of reforms that marked an important stage in the democratization of Athenian culture. Pericles positioned himself as the spokesman for the interests of the entire population of Athens, in contrast to his opponent, Thucydides, the successor of Kimon, who relied only on the aristocracy.
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via Boing Boing by Andrea James
Tim from Grand Illusions dusted off a decades-old carbon arc lamp to show how it works, and how to create colorful and hypnotic pulsing patterns.
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an opinion piece by Matthew Walther for The Week
Ninety years ago the English publisher Duckworth issued a biography of Dante Gabriel Rossetti by an unknown writer. The anonymous reviewer in the Times Literary Supplement heaped scorn on the efforts of "Miss Waugh," whom he seems to have regarded as a kind of sexually frustrated maiden aunt.
This was not the last time that Arthur Evelyn St. John Waugh would find himself on the receiving end of critical nastiness. Toward the end of his life he was driven to temporary insanity by the questions of BBC interviewers and the hostility of the tabloid press, an experience recounted with bleak hilarity in The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold.
When Waugh died on Easter Sunday in 1966, he was praised by contemporaries such as Graham Greene, who called him "the greatest author of my generation." In death he has been rewarded with one of the most devoted, if not among the most sizable, followings in modern literature. Not one of his novels has ever gone out of print, and even his biographies and travel writings continue to sell tolerably well. Some readers find that Waugh's novels speak to them in an intensely personal manner that is rare among authors working outside of science fiction or fantasy. Decline and Fall, Kingsley Amis said in a retrospective essay, was the "first novel written for me."
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via Interesting Literature
Henry David Thoreau (1817-62) is not primarily remembered now as a poet, but as the author of Walden (1854), about his time living a few miles from his home in the woods of Massachusetts. But in his poem ‘Friendship’, Thoreau offers a powerful perspective on the relationship between love and friendship.
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via About History by Alcibiades
The Dutch-Portuguese war was an armed conflict in the 17th century, in which the Dutch East India Company and the Dutch West India Company fought throughout the world against the Portuguese Empire. The war was fought simultaneously with the Eighty Years’ War raging in Europe, in which the Netherlands fought for its independence from Spain (in the dynastic union with Portugal), but cannot be considered a part of it, as it continued even after Portugal regained its independence in 1640. In a number of instances, the Dutch were helped by the British. As a result of the war, Portugal was the winner in South America, and the Netherlands in the Far East. England won due to the long confrontation between its two main trading rivals.
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