Continuing this month’s survey of Books Read, here are a few more entries:
- Vanity Fair, March 2009. The annual Hollywood issue is supplemented with “The Obama Era Begins” – and “Historic Portraits of Washington’s New Establishment” by Annie Leibowitz.
- Money, Special Report: Rescue Your Retirement. Too little, too late. They’re talking about people who make hundreds of thousands a year – and can put like sums aside.
- Terry Eagleton: After Theory. I’m not quite sure what to make of this one, an office freebie. I was expecting something related to literary theory, rather than an attack on “cultural theory” and “postmodernism.” Still, working from a Marxist perspective, he crosses over into theological and philosophical issues, so it fits into that stream of thought in this mini-sabbatical.
- Jonathan B. Tucker: Scourge: The Once and Future Threat of Smallpox. Jonathan, of course, stayed with us for a week of the Obama primary campaign. Very well written, especially considering its technical nature.
- Carlos Baker: Emerson Among the Eccentrics: A Group Portrait. Jessica’s copy, at her insistence. A good follow to Ives’ admiration. Am especially intrigued by what might have developed had Emerson linked his sense of overarching Reason with Logos and then Christ, rather than simply a universal goodness that instead evolved (the Unitarian evolution).
Curious bits with local twists for me: Father Samuel Moody, Emerson’s great-great-grandfather, famous preacher of Mount Agamenticus, Maine.
The Wesleyan Academy at Newmarket NH.
Indian name for Mount Washington was Agiocochook, as used by Thoreau.
“The God who made New Hampshire / Taunted the lofty land with little men” – Thoreau, “Ode Inscribed to W.H. Channing.”
The Old Man, the Great Stone Face, “that grave old Sphinx” (Thoreau).
Emerson: “I acknowledge (with surprise that I could never forget) the debt of myself and my brothers to that old religion which in those years, still dwelt like a Sabbath peace in the country population of New England, which taught privation, self-denial, and sorrow.” (on the death of Dr. Ezra Ripley)
Passenger rail service to Concord, Mass., began June 17, 1844.
Emerson was irritated by Shaker “dunce-dance,” “with buildings ostentatiously neat,” as if entering a “hospital ward of invalids afflicted with priapism.”
“… our Concord River which is narrow and slow and shallow.”
Emerson had always shown a fondness for Maine, even including the snowbank near Berwick into which his sleigh-stage had inadvertently dumped its passengers back in 1842.
Department of Interior Secretary James Harlan, “a grim Iowa Methodist” according to Walt Whitman. (Harlans originally a Quaker family connected to my own ancestors.)
In 1852, John Albee, a 19-year-old senior at Phillips Andover Academy, came to Concord to interview Emerson and met a man whose name sounded like Thorough or Thurro. (Note the accented syllable, being the first.)
- Samuel Butler: Erewhon. A satire of the assumptions of civilized society – especially Victorian England and its established church – as well as those of Utopian enterprises, this slow-moving narrative was an amusing read. Consider its Musical Bank (echoing both the Church of England and the chambers of high finance) or the College of Unreason as two examples. (Another of my college-era collection, this time passed on to Jessica.)
- G.E. Moore: Principia Ethica. “What is GOOD?” is the premise for this work from my college-assignment collection. We never discussed it, though, and I never took the ethics course. Perhaps inadvertently, the definition of the Highest Good works best in theological terms.
Jnana's Red Barn 