Another fine bit from Hort’s The Way, The Truth, The Life. It captures something I wish I could bear more presently in mind when I teach.
For every questioner who is not the merest sophist, if indeed we dare make that exception, is concentrically manifold, self within self; and the question which alone he is able to present in words is but a rude symbol of the question in his mind, as this again is but a rude symbol of the whole search within.
From F J A Hort’s The Way, the Truth, the Life:
All Christian life is sacramental. Not alone in our highest act of Communion are we partaking of heavenly powers through earthly signs and vehicles. This neglected faith may be revived through increased sympathy with the earth derived from fuller knowledge, through the fearless love of all things.
Nilometers everywhere, to the left and to the right of me. But not a Realometer in sight!
Great bit of Bugbee from Ed Mooney’s blog.
Tuesday, January 15, 1963
No wind stirs.
At Zero Fahrenheit the flakes of snow are not at all large.
Incredibly lightly and unwaveringly they fall.
A myriad of them fills our meadow round the house.
One sees them best looking at the trees beyond.
Their falling accentuates the still-standing trees, the dark trunks.
And the still of the trees is the nearness of falling snow.
Occasiona11y, in the meadow, a weed nods and lifts again.
The low fire on the hearth is even more discreet.
Henry Bugbee, A Way of Reading the Book of Job
Reading Husserl Or, Wandering About in the Panopticum Waxworks
for my phenomenology students
I have been reading
Husserl
or I think I have;
it’s hard to tell
to tell the difference
I confront his pages
in sternly receptive fashion
hoping for a clear sentence
one that will carry clearness a little further
and make the page more than a motley of wanton arabesques
I want, I guess, for my intuitive presentation
of the physical appearance of the words
to undergo an essential phenomenological modification
(that’s rather a mouthful)
so that the words begin to count as expressions
(Mean something, dammit!)
and I can understand
my meaning-intentions cry out
for meaning-fulfillments
“For the earnest expectation of the creature
waiteth for the manifestation of the sons of God.”
Reading well,
I have been told,
is reading true books
in a true spirit—a noble exercise
But here I am in a sweat
reminding myself: no pain, no gain
lifting long sentences weighted with imponderable German words,
the unintelligible unlightness of being-Husserl
And it may be
that the books of
the great poets have
yet to be read, and that because
only a great poet can read them
And so it may be
at least by that math
that I am no great phenomenologist
I haven’t as many eyes as Husserl
The Philistine only dies with us, and always lives with us.
(from a seminar handout)
As I said last time, Husserl starts, starts and starts again, and again, tracing and retracing his steps. He makes a set of phenomenological distinctions and elucidates them. During the elucidation, the need for a new set of more finely drawn phenomenological distinctions becomes clear. Husserl then retreats and starts over; he retraces his former path, but now with even more-mincing steps. Sometimes, the former distinctions are overthrown in favor of the latter, sometimes they are kept, but as as marking the gross phenomenological anatomy, and requiring finer phenomenological anatomizing. And so Husserl goes, back and forth, starting over and over, a beginner among beginners. Husserlian phenomenology is a race to the starting line.
We, too, dull our understandings with trifles, fill the heavenly spaces with phantoms, waste the heavenly time with hurry. When I trouble myself over a trifle, even a trifle confessed–the loss of some little article, say–spurring my memory, and hunting the house, not from an immediate need, but from dislike of loss; when a book has been borrowed of me and not returned, and I have forgotten the borrower, and fret over the missing volume…is it not time I lost a few things when I care for them so unreasonably? This losing of things is of the mercy of God: it comes to teach us to let them go. Or have I forgotten a thought that came to me, which seemed of the truth?…I keep trying and trying to call it back, feeling a poor man till that thought be recovered–to be far more lost, perhaps, in a notebook, into which I shall never look again to find it! I forgot that it is live things which God cares about.
Point out what’s not hidden.
Quantum Est In Rebus Inane 