Quiddities & Haecceities

Paul Keegan writing[£] about the poet/artist David Jones in the latest edition of the London Review of Books: The supposed pedantry or antiquarianism of Jones’s procedures, visual as well as verbal, are deceptive. He relied on anachronism, sly private reference and a conviction that accuracy was allied to distortion, just as the distortions of idiomatic… Continue reading Quiddities & Haecceities

Distinguishing the perilous adventure of selfhood

Terry Eagleton writing in the latest edition of The London Review of Books: Kierkegaard is careful to distinguish the perilous adventure of selfhood from whimsical self-fashioning, in which the self, intoxicated by endless possibility, reinvents itself experimentally from moment to moment, shucking off responsibility for the past and surrendering to the aesthetic allure of the… Continue reading Distinguishing the perilous adventure of selfhood

LRB chortles

The latest edition of the London Review of Books contains an unprecedented number of chortles. By which, I mean two.

Privilege

In ‘New Problems in Medical Ethics’ (1956), Peter Flood, a Benedictine, stated that Christians in pain should accept suffering ‘as permitted by God for our betterment’.