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Cosmos, Life, and Liturgy.

By Juliet du Boulay

The following essay is the introduction to Cosmos, Life, and Liturgy in a Greek Orthodox Village, winner of the 2010 Runciman Prize. Juliet du Boulay’s earlier work, Portrait of a Greek Mountain Village, is now considered a classic text for the anthropology of Modern Greece.

Juliet du Boulay in 1980. Photograph by Edwin Mickleburgh.

THE SUBJECT OF THIS book is the imaginative world of an Orthodox Christian village in Greece, and specifically the cosmological, religious and moral imagination associated with the characteristic forms of its life. The pattern of this life, formed for the most part by villagers living directly on the fruits of their own labour in their fields and forests, was the subject of my previous book, Portrait of a Greek Mountain Village, (1) and the present book aims to reveal the inner world which corresponds to that outer world.

To become aware of the religious imagination in subsistence villages of this kind in Europe involves engaging with a living reality which is often only seen at a distance, through the prism of debates which remain very much alive in the religious history of the West. With a Greek village this is particularly the case: Greece has remained to many the mother of the western world, whether as the first source of free, rational thought or as the source of the Greek language in which the New Testament was first written. And for this reason western preoccupations with Greece have shaped perceptions of the Greek imagination in at least three distinct ways.

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Dostoyevski and the religion of suffering 4.

By Eugène-Melchior de Vogüé

Part Four.
Navigate our series by starting here.

Ron Arad's plex-boxed limited edition of The Idiot (2006).

AFTER THIS BOOK HIS talents rose no higher. He gave a few more strokes of his mighty wings, but always in a circle among the mists of a darkening sky – like a huge bat in the twilight. The Idiot and The Possessed, and especially The Brothers Karamazoff, are spun out to intolerable lengths, and the “play” in each is not more than a pleasing embroidery which lends itself to all the author’s theories, and into which he stitches all the types previously treated or imagined in the hell of his fantasy. It is a Temptation of St. Anthony painted [sic] by Callot. The reader is annoyed by a crowd of “shadow pictures” rushing about through the plot; big, cunning, chattering, inquisitive children perpetually occupied in criticizing other people’s consciences. The entire novel is no more than a dialogue between two tub-thumpers or “brain-pickers” who with the craftiness of a Red Indian try to get at each other’s secrets.

These generally relate to a plot for committing some crime or to a love affair. The conversations recall the proceedings of the Inquisition under Ivan the Terrible or Peter the Great; it is the same mingling of terror, duplicity and loyalty still remaining in the race. At other times, the disputants try to penetrate the maze of their philosophic and religious beliefs, and, like two doctors of divinity at the Sorbonne, assail each other with dialectics, at times subtle, or rude. Some of the words spoken also call to mind the dialogues between Hamlet and his mother, or with Ophelia and Polonius. For two hundred years socialists have been discussing the question as to whether Hamlet was really made when he spoke as he did, but whichever way the question is answered, the reply in either case is applicable to Dostoyevsky’s heroes. It has often been said that the author and the characters who reflect him were simply as mad as Hamlet.

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Why doesn’t Britain have a Tea Party?

By Anthony O’Hear

The first one.

I HAVE BEEN SPENDING the summer in the USA, in the small town of Bowling Green, Ohio, and I have come to appreciate some of the virtues and bars of Main Street and small town America, combined, it must be said, with visits to art museums in Detroit, Cleveland, Boston, Minneapolis and, above all, our local one of Toledo, all to a considerable degree privately collected and funded, and all boasting collections of European art which would grace any European capital.

I have also been keeping an eye on politics here in the USA and over there in Britain. The British scramble for power now over, the similarities between the big governments in Washington DC and London are, frankly, closer than the differences. (Continued)

The King at a ballgame, 4 July 1918.

WIDESPREAD CELEBRATIONS.

George V meets Herb Pennock I.

VERY COMPLETE ARRANGEMENTS HAVE been made to enable the American troops at present in Great Britain to observe their national festival with all the freedom of home. The central feature of to-day’s events will, of course, be the baseball match between teams representing the American Army and the American Navy, at which the King and a Royal party will be present. This event will undoubtedly become historic. Apart from this, however, elaborate programmes have been arranged both in London and in the provinces.

The baseball match, at which the King will be present, begins at 3 o’clock this afternoon at Stamford Bridge, and it is requested that the public will be in their places before that time. His Majesty will be accompanied by the Queen and Princess Mary, and Queen Alexandra and the Princess Victoria are also expected to be present. The Royal party will drive to the Chelsea football ground in open carriages , and on their arrival at 3.15 the captains, umpires, and possibly other representatives of the teams will be presented. The game will be suspended, and the King will hand a ball to a representative of one of the teams, and not “pitch” it, as has been stated. The game will then be resumed. When the President of the United States starts a match, his “pitching” is confined to throwing the ball on to the field for the “pitcher” to deal with, and, as the front of the grand stand at Chelsea is netted, even this limited participation in the game would present difficulties.

(Continued)

Excerpt: Science and social reform in America.

By Ronald G. Waters

Hominid skulls. Smithsonian.

THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN SCIENCE and social reform is a tangled one and relatively recent in origin. Indeed, the notion of reform as an ongoing and positive process, and of reformer as a career, clearly emerged in America only in the first half of the nineteenth century [1]. Modern science as we know it is still more recent.

Even so, as early as the 1830s, some reformers evoked “science” as a justification for particular causes and a guide for social change. Such rhetoric, however, appeared most commonly in movements to create new and better kinds of institutions—schools, asylums, and prisons, for instance—as well as among a small number of utopians and in health and other reforms aimed at improving humankind through understanding physiological “laws.” In a few instances, “science” actually served as a weapon against reformers’ goals. (Continued)

Prohibition: False glamour, lax enforcement.

A Fortnightly Review of
Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition
By Daniel Okrent
468 pages $30.00 Scribner.

Reviewed by Andrew Sinclair.

THERE IS A DIFFERENCE between history and journalism. This account of Prohibition is written by a contemporary journalist. Daniel Okrent was public editor of the New York Times and managing editor of Life magazine. So his account of the thirteen Dry years teems with phrases such as ‘a smart move’ or ‘fake rye’ or ‘lubricious behavior’ or even the remarkable ‘Apart from “21”, which was sui generis, Manhattan speakeasy style ran…’

Last Call is reportage, not social history. The running style in this extended account is that of a newsman, sniffing out the good stories. And there are plenty of them, from that golden age of gossip and occasional retribution. Although there is a great deal of dazzle and detail, there is little new in the causes and consequences of Prohibition – the rural saloon and the rise of women’s rights, the conflict of the country against the city, the attack on foreigners and the surge of nativism, and the economic reasons for Repeal.

(Continued)

Philosophy as a personal journey.

By Anthony O’Hear

‘Philosophy begins in wonder. And at the end, when philosophic thought has done its best, the wonder remains. There have been added, however, some grasp of the immensity of things, some purification of emotion by understanding. Yet there is a danger in such reflections. An immediate good is apt to be thought of in a degenerate form of a passive enjoyment. Existence (life) is activity ever merging into the future. The aim of philosophical understanding is the aim of piercing the blindness of activity in respect to its transcendent functions.’
– A. N. Whitehead, Modes of Thought.

Kathleen Raine.

THERE ARE, IT SEEMS, two senses of ‘philosophy’. There is first the sort of thing you read in the ‘mind and spirit’ section of bookstores, where distinguished and not–so-distinguished writers hold forth on what inspires them, what their beliefs are, what happens after death, etc. These people are normally lay-folk, philosophically speaking, in the sense that they do not have academic credentials in philosophy. In their own often homespun way they are touching on the so-called ‘big’ questions – the questions and speculations which initially spark an interest in ‘philosophy’ when one is young, but which then, by the vast majority, never get taken any further. The exceptions here are people (like me) who work and study in university ‘Philosophy’ departments, whose main aim, I sometimes unkindly think, is to convince the young that the ‘big’ questions are not the province of proper (that is, academic) philosophy at all. Philosophy in this ‘official’ view is a quasi-science, full of its own arcane language and symbolism, aping the methods of mathematics and physics. Unlike ‘mind and spirit’, this discipline is of interest to no-one but its aficionados.

[Single-page version, with annotation.]

Dostoyevski and the religion of suffering 3.

By Eugène-Melchior de Vogüé

Part Three.
Navigate our series by starting here.

Dostoevsky, 1872, by W.G. Perow.

FREEDOM INDEED, BUT ONLY relative. Dostoyevsky was placed in the ranks of a Siberian regiment. Two years later, in 1856, the change of reign brought him his pardon. Promoted to his former rank as an officer, and reappointed to all civil rights, he was shortly after authorized to send in his papers, but that was as yet far from receiving permission to return to Europe, and above all from obtaining leave to publish his writings, without which life to an author was as nought. At last, in 1859, after ten years of exile, he recrossed the Ural Mountains and entered a New Russia, in which everything seemed changed, everything, so to speak, “aired,” trembling with impatience and hope on the eve of the Great Emancipation.

He brought a wife with him, the widow of a late comrade in the Petrachevsky conspiracy, whom he met in Siberia, loved, and married. As with everything that concerned his life, this bit of romance during his exile brought him unhappiness, to be ennobled by self-abnegation. The young woman loved somebody else better, and it did not take long before she went over to the other man. For a whole year, so his letters show us, Dotoyevsky did all he could to further the happiness of the woman he loved, and of the man his rival, even to writing to St. Petersburg that all obstacles in the way of their union might be removed. “As for myself,” he writes at the end of one of those letters, “by God! I shall drown myself or take to drink.” This incident of his private life is reproduced in his Humbled and Outraged [published in English as The Insulted and Injured], the first of his novels translated in France, but not the best.

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Two poems from the hôpital Broussais, September 1893.

By Paul Verlaine.
New translations by Martin Sorrell.

Paul Verlaine in the hôpital Broussais. A portrait by his friend Edmond Aman-Jean, 1892.

VERLAINE’S FIRST ACQUAINTANCE WITH hospital life was the short period which, in 1885, he spent in the Hôpital Tenon. This palatial edifice in the Menilmontant quarter was where Verlaine was to serve his months of ‘apprenticeship’ in the business. The real centre of his hospital life was, however, to be the Hôpital Broussais, in the rue Didot, which he first entered in December 1886. Verlaine always had a weakness for this particular hospital. It consisted of a series of wide-spreading huts connected by arcades and supported upon wooden piles. One had the sense of camping-out in the country: of being in a way, adventurius:and one lost the galling impression of existing as no more than a burden to the earth: a weight upon the charity of the ‘Assistance Publique.’ And then there was Dotor Chauffard, who was always ready to shut one of his two kinfdly eyes, and the arcades to smoke under, and the green lamp beside his sleepless bed at night-time, and the sound of the ‘ceinture’ trains, and the ‘Get up, lazy’ of the nurses in the morning.
– Harold Nicolson, in Paul Verlaine (1921).

(Continued)

The Fly-fishers’ Club.

By Basil Field.

“But now the sport is marde, and wott ye why
Fishes decrease, and fishers multiply.”

River Lea at Ware.

THE GROWTH OF FLY-FISHING is not so obvious as that of many other pastimes. The goal-posts of football, the nets of lawn-tennis, the pavilions of cricket bear silent witness to the prevalence of those games; nor, if the verbal jingle may be pardoned, does it need the “sight of the lynx” to discover the omnipresence of golf; while the detailed reports of matches, which have spread from the strictly sporting newspapers to the columns of the press at large, testify to the growing interest taken in these pastimes. All of these games, however, are essentially contests in which, individually or collectively, man is pitted against man. Even the kindred sport of bank-fishing is more in evidence than fly-fishing to the observant traveller. In the Thames Valley, by the Lea River, on the towing path of canals, on the margin of pond and pool, wherever, in short, free fishing is to be found, the waterside seems dotted with fishermen, each sitting like Patience on a wicker basket watching his float.

Fly-fishing, as becomes the poetry of angling, bids her disciples cast their lines in solitude. In solitude—grand, solemn, and but for the “noise of many waters,” silent, is the capture of the bold sea rover, salmo salar, in his mountain girt native fastness attempted. In solitude—peaceful, smiling, yet silent, too, but for the sighing of the sedge, the “murmur of innumerable bees,” and the friendly twitter of the swallow, is the death of his timid inland cousin, salmo fario, compassed by means of gaudy silk and fraudful feather.

Although the fly-fisher is thus hidden from the common eye, as in a “wilderness of sweets,” it is, however, possible in some sort to gauge his growth. To this end, without laborious investigation of statistics, let us glance at the manufacturer and sale of his implements, and at the literature concerned with his art.

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