tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6130830332820181818.post7583401242709542685..comments2024-03-29T03:56:08.315-04:00Comments on johnshaplin: 'Man' by Bengt Jangfeldtjohnshaplinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17618981988062495637noreply@blogger.comBlogger3125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6130830332820181818.post-37002822826059100762015-07-20T11:11:56.519-04:002015-07-20T11:11:56.519-04:00The theologian John Drury reflects “if one is to t...The theologian John Drury reflects “if one is to think of a central thing about being human, it is the need for a response from some other – a person, or it could be a work of art or music - - and the fulfilling joy of getting one. It applies at home and at work, needs urgently to be there when we are born and when we are dying, and really everywhere and always: you take on another (all that other, not just the nice bits), and that other takes on you (all of you). Religion, not the least the Christian religion, is deeply aware of this. Sacrifice, so central to the Gospel texts of Bach’s Passions, is such a mutual exchange: pitched beyond morals into the realm of amazing grace and its unclenched exchanges- the whole new Testament is saturated in it. This longed for reciprocity (it has an erotic ache to it) seems to be what makes life worth living.” (private correspondence, April, 2013, in Bach; Music in the Castle of Heaven by John Eliot Gardener, footnote page 76)<br /><br />johnshaplinhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17618981988062495637noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6130830332820181818.post-54059380833495703102015-07-20T11:11:08.859-04:002015-07-20T11:11:08.859-04:00“We are a nation of father haters,” wrote V.S. Pri...“We are a nation of father haters,” wrote V.S. Pritchett, ‘The eighteenth century father is a pagan bursting a blood vessel in the ripeness of time; the nineteenth-century father is a Jehovah dictating an inexhaustible Deuteronomy. We pass from the illusion of fate, luck, and fortune, in the eighteenth century, with its speculations, profits, and losses, the good receiving sentimental and material rewards, to the wary husbandry of the nineteenth, when money gains an ordering autonomy and men have at last and abstract master to serve, a master whose demands outweigh all others. Endings are no longer tidy; after Balzac the conventional happy ending is suspect and classical closure to which readers had become accustomed could no longer be depended upon.<br /><br />”Imperfection”, The Novel: A Biography by Michael Schmidt<br />johnshaplinhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17618981988062495637noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6130830332820181818.post-59652361424564672822015-07-20T11:10:28.742-04:002015-07-20T11:10:28.742-04:00“Hatred of the bourgeois,” wrote Flaubert, “is the...“Hatred of the bourgeois,” wrote Flaubert, “is the beginning of virtue.” Also, “Human language is like a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, when all the time we are longing to move the stars to pity.”johnshaplinhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17618981988062495637noreply@blogger.com