So I began with something a little poetical, something that soars to the heavens. But now it is time to come back down to earth.
Down to business. What did I read this week?
Since uni is back for the year, and I have to start tutoring next week, I was rather overwhelmed by THE INSTITUTION in which I now find myself. Bureaucratic paperwork, inductions and seminars. A lecture to attend. The Deakin Philosophical Society reconvened. The air is thick with optimism and expectation. By Wednesday evening I was having difficulty breathing.
The great throng of humanity pressed about me. So I found solace in 19th century Russia.
Gorky - "My Childhood"
I can always rely on the Russians to bring me back to myself. Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky and now Gorky. What a gift to be able to remember the world through the eyes of a child, and to be able to translate it into the world of the adult, without losing that magical quality that makes the child's world so - new, big and unique. His was not a happy childhood, and the stark existence of 19th century Russian peasants, and even tradesmen, like his grandfather, reminds me I am, really, living a charmed life.
I continued reading Karl Barth's "Protestant Theology in the Nineteenth Century", ploughing my way through his essay on Kant. Whenever I read Kant I begin to sweat and shake with sheer terror and fear. But I managed to create some order and sense out of chaos, and was rewarded with Herder.
Bless you, Herder, with your poetry, your beautiful words and magnificently crafted images.
Bless you for your joyful cry “I am not here to think! – To be! To feel! To live! And to rejoice!"
I want to leap out of my seat with joy when I read his thoughts on the Bible (so different from my own "happy" experience)
"Flee, my friend, the scholastic whims and sublte speculations upon this subject, the sweepings of old barbaric schools, which will often destroy for you the best natural impression of the spirit of these writings. From the moment when you bar yourself up at the bottom of a precipice and help weave a spider's web of philosophical questions and distinctions instead of enjoying and applying a healthy view and living the divine effects, the spirit of these writings will depart from you. It is a natural, happy and childlike spirit, and it does not love such caverns and servile examinations. If you do not hear the sound of its footsteps as heralding the arrival of a friend or loved one but slavishly seek to measure and grope out its stride, then you will not hear it coming." (From Letters Concerning the Study of Theology)
Like water to quench a desperate thirst. But still, I must continue to weave a spider's web of philosophical questions... I cannot quite buy into the happiness of this Romanticism. For me, I shall have to stick with Augustine.
Assuredly I labour here and I labour within myself;
I have become to myself a land of trouble and inordinate sweat.
I shall sweat a while longer.
