What are you currently reading?

[Fleur-de-Lys]

L'Agnese va a morire (And Agnes Chose to Die) by Renata Viganò. It's pure communist propaganda. Strange that I didn't notice that when I first read it in college. But I'm desperate to practice my Italian these days.

[Sempronius]

L'Agnese va a morire (And Agnes Chose to Die) by Renata Viganò. It's pure communist propaganda. Strange that I didn't notice that when I first read it in college. But I'm desperate to practice my Italian these days.

You should read I promessi sposi by Alessandro Manzoni. Haven't read it myself but it is a classic.

[MilesChristi]

Men at Arms

[red solo cup]

Lee and Grant by Gene Smith.

[Carleendiane]

L'Agnese va a morire (And Agnes Chose to Die) by Renata Viganò. It's pure communist propaganda. Strange that I didn't notice that when I first read it in college. But I'm desperate to practice my Italian these days.

You should read I promessi sposi by Alessandro Manzoni. Haven't read it myself but it is a classic.

I read The Betrothed years ago and loved it. It is the one and only work of fiction on Fr. John A. Hardon's, lifetime reading list. The humor was great and a very pleasant read, a comedy/drama, Catholic through out, and I've never forgotten it. I may just read it again. I read very few books twice. Yep, I recommend it, but would enjoy reading others take on the book. An historical novel first published in 1827 in Italian.

[MilesChristi]

Summa of the Summa

[Lynne]

L'Agnese va a morire (And Agnes Chose to Die) by Renata Viganò. It's pure communist propaganda. Strange that I didn't notice that when I first read it in college. But I'm desperate to practice my Italian these days.

You should read I promessi sposi by Alessandro Manzoni. Haven't read it myself but it is a classic.

I read The Betrothed years ago and loved it. It is the one and only work of fiction on Fr. John A. Hardon's, lifetime reading list. The humor was great and a very pleasant read, a comedy/drama, Catholic through out, and I've never forgotten it. I may just read it again. I read very few books twice. Yep, I recommend it, but would enjoy reading others take on the book. An historical novel first published in 1827 in Italian.

From one of the reviews on Amazon... "Pope Francis has read this novel three times, and to this day keeps a copy of it on his desk and plans to red it again." Oh well, I bought it anyway...    $0.83 on Kindle.

[MilesChristi]

King John

(Summa Summa is like a textbook, will take me longer)

[John Lamb]

Well, Goethe himself didn't consider it as a great a book as I do.  He considered it something of "a youthful indiscretion," to paraphrase Henry Hyde.  But I don't disagree with you.  In a sense, Werther exchanges the worship of God for the worship of a woman, even though this isn't explicit.  I don't think it would be a stretch to call his devotion to Lotte almost religious.  He has a contemptus mundi for the inanities of high society.  He is like a pilgrim in this world.  His love is almost a kind of fanaticism.  What compels the fanatic?  It seems strange that a suicide bomber is driven by the supposed words of God as revealed to a seventh century Arabian prophet.  It does not seem so strange to me, though, if the object of obsession is a beautiful woman.

I read Werther years ago and wasn't terribly impressed with it. I think the reason is that the more grand, more profound, more beautiful romantic gesture would have been if Werther had continued to love her even into his old age, doing what he might for her without intruding upon her marriage, even if all he was able to do was pray for her daily and compose the odd poem for her occasionally, i.e. like Dante's love for Beatrice. Suicide just seems like the cheap and easy way out, motivated more by excessive vanity and the desire to win easy fame as one of history's great lovers, rather than bearing the pain of love like a true lover and a true man. So I agree with Heinrich here on the vapidness of Sturm und Drang.

Here's one of the most beautiful verses in the bible: "So Jacob served seven years for Rachel: and they seemed but a few days, because of the greatness of his love." (Genesis 29:20)

Here's one of the most beautiful passages about romantic love I've come across, from Kierkegaard:

A young swain falls in love with a princess, and the whole content of his life consists in this love, and yet the situation is such that it is impossible for it to be realized, impossible for it to be translated from ideality into reality.

The slaves of paltriness, the frogs in life's swamp, will naturally cry out, "Such a love is foolishness. The rich brewer's widow is a match fully as good and respectable." Let them croak in the swamp undisturbed. It is not so with the knight of infinite resignation, he does not give up his love, not for all the glory of the world. He is no fool. First he makes sure that this really is the content of his life, and his soul is too healthy and too proud to squander the least thing upon an inebriation. He is not cowardly, he is not afraid of letting love creep into his most secret, his most hidden thoughts, to let it twine in innumerable coils about every ligament of his consciousness–if the love becomes an unhappy love, he will never be able to tear himself loose from it. He feels a blissful rapture in letting love tingle through every nerve, and yet his soul is as solemn as that of the man who has drained the poisoned goblet and feels how the juice permeates every drop of blood–for this instant is life and death. So when he has thus sucked into himself the whole of love and absorbed himself in it, he does not lack courage to make trial of everything and to venture everything. He surveys the situation of his life, he convokes the swift thoughts, which like tame doves obey his every bidding, he waves his wand over them, and they dart off in all directions. But when they all return, all as messengers of sorrow, and declare to him that it is an impossibility, then he becomes quiet, he dismisses them, he remains alone, and then he performs the movements. If what I am saying is to have any significance, it is requisite that the movement come about normally.

So for the first thing, the knight will have power to concentrate the whole content of life and the whole significance of reality in one single wish. If a man lacks this concentration, this intensity, if his soul from the beginning is dispersed in the multifarious, he never comes to the point of making the movement, he will deal shrewdly in life like the capitalists who invest their money in all sorts of securities, so as to gain on the one what they lose on the other–in short, he is not a knight. In the next place the knight will have the power to concentrate the whole result of the operations of thought in one act of consciousness. If he lacks this intensity, if his soul from the beginning is dispersed in the multifarious, he will never get time to make the movements, he will be constantly running errands in life, never enter into eternity, for even at the instant when he is closest to it he will suddenly discover that he has forgotten something for which he must go back. He will think that to enter eternity is possible the next instant, and that also is perfectly true, but by such considerations one never reaches the point of making the movements, but by their aid one sinks deeper and deeper into the mire.

So the knight makes the movement–but what movement? Will he forget the whole thing? (For in this too there is indeed a kind of concentration.) No! For the knight does not contradict himself, and it is a contradiction to forget the whole content of one's life and yet remain the same man. To become another man he feels no inclination, nor does he by any means regard this as greatness. Only the lower natures forget themselves and become something new. Thus the butterfly has entirely forgotten that it was a caterpillar, perhaps it may in turn so entirely forget it was a butterfly that it becomes a fish. The deeper natures never forget themselves and never become anything else than what they were. So the knight remembers everything, but precisely this remembrance is pain, and yet by the infinite resignation he is reconciled with existence. Love for that princess became for him the expression for an eternal love, assumed a religious character, was transfigured into a love for the Eternal Being, which did to be sure deny him the fulfilment of his love, yet reconciled him again by the eternal consciousness of its validity in the form of eternity, which no reality can take from him. Fools and young men prate about everything being possible for a man. That, however, is a great error. Spiritually speaking, everything is possible, but in the world of the finite there is much which is not possible. This impossible, however, the knight makes possible by expressing it spiritually, but he expresses it spiritually by waiving his claim to it. The wish which would carry him out into reality, but was wrecked upon the impossibility, is now bent inward, but it is not therefore lost, neither is it forgotten. At one moment it is the obscure emotion of the wish within him which awakens recollections, at another moment he awakens them himself; for he is too proud to be willing that what was the whole content of his life should be the thing of a fleeting moment. He keeps this love young, and along with him it increases in years and in beauty. On the other hand, he has no need of the intervention of the finite for the further growth of his love. From the instant he made the movement the princess is lost to him. He has no need of those erotic tinglings in the nerves at the sight of the beloved etc., nor does he need to be constantly taking leave of her in a finite sense, because he recollects her in an eternal sense, and he knows very well that the lovers who are so bent upon seeing "her" yet once again, to say farewell for the last time, are right in being bent upon it, are right in thinking that it is the last time, for they forget one another the soonest. He has comprehended the deep secret that also in loving another person one must be sufficient unto oneself. He no longer takes a finite interest in what the princess is doing, and precisely this is proof that he has made the movement infinitely. Here one may have an opportunity to see whether the movement on the part of a particular person is true or fictitious. There was one who also believed that he had made the movement; but lo, time passed, the princess did something else, she married–a prince, let us say–then his soul lost the elasticity of resignation. Thereby he knew that he had not made the movement rightly; for he who has made the act of resignation infinitely is sufficient unto himself. The knight does not annul his resignation, he preserves his love just as young as it was in its first moment, he never lets it go from him, precisely because he makes the movements infinitely. What the princess does, cannot disturb him, it is only the lower natures which find in other people the law for their actions, which find the premises for their actions outside themselves. If on the other hand the princess is like-minded, the beautiful consequence will be apparent. She will introduce herself into that order of knighthood into which one is not received by balloting, but of which everyone is a member who has courage to introduce himself, that order of knighthood which proves its immortality by the fact that it makes no distinction between man and woman. The two will preserve their love young and sound, she also will have triumphed over her pains, even though she does not, as it is said in the ballad, "lie every night beside her lord." These two will to all eternity remain in agreement with one another, with a well-timed harmonia praestabilita, so that if ever the moment were to come, the moment which does not, however, concern them finitely (for then they would be growing older), if ever the moment were to come which offered to give love its expression in time, then they will be capable of beginning precisely at the point where they would have begun if originally they had been united. He who understands this, be he man or woman, can never be deceived, for it is only the lower natures which imagine they were deceived. No girl who is not so proud really  knows how to love; but if she is so proud, then the cunning and shrewdness of all the world cannot deceive her.

In the infinite resignation there is peace and rest; every man who wills it, who has not abased himself by scorning himself (which is still more dreadful than being proud), can train himself to make this movement which in its pain reconciles one with existence. Infinite resignation is that shirt we read about in the old fable. The thread is spun under tears, the cloth bleached with tears, the shirt sewn with tears; but then too it is a better protection than iron and steel. The imperfection in the fable is that a third party can manufacture this shirt. The secret in life is that everyone must sew it for himself, and the astonishing thing is that a man can sew it fully as well as a woman. In the infinite resignation there is peace and rest and comfort in sorrow–that is, if the movement is made normally. It would not be difficult for me, however, to write a whole book, were I to examine the various misunderstandings, the preposterous attitudes, the deceptive movements, which I have encountered in my brief practice. People believe very little in spirit, and yet making this movement depends upon spirit, it depends upon whether this is or is not a one-sided result of a dira necessitas, and if this is present, the more dubious it always is whether the movement is normal. If one means by this that the cold, unfruitful necessity must necessarily be present, one thereby affirms that no one can experience death before he actually dies, and that appears to me a crass materialism. However, in our time people concern themselves rather little about making pure movements. In case one who was about to learn to dance were to say, "For centuries now one generation after another has been learning positions, it is high time I drew some advantage out of this and began straightway with the French dances"–then people would laugh at him; but in the world of spirit they find this exceedingly plausible. What is education? I should suppose that education was the curriculum one had to run through in order to catch up with oneself, and he who will not pass through this curriculum is helped very little by the fact that he was born in the most enlightened age.

Actually he goes on, and develops the idea into an even higher stage.
http://www.solargeneral.org/wp-content/uploads/library/fear-and-trembling-johannes-de-silentio.pdf

[John Lamb]

This book would remind me of my youthful romantic insanity. I know what it is like to fall into irrational fanaticism over a woman. I sometimes think about a girl who I fell in love with when I was younger. We worked together for a while. It was completely irrational. She was a former S&M prostitute. She was a submissive and people paid her to let them abuse her. She told me how one time one of her clients chained her to a radiator and left her there all night. I fell in love with her and she seemed to have liked me also, but we never dated or had sex. I would have married her and if I did it would have been a disaster in every way probably ending with both of us in hell. One time we spent the night together at her apartment but I was too scared to touch her other than letting her kiss my forehead a few times. She asked my permission and I allowed her. But I was petrified and we spent the whole night awake lying next to each other without sleeping, watching movies, as I hand-rolled and chain-smoked cigarettes. It is possible that I have never been more afraid than I was of her that night. And I thought at the time that that night of pure terror was one of the best nights of my life. On the last night we worked together she came up to me in the back room and grabbed my head and kissed me on the lips. Then after work I walked her half the way home and we talked. I remember her telling me that I always said the right thing like Cary Grant in the movies. Obviously this happened in my years when I sinned with women and had no religion, before I converted. Sometimes I look at pictures of her online to remind myself of what she looked like. I would post her picture here and ask if people thought she was beautiful, but I do not want to reveal her identity. I wonder if she ever thinks of me like I do of her sometimes. I do not miss her or wish that we did get married, but I think about how irrational our relationship was and what a disaster it would have been.

Actually what I do wonder sometimes is that perhaps some people are inspired by God to love each other but many or most I would say are tempted by the devil when they "fall in love". Yes, I am at fault for not using the word "most" or "many" and just speaking generally. I could easily believe that the time I "fell in love" with the girl I posted about in this thread it was due in part to the inspirations of the devil or his demons of lust who inflamed my passions, inspiring my irrational attraction, and that this happens often, leading to many millions of bad relationships (In case this is not clear also, this part of the post is not a joke, but something I have considered).

This reminds me of a passage from St. Thérèse's diary.

St. Thérèse met a young girl her own age at school, and they became somewhat close. They parted for a while (it may have just been over the summer break) and St. Thérèse was excited to be reunited with her old friend: but when they finally met, she wanted nothing to do with Thérèse. But it's what St. Thérèse writes next that is significant, something along the lines of: "nevertheless, I never fail to mention this girl / this friend of mine in my prayers, because when my heart loves, it loves forever."

It's hard to know in romantic love what part of it is simple human passion, what part is demon-inspired lust and delusion, and what part is God-given inspiration mixed with divine charity. Obviously Thérèse's case is not about romantic love specifically, but it's similar to yours in that it's a failed relationship in worldly terms that still nevertheless made a permanent impression on her heart, so spiritually speaking it is somewhat of a success.

I met a woman who I knew it was imprudent for me to be involved with, but I asked God to let me be with her anyway. God answered my prayer by letting it end very quickly. Still, even though it was a failure and even a regret from one perspective, I'm not entirely sorry that I met her, because even though I realise it was stupid to have been romantically involved with her, I still made a connection and can still say I love her on some level, and still pray for her. Perhaps that's why God let you meet this woman, maybe He wants you to pray for her.

[red solo cup]

Seven Years in Tibet by Heinrich Harrer. This short video shows some of the things he witnessed.

[Habitual_Ritual]

This is very interesting:

[Mono no aware]

I read Werther years ago and wasn't terribly impressed with it. I think the reason is that the more grand, more profound, more beautiful romantic gesture would have been if Werther had continued to love her even into his old age, doing what he might for her without intruding upon her marriage, even if all he was able to do was pray for her daily and compose the odd poem for her occasionally, i.e. like Dante's love for Beatrice. Suicide just seems like the cheap and easy way out, motivated more by excessive vanity and the desire to win easy fame as one of history's great lovers, rather than bearing the pain of love like a true lover and a true man. So I agree with Heinrich here on the vapidness of Sturm und Drang.

I would say that for Werther, the deranged response is almost the only appropriate one.  The passage you quoted from Kierkegaard verges on Plato's spirituality, where Diotima teaches Socrates that the contemplation of physical beauty is the beginning of the contemplation of mystical beauty.  This aligns with the Platonic notion that the perfect exists somewhere afar off in the heavens, and that the forms we observe in this world are only imperfect reflections of the ideal.  And for the most part, this is a satisfying scheme.  But it can be upended.  What happens when earthly beauty surpasses all else?  It is completely orthodox to say of holy wisdom, "she is the effulgence of eternal light, the unspotted mirror of God's majesty," and "being compared to the light, she is found before it."  But it would be blasphemous to say such things of a mortal creature.  Who is she whose beauty eclipses the glory of God?  This is a terrible occurrence when it happens, and there is really no sane response that honors it. 

Writing poetry certainly has its place, but that is kind of like the mannered solemnity of the priest calmly pacing the altar and swinging the censer.  It's the appropriate thing to do when things are nicely ordered: when the heavens are above, and the squalor is here below.  But what's to be done when the whole scheme is thrown into disarray?  I think that's why Werther has his vehemence.  His obsession can't be decorous, but in its delirium it's just as grand and profound.  He is truly like a pilgrim in the world.  He is so sensitive and perceptive and keenly attuned to beauty; this is why he finds society so banal and tiresome.  Let's face it, there are a great many people who have dull and coarse minds, and can breeze through life contentedly without being too terribly troubled over beauty.  Werther's condition is both a blessing and a curse.  But the Sturm und Drang in Werther, as I see it, is a reaction against vapidity.  It's a romantic fervor as strong as any religious ecstasy, and Werther is as mad in the eyes of the world as those saints who go off to desert caves and live on locusts and wild honey.  His passion simply goes in the opposite direction.  At one point Werther writes about feeling as though he's possessed by a demon.  It's like that line in The Cloud of Unknowing: "the devil hath his contemplatives as surely as God has His."

[John Lamb]

I would say that for Werther, the deranged response is almost the only appropriate one.

The thing is that I question his sincerity. Yes, he's a sensitive soul by nature. But he's also one by choice. I think he's aware and proud of it. I remember in the opening chapters his musing on his own artistic appreciation of nature, and on reflection I think it's somewhat vain and foppish. There are emotions that come to us by nature, and there are contrived ones that we almost force ourselves to have. This is especially the case with young people and romantic love, when they brood on that love and strain their emotion beyond its natural limits because they're obsessed with the romantic idea of being in love. However, the Platonists (like Dante, at least in his relationship to Beatrice) have the correct understanding of how to sublimate romantic love and lift it beyond mere passion. They see it precisely as a participation in the eternal Beauty, as a kind of shadow and foretaste of the beatific vision; and this isn't idolatrous because there's no confusion (assuming the lover's a correct Platonist) between the Divine Beauty and its mortal representative.

The Byronic corruption of romantic love - Werther being a precursor and Byron himself its fulfilment - is a degeneration of the medieval, Platonic tradition. It's precisely a failure to see the heavenly in the earthly, the divine in the human, the eternal in time. It's a failure of the spirit. Byronic love is the atheistic version of Platonic love; it's what happened when the romantic European soul lost its faith in God, but still wanted to flirt with the divine Eros. That's what Byron is compared to Dante: a mere flirt. Once you cut off romance from the Platonic realm, and keep your passion from ascending to heaven (the only place where it can find fulfilment, seeing as romantic longing has a certain infinity to it), you really do fall into Wertherian madness and idolatry: the girl, no matter how pretty she is, can never satisfy that longing which is really the religious desire to worship the Divine. They commit a kind of blasphemy in refusing to give thanks to God for His creation; instead of saying, "thanks be to God, Creator of all beauty," and lifting their love for the woman up to a love for God, they effectively turn away from God and try to worship the creature rather than the Creator. So Werther's suicide would be what St. Paul calls a "sacrifice to idols". He's really worshipping his own vanity, stubbornly refusing to worship God. In fact, you can almost see it as Werther himself trying to take God's place, as in the opening chapters where he tries to take the beauty of nature and, instead of giving thanks to God for it, gives thanks to himself for his own refined art of appreciation: a profound shift in the European soul tracing its descent from the worship of God to the worship of man, of man usurping God's role as creator.

Byronic love is a kind of impiety; despite however much the Werther-Byronic types might flatter themselves for their superior sensitivity to beauty and profundity of emotion, for all that they're merely just failing to do what any simple man can do: giving thanks to God. Werther didn't need to kill himself to "prove" that he loved Charlotte, he just needed to offer his love for her to God as a prayer. That's why I'd insist that, despite all his pretension, he's at bottom a selfish and conceited idiot who's more a lover of his own self than of Charlotte (after all, why burden someone you love with your suicide?).

When the world talks of worthy gentlemen, we hear "Po Yi and Shu Ch'i." Yet Po Yi and Shu Ch'i declined the rulership of the state of Ku-chu and instead went and starved to death on Shou-yang Mountain, with no one to bury their bones and flesh. Pao Chiao made a great show of his conduct and condemned the world; he wrapped his arms around a tree and stood there till he died. Shen-t'u Ti offered a remonstrance that was unheeded; he loaded a stone onto his back and threw himself into a river, where the fish and turtles feasted on him. Chieh Tzu-t'ui was a model of fealty, going so far as to cut a piece of flesh from his thigh to feed his lord, Duke Wen. But later, when Duke Wen overlooked him, he went off in a rage, wrapped his arms around a tree, and burned to death. Wei Sheng made an engagement to meet a girl under a bridge. The girl failed to appear and the water began to rise, but, instead of leaving, he wrapped his arms around the pillar of the bridge and died. These six men were no different from a flayed dog, a pig sacrificed to the flood, a beggar with his alms-gourd in his hand. All were ensnared by thoughts of reputation and looked lightly on death, failing to remember the Source or to cherish the years that fate had given them.

https://terebess.hu/english/chuangtzu3.html#29

[Mono no aware]

I agree with almost everything you wrote there, John Lamb, except I don't think I can be persuaded to see Werther as a poseur.  At worst I might consider him as "a child of his age," since we can agree that the 18th century was a huge upheaval in European thought and marked an overall turning away from God; and Romanticism was a rejection of both Enlightenment sensibilities as well as the religious dogmatism which the Enlightenment strove to overturn.  So the Romantics turned back to nature, and even in its Christian expressions Romanticism has a distinctly pagan tinge.  But Werther precedes Bryon and Romanticism.  If he's doing anything along the lines of a trend, he's actually starting the trend.  His Christianity is lukewarm at best; he can quote the bible, but he's alienated by the boring and bourgeois quality of the Christianity with which he is familiar: it's a whited sepulchre.

Perhaps if he had a better religious formation things would have played out differently for him.  Or perhaps not.  Suicide is always a ghoulish act, but at what point does "too much" become "too much to bear?"  When the sensitive and perceptive soul collides with an incomprehensible level of beauty and grace, then it becomes almost impossible to see one's way to the traditional ordering of the passions.  It has nothing to do with vanity or self-aggrandization, I don't think.  It is simply madness from being overwhelmed.  And I don't think Werther could help that.  We might say that he should "be more sensible," but he is not so made. 

Albert replied, "a person who is carried away by his passions loses all power of judgment and is viewed as a drunkard or madman."

"Oh you sensible people!" I exclaimed.  "Passion!  Drunkenness!  Madness!  You stand there so calm, so unsympathetic, you moral people.  You condemn the drunkard, abhor the man bereft of his reason, pass by like the priest and thank God like the Pharisee that He did not make you as one of these."