Friday Links
January 20, 2023
“Vanitas Still Life” by Pieter Claesz, 1630
“When You Pursue Me, World” by Rhina Espaillat and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz
Attention and the Screen Sick Soul, by Steven Knepper, in Church Life Journal
Stay Awake: Death, Catholicism, and Yvor Winters from James Matthew Wilson
Phil Klay and Jacob Siegel discuss Stevens’ “Sunday Morning” and Hopkins’ “God’s Grandeur”
Joshua Hren in Front Porch Republic on Bernanos’ The Diary of a Country Priest
“When You Pursue Me, World” by Rhina Espaillat and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz
This stunning translation from Rhina Espaillat appeared in the December 2022 issue of Plough, and includes a recording of Espaillat reciting the poem. Wiseblood Books will be releasing Espaillat’s translations of the poems of San Juan de La Cruz in June of 2023 and her translations of Sor Juana’s poems in September of 2023.
Attention and the Screen Sick Soul, Steven Knepper, in Church Life Journal
In this excellent essay in Church Life Journal, Steven Knepper discusses what Matthew Crawford calls “the attention economy” — the marketplace where we are the resources being mined, the commodification of each of us and our attention. Knepper weaves his way from gas-station pump screens blaring ads to Crawford’s “attention economy” theory to Iris Murdoch’s philosophy of virtue to Josef Pieper’s concerns that many of us have forgotten how to see to Romano Guardini’s observation that our inner lives and outward actions intertwine and nourish each other — all this with several stops in between. What we attend to is what, in part, forms us and our imaginations. Knepper offers practical solutions to how we can mitigate “the attention economy” and its drain on us.
Stay Awake: Death, Catholicism, and Yvor Winters by James Matthew Wilson
“How we ought to live is clarified through contemplating the nature and meaning of our death.” In this essay on the poet and critic, Yvor Winters, James Matthew Wilson discusses the Thomistic foundations of Winters’ thought. With Aquinas (and others) to guide him, “Winters sought to cultivate the life of the mind so as to attain as much as possible a true philosophical knowledge of things good, true, and noble.” As noted in Steven Knepper’s essay, so many of us have ceded our attention to entities that aim to distract us from reality, especially that ultimate reality, death. Wilson shows us that attending to our mortal end will help us to attend more keenly to our lives. Human flourishing, our flourishing, can only come about, as the Church teaches, “by memento mori, by recalling and recalling again the fact of death.”
Phil Klay and Jacob Siegel discuss Stevens’ “Sunday Morning” and Hopkins’ “God’s Grandeur”
Klay and Siegel host one of my favorite podcasts - Manifesto! A Podcast. Their conversations are always interesting and lively, and this episode is no different. Klay and Siegel take two things — a (loosely defined) manifesto and a work of art — and discuss them in relation to each other. They often, but not always, have a guest who chooses the works to discuss. These are conversations between friends who believe that art and literature matter because being human matters, and art and literature can teach us something about what it means to be human. In this episode, they discuss “Sunday Morning” by Wallace Stevens (manifesto) and “God’s Grandeur” by Gerard Manley Hopkins (art). “We live in an old chaos of the sun,” claims Stevens’ narrator. “The world is charged with the grandeur of God,” answers Hopkins, “because the Holy Ghost over the bent/World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.”
Joshua Hren in Front Porch Republic on Bernanos’ The Diary of a Country Priest
In his magnificent novel, The Diary of a Country Priest, George Bernanos’ gives us a flawed, sickly, very human, country priest, the young Curé d’Ambricourt. Bernanos shows us through the Curé’s fumbling devotion to his parishioners that love, grace, and redemption exist even amidst poverty, failures, and suffering. In his essay, Hren focuses on the novel’s “unflinching inquiry into a Gospel mystery too often tamed when touched from actual pulpits: the poor you have always with you.” The young curate, having suffered extreme poverty and hardship during his childhood, wants to solve the problem of poverty in his parish, but as Hren explores, “Christ’s bond with poverty is an unsolvable mystery.” And therefore, poverty, like all suffering, is more than merely a problem to solve.
