The Broken Center and Dante

Here's another example of the power of the blogosphere. Father Richard John Neuhaus, on First Things, notes the passing of Nathan Scott, who sounds like a wonderful scholar and critic (who also liked cigarettes and dry martinis, which also earn points in my book). He mentions Scott's book The Broken Center. I check it out of the library of the college where I used to teach. It's stunning. It surveys modern literature's ways of coping with the disappearance of meaning from life, which coincided wqith the abandonment of faith. It finds parallels betwen 2oth century novels and ancient Gnostic heresies. It displays an amazing breadth and depth of learning, and it resonates with my own sense of modernists like Pound, Eliot, Joyce, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald.

It also includes quotes from other works that I now want to read or re-read. For example, he quotes from Richard Sewell on the essence of tragic action: "Man at the limits of his sovereignty--Job on the ash heap, Prometheus on the crag, Lear on the heath, Ahab on his lonely quarterdeck...with all the protective covering ripped off."

Perhaps to balance this book about the absence of a center, I have started The Divine Comedy, which perhaps is the literary work that demonstrates the unbroken center par excellence. I am reading Dorothy Sayers' translation, and it is marvelous, although I am finding myself wanting to learn Italian, so I can read the original text.

Incidentally, starting my own blog has made realize again how hard it is to convey as solid English what seemed so intelligent when it was but a fleeting idea. I thought of Eliot's famous description of poetry in this context:

(a) raid on the inarticulate
With shabby equipment always deteriorating,
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion.

"Undisciplined squads of thoughts" applies equally well to writing a blog post.

Posted by Finn MacCool