Book Review: The Life of J.-K. Huysmans by Robert Baldick
“Lord, you gave him great talent, and he used it for your glory. You gave him great suffering, and he accepted it for your blessing…”
– Abbé Fontaine
Tag: history
Book Review: New Lies for Old by Anatoliy Golitsyn
“Our major secret weapon is to deprive you of an enemy.”
– Georgi Arbatov
Trobadourism: The Idolization of Romance and Its Decadent Consequences, Past and Present
“Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks, / But bears it out even to the edge of doom.”
– William Shakespeare
Book Review: Religion and the Rise of Western Culture by Christopher Dawson
“The importance of these centuries…is not to be found in the external order they attempted to create, but in the internal change they brought about in the soul of Western man—a change which can never be entirely undone expect by the total negation or destruction of Western man himself.”
– Christopher Dawson
Book Review: The Making of Europe by Christopher Dawson
“For heroes have the whole earth for their tomb; and in lands far from their own, where the column with its epitaph declares it, there is enshrined in every breast a record unwritten with no tablet to preserve it, except that of the heart.”
– Pericles, “Funeral Oration”
Book Review: Sigmund Freud and the Jewish Mystical Tradition by David Bakan
“And have no fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness, but rather reprove them.”
– Ephesians 5:11
Book Download: English Literature: A Survey and A Commentary by Brother Leo
The soul, the mind, needs food and exercise just as the body does; but the food of the mind is not bread, and its exercise is not games. It feeds on visions of truth and beauty as supplied by the master word artists in literature; its exercise is to wrestle with ideas enshrined in noble books, even as Jacob wrestled all the night with the angel; and its reward is, like Jacob’s, to receive a joyful blessing at the dawn.
Book Review: The Gothic Cathedral: Origins of Gothic Architecture and the Medieval Concept of Order by Otto Von Simson
“Against the darkness of the interior, the windows are in effect grey or black, and one must go inside the church and turn round in order to see the fire of the glass catch alight; the outside is here sacrificed to the inside. Why?
Perhaps, Durtal answered himself, it’s a symbol of the soul illuminated in its innermost places, an allegory of the spiritual life…”
– The Cathedral, J.K. Huysmans
A Lament For Lost Fragments
“Those who seek gold dig up much earth but find little.”
– Heraclitus, (Fragment B22)
Book Review of A History of Philosophy, Vol. I: Greece and Rome by Fr. Fredrick Copleston, S.J.
“And a vision was shewed to Paul in the night, which was a man of Macedonia standing and beseeching him, and saying: Pass over into Macedonia, and help us.”
– Acts 16:9