Yankee: Just a Travel Book

-So, I hope you finished Yankee for today’s class.
-I did, but I must admit I read the last 50 pages in diagonal… everybody ends up dead, right?
-You didn’t like it.
-Well… no. For a travel book it’s all right, I guess.
-What do you mean?
-I mean it’s a travel book: Hank goes through his imaginary Middle Ages. No character -development, no plot. Broken scenes with no unity whatsoever…
-You are being too hard on it.
-Maybe. I don’t like people who mock Lancelot either.
-So it’s kind of personal…

Quomodo Sedet Sola Civitas: some thoughts on the Liturgy and Waugh

The first time those words appear in Brideshead Revisited they are used by Cordelia in a conversation with Charles. She quotes the beginning of the book of Jeremiah in order to express her thoughts after the chapel in Brideshead was left empty. The phrase quomodo sedet sola civitas -how lonely the city stands- is taken from the beginning of book of Lamentations, when the prophet cries over the destroyed Jerusalem; they are also used by the Liturgy of the Church in the office of Tenebrae to lament over the death of Christ.

Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled…

I’ve been for a couple of months already systematically reading the Comedy. Even though it has been hard work, I only regret not to have done it before. As an Eliot fan, reading Dante and discovering the references in their context and not as isolated quotes has been very enriching. It makes a lot of difference!

From Ideological Novels, libera nos Domine!

Some years ago a priest who was worried about my formation and the dubious orthodoxy of the books in my reading list, recommended me to mix my peculiar novels and poems with something good -good meaning here instructive, solid and doctrinally sound-. So I took a couple of novels about the first Christians hoping to have a good time while being edified by their example. The start was promising: I read Quo Vadis and I liked it a lot, then I went for Fabiola of Nicholas Card. Wiseman and… my love affair with the novels about the first Christians came to a sudden end.

Manifesto

I should be saying in this entry what this blog is about, but I’m afraid  have no definite plan. I just intend to drop, from time to time, thoughts that come mainly from the books I’m reading… daydreaming about the way things sometimes are…