Friday Links, December 15, 2017

The January 2018 issue of First Things includes poems from James Matthew Wilson and our own Joshua Hren, but I have a particular fondness for "Saint Martha and the Dragon" by my friend Adam Cooper. "And yet she girds her loins for this one thing, / To sit beside her sister at his feet, / While dishes burn and stewpots, seething, spill."

Should you only buy the amount of books you can reasonably expect to read, or should you surround yourself with more books than you'll ever have time to read? "Why? Perhaps because it is a well known psychological fact that is the most incompetent who are the most confident of their abilities and the most intelligent who are full of doubt. (Really, it's called the Dunning-Kruger effect). It's equally well established that the more readily admit you don't know things, the faster you learn."

Back to First Things for a moment, when rummaging through their archives one finds a delightful rant about the hatefulness of Joyce's Ulysses. "For at least the past fifty years, fans of the notoriously difficult novel have gathered around the world in order to drink, dress up and celebrate their status as the literary equivalent of Trekkies. Who are these people? And why is such a monstrously bad book still praised so highly? Perhaps it can be attributed to the career inferiority complexes of English majors."

Can a reclamation of magnanimity elevate the current level of public discourse? Stephen M. Klugewicz thinks it's a possibility. "But what is ultimately called for in modern public discourse is not mere humility, but magnanimity, which literally means having a 'large spirit,' or a 'great soul.' The fortunate among us have known at least one such person with a great soul—that person who never gossips, who appears not to see faults in others, overlooking, or at least silently tolerating such failings, and seeming to notice only the good qualities of his fellow man."