classics digests, reflections and reviews
(Mad) Scientist Manifesto Popular lectures are the easiest to listen to, but they are necessarily both superficial and misleading, since they have to be graded to the comprehension of an ignorant audience. Popular lecturers are in their nature parasitic. They exploit for fame or cash the work which has been done by their indigent and unknown brethren. One smallest new fact obtained in the laboratory, one brick built into the […]
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The COVID-19 pandemic and government lockdown have turned my leisure reading to old -almost a century old- science fiction/dystopian/horror novels, such as The Island of Doctor Moreau, Dracula and 1984. Looking back, I noticed a pattern in my choices: all these novels make references to religion and God, and the destiny of man, both as an individual and as a species. Like Aldous Huxley, whose Brave New World is often […]
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Brave New World is a first-class essay written as a third-class novel. It is intellectually stimulating, but emotionally and imaginatively barren, not to mention spiritually uninspiring — curiously similar to the world it envisions. I had known about it for a long time, but had not read it firsthand, and would probably never read it, if the philosopher Dr. Peter Kreeft hadn’t recommended it as one of twenty-six books people […]
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The following is a transcript of Leonard Bernstein’s address to the audience before a performance of Brahms Piano Concerto No. 1, with soloist Glenn Gould and the New York Philharmonic at Carnegie Hall on April 6, 1962 [1]. I find his speech both remarkable in itself and highly relevant today. Among other things, it demonstrates how people with strong convictions and disagreements can get together and “achieve a unified performance”. […]
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Then he no longer spoke. He would step forward, then retreat, look at the figure in a mirror, mutter and utter unintelligible sounds, make changes and corrections. His eyes, which at table had been amiably inattentive, now flashed with strange lights, and he seemed to have grown larger and younger. He worked, worked, worked, with the entire passion and force of his heavy body; whenever he stepped forward or back […]
Read moreYour hands have made me and fashioned me, An intricate unity; Yet You would destroy me. Remember, I pray, that You have made me like clay. And will You turn me into dust again? —Job 10:8-9 (NKJV) When I received news yesterday of an acquaintance’s being diagnosed with and treated for cancer, that verse in Job 10 came to me. When Job received news that all his children had died […]
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