What an amazing post by Adam Roberts, on Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” as illuminated by a dozen other things, from Homer to C. S. Lewis to a Superman comic.
From John Ruskin's Fors Clavigera, Letter 7:
You are to do good work, whether you live or die. It may be you will have to die; — well, men have died for their country often, yet doing her no good; be ready to die for her in doing her assured good: her, and all other countries with her. Mind your own business with your absolute heart and soul; but see that it is a good business first. That it is corn and sweet peas you are producing, — not gunpowder and arsenic. And be sure of this, literally: — you must simply rather die than make any destroying mechanism or compound. You are to be literally employed in cultivating the ground, or making useful things, and carrying them where they are wanted. Stand in the streets, and say to all who pass by: Have you any vineyard we can work in, — not Naboth's? In your powder and petroleum manufactory, we work no more.
last words
From Evelyn Waugh’s biography of Ronald Knox:
For three days he lay in a coma, but once Lady Eldon saw a stir of consciousness and asked whether he would like her to read to him from his own New Testament. He answered very faintly, but distinctly: ‘No’; and then after a long pause in which he seemed to have lapsed again into unconsciousness, there came from the death-bed, just audibly, in the idiom of his youth: ‘Awfully jolly of you to suggest it, though.’
They were his last words.
My favorite story about Knox, about whom there are many many stories, is that when he had a private audience with Pope Pius XII the chief thing that the Holy Father wanted to talk about was the Loch Ness monster. (I guess that’s more of a Pope story than a Knox story, but anyway.)
Yousuf Karsh’s portraits deserve their great fame, and one of my favorites is this one, of Helen Taussig, who basically invented pediatric cardiology. Taussig was a remarkable person. After becoming fully deaf in adulthood, she developed ingenious ways to communicate with her patients; and at the end of her long life she was studying congenital heart defects in birds.
Phil Foden shouldn’t have gotten the Player of the Year trophy because he’s neither the best nor the most important player on his own team. Luis Miguel Echegaray is right: the Premier League player of the year is Rodri. I despise Man City, but Rodri is titanic. ⚽️
Every year I re-read at least one of John Ruskin’s books, and I’ve just gone through The Stones of Venice again. No other writer lights up my brain quite the way Ruskin does. See posts tagged ruskin on my blog. I often wish I could go back in time and tell my 22-year-old self, “Let Ruskin be your guide.” I would’ve had a very different and more useful career.
Ruskin on Color
The perception of colour is a gift just as definitely granted to one person, and denied to another, as an ear for music; and the very first requisite for true judgment of Saint Mark’s, is the perfection of that colour-faculty which few people ever set themselves seriously to find out whether they possess or not. […]
The fact is, that, of all God’s gifts to the sight of man, colour is the holiest, the most divine, the most solemn. We speak rashly of gay color and sad color, for color cannot at once be good and gay. All good color is in some degree pensive, the loveliest is melancholy, and the purest and most thoughtful minds are those which love colour the most.
– John Ruskin, The Stones of Venice
Ruskin thought about color all the time, and wrote about it often. See for instance this post. He seems to have thought color itself a mystical and revelatory thing, something he was surprised and delighted that God took the trouble to create.
Musa al-Gharbi: “Universities in general, and elite schools in particular, exist largely to launder wealth into perceptions of ‘merit.’ They help the children of wealthy and well-connected families reproduce their social position and feel like they ’earned’ it.” That may not be the whole story, but … he’s not wrong.