Marian Evans (George Eliot), from a letter to Charles Bray in 1859:
I have had heart-cutting experience that opinions are a poor cement between human souls; and the only effect I ardently long to produce by my writings, is that those who read them should be better able to imagine and to feel the pains and the joys of those who differ from themselves in everything but the broad fact of being struggling erring human creatures.
Mary Delany, paper mosaic. Ca. 1775
A decade ago, I wrote an essay about what seemed to me a strange development: the centrality of literature to many people’s Christian faith. I still think about how odd it is that thousands or even millions of people owe their faith not to pastors and sermons and churches, but to novelists and poets.
I’m always negotiating the relationship between micro.blog and my big blog, but I’m getting closer to a system in which micro.blog is a box of delights and the big blog is a Memex. Gonna try to stick with that model.
I despise Man City, but Rodri’s Ballon d’Or is absolutely deserved. He’s been the best player in the world for two or three years now.
Nick Heer: “If software is judged by the difference between what it is actually capable of compared to what it promises, Siri is unquestionably the worst built-in iOS application.” Has been true for more than a decade, will probably continue to be true for another decade.
At the galleys stage of my biography of Paradise Lost — an exciting moment because I don’t have to use Word any more. Here are the epigraphs.
I wrote about articulateness — and the lack thereof — in American Presidents and Presidential candidates. Not so much about politics as about our expectations for public language.
I experience a certain vague ‘spiritualness’ within the world’s chaos, an approximate understanding that God is implicit in some latent, metaphysical way, yet it is only really in church – that profoundly fallible human institution – that I become truly spiritually liberated. I am swept up in a poetic story that is both true and imaginative and fully participatory, where my spiritual imagination can be both contained and free. The church may appear to some as small, even stifling, its congregation herdlike, yet within its architecture, music, litanies, and stories, I find a place of immense spiritual recognition and liberation.
Thinking about it now, the same can be applied to marriage – another audacious feat of the imagination – which, for some of us, like art, like faith, draws into focus what it is to love. It is order itself that allows us to be free.
Listening to: Your Mother Should Know: Brad Mehldau Plays the Beatles ♫
Researchers say AI transcription tool used in hospitals invents things no one ever said. And some of the things it invents are psychotic.
Adam Roberts has a Substack! This should be cause for general rejoicing, and everyone should subscribe. And pay the man! He’s been offering top pun/parody/poetry/pontification content online for years, for free, so you all owe him several thousand dollars each!
Maybe this is a good season for me to re-up my old post on being informed but not absorbed.
