Malcolm Guite with pilgrimage poems for the first week of Lent
At his blog the poet Malcolm Guite features a suite of poems on pilgrimage, one for each day of the first week of Lent: In this first week in…
Category: commonplace book
#AshWednesday with Evelyn Waugh in New Orleans, 1949
Via the Evelyn Waugh Society online I came across this from Waugh in 1949. It captures the falseness of the dichotomy betweent the fleshy pleasure of Mardi Gras and the…
” To Be Perfect Is to Have Changed Often”
It’s been a while since I posted anything linking to Adam deVille’s blog but I was struck by the title of the book he considers here. I am curious to…
“Weren’t you delighted to see such beauty as hers?” : Introducing St Pelagia the Harlot
In “Of Martyrs, Monks, and Mystics: A Yearly Meditational Reader of Ancient Spiritual Wisdom”by Charles Ringma and Irene Alexander, I came across this quote from The Life of St. Pelagia…
Apologetic temperance
At The Frailest Thing, LM Sacasas has a post on digital detox provoked by this New York Times piece by Kevin Roose. The whole thing (in both cases) is worth…
You are not alone: the word “sonder”
I recently came across the word “sonder” Coined in 2012 by John Koenig, whose project, The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, aims to come up with new words for emotions that…
Review of “Homesickness: An American History” by Susan Matt, Irish Journal of Psychological Medicine, 2012
This is a wonderful book I heartily recommend, indeed re-reading the review I hope the warmth of my recommendation is clear. The balance Susan Mat strikes between mastery of the…
An amusing correction in the TLS letters page from 12 years ago
While looking for something entirely different, I came across this letter to the TLS by Tim Nau from January 5th 2007: Sir, -In a paragraph about saints of the Dark Ages…
Séamus Sweeney 