22 Comments

The Orioles were perhaps the most exciting team in baseball last year, are you just as optimistic about this new season?

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Yes. If Bradish and Means get back from their injuries soon, I am especially sanguine. Out of spring training, the team sent down to Triple-A Holliday, Basallo, Stowers, Kjerstadt, Mayo, and Norby, all of whom any other team would have had on their major league roster breaking camp, and did so because there was not yet room for them. No other franchise at the moment has that wealth of talent. So…

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This whole conversation seems like an extended gloss on W. H. Auden's "Moon Landing." Some lines that perfectly capture David's comments on superstition:

[...] and the old warnings

still have power to scare me: Hybris comes to

an ugly finish, Irreverence

is a greater oaf than Superstition.

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Thank you for highlighting!

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Dr Hart, you mentioned something in the first interview along the lines of the need to practice and almost make a liturgical habit of reacquainting ourselves toward wonder to combat the mechanistic view of reality.

Do you have a book recommendation that could help facilitate that? Particularly in the fantasy genre if you can help it.

Thanks!

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As ever, I’d go with Traherne’s Centuries but would add JH Baker’s The Hill of Summer.

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Beautiful. Thank you, sir. I actually have a copy of Centuries that needs revisiting.

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On the topic of book recommendations: which one book of Fermor would you recommend? My turn is coming up in my book club to choose the book and I’d like to showcase him. Maybe one of the trilogy or Roumeli?

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I suppose A Time of Gifts, though they’re all splendid.

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I feared as much; that is a pretty bleak prognosis - I suppose we get what we deserve... In the meantime I shall follow your wise advice and cultivate a deep and healthy superstitious disposition

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That was great - thanks! This may be impossible to answer but I’d love to know what you think… Given there is no way back for the culture to feel a unity and harmony with the external world as objectively meaningful, is there a way through this process of estrangement on the far side of which we can find meaningful communion or are we in for a long and uncertain night of despair…?

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There's alway a chance, I suppose, but then there would still be a good deal of damage to repair. I think, though, that--short of revolution following on unforeseen catastrophe--it's unlikely.

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David, I want to get your thoughts ont the whole Ohtani gambling scandal?

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Whereas I recall that you honoured a Herman Melville volume as 150th in that list. Today, Good Friday, I pick up with Captain Ahab in chapter 28, Melville’s introductory description of the man reaches a climax with ‘…moody stricken Ahab stood before them with a crucifixion in his face; in all the nameless regal overbearing dignity of some mighty woe.’

A lovely conversation with the young woman.

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Her good mood was contagious, I found.

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I just listened to you and Wesley yesterday. It was wonderful, the time flew by. I actually have a question for you: What are your thoughts on Erasmus? I’ve been reading his works a lot and they happen to resonate with me quite a lot. I mean this as a compliment, so forgive me if you don’t see it that way, but you remind me a lot of him (the praise of folly comes to mind right away) So, I was just interested in your thoughts on him.

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I love Erasmus. Surely everyone does. I love Voltaire and Mencken too, so it’s all of a piece.

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My present situation limits me to a single volume and I'm very interested in Leiris's 3rd vol. Would vol 3 still be worth reading without having read 1 and 2? To what extent can each stand alone?

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Yes, every volume can be read by itself.

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Mar 28
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Mar 28
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To be fair, that's just sober judgement.

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And a moral principle, of course.

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