I don’t know how many of our readers know enough French to work through this brief poem, but for them, I shall give a few notes as well as the bald translation. If anyone knows of a good translation, I shall add it to the post.
The U.S. Supreme Court has overturned Roe v. Wade, and we are all happy that a repulsive gaping sore in American law is gone and that Satan’s helpers have got a swat on the snout… However,
The play is a veritable choreography of vengeance. A negative appraiser might find the complexities tedious and contrived, but we might, by examining some of the characters, come to a more positive conclusion;
Since there are no questions or comments on Act I of The Revenger’s Tragedy, we can move on to October’s book: Descent Into Hell by Charles Williams. Williams, as I think everyone knows, was a friend of Tolkien and Lewis, and with them he helped both to vitalize Christian fiction and to lend respectability to supernatural tales.
Jerry D. Salyer, a subscriber who writes in occasionally, has written a brief review published in Catholic World Report. Here is the concluding paragraphs:
The search for a rationally perfect society always leads to tyranny. Morality and politics are rooted not in pure reason but in our attachments by love or strife to others. The Greek mystical philosopher Empedocles is a better guide than the abstract reasonings of Descartes and Kant.
Steven Bannon’s zany conspiracy theory is just a PR stunt, but the posthuman race has already arrived.
Months before hostilities started in Ukraine, the liberal press was warning us indirectly about the intentions of the Democrats, thus revealing to the world what was about to happen.
Some time ago, I abandoned the regular discussion of selected books. The reason should have been obvious. The cause has disappeared, and we can resume. Working on the second volume of Properties of Blood, I need to rewrite the chapters on revenge. This is a good occasion for looking at the classic work of the English stage, The Avenger’s Tragedy….
Men and women have been trying to reason their way into a good life for centuries. Accepting every ideology proposed by the latest crack-brained intellectual, they fall farther and farther away from the moral and political realities required by human nature.
