Reading in Exile

I have finally completed David Foster Wallace's magnificent novel Infinite Jest . It took me eight months, but I read many other novels and other books during that time as well. It's a book worth taking slowly. There's a great deal that could be said about it, but for now I'll just say a little. Much has been written on the themes of the book: addiction in general, America's addiction to entertainment in general, the conflict between the freedom of pure license and obedience to a higher authority, how playing high-level competitive sport both shelters us from the horror of the freedom of pure license and also is a horror and an addiction in itself, the spiritual depth of twelve-step programs, the need to overcome an ironic and cynical stance toward the world in favor of a heartfelt, even naive, sincerity, etc. Much has been written on the form of the novel: its cyclic structure, its encyclopedic accounts of tennis and drugs and Alcoholics Anon...

On my family's road trips, we listen to audio books, to pass the time, and to amuse my wife and I and our children. We've taken a few trips in the last few weeks, and on them we listened to Little Women by Louisa May Alcott , and Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson . Both of these books were among my favorites when I was a boy, and it's a pleasure now to share them with my children. When I read a book, I'm always sensitive to how it is trying to form me, especially how it's trying to form my worldview and my morals. I know that literature is not chiefly meant to be didactic (indeed, extremely didactic literature is boring) or like a work of philosophy, but is meant to be a thing of beauty. Nevertheless, one of the great extrinsic effects of literature is that it teaches us, it forms us, preferably without our even noticing. Human beings are called to greatness. My heart resonates before those books that show me this greatness. There is a place for books tha...

The Western Catholic intellectual tradition is built as it were in layers of texts, with one writer commenting upon another, and then further writers commenting upon that one. Consider, for example, the following chain of commentaries: the Neo-Platonic philosopher Porphyry wrote his Isagoge , which was a commentary on and introduction to parts of Aristotle's logical texts (his Organon ); St. Boethius, in turn, wrote a commentary on the Isagoge , as well as on parts of Aristotle's Organon e.g. the Categories and the De interpretatione . Peter Abelard also wrote a commentary on the Isagoge as well as on various parts of the Organon , but his Isagoge commentary is in large part a commentary on Boethius' commentary on the Isagoge . Abelard in turn influenced later commentators on these logical works. To "comment" is to engage in a paradigmatically traditionary actitivty. It is not merely to merely explain the meaning of the text on which one is commenting. Rather, i...

There may be people for whom writing is a constant pleasure, but for me it is both a burden and a compulsion. As long as I can remember, I have longed to write, and felt the need to put down my thoughts in writing. Writing is thinking; I cannot work out an idea in my head, but must commit it to the page, working it out in the physical interaction with pen or keyboard (and thereby, oftentimes, purging myself of those ideas that fester in my mind, undeveloped because un-developed). In this, we can see the structure of the human person: the spiritual made manifest in the material, the material the very mode of the spiritual's presence to itself. Now, as an academic, I must write, in order to retain my job. But writing is so difficult; one longs to find The word neither diffident nor ostentatious, An easy commerce of the old and the new, The common word exact without vulgarity, The formal word precise but not pedantic, The complete consort dancing together But this is difficult...