3 posts tagged “augustine of hippo”
I'm about twenty pages to starting Augustine's Confessions, arguably one of the most important works in all of the
Western canon. I've read it before, but it's been a few years. And this time, I'm reading the Latin for as much as I can (lest my Latin shrivel up and die like my Greek already has). For fun, I've gone to the amazon.com review page for this book and picked out my favorites. Here are a selection:
Hate to Give it One Star, February 6, 2006
| Reviewer: | bigmac (Boston, MA) - See all my reviews |
Victims Don't Count, December 3, 2001
| Reviewer: | Peter L. Swiinford (Lafayette, IN USA) - See all my reviews |
overrated, September 23, 2005
| Reviewer: | Jeff E. Martin (mechanicsburg, pa United States) - See all my reviews |
There I just told you the best part of the book. Chapters 10 and 11 are absolutely horrific. Can anyone really say they understood those chapters?
Augustine has a major problem with sex in general and is a really bad advice giver on that subject.
Last night, I was at my local coffeehouse tweaking my resumé and reading Augustine,
when someone on the staff put on Joy Division, perhaps my favorite band of all time. I suddenly found myself scribbling frantically in a Kubla Khan-like frenzy about "Augustine and the Unknown Pleasures." Thinking back on it, it made not a single bit of sense and went on and on about how Ian Curtis, living in post-industrial Manchester and Macclesfield, UK, believed he had only internal free will and was bound by the economic and social restraints of working class England that left him isolated and marginalized. Even then, his free will could only be manifested through lamentation. Then, somehow, I wandered into this idea that Joy Division conveys a Romanticism full of the nostalgia akin to Nietzsche's "God is Dead", i.e., that any notion of established and reliable truth has fallen in disillusion and that there is no signifier - only the signs of what was or what was thought to be.To be honest, it was a fun flurry of bad handwriting and theorizing, but to put Augustine and Ian Curtis together like that is wholly sophomoric. Unless, of course, I did a better job of taking on the collapse of the Church of England as a cultural force in contemporary British society. And I was really just writing for fun, anyway.
Well, I always have a number of things on deck: