Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

I invoked one novel of Henry James (1843 - 1916) in my "golden age" list a few weeks back. It was THE SACRED FOUNT. Here is some Wikipedia-type stuff about it.  The novel was published in 1901. It was his 16th novel. By length it might almost be considered a novella.  THE SACRED FOUNT was a departure for James, for several reasons, starting with the first person narration.  Something he never had used before and never would again.  There is also the pagination. All Roman numerals, from beginning to end.  One is accustomed to Roman numbers in a preface and then Arabic numerals for the volume proper.  But in this case, the Romans only end when the book does (at page cxcii). The mental energy required to translate that into 192 is a small thing, but not nothing and presumably contributes to a desired effect.  The plot? As far as outward events go, the plot is simply this.  Our unnamed narrator, a man, takes a train to a party, apparently held on a la...

I'll have nothing to say in this blog over the next couple of days. So this will be our last pre-Christmas post. On Christmas Day itself I'll post the lyrics of a favorite Christmas carol, largely because that's easy to do and I'm holiday-lazy. See you then! The following is a fine statement by John Milton of the eschatological hope bound up with Christianity, and for that matter with the Jewish messianic tradition. enjoy. Time will run back, and fetch the age of gold, And spekl'd vanity Will sicken soon and die, And leprous sin will melt from earthly mould, And Hell itself will pass away, And leave her dolorous mansions to the peering day. Yea Truth, and Justice then Will down return to men, Th'enamelled Arras of the Rainbow wearing, And Mercy set between, Thron'd in celestial sheen, With radiant feet the tissued clouds down steering, And Heav'n as at some festival, Will open wide the Gates of her high Palace Hall. John Milton, Nativ...

I'm still working my way through Leon Chai's book on the relationship between Europe's Romantics and America's mid-19th century Renaissance. I'll say something today about Chai's take on Melville's novella, Billy Budd, Sailor. We begin, as usual in this book, with the relevant European, Balzac. Chai writes about Balzac's attachment to a particular understanding of the "great chain of being," and of how it implied that matter is continuous with spirit, animal nature continuous with that of humans, etc. In this connection, Chai alludes to Balzac's tale, Une passion dans le désert, published more than half a century before Billy Budd .  the passion between panther and soldier is plausible on the assumption that there is a smooth continuum, no sudden break separating soul-endowed humans from organic-but-mechanistic felines. Related: in Seraphita Balzac writes of the body and the spirit in these terms, "The body has redemanded...