When one is in the part of Bogota where buildings crowd the skies, it is good to be able to look east above and between and see the high, green side of a mountain. You look up an see a plunging meadow, sunlit and with all the bushes and trees distinct. It is the clarity that is sometimes most astonishing: you can see eucalyptus against the sky, pines marching in humbler ranks along the ridge, and you get a sense of the texture of the grass even though you can’t really observe it. Very close it seems, and so close to the sky.

A day that began with fog. It cleared unfortunately, and among other things I had a walk while reading in the sun. The clouds were coming out of the south and all the day it remained somewhat hazy. Then out of the north came a storm washing over us. Looking south, against the pale blue and the white clouds still touched by the sun I saw the driven sheets of rain, like supple grey rods in the heavens hastening, like somebody opened up the water too soon and it was being rushed toward the place where it really needed to fall. All slippery and wet, no doubt.

The heavens of Bogota hold many surprises. The rain cleared and the storm moved downtown and wrapped the eastern hills in fog and great darkness. Then it moved southwest. Then it appeared to have dissipated and the clouds overhead were luminous orange with sunset.

We went up north and found the rain had settled there again, as if the storm had circled over Bogota. They do, you know. I’ve watched the storm stand on a little, western hill with all the sky ominous, yellowish grey behind the hill. The clouds will stretch out toward me further east, and then retreat, and suddenly the sun will shine through. Sometimes I’ll watch the rain a long time on the eastern hills, or in the south away, and it will not come to us. It will stop its advance and circle on the spot it already knows well. But we are sometimes rewarded by great, solitary clouds out of the north that drench us, and in late afternoon drench us while the setting sun glows on it all.

The Ochlophobist has a post on Loome of the bookstore. I’m not sure he isn’t guilty of exaggeration in the first paragraph, but you will understand why. It concludes very well and is worthwhile throughout.

The first comment interested me too. WWI as the grave of a lot of Europe’s valuable peers is an idea that makes great sense.

1 As I walked into the station I watched the J70 glide away. Well, it is the right bus but is a crowded bus and I have other options. Then came another J70 and it never got crowded.

2 I got downtown just as the bank opened: no line, no waiting, nothing.

3 I read Walter de la Mare for an hour or so at the library. It is classified as an old book and I can’t take it out, so I have to read it there. Sometimes one reads poetry and it is labor, sometimes it goes easily and is exhilarating, suggesting to one other things along the way. It was the latter this morning.

4 Got Elizabeth Bowen’s To the North and was very pleased with the first two chapters. The novel has many masters, but in the hands of women it reaches its perfection. We will see if this one holds out, but Bowen can usually be counted on for interpersonal subtleties and for very satisfying observation of the details of an age.

5 Had a meeting where we discussed our new contract at work. Looks like we’ll have better pay, better treatment, bonuses, and opportunities for more training. The situation was getting grim there, and now it appears to be turning around. They’ve got me a membership to the British Council.

6 Was able to read on the bus back.

7 Good lunch.

8 Afternoon class cancelled late. No teaching and I still get paid.

9 When I had just made the awful discovery that I’d left the Kalevala at work in a locker, the doorbell rang and the box of books I had not dared expect would actually arrive arrived! My Charles Williams, my Frost, my Yeats, my Bowen’s stories, Boswell’s Johnson, the Worm, an unread Barfield, Coleridge and also Middlemarch for bonus. And my Fenelon, which is already with the Bibles and the Book of Common Prayer.

Thanks to Deborah for mailing it. Thanks to my in-law’s for underwriting the financial aspect thereof.

Just in time for the holidays.

10 My new Moleskine notebook just arrived at the bookstore. I’m down to two pages on the one I have.

For Christmas they light up the city here in Colombia. Only in many places there is little sense of order or taste. The lights blink frenetically, they come in assorted hues, and are used liberally and hung randomly and precariously.

What is the simile I want? It is like . . . it is like . . . science fiction that isn’t so tame. It’s like the aliens landed and started using human lighting without having a human understanding of it.

I’m very happy here.

Want to hear more science fiction? They started piping the priest in the catholic church when he leads whatever singing they do, so we can hear him from the apartment—and none of them can sing. Last night he was singing, If you’re saved and you know it say Amen. Saved!? I thought that was still a sin of presumption in the catholic church. It’s like aliens landed and started using the catholic church without having a human understanding of it.

Wouldn’t it be weird if the aliens landed and all turned out to be evangelicals?

Well, maybe that wouldn’t be so strange. It would explain a lot.

All other love is like the moon,
Which grows and shrinks like flower on plain;
Like bud that blooms and withers soon;
Like passing day that ends in rain.

All other love begins in bliss
And ends in tears and suffering:
No love can salve us all but this,
The love that rests in heaven’s King.

For ever green, renewed again,
For ever full, it never pales.
It ever sweetens, free from pain,
Continues always, never fails.

All other love I fled for this:
Tell me, tell me, where you lie!
‘In Mary, tender, full of bliss,
And yet still more in Christ, live I.’

I found not you, but Christ found me:
Hold me to you with might and main!
And grant that my love steadfast be,
For fear it quickly change again.

And yet—and yet—my heart is sore;
I feel it gushing out my blood.
God leave my side? I care no more—
Still, his will to me be good!

Alas! What should I do in Rome?
I say in word of courtly love:
‘Man’s word undoes me with its doom,
Unless he help who sits above.’

—Anon. Penguin Book of Medieval English Verse, 44.

At the library armed Minerva with helm and shield and spear strides forward barefoot, in a robe and exposing a green knee. There is something very angular about this Minerva, a rectilinear austerity of determination (genitive of source). Her statue stands near the entrance and is poised heading resolutely away from that repository of learning.

From my H13 I looked into an H74 and saw a smooth shoulder, a round chin under rose lips, and billows of black hair. The girl leaning near the door, facing north and heading south was no angular Minerva. Minerva’s hair I’ve never noticed, but the hair of most Colombian girls is glorious every morning, with an unartificial, disheveled charm to its abundant quantity. I noticed too on the top of an insurance building the vegetation rampant in the sun, like shining hair.

I tried to exit the H13 at the Third Millennium Park, but the glass doors permitting people to enter the station from the bus were unresponsive. The bus peeped and hissed and was ineffectively indignant. I think it is a failure in the device onboard the bus because this never happens without there being an antecedental series of refusals on the part of the doors in previous stations along the way. I walked along the narrow ledge and leapt onto the pavement, thus exiting without being numbered at the turnstile that delimits the space for which one pays and the free world. What was odd was that I should lead the way and not the Colombian still engaged in knocking on the glass door.

The morning sun had long reached over the great cliffs that overlook the center of town. There the jungle hung poised and upon us came the shafts of the sun. The vegetation on those rocks seen from a distance has a look of tenacity and siege, as if it were there for war and hangs waiting to move forward. The few buildings on those cliffs stand triumphant.

From the Third Millennium Park you walk up the slope toward the old San Victorino neighborhood where the mobile vulgus of the Revolution resided. On Saturday morning Bogota’s medieval crowds are gathering, the ambulating coffee sellers go in their white coveralls carrying gallons of coffee on back-pack rigged metal cylinders, cell-phone minute sellers are standing with four or five phones chained to their belts—I saw the chain leading away from one, under the long sleeve of a nun’s black habit and up to where she was holding the phone to her ear, the carts are positioned, the plastic spread on the sidewalk, the iron blinds thrown up and merchandising in progress. Calls of breakfast are heard and the halt, the lame, the maimed and deformed, the blind and every kind of panhandler claims a corner by the passing throng from which an intermittent rain of coins begins.

At the military museum a military unit entered a sub-compact Chevrolet. As the guards moved the barrier and let him onto the unrestricted road, they all exchanged glaces without saluting. Guns passing in a darkness of recognition and ritual, and the ghost of Matthew Arnold.

After this it was I went to the library, and on the way I saw a dead pigeon huddled against a bollard. The pigeons are prodigious here, and they must die prodigiously. I’ve seen one dreaming in the water of a fountain, and this second one was by the road, waiting to be swept by one of those whose lot is the endless sweeping of the unending litter of Bogota. It raised the question—this my second dead pigeon—of where the pigeons go to die. It is like the enigma of the chicken bones: so many chicken bones there must be in a city whose digestion can be said to be maintained by the continual passage of the meat, the grease and cartilage of this roasted, boiled, stewed, grilled, griddled fowl. But the bones? Where do they all collect and amass? And the pigeons dying on rooftops, in inaccessible corners, in the tops of palm trees, the bottoms of fountains or deep inside the mysteries of evergreens, who takes them up and gives them burial?

Far away to the south, among the mountains that even the poor have not yet covered they must all be buried, the pigeons and the chicken bones and feathers, decomposing under the clouds now gathering over the city to protect us from the sun. In a damp room I tell my students that a present perfect in English is formed by the auxiliary Have in the present tense and the past participle, and we learn how it is used to talk about life experiences, how the past simple comes into play when we want to get more specific.

Everything is reducible to simplicities, except for some irreducible complexities, you know. I have learned from this class and another student at the same level, that there are people with no love of learning for the sake of learning. For these it is that educational romanticism invents the theory all the world will one day laugh at about multiple intelligences: ways to distract them from the boredom of the interesting while they are not watching a TV in which they do not believe though they watch at least 3 hours every single day. I teach them simplicities and hope they will one day wonder at the irreducible complexities and learn not to worry them, though I’m more worried they’ll never learn to see them.

And Minerva? Curiously, it is to the south that paralyzed Minerva appears to be headed. Minerva must be fed up, and she wants to sit among the decomposing pigeons and the fantastic mounds of chicken bones, or to poke around and find in all that abundance and complexity that by the worms and maggots is being reduced to simple soil some better, new austerity.

* * *
On the dangers of literacy.

La rosa
no buscaba la aurora:
Casi eterna en su ramo
buscaba otra cosa.

La rosa
no buscaba ni ciencia ni sombra:
Confín de carne y sueño
buscaba otra cosa.

La rosa
no buscaba la rosa:
Inmóvil por el cielo
¡buscaba otra cosa!

—Federico García Lorca

Búsqueda realizada Índice de Autor: SCRUTON-ROGER/ en catálogo
Resultados encontrados 1 – 9 de 9

Autor ————————–Tìtulo—————————-Año
1 Scruton, Roger. The aesthetics of music / Roger Scruton. 1997

2 Scruton, Roger. Cultura para personas inteligentes / Roger Scruton ; traducción de Joan Solé. 1998

3 Scruton, Roger. A dictionary of political thought / Roger Scruton. 1982

4 Scruton, Roger. La estética de la arquitectura / Roger Scruton ; versión española de Jesús Fernández Zulaica. 1985

5 Scruton, Roger. La experiencia estética : ensayos sobre la filosofía del arte y la cultura / Roger Scruton ; traducción Cristina Múgica Rodríguez. 1987

6 Scruton, Roger. Filosofía moderna : una introducción sinóptica / Roger Scruton ; traducción Héctor Orrego Matte ; prólogo M. E. Orellana Benado. 1994

7 Scruton, Roger. Filosofía para personas inteligentes / Roger Scruton ; traducción de Vicent Mingus B. Formentor. 1999

8 Scruton, Roger. Historia de la filosofía moderna : de Descartes a Wittgenstein / Roger Scruton ; traducción de Vicent Raga. 1983

9 Scruton, Roger. Spinoza / Roger Scruton ; traducción de María del Rosario García. 1999

I’m enjoying the Everyman’s edition of the Kalevala. I turned to the notes recently and caught up on them and was very pleased. There is an art to notes: they must be succinct in a way that stirs up desire for more but must not be exhaustive, and they must point from themselves in the right direction. These particular notes filled me with a desire for etymology and philology, but also a desire for the worlds of the other old languages mentioned, the mythology harbored in the consciousness tinged (tinge is weak) by that medium.

Good notes help the reader read more intelligently not only by imparting crucial information, but by guiding the reader eventually to ask good questions, to notice things in the text he might not otherwise notice. In a genre like the Kalevala, they guide the inexperienced reader into the peculiarities of its appreciation. So notes can be very important, able to foster love or to stifle it when they are clumsy.

It reminds me of two similar experiences. One is the experience I had of reading that learned book by William Ramsay, St. Paul the Traveler and Roman Citizen. It changed the way I looked at the text of the New Testament, began an understanding of the learning around that ancient document—particularly textual criticism. It was not a note, but compared to the New Testament, Ramsay’s book is like all the rest of philosophy to Plato.

The other experience is that of reading the notes of Tozer at the end of Knowledge of the Holy. Tozer was mostly very good at succinctness, and if those notes are not almost too succinct then nothing is. But they are not too succinct, they are enough and when followed open onto a whole new dimension of existence—at least they did for me. Such is the function of a proper Note.