‘The statue of St Teresa of Avila, rapt in her vision of the fiery angel, can be found in a side chapel in the Roman Church of Santa Maria della Vittoria ...
What we have here is a striking embodiment, in wood and marble, of the Ignatian method of meditation. It was a method that Bernini practised himself, in which the devotee was recommended to imagine, as physically as possible, the key moments in the lives of Christ and His Saints. The method is based on a lively faith in the Incarnation, that God really did become man and that matter has, ever since, been open to invasion by the sacred. The belief is particularly obvious at Mass, when the consecrated bread becomes a ‘host’ for the Body of Christ, but it is just as potent in the doctrines that teach that the human body is a dwelling place for the Holy Spirit or that justify the use of the bells, statues, icons, relics, incense, oil, water and salt (and similar aids to devotion) by defining them as potential channels through which God can reach the worshipper. It is this theology that allows Bernini to transform St Teresa's inner vision into a tactile experience and underpins the Catholic assertion that worship is not an exclusively mental occupation, but can be adequately expressed in physical action as well.’
Sarah Lenton, ‘Pious Gestures’ in the Royal Opera House's programme notes to its 2006 production of Tosca.
‘The leftist German philosopher Jürgen Habermas, hero of the 1968 movements, [addressed the vacuum of purpose and meaning] in his fascinating recent dialogue with his compatriot Pope Benedict XVI. Habermas called for a reconciliation with the religious past of Europe, and acknowledged that democracy may not generate the values on which its vitality depends. The liberal state should "treat with care all cultural sources on which the normative consciousness and solidarity of citizens draws". In other words, concepts of wrongdoing, forgiveness and responsibility are at the heart of a democracy, and any mechanisms available to reinforce these basics are too precious to disregard.’
Madeline Bunting, The Guardian, Monday June 19 2006. Full text at Guardian Unlimited website.
‘Paul de Grauwe, economics professor at the Catholic University of Lauven, gave a presentation at Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein last month in which he ... said he had failed to find a statistically significant relationship between product market regulation and GDP or productivity growth. Too much competition, he posited, might be bad for innovation and growth since companies needed the incentive of economic rents (returns above those available in fully competitive markets, in other words) in order to bring new goods to market.
Nor could Mr de Grauwe find a statistically significant relationship between labour market reform and productivity growth. There was a link between labour market reform and overall growth, but it explained only a small proportion of the variation in growth between two countries.
... some of the claims made for deregulation and flexibility as a cure-all for Europe's ills need to be re-examined. In this context, last week's Employment Outlook from the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development made the point that there was no single way to achieve high employment. Many countries with low unemployment had done so while having extensive labour market regulation.’
Larry Elliott, The Guardian, Monday June 19 2006. Full text at Guardian Unlimited website.
‘The Mémoires [de guerre] begin with a striking sentence—“Toute ma vie, je me suis fait une certaine idée de la France”—a sentence so alike in its rhythm and so contrary in its direction to that equally striking sentence which begins A la recherche du temps perdu: “Longtemps, je me suis couché de bonne heure.” How amazing it had been, to discover a politician who begins his self-vindication by suggesting something—and something so deeply hidden behind the bold mask of his words! I had been equally struck by the description of the state funeral for Valéry — de Gaulle’s first public gesture on liberating Paris—since it too suggested priorities unimaginable in an English politician. The image of the cortège, as it took its way to the cathedral of Notre Dame, the proud general first among the mourners, and here and there a German sniper still looking down from the rooftops, had made a vivid impression on me ... According to the Gaullist vision, a nation is defined not by institutions or borders but by language, religion, and high culture; in times of turmoil and conquest it is those spiritual things that must be protected and reaffirmed. The funeral for Valéry followed naturally from this way of seeing things. And I associated the France of de Gaulle with Valéry’s Cimetière marin — that haunting invocation of the dead which conveyed to me, much more profoundly than any politician’s words or gestures, the true meaning of a national idea.’
Roger Scruton, "Why I Became A Conservative", The New Criterion. Full text at The New Criterion website.
‘Disegno, as Vasari's audience would have understood, enshrined the twin qualities of drawing and design, which were consdiered essential to good painting by this date in Italy. It was held to be the opposite of colore - colour and the application of paint - also an important attribute of painting, but less so than disegno. For Vasari, the Netherlands had in the preceding century made a useful contribution to the history of painting - specifically, to colore - through the introduction of the oil technique, but otherwise could not compete with Italian achievement, as is implicit when he introduces disegno into his discussion of Van Eyck and Antonello. Elsewhere in the Lives, Vasari laments the inability of Albrecht Dürer - one of the greatest draughtsmen of the age - to draw the nude like an Italian, asserting that had he been born a Tuscan, and had the opportunity to study the antique ‘as we do, he would have been our country's greatest painter.’. Vasari and his contemporaries were conditioned to judge art according to a classically inspired ideal of beauty, filtered through the language of Michelangelo and Raphael, with which early Netherlandish painting was of course incompatible. Out of their artistic chauvinism was born the concept of the Netherlands as Italy's poor relation, inferior in aims and achievement.’
Paula Nuttall, ‘From Flanders to Florence’, p. 2.
‘Adobe's ambitious chief executive, Bruce Chizen, has justified his "open - but not open standards" approach by saying: "Once something becomes a standard driven by a standards body, it moves at a glacial pace. And innovation slows down significantly, because you have to get everybody to agree, and there's lots of compromise. If you make it totally open source, you don't get a return on investment." (http://tinyurl.com/gx725.)
Microsoft seems willing to take the risk. Office Open XML is going through the Ecma standards process, with a committee that includes representatives from Apple, BP, the British Library, Intel, Microsoft, NextPage and Toshiba, among others..’
Jack Schofield, ‘Techonology Guardian’, Thursday June 8 2006. Full text at Guardian Unlimited website.
‘In the Synoptic Gospels the Baptist is declared to be Elijah. The identification is made very clear in Matt. (11.14; 17.12), and accepted by Mark (9.13), though Matthew (see the parallel) goes out of his way to make the point more emphatically. Mark 1.6 in the shorter and probably original text does not suggest Elijah, and Luke 1.17 hardly amounts to an identification. John sharply contradicts the earlier, and apparently growing tradition, returning perhaps to a pre-synoptic stage of Christian belief, before apocalyptic necessity called for the discovery of Elijah in some forerunner of Christ.’
C. K. Barrett, ’The Gospel According to St John’, 2nd edition, p. 171.
‘Clock time is our bank manager, tax collector, police inspector; this inner time is our wife.’
J. B. Priestley, Man and Time; quoted at the start of The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger.
‘One of the very images that unifies the fragmentary world of the novel, then, testifies at the same time to that world's mysterious impenetrability. What coheres this society, it would seem, is that every piece of it is equally shrouded in enigma. The fog allows us to see the place as a whole, but only by allowing us to see nothing at all..’
Terry Eagleton, 2003 Preface to the Penguin Classics edition of ‘Bleak House’.
‘We tend to think of language as a passive servant, obediently awaiting our instructions. When we want to say something, we think that we merely have to snap our fingers, and words will appear to give flesh to our thoughts. But words don't work like that. Language is not a servant, but a living material. We must labour with the texture and personality of a language to craft a text that may, if we are lucky, say something close to our intended meaning. Even then, language has a habit of saying things we never meant. As T. S. Eliot's Prufrock bemoans: "That is not what I meant at all. That is not it, at all."
Derrida called this the "supplemental" effect of language. Words are not empty vessels, which we fill with meaning. Before we speak, words already bear centuries of etymological resonance, and a halo of nuance and connotation. Our intended meanings are always supplemented by other meanings that are outside our control. As Derrida puts it, language is "exorbitant".’
Hugh Rayment-Pickard, Church Times, 2 June 2006. Full text at the Church Times website.
‘A propensity to use and enjoy what is available rather than to wish for or look for something else; to delight in what is present rather than what was or what may be ... To be conservative, then, is to prefer the familiar to the unknown, to prefer the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the near to the distant, the sufficient to the superabundant, the convenient to the perfect, present laughter to utopian bliss.’
Michael Oakeshott, quoted by Pat Kane, Guardian, 1 June 2006. Full text at Guardian Unlimited website.
‘The digital money guru Dave Birch has calculated that Chinese gaming enthusiasts who mine gold in online games such as World of Warcraft (in order to sell it to Western players who want to surreptitiously advance their own positions in the game) earn up to 10 times as much as actual gold miners in China who work in a highly dangerous industry.’
Victor Keegan, Technology Guardian, 1 June 2006. Full text at the Guardian Unlimited website.
‘Yes, this is what I thought adulthood would be, a kind of long indian summer, a state of tranquility, of calm incuriousness, with nothing left of the barely bearable raw immediacy of childhood, all the things solved that had puzzled me when I was small, all mysteries settled, all questions answered, and the moments dripping away, unnoticed almost, drip by golden drip, toward the final, almost unnoticed, quietus.’
John Banville, ‘The Sea’, p. 94.
‘We carry the dead with us only until we die too, and then it is we who are borne along for a little while, and then our bearers in their turn drop, and so on into the unimaginable generations.’
John Banville, ‘The Sea’, p. 119.
‘A savant whose name for the moment I forget has posited as a refutation of something or other the assertion that it is impossible for a human being to imagine fully what it would be like to be a bat. I take his point in general, but I believe I could have given him a fair account of such creaturehood when I was young and still part animal myself.’
John Banville, ‘The Sea’, p. 158.
‘Before it is a beginning an egg is an absolute end. It is the very definition of self-containment. I hated to see a broken egg, that tiny tragedy.’
John Banville, ‘The Sea’, p. 159.
‘Much is demanded of the dilettante's offspring. She will do what I could not, and be a great scholar, if I have any say in the matter, and I have.’
John Banville, ‘The Sea’, p. 175.
‘I have ever had the conviction, resistant to all rational considerations, that at some unspecified future moment the continuous rehearsal which is my life, with its so many misreadings, its slips and fluffs, will be done with and that the real drama for which I have ever and with such earnestness been preparing will at last begin. It is a common delusion, I know, everyone entertains it.’
John Banville, ‘The Sea’, pp. 184-185.