Daily Archives: August 26, 2011

Minnesota, Weather +Climate

Just Like Canada

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Lughnasa                                                                                             Waning Honey Extraction Moon

The nights have grown cooler.  The August moon has begun to fade away, and the September moon will not come for a bit.  Dark nights approach, a time for the occult.

Minnesota, Mark says, feels like Canada and the Twin Cities feel like Canadian cities.  The bright blue August sky, the changed slant of the sun’s rays, the occasional cottony fluff high above us all combine, with cool nights and the gradually decreasing highs to put us in the same northern space as Ontario, our nearest Canadian neighbor.

At our best, we are like Canada.  We believe in health care for all people, a good education and jobs that require education.  Winter helps define us and, hey, hockey is big.  We have an openness to our governance that seems to be true in Canada, too.

We share some totem animals, too:  moose, raven, lynx, wolf.

If Minnesota could be the next province, it would fit right in.

Faith and Spirituality, Humanities, Letters, Literature

Text, Reader, Learning

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Lughnasa                                                                              Waning Honey Extraction Moon

Been feelin’ tired, a bit lowdown.  Got a good nap this afternoon and better.

Latin today was a bit more encouraging than I had anticipated.  My translation was not so far off, I hadn’t pursued sentence and clause construction quite as diligently as would have been good, but I had the right idea, for the most part.  I now see another level to this translation process and that is the one where I set off on my own, with no expectation that a tutor will read it.  Instead, I will rely on my own knowledge and skill.  That day is off a ways, but no where near so far as it was a year ago March when I began this journey.

Greg and I had a conversation today about the classics, about language and books and translation and interpretation.  Exegesis and hermeneutics.  This is turf  I know well from my days in Sem.  I persist in believing that there is a history and an author to which texts refer and are bound.  Surprisingly, this belief is not widely shared among academics in literary fields.  They’ve ridden off on the horse of post-modernism, headed, with speed, down what Francis Bacon would have called the wrong path, a path not unlike the Scholastics, where all knowledge happens within a field of words and all conclusions come from deductive reasoning.

Bacon said traveling down the wrong path will not lead your toward your destination and traveling faster down that path only leads you further and further away.