Thus I have found the book - The Evening Colonnade - which I have mentioned twice on this blog already.
In the chapter entitled Little Magazines, Mr Connolly quotes what he refers to as "Hemingway's neo-Thomist *poem":
The Lord is my Shepherd, I shall not want,
Him for long.
Au moins un peu amusant n'est-ce pas?
I have only once attempted to read Hemingway: I tried For Whom the Bell Tolls and found it insufferably boring; why is it so difficult to appreciate writers (or for that matter artists) whom the high-brows - and others - find so great? My feelings apply also to Shakespeare** who does absolutely nothing for me, likewise Dickens, and as I have said before, Henry James.
As for the artists, there are numerous examples: Picasso principally - at least for his more famous works - Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, or Guernica for example - meaningless to me, though I shall never forget a small pencil still life drawing of his that I saw in a small gallery in the Rue de Grenelle (Paris VIIeme); similarly Jackson Pollock or Rothko - unintelligible. Equally when I went to the National Gallery, I was utterly bored by the Titians and so on; how many times did those buggers paint the Madonna? I was much relieved to see that day the work of some of the Dutch masters and the wonderful paintings of Turner and the breathtakingly beautiful work of Canaletto.
Max Ernst in places is OK, Klimt and Schiele excellent, Edward Hopper yet another of my favourites. Lyonel Feininger is superb, e.g. as in the example below.
Until the next time.
* I have added a link here because I had no idea what Thomism is; if any of you can understand it, good luck to you.
**The Sonnets excepted
* I have added a link here because I had no idea what Thomism is; if any of you can understand it, good luck to you.
**The Sonnets excepted
4 comments:
.....so i followed the Thomism link and others as reccommended. I must say I got instantly bogged down by the business of requiring belief in all sorts of nonsense...I arrived at the tenets regarding angels and i stopped.
"Faith and science, i.e. knowledge by demonstration, cannot co-exist in the same subject with regard to the same object (Zigliara, O, 32, VII); and the same is true of knowledge and opinion.
Not enough faith, thats my problem then..`O
Yes angels are rather difficult to swallow. I recall some zoologist saying that if a man-like being carried wings as depicted in the portraits of angels, then his chest whould need to be at least four times the normal diameter in order to carry the necessary muscles and cardio-vascular and pulmoary capacity.
Problem is I think that God cannot be held to be capable of breaking His own rules. Anyhing else would be what the Catholics call a "mystery" - which the greater proportion of religion is to me!
god (to postulate that he exists) breaks his own rules all the time.
I am still convinced that all religions are just a technique for controlling the masses. Always were....secret societies of mysteries. its not a conspiracy theory if its really a conspiracy. All powerful people in the West are united by some secret religious group or other, hiding their foul secret world.
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"god (to postulate that he exists) breaks his own rules all the time."
Ha ha; very good, but an oxy-moron I think!
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