By Wayne Allensworth These things—the beauty, the memory of our own past—are good images of what we really desire…They are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited. C. S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory I have my own personal art gallery that I visit and survey every day of my life...
The End of Things (The Problem of Sisyphus)
By Wayne Allensworth Jacob’s Ladder (William Blake) All good things — and the bad ones, too — come to an end. Everything does. But it can’t be any other way. I was thinking along those lines while my wife and I were “taking down” (as opposed to “putting up”) Christmas, that is, the decorations, this year. We like to have a festive house for that wonderful, evocative, and often, poignant...
Re-enchanting Our Disenchanted World
The fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by the disenchantment of the world. — Max Weber: Essays in Sociology By Wayne Allensworth I craned my neck to see the magnificent ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. I felt the exhilarating sensation of a tingle running through my scalp as I gazed at the Creation, the Fall, the Expulsion from the...
The End of Innocence
By Wayne Allensworth That time is past,And all its aching joys are now no more — William Wordsworth, Tintern Abbey Sometime in the 1990s I admitted to myself that a return to our golden age, however one might imagine it, could never happen. Not a golden age, not even a silver one. A baser metal would have to serve. In researching my book, The Russian Question: Nationalism...
The Seventh Seal and the Knight of Faith (Kierkegaard meets McGilchrist)
By Wayne Allensworth And when he had opened the seventh seal, there was silence in heaven... Revelation 8:1 In Fear and Trembling, Soren Kierkegaard wrote that faith begins precisely where thought stops. What then is faith? In answering that question, YouTube’s “Boy In The Badlands” channel renders a very perceptive interpretation of Ingmar Bergman’s 1957 film The Seventh Seal...
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Sing a Poem, Recite a Song
By Wayne Allensworth For nearly 40 years, your humble observer’s life has been connected in one way or another with Russia, or, better still, the Russian world, that broad cultural expanse that extends across much of Eurasia. And from the beginning of that journey, what drew me in as much as anything about Russia and the Russians were that country’s impressive cultural achievements. A tragic...
Weak Coherence: Madness and Modernity
By Wayne Allensworth (Edvard Munch, The Scream) Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold… William Butler Yeats, The Second Coming This is the third of my articles on Iain McGilchrist’s hemisphere theory, and its implications. An overview of his ideas is found in A Hole in the World and Between Two Worlds: Iain...
We Heard the Chimes at Midnight (On Friendship)
By Wayne Allensworth In Act 3, Scene 2 of King Henry IV, part II, Shakespeare’s grand comic knave, Falstaff, reminisces about old times with his friend Justice Shallow, particularly a memorable night more than 50 years in the past. They recall a woman, Jane Nightwork, who, like Falstaff and Shallow, has fallen victim to advancing age, as time flows on, and the chimes will eventually toll for the...
Between Two Worlds: Iain McGilchrist and the Crisis of Modernity
By Wayne Allensworth This is the second of my articles on Iain McGilchrist and his hemispheric theory of human cognition, which posits two apparently opposing, actually complementary, modes of being and perception as expressed in the Right and Left brain hemispheres (RH and LH hereafter). In the first article, I raised the issue of relationships and how our personality—and our world—come into...
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