The Cedar Room

By my count, I published my 500^th article for CiRCE last week and I thought it a fitting occasion to look back on what I have learned since beginning this column. As a longer reflection on the first five hundred articles, I will be giving a lecture entitled “Intellectual Honesty in an Age of Flattery” through my website GibbsClassical.com on January 21. The lecture will largely concern Nikolai Gogol’s “The Portrait” and what the story means for anyone involved in intellectual work, from painters and poets to teachers and critics.

The beginning of the year is an appropriate time to mull over the state of things, like the state of your own soul, your finances, and your desires, but also the state of the enterprises and institutions to which you have committed your life. During the first week of January, what I really want is a bleak, soul-crushing news story that will help me leverage renewed fervor for my church, my family, my school, and my career.

Prior to the Enlightenment, there was no such thing as “society.” There may have been a society of butchers in New York or a society of Methodists in London, but a society was always a particular group of people who shared a common identity. A society was a knowable and definite body of people.

The latest episode of Proverbial is devoted to a saying from The Divine Comedy that the modern Christian finds particularly knotty (and naughty, perhaps):

“Fame, without which man’s life wastes out of mind,

Leaving on earth no more memorial than foam in water,

Or smoke upon the wind.”