Wednesday, August 27, 2008
Apt words before school begins…
… study must first of all leave room for worship, prayer, direct meditation on the things of God. Study is itself a divine office, an indirect divine office; it seeks out and honors the traces of the Creator, or His images, according as it investigates nature or humanity; but it must make way at the right moment for direct intercourse with Him. If we forget to do this, not only do we neglect a great duty, but the image of God in creation comes between us and Him, and His traces only serve to lead us far from Him to whom they bear witness.
Study carried to such a point that we give up prayer and recollection, that we cease to read Holy Scripture, and the words of the saints and of great souls–study carried to the point of forgetting ourselves entirely, and of concentrating on the objects of study so that we neglect the Divine Dweller within us, is an abuse and a fool’s game. To suppose that it will further our progress and enrich our production is to say that the stream will flow better if its spring is dried up.
The order of the mind must correspond to the order of things. In the world of reality, everything rises toward the divine, everything depends on it, because everything springs from it. In the effigy of the real within us, we can note the same dependence, unless we have turned topsy-turvy the true relations of things.
– A. G. Sertillanges
This post will be extremely valuable to about 3 people in the world.
I finally found a simple solution for programming with a Scheme REPL in Vim. However, this is useful for REPLs, LISPs, and any “UNIX-interactive” program.
- install exec_with_piped somewhere. (For further reading see mod_pipe)
- in a terminal, run this:
./exec_with_piped /path/to/YOURPIPE "YOURREPL"
i.e. ./exec_with_piped ~/.SCMPIPE "gsc -:d-"
(note that your REPL needs to expect STDIN/STDOUT rather than interact with the console via it’s own readline, gambit’s -:d- sets this.)
- put/map this macro in your .vimrc:
nmap F)mT%mt%l:'t,'Tw! /path/to/YOURPIPE
Now, fire up some scheme, and place the cursor after the closing parenthesis of the SEXP you wish to send. Hit F2 and start scheming.
From the Discourse On The Origin And The Foundations Of Inequality Among Men:
For it is no light undertaking to disentangle what is original from what is artificial in man’s present Nature, and to know accurately a state which no longer exists, which perhaps never did exist, which probably never will exist, and about which it is nevertheless necessary to have exact Notions in order accurately to judge of our present state.
Thursday, December 13, 2007
From the Politics, my ‘final draft translation’:
Why man is a political animal rather than all bees and every animal
belonging to a herd is clear. For, as we say, nature does nothing in vain; and
of animals man alone holds speech. On the one hand, the vocal sound of
the painful and pleasant is a sign, and hence it also belongs to other animals
(for their nature has come as far as this: having perception of the painful
and pleasant and signalling these to others), but speech is for making visible
the beneficial and harmful, and consequently the just and unjust; for this
in relation to other animals is peculiar to men: alone having perception of
good and evil, of just and unjust, and of other things; the fellowship of these
makes a household and a city.
From A Lexicon Of The Homeric Dialect
My main hope has been, by making the reading of Homer easier, to bring him to readers who will read the epics as what above all things they are–as poems, as works of imagination. For such reading, translations being useless, an accurate and familiar knowledge of the Homeric language is the first essential. This knowledge is not to be acquired without hard, and possibly repulsive, work with grammar and dictionary; but though the way be long, the reward is sure. Let a man once acquire the power to read Homer as he reads Spenser or Milton, and he will have a possession which he would change for no other, an unfailing source of solace and of the purest pleasure. Homer is like Shakespeare in this, that he cannot be exhausted, that the more he is read the more there is found, and that while the effects are more and more felt, the means by which they are got remain more and more mysterious. The epics must be read as wholes, and not as is too much the way, in books here and there. It will come to be realized more and more with each reading that under the smooth and apparently art-less surface there lie depths of supreme and conscious art. The man who has realized this has gone far to solve for himself the Homeric problem.