My Wednesday staff meeting got pushed to this afternoon. This worked out well for me because I was unmotivated to do church stuff yesterday and skipped it. The delayed meeting gave me time to write a music note for this Sunday and put info into the bulletin doc.

For exercising this morning I found a neat little introduction to Eric Auerbach’s Mimesis (link). I have read a couple of chapters in this book and am looking forward to getting back to it after I finish Frye’s The Great Code.

In the video, Conrad Van Dyke quoted from p. 59 and I ran and got my copy of the book to make a note on the passage. I bet you can see why:

“If it is true that man is capable of everything horrible, it is also true that the horrible always engenders counterforces and that in most epochs of atrocious occurrences the great vital forces of the human soul reveal themselves: love and sacrifice, heroism in the service of conviction, and the ceaseless search for possibilities of a purer existence.”

I thought this was a positive thought for the terrible times we seem to be living in under our leadership in America right now.

It also inspired me to read the next chapter in Mimesis (The Arrest of Peter Valvomeres) instead of skipping ahead to chapters on Dante, Montaigne, Virginia Woolf and others.

This thin little book came in the mail today. I bought one that wasn’t in such great shape because it was more affordable (60 bucks instead 200 bucks).

It’s one of those books that the reader had to slit pages in order to read. I guess the person who had it before me didn’t read the preface since I had to fetch a sharp knife and open it in order to read it. According to the preface, Eliot read the Temple Classic edition of Dante that I own.

I am spoiled.