“Now that we have split the atom and spliced the gene and sent a kind of emissary into interstellar space we may have some idea of the possibilities the Lord saw adumbrated in the aspirations of early humankind.” -Marilynne Robinson on the Tower of Babel (“Reading Genesis”)

"I got the guiltiest conscience/ Listening for a savior on a Saturday night/ I got my ear to the ground/You got Easter Sunday in your eyes" open.spotify.com/track/3OySUz...

Congregavit nos in unum Christi amor

Robinson making a similar point to Calasso “To assign causes to events is clearly not the method or intention of biblical narrative. We don’t know why Abel’s offering was acceptable and Cain’s was not, why Jacob was favored over Esau or Israel over the nations” (“Reading Genesis”)

“It is striking how the scale of thought has contracted with the loss of serious theology. A contemporary Kant or Hegel would find little purchase in the vocabulary of thought allowed to us now” -Marilynne Robinson, “Reading Genesis”

“This narrative sequence [of the early chapters of Genesis] establishes a profiling & essential assertion of the sacred good, making pangs and toil a secondary reality, likewise the punitive taking of life” -Robinson channeling the privatio boni at the start of Reading Genesis

Good afternoon www.youtube.com/watch?v=DKEQ...

Really sad to hear this, both of the closing and Rolf's cancer diagnosis. One of my favorite stores in Philly share.inquirer.com/SzazEj

"He'd not liked the peacetime army and it was understandable, there was no place in it for a man with a paperback edition of Kierkegaard in his pocket" -Len Deighton, the Ipcress File

Happy opening day to those who celebrate open.spotify.com/track/1Y3VFY...

In and around the Shawangunks (including New Paltz haulz)

“He had the advantage of both a good brain and a family rich enough to save him using it” -Len Deighton, The Ipcress File

Good evening open.spotify.com/album/1NvW80...

Len Deighton, spy novelist and author of The Ipcress File, dies aged 97

John Moreland

“All did not go well with this democratic approach: division arose between the Americans and the British over the name for God.” -Bruce Gordon on a 19th century attempt to translate the Bible into Chinese (The Bible: A Global History)

Jane Kenyon

Good morning open.spotify.com/track/1dhosP...

Spring albums: Graceland, Father of the Bride, Shore

New season has got to begin I can feel it leaning in, whispering open.spotify.com/track/6pRIJ3...

“Whereas earlier revisions [of the KJV] had focused on typos, efforts were now focused on improving the translations. Not all went well. The most outrageous misfire came in 1631 with the so-called Wicked Bible, in which a crucial ‘not’ was omitted from the seventh commandment”

Wings of Desire (1987)

"Another [fossil] find, near Albany, NY, was recorded by Cotton Mather, who argued in a letter to the Royal Society in London that they were the bones of the Nephilim...for Mather, the discovery confirmed that...key stories in the OT had actually taken place in the Americas"

"Unlike in the West, were clear lines of demarcation separated Catholics and Protestants, in the East [in the 16th century] there was a much more fluid culture in which a wide range of groups, from Jesuits to Unitarians, found space in lands such as Transylvania and Poland."

Good evening open.spotify.com/album/0zcSjj...

“[The Coverdale Bible] was known as the Bug Bible or Treacle Bible on account of two notable passages: ‘Thou shall not need to be afraid of any bugs at night’ (Ps. 91:5) and ‘There was no more treacle at Galahad’ (Jer. 8:22).” -Bruce Gordon, The Bible: A Global History

...[the narcissist's] insecurity, which he can overcome only by seeing his 'grandiose self' reflected in the attentions of others, or by attaching himself to those who radiate celebrity, power, and charisma. For the narcissist, the world is a mirror" -Christopher Lasch

"Chaucer likely did not have a Bible open in front of him for easy consultation for the plethora of scriptural references that pour from the mouths of his bawdy characters...his men and women quote scripture from memory...in a mostly illiterate world, the Bible was simply known"

Good morning open.spotify.com/track/2QCJcm...

Nirvanna: The Band - the Show - the Movie was great; I'm surprised I hadn't heard of these fellows before but I'm very much looking forward to the Bourdain movie now

“[The Bible] is, as it were, a kind of river, if I may so liken it, which is both shallow and deep, wherein both the lamb may find a footing, and the elephant float at large” -Gregory the Great, quoted in “The Bible: A Global History” by Bruce Gordon

Jason Isbell I almost entered a fugue state from how good this show was

"The desert was the only proper place for Yahweh and his beloved to start seeing each other again." A Lenten sentence from Roberto Calasso's "The Book of All Books"

Joan Didion on Jackson’s 1988 supporters

“Evil does not reach its perfect state simply by being committed. It is at least equally importantly that it be wrongly named, since this guarantees that the mind cannot come to see it clear and whole” -Roberto Calasso, The Book of All Books

Now we’re talking open.spotify.com/album/74sjx2...

“The Bible has no rivals when it comes to the art of omission…Only by reading the Bible through can one weigh the omissions against the repetitions, which are equally glaring. And only by summing omissions and repetitions can one grasp that unique phenomenon…which is the Bible.” -Roberto Calasso

She was used to men answering her with one part of their mind on religion. That was one of the reasons why Edward had become so unsatisfactory after he had ceased to be a curate and become an actor” -Muriel Spark, The Only Problem

Good morning open.spotify.com/track/2I88WC...

“These were exceedingly precarious footholds, though it’s true that for anyone writing in German, Goethe is their Homer” -Roberto Calasso, commenting on the antecedents (which included a passage by Goethe) for Freud’s “Moses and Monotheism”

Wild Pink @ MilkBoy Philadelphia

“For a long time people found it hard to accept that nothing should be known of Abraham, the patriarch, until, in his old age, Yahweh spoke to him…But what makes Genesis special, powerful and unique was precisely this empty space” -Roberto Calasso, The Book of All Books

Snow weekend plans

“Fatal meetings tend to happen near wells. As with Rebecca, or Rachel, or with Demeter in Eleusis.” -Roberto Calasso, The Book of All Books

Love Robert Alter on the arc of Jacob’s life: “The powerful young man who made his way across the Jordan to Mesopotamia with only his walking staff…is now an old man tottering on the brink of the grave, bearing the deep wounds of his long life”

Robert Alter 🤝 Henri de Lubac: footnotes that take up 2/3rds of the page

In 2026, we’re Genesis-maxxing

Cracking up (from Calvino’s “Cosmicomics”)