Happy Thanksgiving

L.U.S.K. wishes you all the pecan pie in the world!

Giants in the Earth

I've recently come across two authors I read years ago but have neither heard discussed nor read about in the decades since. First came O.E. Roolvag's novel Giants in the Earth, presented in the subtitle of "A Norwegian American Journey." This essay from The American Conservative is presented as part memoir, part literary review, and with a substanatial section on Norwegian film. Second was Ernst Cassirer, most likely the least well known of the four famous philosophers discussed in Wolfram Eilenberger's Time of the Magicians: Wittgenstein, Benjamin, Cassirer, Heidegger, and the Decade That Reinvented Philosophy. I read Giants in the Earth as an 11th grader at Central High School in Philadelphia, and I read Ernst Cassirer as a first-year student in Wesleyan University's Freshman Integrated Program. I wonder if anyone anywhere is working through Roolvag and Cassirer as assigned reading right now.

a bookseller or a publisher

"My parents-in-law, now the only material support left to us, even if it is not robust, but who are willing to make the utmost sacrifices, insist that I should become a bookseller or a publisher."

~~ Walter Benjamin

the actual basis of all symbolic forms

"In the winter of 1919, as he passed through the machine-gun fire of the Spartacist uprising, this time on his way to the university rather than the press office, he was already working on the manuscript of the first volume, concerning the phenomenon of human language as the actual basis of all symbolic forms. Cassirer was sure that he was working on something of consequence, the great idea of his life. And, as if summoned by fate, in May 1919—around the time that the corpse of Rosa Luxembourg, murdered in January, was fished out of the Landwehr Canal—he received a letter from the newly established Hamburg University."

~~ from Time of the Magicians: Wittgenstein, Benjamin, Cassirer, Heidegger, and the Decade That Reinvented Philosophy by Wolfram Eilenberger

a library in his country house

"I'm haunted by the fate of my friend Dave, who finally, after a long lifetime on an academic salary, could afford at seventy to build a library in his country house—the house itself only acquired in his mid-sixties. A month after the architect's plan was approved and the contractor broke ground, Dave was diagnosed with terminal cancer. He was too weak to go up and see the walls rising from the muddy ground, the built-in shelves, the balcony overlooking the verdant fields. By the time it was finished, he was dead."

~~ from My Life in the Middle Ages: A Survivor's Tale by James Atlas