Notebook

What does it mean to be a man? This is a question that often touches upon the greatest issues of an age, and such was certainly the case for Edmund Spenser. This essay seeks to express the centrality of humility in the face of divine mercy as a part of Spenser’s view of the masculine male initiation into maturity, tracing it from a historical debate on the conflict between both secular warrior and religious scholarly cultures, through Renaissance discourse on courtly virtue, and finally in the tale of Spenser’s Redcrosse Knight itself.

Beowulf is the story of a tragic hero from a forgotten age who is thrust into kingship, and ultimately fails in his duty. By identifying Beowulf as the archetypal hero, demonstrating his rise into a fully-realized warrior, and subsequently explaining his failure to adapt as king, we might learn more about duty and how to mature with wisdom.

At the Great Exhibition of 1851, a full recreation of a medieval court sat alongside the marvels of industrial Britain. This essay traces how the revival of Arthurian legend across the nineteenth century helped shape a British national identity built first to justify empire, and later to worry over its costs.

Joris-Karl Huysmans and the persistence of the supernatural—on the Black Mass, the occult underworld of fin-de-siècle Paris, and a man too fascinated by evil to be seduced by it.

A roundup of what I read between late June and the first day of autumn—Greek epic, nineteenth-century sea novels, political science fiction, modernist fiction, satire, and Nietzsche.

A review of the novella by Ernst Jünger—a slim, difficult book about scholars, tyranny, and the temptation to retreat into one’s own mind.

A review of the novel by Philip K. Dick—on the pulpy detective novel beneath the philosophy, and what the film quietly left behind.

Rereading Heinlein’s novel of lunar revolution and self-government—on a computer who becomes a person, and founders who relinquish the power they seized.

A review of Steven Runciman’s history of the Brooke dynasty—three generations of English rajahs who ruled Sarawak as personal sovereigns.

A review of the novel by Herman Melville—a sailor’s first, disillusioning voyage, and my own long, on-and-off courtship with Melville’s work.

A review of the epic by Apollonius of Rhodes—an unexpectedly entertaining post-Homeric epic, following Jason and the Argonauts east to Colchis for the Golden Fleece.

A review of Burnham’s 1943 study of political realism, tracing his break from Marxist orthodoxy toward an amoral, Machiavellian account of power. The essay follows Burnham’s argument that ruling élites maintain their position chiefly through myth rather than truth, and weighs where that argument holds up against where it falls short.