Sublime ignorance

[radiantfracture]

Several more inches of snow fell in the night. All this would be perfectly ordinary anywhere even half a league north or a laddersworth higher in elevation, but here we are having our yearly festival of confusion.

I trudged downtown and back to pick up my prescription, so I feel accomplished, not to say enervated.

I will also submit the Indigenous education conference proposal today. That is my useful act for Wednesday. Now I will eat a pot pie and read The Club as the wind shakes its great sails across my shingles.

We have finally got through Boswell (hurray!) and are on to Burke. I have just read this sentence:

It may surprise readers today, who know Burke as a great political writer, that his breakthrough publication was a treatise on aesthetics, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful.

--which points up my biases, since the sublime and beautiful is what I know Burke best for and I am only vaguely aware of anything else he did. I eagerly anticipate the amendment of my ignorance.

Do you know anything about Burke beyond the sublime? His political theory? Any particular highlights?

The book has to go back in two days and I don't expect I'll be done. I may never make it to Edward Gibbon.

{rf}

Comments

[oursin]

He had a lengthy career in India, rising to become Governor of Bengal, which effectively made him Governer-General over the three Presidencies (Bengal, Madras and Bombay) where the East India Company was in power. In 1787 he was accused of corruption and impeached. There was a lengthy trial, and he was acquitted in 1795. The prosection brought together Burke (urged on by a mate who had been wounded in a duel by Hastings) with two men who I would have guessed were otherwise political anathema to him, Charles James Fox and Richard Brinsley Sheridan.

Wikipedia seems fairly solid on him and his ambiguous legacy.