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

[glinda]

I knew him entirely as a political theorist - he was one of those 'great political thinkers' that we covered in class, I remember that the class was very interesting but not really of any practical use to me with the notable exception of some useful background knowledge when I came to study the American Revolution a couple of years later. But as both those incidients are a decade and change behind me, I cannot say I remember much about his writings other than vastly prefering the work of Thomas Paine on the subject...