A medievalism I can identify with - I love Organizing!

Jan 22, 2012 22:55

"At his most characteristic, medieval man was not a dreamer or a wanderer. He was an organiser, a codifer, a builder of systems. He wanted 'a place for everything and everything in the right place' Distinction, definition, and tabulation were his delight. Though full of turbulent activities, he was equally full of the impulse to formalise them. War was (in intention) formalised by the art of heraldry and the rules of chivalry; sexual passion (in intention), by an elaborate code of love. Highly original and soaring philosophical speculation squeezes itself into a rigid and dialectical pattern copied from Aristotle. [...] Every way in which a poet can write (including some in which he had much better not) is classified in the Arts of Rhetoric. There was nothing which medieval people liked better, or did better, than sorting out and tidying up. Of all our modern inventions I suspect that they would most have admired the card index."
~C.S. Lewis, The Discarded Image, 1964

quote, books, medieval

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