Link Salad, the Dead Animals Edition
-- Squeak and Gibber - John Crowley, Lapham's Quarterly, Fall, 2013
"The more austere sleep-wake dichotomy persisted in some Protestant thought. Stern New Englanders perhaps liked the Occam’s razor economy of it. In a churchyard in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, the founding Sedgwick family has arranged its members’ graves in concentric circles, all facing inward, supposedly so that in the momentary confusion of the Last Day, as their graves are opened and they come forth, they will see familiar faces around them. Tourists are shown the place-the “Sedgwick Pie”-and get a chuckle out of the old simplicities our forebears held. The commonest locus nowadays for the radical idea that the body is the literal residence of the person after death, and under the right circumstances can get out of the confines of the grave and resume its life on earth-that would be the zombie movie. As a Catholic child I always found the prospect of the general resurrection of the dead creepy, and in my imagination it always took place at night."
-- One of Us - John Jeremiah Sullivan, Lapham's Quarterly, Spring, 2013
"Only with the Greeks does there enter the notion of a formal divide between our species, our animal, and every other on earth. Today in Greece you can walk by a field and hear two farmers talking about an alogo, a horse. An a-logos. No logos, no language. That’s where one of their words for horse comes from. The animal has no speech; it has no reason. It has no reason because it has no speech. Plato and Aristotle were clear on that. Admire animals aesthetically, perhaps, or sentimentally; otherwise they’re here to be used. Mute equaled brute. As time went by, the word for speech became the very word for rationality, the logos, an identification taken up by the early Christians, with fateful results. For them the matter was even simpler. The animals lack souls. They are all animal, whereas we are part divine."
"The more austere sleep-wake dichotomy persisted in some Protestant thought. Stern New Englanders perhaps liked the Occam’s razor economy of it. In a churchyard in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, the founding Sedgwick family has arranged its members’ graves in concentric circles, all facing inward, supposedly so that in the momentary confusion of the Last Day, as their graves are opened and they come forth, they will see familiar faces around them. Tourists are shown the place-the “Sedgwick Pie”-and get a chuckle out of the old simplicities our forebears held. The commonest locus nowadays for the radical idea that the body is the literal residence of the person after death, and under the right circumstances can get out of the confines of the grave and resume its life on earth-that would be the zombie movie. As a Catholic child I always found the prospect of the general resurrection of the dead creepy, and in my imagination it always took place at night."
-- One of Us - John Jeremiah Sullivan, Lapham's Quarterly, Spring, 2013
"Only with the Greeks does there enter the notion of a formal divide between our species, our animal, and every other on earth. Today in Greece you can walk by a field and hear two farmers talking about an alogo, a horse. An a-logos. No logos, no language. That’s where one of their words for horse comes from. The animal has no speech; it has no reason. It has no reason because it has no speech. Plato and Aristotle were clear on that. Admire animals aesthetically, perhaps, or sentimentally; otherwise they’re here to be used. Mute equaled brute. As time went by, the word for speech became the very word for rationality, the logos, an identification taken up by the early Christians, with fateful results. For them the matter was even simpler. The animals lack souls. They are all animal, whereas we are part divine."