Amor Mundi 4/21/13

04-22-2013

Every Sunday, The Hannah Arendt Center Amor Mundi Weekly Newsletter will offer our favorite essays and blog posts from around the web. These essays will help you comprehend the world. And learn to love it.

That Time Dickens Didn't Meet Dostoevsky

Russianist Eric Naiman considers the career of the British historian A.D. Harvey, whom he believes is responsible for propagating the claim that Dostoevsky met Dickens during an 1862 visit to London. Naiman believes that, under various pseudonyms and over the course of several decades, Harvey has written a number of articles that occasionally criticize, but usually praise, his own work. Those of you thinking about grad school beware; Naiman suggests that Harvey-who, despite having written more than a dozen books of various kinds, has no academic affiliation-may have been driven to this by the scholarly life: "Even for holders of tenured university positions, scholarship can make for a lonely life. One spends years on a monograph and then waits a few more years for someone to write about it. How much lonelier the life of an independent scholar, who does not have regular contact, aggravating as that can sometimes be, with colleagues. Attacking one's own book can be seen as an understandable response to an at times intolerable isolation. How comforting to construct a community of scholars who can analyse, supplement and occasionally even ruthlessly criticize each other's work. I've traced the connections between A. D. Harvey, Stephanie Harvey, Graham Headley, Trevor McGovern, John Schellenberger, Leo Bellingham, Michael Lindsay and Ludovico Parra, but they may be part of a much wider circle of friends."

Is Organic Better?

Ria Chhabra decided to check out the hype around the health benefits of organic food. She tracked the health and vitality of two groups of fruit flies, one swarming around conventional bananas and potatoes and the other given pricier organic fare. There has been great skepticism recently about the benefits of organic food. But Chhabra's results-recently published in PLOS ONE, an international, peer-reviewed, open-access, online publication-show increased fertility, lower stress, and longer lives for the flies fed organic produce. What makes this study especially fascinating, is that Chhabra is only 16. Read the story of how her high school science project is making waves throughout the world of science.

The Space Between

Christina Davis ponders the meaning of the space in the title of T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land." She suggests that his use of "waste" as an adjective gives it a temporal quality, one that suggests an impermanent state: "In this phrase, he was likely echoing St. Augustine's concern about the ossification of certain written words into an orthodoxy: "I should write so that my words echo rather than to set down one true opinion that should exclude all other possibilities.""

To the Wonder

Terence Malick offers a cinema inspired by grand conceptual oppositions and profound experience. In Tree of Life, Malick meditates on the tension between grace and will. In his new film, To the Wonder, Malick offers archetypes of the artist, the rationalist, the personal experience, and passion. In The New Yorker, Richard Brody rightly revels in the magic of the film: "What Malick is after-by way of his archetypes and through his images-is religious experience as such, and he defines it in a scene set in the priest's church. There, an elderly, gray-bearded black man who is cleaning the stained glass speaks and tells the priest what he's missing-"You've got to have a little more excitement"-and, a moment later, shows him what he means, exclaiming, "The power hits you!" and speaking, excitedly, in tongues, then putting his hand on the stained glass and saying that he feels the warmth of the light."

Designer Landscapes

Nick Murray interviews landscape architect Diana Balmori about the changing role of her profession. Balmori, for her part, emphasizes that it is not enough to simply return a landscape to nature, nor to conquer it somehow. Instead, she says that she tries to build in a way that strengthens relationships between an environment and its inhabitants.

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