Seeing Things!..with Berry & Folks
A SEi Society Meeting...explorations in prudence
A SEi Society Meeting (Houston)
We'll begin an exploration of the virtue of prudence--see quotes below. We'll have some focus on the issues of perception, silence, and covetousness.
After a brief discussion of prudence, we'll take some unexpected paths (dark and luminous, perhaps also numinous). The primary elements of the meeting will be a reading and discussion of a poem (or two) by Wendell Berry and an old European folktale: "The Yellow Dwarf". (copies will be provided)
Some refreshments will be served, but feel free to bring a choice beer or wine (or cigar) to share.
There are no fees for the event; donations are welcome.
Best!
Jeff
Please RSVP--space will be limited
the whine of a mosquito in his ear,
grow thirsty, tired, despair perhaps
of ever finding them, walk along way.
He must give himself over to chance,
for they live beyond prediction.
He must give himself over to patience,
for they live beyond will. He must be lead...
~ from a poem by Wendell Berry
See link below to a collection of his poems--a book to have and keep!
Seeing Things!..with Berry & Folks: a SEi Society Meeting (Houston)
Tuesday, Feb 16, 2016, 07:00 PM
1707 Milford St, Houston, TX, United States
RSVPs are enabled for this event.
ponderings in prudence...
The stages of transformation (of true knowledge into prudent decision) are: deliberation, judgment, decision...
To mention fortitude and prudence in the same breath seems in a measure to contradict modern man's notion of prudence and also of fortitude...The term "prudence" has come to mean rather the slyness which permits the cunning and "shrewd" tactician to evade any dangerous risk to his person, and thus escape injury and even the possibility of injury...To us prudence seems to be that false "discretion" and "cool consideration" conjured up by the coward to shirk the test. To prudence thus conceived, fortitude seems plainly unwise or stupid...
...these false prudences arise from covetousness and are by nature akin to it...how impossible just estimate and decision is without a youthful spirit of brave trust and, as it were, a reckless tossing away of anxious self-preservation, a relinquishment of all egoistic bias toward mere confirmation of the self...
~ ~ ~
The man who does good follows the lines of an architectural plan that has not been devised for himself or even totally understood by himself in all its components. This plan is revealed to him moment by moment only through a narrow cleft and a tiny gap; in his transient condition, he never perceives the specific plan for himself in its global and definitive form. Concerning conscience, which to an extent is prudence itself, Paul Claudel says that it is the "forbearing lamp that characterizes for us not the future but the immediate".
~ Josef Pieper, from A Brief Reader on the Virtues of the Human Heart and The Four Cardinal Virtues (see links below)
Samuel & Erasmus institute
Email: jpresberg@samuelerasmus.org
Website: www.samuelerasmus.org
Phone: 832.693.2889