Hearing Reality & Seeing Songs
A Meeting of the Erascible Sam & Folly Club (Houstonia)
A Meeting
While taking different approaches, we will continue our exploration of the virtue of prudence. We will have some focus on the topic of memory and take fresh looks at imagination, "cosmological sense", and conscience. (See quotes below).
Following our discussion we'll take some turns, engaging a modern song and traveling into the old mysterious wonder-world of a Russian folktale: "The Death of Koshchei the Deathless". (Copies of each will be provided).
Remember to bring a journal and to rsvp.
(Time permitting, a mean game of Hearts may be on the table).
Warm regards,
Mr Presberg
Hearing Reality & Seeing Songs: Erascible Sam & Folly Club (houstonia)
Saturday, Feb 20, 2016, 01:30 PM
1707 Milford Street, Houston, TX, United States
RSVPs are enabled for this event.
Hungry and faint he wandered on, walked farther and farther, and at last came to where stood the house of Baba Yaga. Round the house were set twelve poles in a circle, and on each of these poles was stuck a human head; the twelfth remained unoccupied.
"Hail, granny!"
"Hail, Prince Ivan! wherefore have you come? Is it of your own accord, or on compulsion?
"I have come to earn from you a heroic steed."
"So be it, Prince! You won't have to serve a year with me, but just three days. If you take good care of my mares, I'll give you an heroic steed. But if you don't--why, then you mustn't be annoyed at finding your head stuck on top of the last pole there."
~ from "The Death of Koshchei the Deathless" ( A Russian folk tale included in Andrew Lang's The Red Fairy Book)
further ponderings in prudence...
The stages of transformation (of true knowledge into prudent decision) are: deliberation, judgment, decision...
"Prudence as cognition"(deliberation, judgment)...of the concrete situation of concrete action, includes above all the ability to be still in order to attain the objective perception of reality. There is in addition the patient effort of experience...which cannot be evaded or replaced by any arbitrary, short-circuiting resort to "faith"--let alone by the "philosophical" point of view which confines itself to seeing the general rather than the particular...
..truth of real things...is contained in the true-to-being memory...it "contains" in itself real things and events as they really are and were. The falsification of recollection by the assent or negation of the will is memory's worst foe...The peril is the greater for its being so imperceptible...There is no more insidious way for error to establish itself than by this falsification of the memory through slight retouches, displacements, discolorations, omissions, shifts of accent...memory can be ensured only by a rectitude of the whole human being which purifies the most hidden roots of volition...
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
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 Prudence
Samuel & Erasmus institute
Email: jpresberg@samuelerasmus.org
Website: www.samuelerasmus.org
Phone: 832.693.2889