A blog about books, words, history and the spaces in between. by Cristian Ispir
It is as important to preserve the written heritage of the past as it is to enrich it with the books of our generation. Safeguarding yesterday’s books while penning those of tomorrow. The future looks like it’s going to be digital, and so the preservation of the past may also have to inhabit the digital … Continue reading Saving the soul of the book
Ideas and stories have always competed for longevity, prestige and popularity. Like seeds, some fall on the side of the road to die before they can germinate; others germinate but don’t grow; others grow and change the landscape completely. To judge from the story of Abelard and Heloise, it seems that the academic journal will … Continue reading Glossy Abelard and Heloise
What strikes me about the ancient Mediterranean world is that it was competitive, adversarial, agonistic. The myths that ancient people told themselves were about groups vying for prizes of all sorts, women, cities, glory. Not even the gods could escape the competition framework. Rather than being apathetic, Lucretian deities removed from the world of the … Continue reading The agonia matrix
No free man shall be seized, imprisoned, dispossessed, outlawed, exiled or ruined in any way, nor in any way proceeded against, except by the lawful judgement of his peers and the law of the land. Magna Carta, clause 39 Over the last two weeks, I’ve been sitting as a juror in a criminal trial in … Continue reading ‘By the lawful judgement of his peers’: to be a juror
We shall never know the truth about the Roman emperors. History may be written by the winners, but often the great winner is time. The destructive, surreptitiously annihilating passage of time. The deeds of the past, the truth of history isn’t available not because contrary human agency prevents them, but because the natural pull of … Continue reading The passage of time
Plato’s so-called ‘myth of the cave’ is proverbial. For generations, it served as a warning against ignorance, against the power of complacence. For many, it underlines the liberating force of rising above appearances but also the high cost of knowledge. The Matrix, the Island, the modern incarnations of the Platonic myth are as widespread as … Continue reading On the screen
Of all the things that have been taken away by Covid, the ability to travel overseas seems to rank highest in many people’s cahiers de doléances. At least for those who haven’t been burdened by bereavement, joblessness and the decline of mental health, the lockdown is not so much an injunction to stay inside than … Continue reading Bounded in a nutshell
The great thing about the great works of literature is that they are never what they appear to be. A good book always escapes definitive answers and easy pronouncements. The more we think about a book, the more the book becomes something else. That is also the reason why many of us go back to … Continue reading Even the angels complain
No critique of our culture would be complete without a statement about (read: indictment of) the decline of the role, status and utility of poetry. Of all the major cultural shifts in the West’s transition from the premodern to the modern age, the diminution of Poetry is the one which has been almost totally neglected. … Continue reading The collapse of poetry
One of the lessons of textual criticism is that older is not always better. Scholars who study old texts and try to resolve the puzzle of the texts’ origin and evolution know very well that age is not a guarantee of validity. This basic principle is known as ‘codex retentior non deterior’, literally meaning that … Continue reading The value of antiquity
