The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by Naomi Chana:

The Manicheans did no idols make
Without themselves, nor worship gods of wood,
Yet idols did in their Ideas take,
And figured Christ as on the cross he stood.
Thus did they when they earnestly did pray
Till clearer Faith this idol took away.

We seem more inwardly to know the Son
And see our own salvation in his blood
When this is said, we think the work is done
And with the Father hold our portion good,
As if true life within these words were laid
For him that in life never words obeyed.

If this be safe, it is a pleasant way,
The Cross of Christ is very easily borne;
But six days' labour makes the sabbath day,
The flesh is dead before grace can be born,
The heart must first bear witness with the book,
The earth must burn, ere we for Christ can look.

[Fulke Greville, from Caelica. I am not myself Christian, but I could wish for more Christianity and less idolatry in all this.]

Why is Numbers missing from the original list of books? The whole census thing gives it a bad name, but in fact it includes plagues and wars and holy wars and God zapping people with fire and people getting swallowed up by earth and impalement during public sex and -- neither last nor least -- a talking donkey.

I nominate Bill Watterson, on the theory that most of it reminds me of Calvin's fantasies and the non-human observer is the most sensible entity by far.

One of the advantages of living alone is that nobody need be disturbed by my whoops of laughter -- but I am obliged to this comment thread for reminding me where Stanley Ukridge had been traveling just prior to his irruption into Wodehouse's oeuvre.

Now I am pondering the extent to which Love Among The Chickens is derived from that famous remark of Baltasar Gracian that the stars were "chickens of the celestial acres" -- which Borges very correctly calls blasphemous -- and as such whether Wodehouse and Borges were related in even approximately the same way as Omar Khayyam and Edward Fitzgerald.

This is all helping immeasurably in keeping me from writing a very dull book review. ;)

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