Insights from the Talmud....and Aristotle.

I am thoroughly enjoying dipping into the Penguin Classics The Talmud: A Selection, being constantly amazed and enthralled with the wide-ranging debates and scholarship that can be found this record of Rabbinic discussion on Jewish law, ethics and their interpretation of scripture as a guide to daily life. One particularly wonderful passage from chapter three of the seventh tractate (Nidda) is this:

'Rabbi Simlai expounded: What is a baby like in its mother's womb? He is like a folded notebook, his hands on his two cheeks, his two elbows on his two knees, his two heels on his two buttocks, his head between his knees, his mouth closed and his navel open; he eats what his mother eats and drinks what his mother drinks, but he does not excrete in case it kills his mother. As soon as he emerges into the fresh air, what was closed opens, and what was open, closes, for otherwise he could not survive. While still in the womb a light shines over his head, and he sees from one end of the world to the other, as it is said When his lamp shone over my head, when I walked in the dark by its light (Job 29:3) - do not be surprised at this, for a man sleeps here and in his dreams sees Spain - and these are the best days of a man's life, as it is said O that I were as in months gone by, in the days when God watched over me (Job 29:2) when there were months not years.'

Apparently during this time the child is taught the whole Torah, but on emerging from the womb into the fresh air 'an angel slaps his mouth and causes him to forget the whole Torah' so for the observant Jew the whole of life is spent trying to regain that former state of blessed knowledge.

There follows an excursus on what it takes to form a whole human being:

'Three partners form a person: the Holy One, blessed be He, his father and his mother. His father produces the white seed out of which are formed bones, sinews, nails, the soft matter of the brain in his head and the white of the eye: his mother produces the red seed out of which are formed skin, flesh and hair, and the dark part of the eye: the Holy One, blessed be He, puts in him spirit and soul and facial appearance and the seeing of the eye and the hearing of the ear, the speech of the mouth, the movement of the legs and discernment and understanding. When his time comes to depart from the world the Holy One, blessed be He, takes his portion and leaves before his mother and father their portion.'

I was particularly struck by recognition of the idea that the foetus is not just the sum of his bodily constituents, but requires additional divine input to make him 'alive'. Aristotle, who also spent a lot of time trying to work out how the foetus was formed, considered that the male contributed the vital heat required to give the soul form (the 'colder' female merely supplied the matter). Indeed, he thought that females were colder, damper, inferior versions of males - but this is the guy who considered that plants were upside-down animals because they had their nutrition-seeking parts down in the earth (unlike animals mouths which tend to be on the upper end of the body) and their generative (seed-bearing) parts waving about in the air (unlike animals who have their generative parts safely tucked away)!

Both the Talmud and Aristotle agree however that the male embryo becomes 'ensouled' at 40 days gestation.....the female embryo somewhat later.

Because they're a bit colder (thought Aristotle) they take somewhat longer to get going, see?

Metamorphosis I am Hoping for, not Dereliction.

I am rather sad at the demise of Borders bookshops as I have spent a lot of time (and money) browsing their shelves and drinking coffee in the in-store Starbucks of the York branch. It's rather unusual in that the back half of the building was originally a chapel, and the cafe area occupies the gallery that runs around the four walls in a squared-off oval.

Ever since he was very young, the Bright-Eyed Boy and I have spent many a happy hour peering over the handrail and playing our favourite game of 'Book Spotting' with a coffee/bun to hand. This consists of one party naming a book that they can see on the shelves on the floor below, which the other party has to locate and describe. Good for both observation and verbal skills, although we just enjoy it. We went to have a possibly final cup of coffee there today, but sadly found that the coffee-shop was shut for a staff meeting. I hope we manage to fit one more in before the doors shut forever. As a venue, it really does hold many fond memories for me and I hope that the building isn't going to be turned into yet another crappy cheap clothes shop. In truth, I guess I am partly to blame for the chain's demise. Although I have bought a lot of books from them in my time, in many instances the limits of stock, the esoteric nature of my wants, or simply cost, have driven me into the arms of online retailers. Which is where a lot of Borders' clientele have ended up, I suspect.
Mea culpa, Borders.
When I was browsing in town on Saturday, whilst waiting for daughter #3 to do her rowing training (in the boathouse gym, as the river has well and truly burst its banks) I went to a favourite antiquarian book shop, Ken Spelmans on Micklegate. This is absolutely lovely, smells just right (ever so slightly musty), is suitably poky and has an open coal-fire glowing in the back room. Up the rickety stairs there is a modest theology and classics section (always a few Loebs to be had) where I chanced upon a wonderful leather-bound copy of Donnegan's Greek/English Dictionary dating from 1837. I was severely tempted, but as it was a tome of considerable avoir du pois and I had only just started my two-hours' browsing, I regretfully put it back. However, when I thought about it over the rest of the weekend, I developed a terrible hankering for it (small Greek font has a strange effect on me). Monday (a teacher-training day) saw the boy and I legging back up the hill to snatch it gleefully of the shelf. I had previously told myself that it would probably have been bought (to guard against disappointment) but when I saw that it hadn't - well, it was like a real chemical 'hit'. The nice thing about Spelmans is that they wrap your purchases up in green parcel paper, so you feel like Mr Brownlow or some other Dickensian character as you walk out of the shop.
I have to admit to taking advantage of the 20% off sign in Borders and bought Alexander McCall-Smith's The Comfort of Saturdays, a Penguin Classics copy of Selections from the Talmud and an Oxford Classics version of Kafka's short stories. I whipped through the first in no time at all (and for a while found myself thinking in a similar fashion to Isabel Dalhousie: wistfully philosophic) and am dipping in and out of the second. I will read the third in dribs and drabs, as Kafka is far too weird to read a lot of in one go. We've been reading some portions of untranslated Kafka in the German Reading Skills classes and he is a most unsettling author. Nothing is comfortable or predictable. All is alienation and rejection. I remember borrowing Metamorphosis and other stories from the library in response to another (similar) author's work. Damned if I can remember who it was now!

Cranfield Calls

When I was working at my desk the other day, I ran out of space and had to move some books out of the way (it happens quite often). So I picked up the two volumes of John Chrysostom's homilies and put them on the shelf just under the printer and forgot about them. Dammit - forgot the sun swings round during the course of the day so that by two in the afternoon that shelf is bathed in full sunlight - which did my two new acquisitions absolutely no good at all!

So much for letting them dry out slowly: the bottom-most one was OKish, but the front cover of the upper one was bent as a banana by the sun's unrelenting warmth.

I had to call in LSJ (my biggest book) as well as a couple of concordances BDAG and BDF to weigh the b*gger down and flatten the cover out again. I curse my oversight. Now I need to conserve the spine with some appropriately organic glue. Fish bone or hooves, I think.

It still being Lent, and having finished The Book of Margery Kempe, I am going to turn my attention to Julian of Norwich's 'Revelations of Divine Love'. I bought this Penguin Classics version second-hand a number of years ago and now intend to re-read it as a spiritual companion piece of contemporaneous medieval piety. I also have 'The Cloud of Unknowing' (again a second-hand Penguin Classics) which I may read during Easter week if I have finished Dame Julian's book.

The Douglas Moo commentary on Paul's epistle to the Romans is most excellent: his attention to the textual and linguistic issue puts it squarely in my field of interest. However, as I am currently looking in great detail at Romans 5:12-14, I find my self time and time again directed towards C.E.B Cranfield's two-volume ICC commentary, constantly cited as THE authoritative voice on this epistle. And can I find a pre-owned copy? Well, yes I can, but not for less than £40! I have the Sanday ICC precursor to Cranfield and that is quite adequate, but it's the Cranfield that I really hanker for. It IS on Google books, but as is so often the case, the very pages that I wish to consult are 'not part of this preview'. Most vexing. Nor will the all-in-one Cranfield commentary fit the bill, as in its drive to become more compact and, I suppose, more user-friendly, it has omitted the very textual matters that I find so interesting. That's a shame because the compendium volume is easily and cheaply available brand-new. Ah!....but I LIKE the older ICC's with their green cloth covers and gilt titles, and their slightly musty smell and damp feel......I promise I will not let them sunbathe neglected on my shelf.....

I'll Be Damned...

I rather like the wall of black Penguin Classics in my local Borders book shop. They look....well....pretty serious and intriguing. I think Borders has a Bit of a Problem knowing what to do with 'the classics', be it either of the Aristotelian or the Brontean sort. They started off a few years ago with a pretty good collection of Greek and Roman stuff (better than Waterstones, which doesn't even have a Classics section), including a few Loebs (drool, drool), general histories and Classical texts (but only major authors) in translation, all arranged in broadly alphabetical order. It seemed to work quite well. 'Classic' authors like Tolstoy and Hardy could be found slotted into the fiction section where alphabetically appropriate. That seemed to work quite well too. Over the past few years there has obviously been a rethink and subsequent revamp, and all the works by 'classic authors' (be they 4thcentury BC or 19th century AD) were lumped together, the Oxford Classics translations cheek by jowl with the Wordsworth Classics (very cheap and not to be underrated- my Aeneid was more faithful to the Latin than quite a few others I could name!), the stark black Penguin Classics and the lurid lime green bargain classics (which i can't bring myself to look at). This motley assembly obviously offended whoever is in charge of the shelf displays, and more recently the books have been divided by publishing houses. The Oxford Classics now present a wall of white, with red tips (a bit bland); the Wordsworths - a wall of blue, with cute little cameo pictures on the spine; the lime green monsters just look hideous, but the Penguin Classics look sombre and studious and rather lovely. I like riffling through them for unknown (to me) gems, and it was this approach that led me to find and buy Huysmans' 'Against Nature' which I absolutely loved, enjoying every rich and bejewelled sentence. Last Friday, my duties discharged for the week, I took a copy of 'The Damned' up to the in-house Starbucks with the intention of leafing through it over a cup of de-caf Americano. But, as luck would have it WHO was sitting across the room from me but a priest acquaintance, who waved at me cheerily. Thinking that 'The Damned' was probably on the Index of Banned Books, and not wishing to give offence, I turned it over and covered it surreptiously with my copy of the Independent. So I did not get a chance to skim through it as I had wished.

I returned a few days later, however, and bought it, as the half-term holidays were coming up and I have the rare chance to read first thing in the morning for a week. I hope it will be as intriguing as 'Against Nature' - I've read a few online reviews and many of the people who 'get' Huysmans' writing (and there are many who complain that 'Nothing Happens' - well, duh!), rate it just as highly, and some even more so. He was such an encyclopaedically knowledgable writer. His discourses on the various topics within his books are fascinating lectures in their own right: I loved the chapter on the decay of Latin literature and envy his breadth of learning. Only this morning I read a wonderful description of the Grunewald Crucifixion.

Incidentally, whilst walking out of the book shop, who should I see walking in but my priest-acquaintance, who again waved cheerily at me. Fortunately I had my purchase secreted deep in my bag.

A Book as a Present. For Me.

For once I had a really good excuse to go shopping for books: a family Christening. Now, most Christening presents are useless tat that get shoved to the backs of cupboards to tarnish and eventually get thrown out. Really good presents are really expensive, things like a vintage port to lay down for the eventual 21st birthday (what 21 year-olds like port anyway?), or gold sovereigns...so I hit on the idea of a Really Nice Old Book. Will probably increase in value and prove saleable should the recipient be in need of a cash-injection in the future. Off to the local antiquarian book-shops, of which there are a few locally. My goodness, the Rackham-illustrated fairy tales are expensive: hundreds of pounds! As are most of the things that I had in mind. So what about a modern first edition? What I really wanted (perverse sense of humour surfacing here) was 'The Devil Rides Out' by Dennis Wheatley, and although there were Wheatley first editions, they looked a bit raunchy for an eighteen-month old. More suitable for his Dad, I think.

It was at this point that I got distracted, as I so often do, and I decided to go up the winding stairs to the theology section. Doing a doctorate gives me a sort of licence to peruse this section for Useful Books and, hey - what do you know - Nathan Han's 'A Parsing Guide to the Greek New Testament'. Wow - how fortuitous: a complete list of the verb forms as they occur. How useful is that for discourse prominence analysis?! And in good condition too - no dust-cover, but never mind, I'm running out of that adjustable film book-cover stuff anyway. So I bought it, chortling at my good fortune, and scuttled of to Starbucks where it is totally acceptable to sit awhile, reading like a Clever Person.

I have to confess a few previous sins to you at this point: I am addicted to online book buying. My favourite supplier is The Book Depository, because they don't add a delivery charge to most of their stuff, which tends to be as cheap, if not cheaper than Amazon. Though I do like Amazon too, because the sidebar options to buy second-hand from small dealers can yield some real bargains viz. my recent purchase 'A Greek New Testament Reader's Edition' in pristine condition from a guy at Oxford. And I like ABE Books to for the more obscure/out-of-print stuff (most recently 'Syriac Grammar: A New Approach'). Birthday money allowed me legitimately to buy 'A Dictionary of Paul and His Letters' (now satisfactorily covered with a film book-preserver) initially through the web, but when they postponed delivery I cancelled and bought it from the local St Paul's shop. The staff seemed so surprised that someone had actually bought something that they gave me a free St Paul calendar of saints' days. Another local second-hand bookshop had recently just got in a number of International Critical Commentaries (I am trying to collect a pre-owned copy for each of the books of the NT), including 2nd Corinthians which I was lacking and thereby hangs another shameful book-buying tale (for that, see another of my blogs 'parablepsis'). Suffice to say that I ended up buying 1st Corinthians too. Yesterday.

Being interested in language, I had been intending to buy the Penguin Classics annotated 'Alice in Wonderland/Through the Looking-Glass', mostly for the brilliant word-play, and insights into Dodgson's mind and world. As I was going up the stairs in Borders, I picked up a copy of it to scan as I had my coffee (coffee is another addiction of mine, so there'll probably be many a mention of it in this blog unless I start another one dedicated to that too). I had taken the precaution of getting a mini bank statement before I started out, so I knew that I only had £7.55 to last me until Monday, having bought the parsing book - and I know that Penguin Classics tend to be expensive. Oh - and I had picked up a copy of Petronius' 'Satyricon' which I had been intending to read ever since I had read Apuleius' 'The Golden Ass' which I found surprisingly funny (tho' it did go off a bit at the end) - and that was £10.99! This last was just a reprint of a 1965 text, so the translation was a bit evasive to say the least, so I put that back. But for some strange reason the Lewis Carroll was only £5.99, well within budget so, reader, I bought it.....