Learning Japanese

My reading goal for this year is simply to read a shelf of books. I’m not reading as much as I hoped, but I am still learning. I’m not sure what prompted me this time to make the effort to acquire Japanese, but this is how I’m using my free time. I’m about 45 days into it, but I didn’t start with nothing. Here is a timeline of previous efforts:

• October 2019: Used a couple apps to learn katakana and hiragana, and began learning basic kanji. This did not last long, but the several hours spent on kana meant it was easier to pick them up again every time I restarted.
• July 2022: In a few weeks, I powered through the entire jlab beginner’s course. This is an Anki deck that goes through grammar points with audio/visual examples from anime and other media. I went through it much faster than one is supposed to and, not having continued with reviews, I forgot most of it.
• June 2023: Started going through an RTK deck for a few weeks. I moved in July, and so got distracted away from it. Also started listening to Paul Noble’s Japanese for Beginners on Audible. I had used his Spanish course to improve my ability to form sentences, so I thought it would be helpful here.

Now that I’ve started to get settled in my new assignment, I started learning again right after Thanksgiving.

• Anki is again the main tool I started with. The first deck I used was called AJT Transition, meant to teach the 1000 most common words. This deck gives the words in context and also introduces the relevant kanji at the same time. Even though I was moving through this deck consistently, kanji was still difficult to recognize, so I added the RRTK450 deck, which is a shortened version of the RTK deck, limiting the characters introduced so that they are more relevant (instead of trying to cover all the jouyou kanji). To review grammar, I deleted and reinstalled the latest version of the jlab deck. This time, I am going through it at a normal pace. Of these three decks, the jlab deck for grammar is the only one I am still doing in Anki.
• For vocabulary and kanji, I have switched entirely to using jpdb, introducing at least 20 new cards a day. Jpdb combines several features together. It has the SRS (spaced-repetition system) that makes Anki so useful, but seems to follow a better algorithm.
• Whenever there is a word to learn, jpdb first teaches you the kanji that make up the word, as well as the components of that kanji. To learn the word 食べる (taberu, to eat), you would first learn 食. But this is made of 人 and 良. But this latter is made of 丨 and 艮. And this latter is made of 日 and another character. So for one card (食べる), it is necessary to learn 7 cards. This takes longer, but then then the knowledge of those characters sticks and helps to learn other words. So I don’t have to learn new kanji when I learn the word 人 (hito, person) or 良い (yoi, good).
• The other excellent feature in jpdb is that it has built-in decks for various anime and books. When you add one of these, new vocabulary will be introduced only from that deck. They can added chronologically (as the words come up in order in that particular form of media), in order of frequency within that deck, or in order of frequency within their entire corpus. You also can see what percentage of the vocabulary is known and how much that covers of that particular form of media. For example, let’s say I want to learn the vocabulary used in Neon Genesis Evangelion. According to jpdb, I know 6% of the unique vocabulary (349 of 5233 words) and this covers about 41% of the words actually used in the series. One can even specify a certain episode: For episode 22, say, I know 21% of the unique words (142 of 663) and this covers 37% of what is spoken.
• Since my vocabulary is still quite limited, I try to keep learning the most common words in the corpus, but it’s helpful to see just how much I should be able to understand of any given piece of media. Jpdb tracks words across all your decks. My current count is 450 non-redundant vocabulary and 318 kanji. Sometimes it seems I would go faster without the kanji reviews (they can be turned off), but I’ve been assured the kanji reviews drop off once learn a certain base amount.
• More on grammar: I bought my copy of Genki I right before Thanksgiving. I finished the first two chapters, but have not used it consistently. It is a textbook meant for classrooms, and so it can feel tedious, but I intend to go back to it. I still need grammar though! As I said above, I am using the jlab deck, which is largely based on Tae Kim’s grammar guide. I considered just powering through Tae Kim, but it seemed like just as much of a textbook as Genki, so I did not. One popular guide to Japanese recommended a YouTube channel called Cure Dolly for learning grammar, just watching 3 videos a day for a month. It’s a bit strange, as it sounds like an old English lady using an anime avatar… but the explanations were helpful! Another great video is Game Gengo’s JLPT N5 Grammar Textbook, which just goes through each grammar point in the earliest proficiency level. It is just over 2 hours, but he gives an example sentence and explanation for each one. I will probably listen to this again before trying the N4 video, which is over 4 hours.
• Many of the guides recommend immersion as soon as possible, so I have made some attempts at this. One Piece being the most familiar anime to me, I usually have that on in the background, without subtitles. I will look up words if they come up often, but I can tell enough of what is going on to enjoy it. I am primarily using One Piece vocab decks on jpdb, focused on whichever season I am watching. Of all the streaming services, Netflix is the one that seems to have Japanese subtitles for most of their anime, so I’ve tried a few different ones on there. I finally settled on Violet Evergarden, which I have never seen before but has been on my list. Though I have only watched it Japanese with Japanese subtitles, I could probably explain what has happened in the story up to this point. This is certainly encouraging!
• As for books, I was very fortunate to have one of my co-workers bring in her stash of Japanese children’s books! (She had a relative in Japan and once visited herself, so that is why she had them.) This includes a version of Where the Wild Things Are, written entirely in hiragana (I recognized the word kaiju right away). And then a bunch of books from a series of fantasy, from Momotarou to the Wizard of Oz. I put these down when Christmas got busy, but I was able to read through whole pages with a dictionary. I want to finish at least one of them.
• My video game consoles are set to Japanese, and I’ve tried to play some. For fighting games or platforms, you can get by without really knowing any of the language, so I don’t think these do much. Pokemon is often recommended for beginners, but I tried it a little too early and found it far too difficult to enjoy. More recently, I started the original Final Fantasy VII. This is hard as well, but my practice on vocab, kanji and grammar have certainly made a difference. I just need to make sure I have time when I sit down, because I have to look up a lot of words in the dialogues! The iOS app Midori has been excellent here, a JP-EN dictionary with a camera function.
• As for listening, most of my immersion comes from either Japanese pop music or from an easy podcast called Nihongo con Teppei, which is just 3-minute clips of him talking about various topics. Today, he was talking about eggs (tamago). I have tried both ordinary podcasts as well as a Japanese audiobook, but these were too difficult for now.
• Immersion isn’t just about consuming media, but about doing whatever you normally do, but in your target language. One of the things I normally do is pray. I am still working on a few words, but I will soon have the Hail Mary down in Japanese, which will allow me to pray the Rosary. All of that repetition will certainly help! I also obtained a Japanese version of Christian Prayer (教会の祈り) so I can begin learning some of my daily Psalms. The vocabulary is still a bit beyond me, so I haven’t gotten too far here. I would like to be able to pray Night Prayer in Japanese, and eventually the Mass.

And that’s where I’m at! When I look at videos or essays about other Japanese learners, I feel as though I’m behind, but this current stretch hasn’t even be 2 months yet. At this point, every bit of progress makes a big difference.

Reading Cymbeline

What encouraged me to read it.

I have spent many more hours of my life listening to Pink Floyd than I have reading or studying Shakespeare. Among the obscurer Pink Floyd albums, one finds More, a soundtrack for a long-forgotten film. About half the songs on it are worth listening to, including the track “Cymbaline”. Though spelled differently than the title of Shakespeare’s play, it always reminded me that there was a Shakespeare play I hadn’t read. More recently, I am discovering how few people around here read Shakespeare and decided I should read all of his plays. I started with this one, because the copy was sitting on my shelf.

Act I: The beginning.

After picking up Cymbeline, I noticed it had five acts and realized that this is true of all Shakespeare’s plays (it’s been a while). Another author pointed out the simple truth that his plays have a beginning, a middle and an end. And so I decided to look especially close at the first, third and fifth acts to discover if these map neatly, especially looking at the beginning for where knots are tied, and at the end where they are unraveled. It was surprising just how many questions and tensions are set up in Act I:

• Imogen wants to marry someone below her state (in opposition to the king)
• We see a distinctive bracelet and ring shared by the couple, obviously because they will factor in the plot later
• Posthumus is banished
• Cloten wants to marry Imogen, and he is brutish and horrible
• Iachimo challenges Posthumus on the virtue of his beloved
• Queen borrows poison (meant for evil) and the poison is not deadly (so we are ready for a twist)
• Two long-lost sons are mentioned (odds of them showing up are pretty high…)
• Iachimo says he will leave some goods with Imogen (and this will be important, for why should we hear of something so petty?)

Shocking moments.

I was very surprised at two moments in the play: First, watching Iachimo come out of the trunk in Act II. Yes, I knew there was something fishy about the trunk, but I was shocked nonetheless at the audacity of the move. Even though I was just reading it, I might as well have watching him break forth from it on stage. The other moment of shock came when Polydor goes off screen and returns carrying the head of Cloten!! How truly horrible, even if thoroughly deserved. And it is even more base of a death, because it seems to happen only to set up a later scene, when Imogen looks over and sees this beheaded man in Posthumus’s clothing, and therefore concludes he has met his fate. Cloten is so base a character, that it was necessary to remove his head in order to form any sort of likeness to one so noble.

The fantastic.

I enjoy the fantastic moments in Shakespeare’s plays, from the familiars of The Tempest to the faeries of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. And we get just a little bit of it here, in the form of a dream, so that it is not too unnatural. (When I saw “Jupiter” among the dramatis personae, I knew something of the sort was coming.) The dream shows Posthumus his own parents and siblings, so that he gets a sort of family reunion of his own. The apparitions appeal to Jupiter and we get this great stage direction: “Jupiter descends in thunder and lightning, sitting upon an eagle: he throws a thunderbolt. The Apparitions fall on their knees” (Act V.4). After the full vision, which is more than a dream, a prophetic book remains with Posthumus, to be interpreted later by the Roman Soothsayer. Oddly, this soothsayer dreams this same image of Jupiter back in Act IV.3. Both the book and the presence of the dream in two minds indicates that there is more here than coincidence.

Also, as far as I can tell this dream is the only thing that connects this play to the “Cymbaline” of Pink Floyd, which is itself about a dream (although a rather nightmarish one). There is also the lyric, “Will the final couplet rhyme?” The answer is yes: “Set on there! Never was a war did cease, / Ere bloody hands were wash’d, with such a peace.”

Britain and Rome.

I have never looked into the question of whether Shakespeare is Catholic. When proponents of this view spoke of it, it had the air of a conspiracy theory, and the greatest lovers of Shakespeare rarely seemed to think it matters one way or the other. It was enough for me that Shakespeare presents in his plays what is good, true and beautiful, and therefore certain agreeable with a Catholic view of the world (cf. Phil 4:8). The obvious point against his Catholicism was always his portrayal of St. Joan as a witch in Henry VI, Part 1, and so I never wanted to explore much further.

That being said, it seems hard to ignore parallels between the Britain and Rome of this play, and the England and Roman Church of Shakespeare’s day. Cymbeline, who is obviously good-natured (as appears in his progeny, Imogen and his two sons) allows himself to be swayed by the basest persons of his race, a Queen who would destroy the finest fruit of Cymbeline’s line, and Cloten whose very name reminds one of a blood clot—one who would stop up the continuance of any noble blood. He is swayed by them not to pay tribute to Rome, just as the finest persons in England were swayed by the least noble to distance themselves from the Roman Church. All the events in Act V happen so fast, that I cannot quite recall all what makes the king decide to change his mind. But seems ultimately to be the interpretation of the soothsayer, finding that Britain would flourish entirely by it. It is Roman religion that brings about prosperity and peace for Britain. It is even a knowledge of the Latin language that allows the divine message to be interpreted. For Posthumus Leonatus is the lion’s whelp; and the “tender air” is “mollis aer” in Latin, which sounds quite like “mulier”. It perhaps sounds a little silly, but as Cymbeline says “This hath some seeming.”

Having written “Cymbeline’s line” in the paragraph above, I realized how even that name sounds, like “symbol line”. I have heard others say it “symbol-leen”, but I will stick to my Floydian pronunciation for now. Perchance this king is meant then to be a symbol of England’s royal line? And so just as Cymbeline obtains peace and plenty by union with Rome, so the line he symbolizes ought to do the same. (This is a little silly, I admit.) Alas, the monarchy of England remained dense.

The title.

And why should the play be called Cymbeline? The title character only has 290 lines, lagging behind Imogen, Posthumus, Iachimo and Belarius. He doesn’t stand out as particularly brilliant either, from his injustice to Belarius to being swayed by base Cloten and Queen to expelling noble Posthumus. I think he remains the title character because it is a play largely about the nobility of blood. When Imogen unknowingly meets her brothers, it is overwhelming how thoroughly they all love each other. Even when disguised as a man, her nobility cannot be hid. Even as Polydor walks in with a bleeding head, I’m sure he gives the impression of Theseus with the head of a Minotaur or Perseus with the head of Medusa. He is not hated for it, despite it being a rash and ugly action. The brothers are later mistaken for angels. Cymbeline starts off the drama of the play rejecting Posthumus on account of his lacking nobler blood, an error on his part, but still rooted in this same thing. Anyway, since the play focuses much on the noble blood of the characters, it makes enough sense to name the source of this noble blood.

Genre: A Mercy-Forgiveness Play.

The first folio calls this work a tragedie, but it does not end as one. Many reckon it a “romance”, according to the ancient meaning of the word. I appreciate the division of Shakespeare’s plays given by Duane Berquist, and with him it seems correct to call Cymbeline a mercy-forgiveness play. Unlike the tragedies (which are serious and have a somber ending) and the comedies (which are lighter and have a happy ending), Cymbeline falls somewhere in the middle, having a serious theme and a happy ending. It mixes the qualities of both comedy and tragedy and so falls somewhere in between. That mercy or forgiveness is the theme is abundantly clear in all the reconciliations that occur in the final scene: Posthumus and Imogen reconciled, Rome and Britain reconciled, Polydor forgiven for beheading, Belarius forgiven for his abduction, Queen admitting her crimes, Iachimo fessing up to his foul deeds, and so on. Lots of pain and strife (and some death), but ultimately a happy conclusion.

That’s all enough for now. I would like to recount Duane Berquist’s division of the plays in another post. Perhaps when I finish another of these in-between plays.

One addition: Apparently Pink Floyd later renamed their “Cymbaline” to “Nightmare” when they performed it in 1969, as part of a suite called “The Man”. It has lengthier instrumental parts but still includes the same lyrics, and so also keeps the phrase, “It’s high time, Cymbaline!” But alas, I haven’t found any reason for why Waters chose this title.

Balzac, Treatise on Modern Stimulants

This work seems like a challenge to write about for 30 minutes since it is such a short work. 41 small pages. Nonetheless, here some thoughts (unorganized by the end).

Me, enjoying a modern stimulant somewhere in California. 2014.

Though I have read Balzac before, this was in the form of novels (Eugénie Grandet, The Wild Ass’s Skin, Colonel Chabert), and I expected my next foray would be a novel. But when I turned to Twitter for reading recommendations, this came from one particularly well-read friend. And since it was much shorter than the last book he recommended to me (“one of the most amusing books in our language”), it seemed worth a shot.

This little treatise ended up as a perfect follow-up to my reading of The Count of Monte Cristo. The Count of that novel, who keeps his normal fair to a minimum, makes no secret of the substances by which he regulates his sleep. When we first see his hidden palace room, he offers his guest a serving of hashish which brings about deeply satisfying hallucinations. He carries around an emerald which contains his “sleeping pills”, and we see another scene where a child breaks into his cabinet full of vials which induce untold effects.

The Count of Monte Cristo

Preliminary note. It seems good to write something on each book that I finish, but it also doesn’t seem worth too much time. The time limit is set for 30 minutes. At that point, I will wrap it up and post. That will save more time for reading.

The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas was an excellent novel. The only point against it is its length! Providence was kind enough to grant me a period of isolation from society which allowed me to finish it. Some thoughts.

[All spoilers below.]

Another Round of Classics

The first classics challenge was a success: I read 50 classics within 5 years. I did this even with sets of months where I read almost nothing. The existence of the goal always prompted a return to reading, and so it makes sense to start again. Last time, my starting list was composed mostly of books that were sitting on my shelves. So also now: there are two shelves in my room filled with literature I have not read, so these are the titles I will start with.

1. Naguib Mahfouz, The Cairo Trilogy.
2. Charles Dickens, David Copperfield.
3. James Joyce, Ulysses.
4. Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow.
5. Fyodor Dostoevsky, Demons.
6. Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain.
7. Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Idiot.
8. John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath.
9. Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady.
10. John Steinbeck, East of Eden.
11. Anthony Trollope, Barchester Towers.
12. Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet.
13. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Italian Journey.
14. Rumer Godden, In this House of Brede.
15. Orhan Pamuk, The Black Book.
16. Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
17. Italo Svevo, Zeno’s Conscience.
18. Fernando Pessoa, A Little Larger than the Entire Universe.
19. Orhan Pamuk, Snow.
20. Charles Dickens, Hard Times.
21. Olga Tokarczuk, Flights.
22. Rebecca West, The Fountain Overflows.
23. William Faulkner, Go Down, Moses.
24. Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth.
25. António Lobo Antunes, The Natural Order of Things.
26. Molière, The Misanthrope.
27. Molière, Tartuffe.
28. H.G. Wells, The Time Machine.
29. Jules Verne, Journey to the Center of the Earth.
30. Leo Tolstory, The Kreutzer Sonata.
31. John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress.
32. José Saramago, The Elephant’s Journey.
33. Robert Bolt, A Man for All Seasons.
34. Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting.
35. Ismail Kadare, The Traitor’s Niche.
36. Stanislaw Lem, Hospital of the Transfiguration.
37. Rainer Maria Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge.
38. Henry James, The Europeans.
39. Hugo von Hofmannsthal, The Lord Chandos Letter.
40. Stefan Zweig, The Post-Office Girl.
41. J.A. Baker, The Peregrine.
42. Jens Peter Jacobsen, Niels Lyhne.
43. Luigi Pirandello, The Late Mattia Paschal.
44. James Joyce, The Dubliners.
45. George Eliot, Scenes of Clerical Life.
46. Graham Greene, Brighton Rock.
47. Herman Melville, Moby-Dick.
48. Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows.
49. Isaac Bashevis Singer, Shosha.
50. Honoré de Balzac, Père Goriot.

As I finish books, I will edit this post and move them from the list above to the list below.

1. Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo.
2. Dorothy Day, The Long Loneliness.
3. Honoré de Balzac, Treatise on Modern Stimulants.

First Classics Challenge Complete

Within this last week of 2021, I have completely the challenge I set out for myself of finishing 50 classics within five years, starting from April 22, 2017. If I were to include dates, it would be clear that there were vast stretches of time without any books finished, and certain intense periods when I read a number of titles quickly.

It is also apparent from the lack of hyperlinks after #30 that I no longer took time to write about the books I finished. The benefit didn’t seem to justify the time spent on them. All in all, participating in this challenge probably helped me read more than I otherwise would have in the last five years, so it was worth it over all. My next post will contain a proposal for renewing this challenge.

Definition of classic

On another blog, there was a conversation that broke out on the meaning of the word “classic”. I gave my initial response, but decided eventually to look in the dictionary. The editors of dictionaries put a lot of work into them, so it’s only fair that we make use of them. I started, however, with my Latin dictionary, where “classicus” meant “belonging to the first class, of the highest class”, usually in reference to some segment of the Roman people. If this is where the English word “classic” originates, then it gives us some idea of what it will mean. Moving on to the Oxford Dictionary, I think every definition stated on that blog post is contained here in one way or another.

“Classic” as an adjective has two definitions. First, “judged over a period of time to be of the highest quality and outstanding of its kind”. This definition combines the time criterion that showed up in many comments with the criterion of being the best of its kind, again where the fact it has lasted a long time seems more an indication of the worth, which is the more important factor. The second definition of the adjective is similar but distinct, “very typical of its kind”. Typical in the sense of “having the distinctive qualities of a particular type of person or thing” (Oxford). In this sense, the Iliad and the Odyssey are classic epics, Moby Dick is a classic American novel, and Hamlet is a classic tragedy. This definition accounts for why certain books are called classics of a genre or region, but are not unqualified literary classics.

“Classic” as a noun has two relevant definitions. The first is related to the adjective just described, “a work of art of recognized and established value”. The second is limited but related, “a subject at school or university which involves the study of ancient Greek and Latin literature, philosophy, and history”. I think there’s a way in which the Greek and Latin cultures laid the groundwork for Western notions of excellence in art, so there’s a reason why the name “classic” is attributed to them in a special sense.

The third sense of the noun does not apply to this conversation, but is worth reporting for the sake of completion: “a major sports tournament or competition, especially in golf or tennis”. This name probably comes from the event being regular and traditional in its own fashion.

As for the word “classical“, this adjective primarily means “relating to ancient Greek or Latin literature, art, or culture”, and secondarily “representing an exemplary standard within a traditional and long-established form or style”, such as classical music and classical dance.

Now while all the respondents on the original post recognized some aspect of one of the definitions above, there were also questions about how to determine if a work is a classic. One response said, “the question is unanswerable, unless we are willing to elect some governing body the supreme keeper of literature”, indicating the difficulty of knowing who can determine the excellence of a work. Another response placed this responsibility in the reader: “I’d say we as humans determine individually what is classic to US. That’s sort of what we’re doing here in the club, I think — hunting down our own classics.”

This reader is, nevertheless, guided by others. I’m reminded of Aristotle’s Topics, where he talks about how to attain knowledge by dialectical reasoning (rather than certain demonstrative reasoning), and he says you must start with opinions held “by all, or by the majority, or by the most notable and illustrious of them” (Topics, I.1). For this reason, we who read classics often look at lists of books put together by either a wide survey of readers, or by a group of notable intellectuals, or perhaps by one individual in particular who we believe to be particularly insightful.

As I was considering the role of the reader in determining which works to consider classics, I was reminded of a few quotes from W.H. Auden (that I once read on another literary blog) on the intersection of judgment and taste. These reflections indicate how a work could be a classic without necessarily being a book one enjoys.

“My taste tells me what, in fact, I enjoy reading; my judgement tells me what I must admire. There are always a number of poems that one must admire but that, by reasons of one’s temperament, one cannot enjoy. The converse is not necessarily true. I don’t think I like any poem that I do not also admire, but I have to remind myself that in some other fields–tear-jerking movies, for example–I revel in what my judgment tells me is trash.” (W.H. Auden, 19th Century British Minor Poets)

“As readers, we remain in the nursery stage so long as we cannot distinguish between taste and judgment, so long, that is, as the only possible verdicts we can pass on a book are two: this I like; this I don’t like. For an adult reader, the possible verdicts are five: I can see this is good and I like it; I can see this is good but I don’t like it; I can see this is good and, though at present I don’t like it, I believe that with perseverance I shall come to like it; I can see that this is trash but I like it; I can see that this is trash and I don’t like it.” (W.H. Auden, A Certain World: A Commonplace Book)

Journal: Aristotle, Dante, hopefully more

With each day, it looks like this isolation will last longer. Even it is eventually lifted, the schools have been called off for the year, which means no chaplain duties until September. So it’s as if my summer is beginning two months early: the routine and habits I take up now could theoretically carry me through the next 5 months, so it’s important to make a good start. I have continued reading since my last post, but not nearly with the consistency I had hoped. My reading chair is placed far too close to the PlayStation, which offers absolutely no help to completing my syllabus. Here’s what I’ve picked up lately though:

Aristotle, Metaphysics XII. I finished reading that book of the Metaphysics where Aristotle arrives at immaterial being and numbers them. I had begun in my last post to consider the notion of circular motion as present in self-movers. Aristotle shows that there must be something which is moved with an unceasing motion, and that this mobile itself must be eternal, and also there must be something which moves that ever-moving mobile. This mover itself is moved by nothing as it moves the mobile, which is the “first heaven”, the outermost sphere of the universe. One might ask, “Is it possible to move another without being moved oneself?” And he points out that this is clear the case with objects of desire: The glass a of beer moves me to pick it up, not by being moved itself, but through being an object of knowledge and desire. This leads to a whole school of interpretation (perhaps the most common) that says, for Aristotle, the unmoved mover only moves in the mode of a final cause and not in the mode of an agent cause. Thomas will disagree with this interpretation, since God must be both final cause and agent cause, but I can see how people arrive at the conclusion based on this text. Aristotle says, “The final cause, then, produces motion as being loved, but all other things move by being moved” (XII.7), the implication being that things which move but are not moved only do so in the mode of a final cause. Other texts, for example the talk about power in Physics VIII (if I recall correctly), indicate that the first mover does indeed move in the mode of an agent cause without being moved.

Journal: A return to Aristotle

Recently I had a long phone conversation with a friend who is working on a doctorate in philosophy. I expected a few questions about book recommendations and how to worship with the present pandemic, but the conversation was mostly spent on the object of his study, namely, the actions of the simple substances (angels) upon man. Without going into the points around which our conversation turned, the chief effect was that I wanted to fill in those gaps in my reading concerning the angels, what they are and what we can know about them, both from reasoning and from faith.

The first book I picked up to this end contained the Enneads of Plotinus, a philosopher who certainly speculated on the multitude of incorporeal beings. But realizing how “out of shape” I was philosophically, I retreated to more familiar ground. I found my copy of Aristotle’s Metaphysics, and started reviewing sections I did not remember well, namely, Book IX on actuality and potency and Book X on unity. Unlike a novel, where one can read continuously and reasonably hope that what is obscure will become clear later on, when something is obscure in Aristotle, I have to slow down. The questions I ask myself the most often when reading Aristotle are “Is this true?” and “How do I know that?” This is especially true when he talks about motion, about which he makes many universal statements. Aristotle did not grow up hearing about the big bang, the expanding universe, inertia and universal gravitation, atomic models, waves and particles, the death of stars, and so on; therefore, a contemporary person is reasonably skeptical when such a person makes a universal statement about motion itself. And yet, I have the same “macro” experience that Aristotle did. I should at least be able to understand why he thinks certain truths are self-evident or demonstrable.

Angels in NGE and St. Thomas Aquinas

[I previously said I wanted to write on the Human Instrumentality Project from theological point of view, but as I continued thinking, I was taken in more by another aspect of the series.]

First of all, if you have not seen Neon Genesis Evangelion and you do not want any revelations about the final episodes, do not keep reading. From this point on, I will make no effort to conceal plot details.