book of the month

Tonight was my first night of single motherhood. Usually, Nathan and I come home about the same time, scarf down some food (probably whatever microwave dinners I picked up as cooking has not been a priority lately), and head off to our meeting du jour. Tuesdays, I have no meetings (though I am contemplating joining a yoga class) and so, as my husband marches his young idealists through the muddy soccer field to learn the higher life lessons of competition and running until vomiting, I am home...with a glass of wine...curled up on the carpet by the fire...gently, then violently pushing Buttercup's teeth away from my tender, exposed foot flesh. She's a doll, that one.

Before I crashed in the middle of the living room, I decided to pull a book off the shelves in our office. I combed through for one I had never read, or at least one never started when I became distracted by the promise of another books' tale. I stumbled upon The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth by David Bentley Hart. Now, I think this book must have been part of Nicholas Ireland's collection that we inherited when he sauntered off to Romania. Apparently, it is Hart's dissertation as a published book, and the back cover promises "penetrating and frequently amusing critiques of Foucault." Without any need to read further, I cast off the small mammal trying to mate with my leg and dived into the first chapter.

I nearly drowned. Has it been that long since I took a look at someone's dissertation? Well, I had to reverse and reread quite a bit. Though I'm moving through slowly, I'm finding the work cathartic. I don't know if that is because I am so thirsty to be back in the center of cerebreal learners or just because I'm lonely and Foucault seems like an old friend.

Regardless, ideas expressed thus will likely keep me coming back for more: "The interrogation here is the difference between two narratives: one that finds the grammar of violence inscribed upon the foundation stone of every institution and hidden within the syntax of every rhetoric, and another that claims that within history a way of reconciliation has been opened up that leads beyond, and ultimately overcomes, all violence."

Hart's ambitious. Nicholas's marginal notes cease after page 7. Perhaps I'll make it further with the promise of Derrida still to come...