Perhaps… defining the ends of life requires a hermeneutic inquiry, which must grope toward an adequate language in which these ends can be fully brought to light.

Finished reading: Cosmic Connections by Charles Taylor 📚

I doubt I’ll find the time or mental capacity to elaborate on this any time soon, but much of this book was, for me, a wonderful extension and significant deepening of something from the introduction to his A Secular Age, a quote that, for reasons I sort of mentioned here, I very often think about, probably more so than any other from Taylor:

We are deeply moved, but also puzzled and shaken. We struggle to articulate what we’ve been through. If we succeed in formulating it, however partially, we feel a release, as though the power of the experience was increased by having been focused, articulated, and hence let fully be.

I’ve tried for the last several days to summarize a little more than this, but… too many rabbit roles, not enough time. So I’ll coin toss on a good excerpt.

It was probably just me, but I had a couple false starts with this book and it didn’t really come alive until a couple hundred pages in, beginning with the chapter on Rilke, I think. (On a practical note: The 600 pages are not nearly as daunting as those of A Secular Age. For one thing, the footnotes, which are never longwinded, are where God intended them to be, at the bottom of the page so you don’t have to flip endlessly to the back. There are also long sections where poems are given in their original German or French, followed by English translations. And best of all, the poems are always given plenty of room on the page to breath.)

I found all the chapters where he focused on one poet — Rilke, Beaudelaire, Mallarmé, Eliot, Misosz — very enjoyable.

In any case, Czeslaw Milosz wins the toss:

In ages past, we often thought that religiously inspired philosophers were best suited to define to define this latter element (for Catholics, the work of Aquinas). In the contemporary world, we look to political scientists or historians to discern the trends. The daring idea that Milosz puts forward is that a poet can do that; and a poet with the means of a poet: that is, not the study of learned documents, works of Plato and Aristotle, or the works of social science; but the poet’s way of articulating the deepest intuitions that come to him/her as a spiritual being contemplating our present condition.

Which may simply say — at least says — along with the likes of William Carlos Williams and Nadezhda Mandelstam: before science, before philosophy, look for the “groping-toward-an-adequate-language” that is good poetry; it will bring you a lot closer to genuine reality.