Romeo and Juliet

Every year I teach this I learn something new about it. This time, I noticed some symmetry in Juliet’s lines when she learns that Romeo has killed Tybalt and Romeo’s response to the opening scene’s brawl. Juliet describes Romeo in III.ii:

O serpent heart, hid with a flowering face!
Did ever dragon keep so fair a cave?
Beautiful tyrant! fiend angelical!
Dove-feather’d raven! wolvish-ravening lamb!
Despised substance of divinest show!
Just opposite to what thou justly seem’st,
A damned saint, an honourable villain!

These oxymorons mirror what Romeo says in I.i:

Here’s much to do with hate, but more with love.
Why, then, O brawling love! O loving hate!
O any thing, of nothing first create!
O heavy lightness! serious vanity!
Mis-shapen chaos of well-seeming forms!
Feather of lead, bright smoke, cold fire,
sick health!
Still-waking sleep, that is not what it is!

And I was struck, ever more forcefully, by Romeo’s utter immaturity. He whines and cries in III.iii, learning of his banishment, as if here were a toddler who’d had his toys taken away from him. In fact, that seems to be all Juliet is in that passage.

As I Lay Dying: Meditations on Return by Richard Neuhaus

This book opened my thinking in many ways. First, it introduced me to the writings of Simone Weil and inspired me to buy one of her books, Gravity and Grace.

The Faiths of Our Fathers: What America’s Founders Really Believed by Alf Mapp

We often hear claims about the Founding Fathers’ religious views, with those claims fairly accurately reflecting the religious and political beliefs of the speaker: conservatives claim they were all traditionalist Christians; liberals claim they were deists with only a token belief in God.

A few surprising things I learned:

• Ben Franklin was positively polytheistic, believing in a supreme god who was over a lesser god, the creator of our universe.
• Thomas Jefferson’s books were not place in the Philadelphia Public Library’s circulation as late as 1830 because of a belief that he was an atheist. He was, briefly, in his youth. Eventually, he became something of a Christian, though he rejected all notions of the supernatural. He even edited his own version of the New Testament, removing all reference to miracles.
• Benjamin Franklin was a guest of the Hellfire Club at least twice, though according to some sources he was merely spying.
• George Washington refrained from taking communion. There is some conjecture that he did so because he felt “unworthy”, as defined in First Corinthians 11:25-29, with verse 29 being key: “For he that eateth and drinketh unworthily, eateth and drinketh damnation to himself, not discerning the Lord’s body.”
• John Marshall was famous for his Christian ethics and charity, but like Washington, he didn’t take communion.

Life of Pi by Yann Martel

It used to be one of my favorites. When I learned about the charges of plagiarism, the book lost a lot of its sheen. Still, the combination of zoology and spirituality makes the book worth it on a basic level. (I read this during our daily Silent Sustained Reading period at school. I wasn’t necessarily intending on re-reading it, but I needed to set the proper example, and that was the the only book at hand.)

1. Re-read
2. For school