Literature/Quotes

Copied from a book by David Foster Wallace

[Thomas Aquinas’] teachings constitute a complete system, which is why, as ‘Thomism’, they provide the Roman Catholic Church with its philosophy, whose official status was further confirmed by Pope Pius X in Doctoris Angelici (June 1914): ‘The capital theses in the philosophy of St Thomas are not to be placed in the category of opinions capable of being debated one way or another, but are to be considered as the foundations upon which the whole science of natural and divine things is based; if such principles are once removed or in any way impaired, it must necessarily follow that students of the sacred sciences will ultimately fail to perceive so much as the meaning of the words in which the dogmas of divine revelation are proposed by the magistracy of the Church....

Re John Updike’s Toward the End of Time Maybe the one thing that the reader ends up appreciating about Ben Turnbull is that he’s such a broad caricature of an Updike protagonist that he helps clarify what’s been so unpleasant and frustrating about this author’s recent characters. It’s not that Turnbull is stupid: he can quote Pascal and Kierkegaard on angst, discourse on the death of Schubert, distinguish between a sinistrorse and a dextrorse Polygonum vine, etc....